“View’s better from here anyway,” Alex said, grinning back at me. He held up the keys to the Suburban. I laughed out loud, grabbed his hand.
“You’re something, you know that?” I asked as we climbed up on the hood—side by side, his body warm and solid next to me.
“Weird,” Alex said, smiling a little. “I was just about to tell you the same thing.”
“Oh, were you?” I said, mocking, but Alex turned serious.
I sat up, suddenly nervous. “I didn’t mean—” I began, then broke off, worried I’d offended him.
“Dana, I’ve been singing love songs since I was five,” he told me. “But I’ve never really gotten it. Not like I do when I look at you.” He took a breath. “I love you. Whatever else happens, will you just remember that?”
For a second I only stared at him—the stubborn set of his jaw and his hair falling forward, the resolute truth in his eyes. I felt like I was seeing him clearly for the first time all night.
“I know,” Alex said, shaking his head, ducking his face as his cheeks turned faintly pink. “I’m corny. But it’s true.”
“That’s not what I was going to say,” I told him quickly. My heart was a runaway train inside my chest. “It’s not corny. It’s not corny at all.”
A real smile at that, wide and happy—the pureness of the emotion on his face was shattering, like I was something he’d wanted and wanted but never dreamed he’d get. “No?”
“No,” I promised, and then I finally said it. “I love you, too.”
I sat there and looked at him for a moment, wanting to laugh in disbelief and wonder. Wanting to cry and not entirely sure how come. I leaned forward and kissed him. The sky exploded over our heads.
Charla took Olivia and me for manicures on Friday afternoon, the three of us sitting side by side in the chairs while a pink-haired girl who couldn’t have been much older than me painted tiny stars on the nails of my ring fingers. “Looks pretty,” Olivia said, peering over my shoulder on her way to the dryers, her long hair hanging down into my face.
“You look pretty,” I crowed, and she grinned.
“Get a room, you two,” Charla chided, but she was smiling. Since Olivia and I had finally made up, we were inseparable in a way we hadn’t been since middle school, when we went to the bathroom together and made everyone call us Dolivia.
We stopped for sugar-free raspberry smoothies afterward, and as we pulled out of the parking lot I was flipping radio stations when I heard the first few notes of a cheery, synth-y pop song I vaguely recognized but couldn’t place. At first I thought it was one of the eighties-era love anthems my mom liked, but then Charla slammed on the brakes and I turned to Olivia in shock.
“This is you!” we both exclaimed at the same time.
I’ll never forget what Olivia’s face looked like then, shock and disbelief and happiness and awe all playing across her delicate features in rapid succession. “Holy shit!” she said, mouth dropping open. Then she burst clean into tears.
“I’m happy, I’m happy,” she said, laughing through her sobs as I reached into the backseat and tried to hug her, Charla making a sharp right that sent horns blaring and pulling into a parking spot in a strip mall so that we could listen properly.
Adrenaline was thrumming through my veins as Charla cranked the car stereo, rolling all the windows down so the sound spilled out into the heat. “You sound amazing!” I said, and she really did. Of course I’d heard the demo—I’d heard the finished version, too, but this was different, the thrill of it coming out of actual radio speakers on actual airwaves, where the whole world could hear it, too. My heart thrummed along with the bass line. The chords echoed deep inside my brain. Of all the stuff I’d pictured about Olivia or me possibly getting famous, somehow I’d never imagined this moment. I felt so hugely, enormously proud.
“Come on,” I said, throwing the car door open. I scrambled out onto the pavement, pulling Olivia out alongside me with one manicured hand. We sang along at the top of our lungs to her song on the radio, snotty, happy tears still running down her face as Charla shook her head and smiled like we were a couple of overgrown kids. Maybe this was success, I thought as we spun around on the concrete, the neon brightness of Orlando blurring by, maybe this was why I’d come here: to dance on the side of a highway with my one best friend in the world.
THIRTY-FOUR
That was the week we hit the road. August was fair season in the south; it seemed like every town from South Carolina to Texas was putting on some kind of festival, and Guy had booked Olivia and me to perform at what felt like all of them. The boys did the bigger ones with us, polishing their routines for Tulsa’s tour, but at some of them Olivia and I were solo, coming on before the crowning of the apple pie queen or the prize-winning Holstein cow. Still, I gave those performances everything I had, knowing that each one mattered. Even if Olivia and I wouldn’t admit it to each other, neither one of us had forgotten what was at stake here. Guy would be deciding which of us to take on tour any day now. Every bow I took felt like it could be the last.
The boys headed back to Orlando before our last stop, a county fair in Alabama a couple of hours in the van from Birmingham. It was redneck country—farmland and tiny grocery stores attached to gas stations, bars that made the dive we’d been to in Orlando look like a velvet-rope club.
The fair itself was actually kind of charming, though, or would have been—there were rides and games at one end and lines and lines of food stalls down the center, a flea market and a whole section for 4-H competitions complete with prize spaghetti squash and fat, oinking pigs. But it had rained earlier in the week and never dried out entirely, and the fields were sodden and muddy, sucking at our feet. Mosquitoes hung in dense, predatory clouds—I counted four bites on my arms and legs in the first twenty minutes we were there. It was so incredibly, sulkily hot. And there was a quality to the crowd I couldn’t put my finger on exactly, a tense, edgy restlessness that set my skin humming. I had a bad feeling from the moment I got out of the van, crossing my arms as I followed Juliet across the fairgrounds, glancing uneasily at the overflowing beer tent.
“It looks like the zombie apocalypse here,” I told Olivia as both of us sidestepped a glassy-eyed girl about our age dragging a screaming toddler by the hand. “I don’t like it.”