The idea of anybody thinking I was the kind of girl they wanted advertising their fancy clothes was hilarious to me, but I just nodded, gazing at myself in the mirror. I looked the part more than I had when I came here: my stomach was flatter than it had ever been, my hip bones jutting out the top of my low-slung jeans.
Juliet wasn’t impressed. “It wouldn’t hurt to tighten her up a little more there,” she said to Charla, nodding at me with her chin.
I frowned. “Tighten me up?”
“Add a few workouts, that sort of thing,” Juliet explained. Then she looked at Charla. “We’d need to be careful, though. We can’t have—” She raised her eyebrows. “You know?”
“What?” I peered back and forth between them. “What?”
Charla was nodding. “Juliet just means that if we changed your diet or workout program, it would need to stay between us,” she told me. “So we wouldn’t want Olivia to know.”
I looked at them blankly. “Why’s that?”
“Well,” Juliet said, “we wouldn’t want it to look like preferential treatment.”
I didn’t understand. “How is it preferential treatment if I’m the one who has to go on a diet?”
“It’s not so much preferential treatment,” Charla said delicately. “It’s more that we don’t want Olivia to feel like she needs to do those things to succeed.”
But I did? I shook my head, staring at them dubiously in the moment before it finally clicked. “You know about Olivia?” I demanded. “Since when?”
Charla and Juliet looked at each other again, neither one of them saying anything.
“Just tell me,” I snapped. “She’s my best friend.”
“There was an incident early on,” Juliet said finally, “that concerned us. But Olivia assured us that she was handling it on her own.” She held out a slinky tank top with skinny rhinestone straps. “Here,” she said. “Try this.”
“What kind of incident?” I demanded, but nobody answered. “And you just took her at her word?” Even as I said it I felt like a giant hypocrite; after all, wasn’t that exactly what I’d done the night after Guy’s party? I thought of Mrs. Maxwell asking me to look out for her. I felt about two inches tall.
Juliet, clearly, didn’t want to be talking about this. “Here,” she said again, still holding out the tank top, shaking it a little. Then, off my dubious expression: “It’s not your job to worry about Olivia.”
“I know,” I said before I could stop myself. “It’s yours.”
Juliet raised her eyebrows.
“Dana,” Charla said, “watch it.”
Or you’ll cut me, too? I wanted to say, but didn’t. I looked around the room at the clothes I hadn’t tried on yet, at myself in the mirror. My newly dyed hair shone in the overhead lights. It wasn’t true, what I’d said just now: it was my job to worry about Olivia. It had always been my job, and I was failing. Abruptly, I wasn’t having fun anymore.
“Give me that,” I said, holding out my hand for the tank top. “I’ll get changed.”
THIRTY-ONE
Guy booked us all a spot on a morning radio show out of Orlando that week, which he was downright giddy over. “Right in the middle of drive time!” he crowed when he announced it to all of us at the end of rehearsal. “If we do it right, the affiliates will pick it up, and we’ll get you on the radio in New York and California before the singles even drop.” He turned and looked at me across the studio, thick eyebrows arching. “So don’t screw it up.”
Don’t screw it up felt like a tall order: I was feeling pretty confident onstage lately, but the station wanted stripped-down acoustic performances, right in their studio. There’d be no dancing, obviously—just my voice on the airwaves for thousands of people to hear and judge. I could only imagine all the different ways it could turn into a train wreck. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked Charla on the way home that afternoon.
“Guy says so,” she replied, shrugging at me in the rearview mirror.
Olivia coughed in the front seat—she was getting a cold, had been sniffling all day—and tossed her hair a bit. “I think it sounds amazing,” she said, and I grimaced. Of course she did. Even if she didn’t, she’d never let on, not to me; there had been a time when we told each other everything, but that was over now.
“Can’t wait,” I said, to no one in particular. I looked out the window, squinted up into the sun.
We had to get up at four-thirty to make it to the radio station on time, the sun coming up red and bloody to the east of the highway and everybody a little bleary-eyed. Olivia looked especially tired, her skin gone waxy and pale. The cough she’d had yesterday had turned into a full-on hack now, her eyes dull and nose red. She clutched a travel mug of Charla’s mossy green tea in one hand.
“You okay?” I asked as we headed downstairs to the parking lot.
“Yup,” Olivia said shortly, tucking her mug in the crook of her elbow as she blew her nose. She didn’t look at me. “I’m fine.”
The DJ at the radio station was a short white guy in his forties, a baseball cap over his greasy hair and a generally gone-to-seed quality about him, right down to his crinkled plaid shirt. “We’ve got something for the kiddies this morning,” he said as he introduced Hurricane State, who were performing first. I saw Mikey and Austin roll their eyes; Trevor made a face at me like, can you believe this guy?, but Alex wasn’t giving anything away.
“Thanks for having us,” he said graciously, leaning over the microphone and smiling in a way you could hear in his voice. He didn’t sound nervous at all. “I’m Alex Harrison, and we’re Hurricane State.”
The boys did two songs, “Express Train” and their cover of “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” Alex taking lead on both. Olivia had curled up on a fake-leather couch in the lobby with her eyes closed, but I perched in a rolling chair in the booth with everyone else, trying not to smile too goofily. My own nerves were momentarily forgotten as I watched and I listened: Alex was the kind of pure, natural performer you only come across once in a lifetime, clear-voiced and unflappable and so, so good. Watching him made me want to be better. Hearing him made me want to work hard. Even the rude, scruffy DJ sat up and took notice, pulling his baseball cap off in surprise.
Halfway through the second song, Alex caught me looking, his gaze hooking mine and holding it there, smiling a slow, easy smile. It felt private, even though we were in a studio full of people and he was being listened to by who knew how many more on the radio. It felt like his heart was saying something to mine.
I love you, I wanted to tell him. I pushed the thought away.