“Are you coming or what?” Danica shouts from a few steps ahead of me, and at the impatient look on her face, I sigh and follow her.
It wasn’t always this way. When we were kids, she sometimes let me be the leader in follow the leader. In Simon says, she sometimes let me be Simon. In house, we took turns being the mom and being the dad. And when her family moved away when Danica and I were in elementary school, I was actually pretty sad.
But that was before she started at her new school, where she became a mean girl made for movies. Our families continued to get together for holidays—Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easters—but each year, Danica turned more and more into someone I didn’t know. She grew into someone beautiful and someone ugly, while I stayed more or less the same. I never imagined we’d end up roommates, but at our family dinner this past Easter, when I mentioned wanting to transfer to Mayfield University someday since they have one of the best pre-veterinary programs in the country, she jumped right in and volunteered her father to pay my tuition. She said she wanted to go back to school too. She said we should both go to Mayfield and be roommates. She said it would be so much fun.
At a door near the back corner of the room, my fun-loving cousin marches right up to the first security guard she sees, who also happens to be approximately five zillion times her size, with muscles made of stone and a face to match. “Who do I need to talk to to get backstage?”
At her bossy tone, Muscle Man lifts an eyebrow. “The Easter Bunny?”
“Excuse me?”
“No one’s allowed backstage.” The arms he crosses over his chest warn that he isn’t messing around.
“I’m with Mike,” Danica lies, and after studying her for a moment, Muscle Man laughs.
“Sure you are.”
“I am!”
When Muscle Man just smiles at her like she’s a petulant child, Danica resorts to acting like one. She demands to see his boss and threatens to get him fired. When that doesn’t work, she resorts to curse words. And when those have no effect, all hell breaks loose.
She’s torpedoing her finger into his chest and shouting something about his inbred gene pool when I try to pull her away from him. But Danica is on a rampage, and all my efforts get me is a hard shove that nearly knocks me on my ass. At five feet tall, one hundred and three pounds, I’m not exactly in a position to throw my weight around, and I don’t make a second attempt to try. I’m rubbing my tender collarbone when the security guy picks my assailant up off her feet, and I helplessly follow as he carries her outside.
After serving as an armrest for a sweaty gigantor inside the club, after obliterating my eardrums in front of the world’s biggest speakers, after getting knocked around like a bratty child’s toy all night, all I want is to take a hot shower and crawl into my own bed to sleep for a week straight. Instead, I stand on the sidewalk outside Mayhem, frowning at the furious look on Danica’s face as she glares at the big metal door the security guard just shut behind him.
She came here for one thing, and I know she’s not leaving until she gets it.
“You didn’t have to push me,” I mutter, and her eyes flare.
“You should’ve had my back!”
“And done what? Bite his ankles?”
In her four-inch wedge boots, Danica towers above me. I stare way up at her, trying to remember the girl who played dolls with me up in my parents’ hayloft. But she’s lost somewhere behind fake lashes and fifteen years of getting everything she’s wanted.
“You’ve been nothing but a bitch this whole time,” she snaps, and I sigh and pull my shirt away from my skin again, letting the cool night air dry the sweat beaded on my lower back. There’s no point in trying to defend myself. In Danica’s mind, she’s always simultaneously the victim and the hero, and as her non-rent-paying roommate, I’ve learned to just accept that.
I appreciate everything she’s done for me. I do. If she hadn’t been the little voice in her father’s ear, persuading him to fund my schooling and begging him to make some calls to get us enrolled, I’d be home mucking stalls, not following my dreams. Her dad pays all of my bills—my tuition, my insurance, my living expenses, all of them. And while I suspect that Danica’s sudden interest in my life wasn’t entirely genuine—she’d flunked out of college before, and I think her dad was only open to the idea of her going back if she was living off-campus with a responsible roommate, aka her boring farm-girl cousin—I owe her. I owe her the roof over my head and the massive student loan debt I don’t have.
When her phone rings, she wastes no time dismissing me to answer it. “Katie?” she says. “Guess who just got kicked out of the fucking club. Yes! Because this asshole bouncer wouldn’t let me backstage.” She gives me a dirty look. “Just stood there doing nothing. I know! No, she didn’t even try. Getting a place with her was stupid.”
An icy chill slithers up the back of my neck, and I chew the inside of my lip. Because of my uncle’s insistence that I focus all of my energy on school right now instead of also finding a part-time job, I have no income. My only “job” is not pissing off his daughter. And it’s a job that I’m learning I am very, very bad at.
With my mouth shut, I slink away before my mere presence can enrage Danica further, and when she asks where I’m going, I make up the lamest excuse ever. “To read this flyer over here.”
I walk to a telephone pole to give us both time to cool down, choosing to poison myself with the secondhand smoke coming from the chain-smoking girls standing nearby rather than spend another second listening to Danica’s passive-aggressive trash talk.
“He is so fucking hot,” a girl in cheetah-print leggings gossips as she blows a string of smoke from her bloodred lips. The streetlight hanging above her pours a harsh glow over her bruised-purple hair, making it look even darker against her pale white skin. “And you know what they say about drummers.”
“No, what?” her friend asks, scratching the back of her fishnet stockings with the scuffed toe of her black leather boot.
“Drummers really know how to bang.”
A quiet chuckle escapes me as their drunken cackles echo down the city streets.
“You are so bad!” the girl in the fishnets says. “But I hear he never hooks up with fans.”
“Ever?”
“Ever. You’d have better luck with the bass player.”
“But I hear his girlfriend is batshit crazy . . .”
“Crazier than you?” Fishnets asks, and Cheetah Print pushes her while they giggle and continue fantasizing about my cousin’s ex.
It makes me gaze down the sidewalk at Danica, wondering if in some alternate universe, we could still be friends. Maybe I’d actually have fun at rock shows. Maybe she’d stop being so mean. Maybe we’d like living together.
Maybe we’d even gossip about boys.
Presented with two options—banging my head repeatedly against the telephone pole until this night finally ends, or extending Danica an olive branch—I take a deep breath and walk back toward the club.