“You’re gonna like this week,” Guy promised us on Monday morning—he’d called us into his office first thing, was sitting back in his desk chair looking pleased with himself. “We’re gonna get you into the studio to record.”
“We’re doing albums?” Olivia asked, her eyes gone wide and hopeful.
Guy shook his head. “Just singles for now,” he said, and Olivia and I glanced at each other warily. Though he didn’t say it, it was obvious that this was another hurdle for us to leap over. “We’ll see about the rest.”
The recording studio was tucked away on a side street off a commercial boulevard in downtown Orlando. It was smaller than I’d pictured it and a little grimier inside, the faint smell of cigarette smoke and what looked like coffee stains on the industrial carpet in the lobby. I liked the technician right away, though, a guy named Jerry with a patient way about him and a wide, easy smile. “Take your time,” he advised me whenever I messed up and needed to start over, though I could tell Lucas and Guy were getting restless. “You can’t rush these things.”
Turned out you could rush them, actually: Olivia and I both recorded our singles in less than twenty-four hours total—the two of us in tandem, her shuffling out of the studio just as I shuffled in. I looked carefully away as we passed each other in the hallway, telling myself I wasn’t aching to talk to her—about what had happened last night with Alex, about what was happening now.
It was nearly sunrise by the time Charla drove me back to the complex; I was dead on my feet in my flip-flops, my voice gone hoarse from take after take. “Hey, you,” Charla said, slinging an arm around my shoulders as we crossed the parking lot toward the apartments, smiling at me in the early-morning light. “You did good tonight.”
I let myself lean for a moment, exhaustion and something else, maybe, the feeling of having earned this.
“I did,” I agreed happily, and yawned.
Guy hired a team of producers to mix the singles out in Los Angeles; while they did that, Charla and Juliet wanted to do what they called image work.
“What’s wrong with our image?” I asked, glancing from where Olivia was standing in our shared bathroom to my own reflection in the mirror, frowning a little.
“Nothing’s wrong with it, exactly,” Charla told me, though Juliet was peering into my closet in a way that suggested that wasn’t exactly the case.
I glanced over at Olivia again, at her smooth dark hair and neat black tank top, her arms gone a deep, even tan from being in the Florida sun all summer and her eyebrows two perfect arches. She already looked like a pop star.
Me? Not so much.
“Fine,” I said, huffing a little, turning away from my messy ponytail and naked face in the mirror. “Let’s go get fancy.”
We started at a salon in the nicest part of Orlando: all white and huge and spare, no wrinkly old Peoples stacked in the waiting area or waterlogged lookbooks with wedge hairdos from 1991—nothing like the Cuttery back home. It smelled like flowers and chemicals, weirdly appealing. An Asian girl with French-braid pigtails sat me in a big leather swivel chair, then set about wrapping strands of my hair in tinfoil. “So what do you girls do?” she asked me, nodding her head toward Olivia, who was having her hair washed a few chairs down. “Are you in school?”
I shook my head. “We’re singers, actually,” I said. It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and I felt kind of stupid. The craziest part was how I guessed it was true. “We might be opening for Tulsa MacCreadie at the end of the summer.”
“Seriously? Tulsa MacCreadie?” The girl’s eyes widened. “I’ve never styled a celebrity before.”
“I’m not a celebrity,” I assured her, leaving out the part where only one of us was going to get to go on tour.
“Maybe not yet,” the stylist replied. “Shoot, I hope I don’t mess this up. Not that I usually mess this up? But I’m just saying.”
I was making her nervous, I realized with no small amount of wonder. That was the first time anything like that had ever happened. The coaches weren’t the only ones looking at me differently lately. Soon the rest of the world might, too.
The foil had to stay on my hair for a while, so the stylist sat me on a white leather couch to wait. “How you doing?” Charla asked, coming over with a paper cup of lemon water for me to drink. Olivia, who was beside her, already had one in her hand.
“I feel like Pretty Woman,” I said.
“Like a hooker?” Olivia asked sweetly.
I scowled, stung. “Jesus Christ, Liv.”
Charla rolled her eyes at both of us, which felt patently unfair. “Can you not?”
The stylist brought me back to the chair to finish my haircut, turning me away from the mirror so I couldn’t see while she dried it with a big round brush. When she finally spun me back around, though, my eyes widened. I was blond. Not a garish platinum but a soft honey color, with darker streaks showing through.
“I look hot,” I blurted before I could stop myself.
The stylist laughed. “Yeah, you do,” she said, hugging me good-bye before I went. “Go be famous,” she instructed, and I grinned.
We did costume fittings next, back at the studio—separately this time, Olivia working on vocals with Lucas while Charla and Juliet steered me into the dance room. “We thought we’d spend some solo time with each of you,” Juliet explained.
I nodded. It wasn’t lost on me that this was almost exactly what I’d been picturing when the two of us were first chosen for Daisy Chain. Here we were—new hair, new clothes, the whole celebrity treatment—and we were doing it apart.
Whenever I’d pictured what I’d wear on tour with Tulsa, I’d imagined Madonna’s black catsuit or Whitney Houston’s sparkly dresses, but what Juliet and Charla had in mind for me was mostly just jeans and T-shirts that showed off my midsection. I stood in the studio in my underwear as Juliet pulled outfit after outfit out of clear plastic dry-cleaning bags.
“How much did all this cost?” I asked, looking at the labels, which were stitched with names I’d only ever heard in movies. The bill for my haircut had been over two hundred dollars; I’d seen the receipt when Juliet signed it. “These are, like, really fancy designers.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Juliet told me. “They’re comped.”
“Comped?” I repeated, not sure if that meant what I thought it meant. “Like, they just sent the clothes for free?”
“You’re going to have your picture taken,” Juliet explained, “a lot. They want you in their stuff.”