“Mm-hmm.” I peered up at him from underneath my eyelashes. “Are you?”
That made him laugh. “Yeah, Dana, I’m good.”
I felt wrung out and sleepy; all I wanted to do was pass out with the sound of Alex’s heart in my ear. I was dangerously close to doing just that when I heard it: the sound of a key in the front door lock.
“Shit,” Alex said, eyes widening as my heart swooped unpleasantly inside my chest. “Trevor.”
We scrambled back into our clothes, both of us laughing a little. We smoothed the bed out as best we could manage; I ran a hand through my messy hair. He walked me to the door, and I waved a sheepish good night to Trevor, who’d made a beeline for the refrigerator and didn’t seem to notice anything one way or the other.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Alex told me out on the catwalk. I didn’t want to let go of his hand. But I nodded, kissed him good night, and headed home to our apartment. I looked back at him and grinned one more time before I went.
THIRTY
“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.”
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.
&n
bsp; 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.
Hurricane State’s performance was over before I knew it, the DJ and his producer clapping and pushing the button to go to commercials. “Nice job,” the DJ said, slapping a hand on Alex’s back. “You’re a talented kid.” He nodded at all the rest of them. “All of you are.”
My skin was still thrumming like Alex had touched me. I wanted to jump up and throw my arms around him, show everyone how proud I was, but there wasn’t any time for that: thirty seconds later, we were back from commercial and the DJ was saying my name into the mic. I didn’t have the brainpower to be nervous. Instead I just closed my eyes, clamped the headphones over my ears, and sang.
“That was amazing,” Alex told me when I was finished. The rest of the boys had taken off, but he’d hung around, listening to me like I’d listened to him; the pride on his face now was genuine, and I knew I’d done a good job.
“You were amazing,” I countered.
“All right, we’re all amazing,” Guy said, rolling his eyes at us from his seat in the corner. Then, frowning: “Is somebody getting Olivia in here?”
When Juliet brought her into the booth, Olivia looked even worse than she had earlier, her movements shuffling and her expression not entirely alert. “It’ll be quick,” Juliet was promising as they came through the doorway; Olivia stopped, braced her hands on her knees, and let out a long, wheezy cough. When she righted herself, her eyes were wide.
“I can’t do this,” she said.
Guy snorted. “A little late for that now, sweetheart. We’re back from commercial in forty-five.”
“I’m too sick,” Olivia protested. “I’m gonna sound like total shit.” Her expression was panicked, like a spooked pony. “Dana,” she said, turning to me all of a sudden. “Tell him I can’t.”
I blanched. “Me?” I said.
“Thirty seconds,” t
he DJ told us.
“It’ll be fine,” Juliet promised, but Olivia shook her head rapidly.
“Olivia,” Guy said, sounding irritable, “pull it together.”
“I can’t,” she repeated, her eyes filling with tears—she was sick and exhausted and wrung out, I could tell, starting to lose it entirely. “I’m going to sound like shit, and everybody’s going to hear me. Dana,” she said again, “please.”
I hesitated for a moment, some small, nasty part of me fully aware that this could only be a good thing for me—my only competition, the girl who’d spent the last six weeks telling me I wasn’t good enough to be here, melting down in public seconds before she was supposed to go on?
But it was Olivia.
And she needed me.
“You got this,” I heard myself say quietly, reaching out and tucking her stringy hair behind her ears. Her skin was warm with fever; I wondered if she’d eaten today, if this was garden-variety sickness and nerves or something more. It unsettled me, looking at her and not being able to tell exactly what was wrong. I hated it, the not knowing. I didn’t want that to be how it was anymore. “Just take a deep breath and do the best you can, okay? I’ve heard you sing sick before. It’ll sound like you’re doing it on purpose—you’ll have a rasp or something. It’ll be over so fast.” Olivia shook her head, but I pushed on. “You can do it,” I said again, looking her in the face and trying to keep my voice as steady as possible. “It’s me, and I promise you can. I won’t let you look dumb, remember? Do you trust me?”
Olivia nodded.
“Okay. You gotta live your life forward here, just for a minute.”
That got a smile out of her, albeit a watery one. “Okay,” she agreed.
She sounded fine in the end, all things considered; the cold put a bit of a break in her voice, but not anything you’d notice if you didn’t hear her sing every day of your life. Still, I held my breath, wanting it to go well for her in spite of myself. As soon as the red light went off she doubled over coughing again.