She took a deep breath, but of course I knew even before the words came out. “I’m going on tour,” she said.
“He offered it to you?” I asked, though of course I’d already known that, had known it since I’d gotten back to the empty apartment, had known since I’d turned it down. “And you’re taking it?”
“I’m sorry,” Olivia said. “I know we promised each other—”
“He offered it to me first, you know that, right?” I asked immediately. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to be as mean as I possibly could. “You know you’re taking my sloppy seconds.”
“I know he did,” Olivia said, very voice quavering a little. “And honestly, you’re probably the better performer. But—”
“You’re the one who wanted to make that stupid pact to begin with!” A thought occurred to me then, black and terrible. “Did you set me up?” I demanded. “Is that what you were doing when you said it would be both of us or nobody?”
“No, of course not.” Olivia shook her head. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like, Olivia?” I was yelling now, making a spectacle of both of us in the middle of the parking lot; Guy and the others had stayed inside, but I could see some of the workers from the shipping place watching us with interest. Let them watch, I thought. Let everybody. This was Olivia, the person I’d loved longest out of anyone in the world. I’d thought that meant something. I’d thought we were in this together.
“Please just try to understand what it’s been like for me here,” Olivia said, reaching for my arm again; I jerked away. “I’ve wanted this since I was two.”
“And I had the chance to get out of my shitty life, but I picked you!” My voice cracked at that. “I picked you, Olivia. We’re supposed to be a team.”
“We are a team.”
“We are clearly not a fucking team!”
Olivia’s eyes welled up, too. “Dana,” she said, and she was pleading now. “Come on. You could be anything. You could do anything. This is the one thing I’m good at.”
“And I’m not fucking good at anything, Olivia, but I made this work because it was my one chance to get the hell out of Jessell! We were supposed to make this work together!”
Olivia shook her head again. “You’re stronger than me, okay? You’ve always been stronger than me. And that’s how I know you’re gonna be okay.”
“You’re full of shit.” I couldn’t believe this was happening, except for the part that I could: this had been the most important thing to Olivia since we’d gotten here, hadn’t it? This had been the most important thing to her all along. I felt like an idiot. I felt like the worst kind of fool.
“Just get away from me,” I told her, heading for the car—hers, I realized with a nasty little cackle. Even the car I’d driven here belonged to her. “Have a nice life.”
THIRTY-NINE
“You don’t have to do this,” Alex told me the next afternoon. He was sitting on my bed in the room I’d shared with Olivia at the start of the summer, watching me throw balled-up socks into my duffel. It was the first thing either one of us had said in a long time.
“I mean, I do,” I pointed out a little snottily, checking to make sure I hadn’t left anything in the bureau. “Guy gave my ticket to Olivia.”
“He’d give it back,” Alex said. “If you went to him and told him you really wanted it.”
I shook my head, resting one knee on the mattress beside him. “That’s the thing, though. Guy was right. I didn’t want it enough.”
“Well,” Alex said, threading his fingers through mine in the gesture that would always make me think of him, “what do you want?”
We kissed for a little bit, his soft mouth and soap-sweat smell, the thrum of the pulse in his neck when I put my tongue there. I pulled my other knee up so that I was sitting in his lap; he groaned and leaned backward, trying to take me with him, but I pushed him gently away.
“I can’t,” I told him, bumping my forehead against his. “I gotta do this. There’s a car picking me up in an hour.”
“I’ll be fast,” Alex promised, and I snorted.
“Perv.”
Alex grinned, but he let me get up and head for the closet. “When am I gonna see you again?” he asked.
That stopped me. I hesitated, sitting back down on the mattress beside him.
“I don’t know,” I said, not meeting his gaze. “You’re going to be the one with the more complicated calendar, I think.”
“Not that complicated.” Alex shrugged. “The tour comes through Atlanta in a month or so. We’ll see each other then. And maybe you could fly out and meet me before that, in New York or someplace cool like that.”
I scoffed—I couldn’t help it. “With what money, Alex?”
He looked hurt, and I felt like a jerk. “I’m sorry,” I said, reaching out for his hand one more time. “I’m being an asshole. But I just—I think it’s better for both of us if we’re honest about what’s going to happen now, you know?”
Alex’s eyes narrowed at that. “And what’s going to happen, exactly?”
I took a deep breath. This was the conversation I’d been dreading since yesterday—that I’d been dreading all summer—but I knew we had to have it, and we were running out of time. “I’m not an idiot,” I said. “I know that once you’re on tour, you’re going to meet girls, and have experiences, and—”
Alex barked a laugh at that, cutting me off. “Experiences?” he asked. “What kind of experiences, exactly? You sound like somebody’s mom.”
“It’s not funny!” I snapped. I wanted to lash out in every conceivable direction; I wanted him to see what a joke this all was. “Do you realize that until this summer I’d only ever been out of the state of Georgia one time? I’m a hick, Alex. I’m going to go home and live with my drunk mom and wait tables for the foreseeable future, and you’re going on tour with Tulsa fucking MacCreadie.”
“So what, Dana?” He shook his head. “Who cares?”
“I care, Alex! We’re about to have completely different lives, and yours is going to involve girls throwing themselves at you every second, and mine is going to involve scraping leftover burrito off people’s plates.”
“You chose that,” Alex reminded me. “You could have gone on tour, too. So you don’t get to act like this is my fault now, okay? You don’t get to act like I’m the one leaving you, or like you’re going to break up with me for my own good.” His eyes widened. “Is that what you’re doing?” he asked suddenly, and he sounded so afraid for a second, like the possibility had only just occurred to him. “Are you breaking up with me?”
I opened my mouth, closed it again; it felt like there were razor blades in my lungs. “I—yeah, Alex,” I heard myself say. “I think maybe I am.”