Alex looked over at her, eyes narrowing for a moment before he smiled. “Hey!” he said, gathering her into a hug and lifting her up onto her toes like they were long-lost comrades from a far-off war. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s our first day of rehearsal,” she told him, motioning to the rest of us. “Daisy Chain.”
I stared at the two of them, totally gobsmacked. Olivia and I knew all the same people—or at least, I thought we did. Clearly, I’d been wrong. I looked away, squinting into the sunlight; it was like the rubber band tethering me to reality had reached its elastic limit, snapping me back into the way things actually were.
The others all introduced themselves—Austin was the oldest, at twenty; Mario wore a Diamondbacks ball cap tilted slightly to one side. Mikey had curly dark hair and was the closest to goofy-looking of any of them, while Trevor, a light-skinned black kid with a ring of puka shells around his neck, had the friendliest smile I’d ever seen. All of them were uniformly attractive. Standing in a cluster, they looked like an ad for the Gap.
“So,” Alex asked, “is this the weirdest day of your life so far, or just second or third weirdest?”
I thought he was addressing us generally; it took me a second to realize he was talking directly to me. “Oh, not even top ten,” I said, recovering. “But I’m a weird girl, so.”
It came out distinctly unfriendly, which wasn’t exactly how I’d meant it; still, I thought that was for the best. Olivia was looking at him expectantly, her dark head tilted to the side. I pushed our random late-night conversation out of my head. Alex was cute. So what? They were all cute. That was literally the entire point.
Alex looked like he was about to say something else to me, when Juliet opened the door to the studio, eyes narrowed. “Gentlemen!” she called, sounding impatient. “You coming in here, or what?”
“We better go,” said one of them—Austin, I thought, the big brother of the group. “See you guys later.”
“You should come over one night,” Trevor added. “We’re neighbors, after all.”
Juliet called us in a few minutes later, and as we headed back into the studio I yanked Olivia aside. “Who was that?” I asked incredulously. “How do you know him?”
Olivia looked over her shoulder, like Alex might materialize at any moment to hear her. “Do you remember Prince Charming?” she asked me quietly.
“That’s Prince Charming?” I asked. Olivia used to talk about Prince Charming all the time in middle school, when she was doing a bunch of regional theater out of Atlanta. They’d been in Cinderella together when we were thirteen. He had not, in fact, played Prince Charming—he’d played a footman—but she’d had a massive crush on him, so the name had stuck. “Prince Charming is in this boy band?”
“Shh!” Olivia hissed. Then, “What, you think that’s lame?”
“No,” I said. “I think that’s the kind of irony that would make Alanis Morissette really proud.”
“I can’t believe I threw myself at him like that,” she said. “I didn’t even think he’d remember me.”
“You didn’t throw yourself at him,” I promised. “And of course he remembered you.”
“We were kids.”
“It was, like, four years ago!” I snorted. “Did you know they were touring with us?”
Olivia shook her head. “I knew he was in Hurricane State now, but that was it. They’re, like, borderline actually famous. They did one of those MTV beach house things over spring break.” She was practically glowing. “Doesn’t that feel like a crazy coincidence?” she asked. “Both of us just . . . being here?”
“Yeah,” I said, bumping her shoulder as we headed into the voice room, trying not to think about the fact that she’d known her crush might be here and hadn’t told me. “It’s pretty crazy.”
Lucas, our voice coach, a trim, sandy-haired guy in his thirties wearing a fitted sky-blue polo shirt, was already waiting behind the piano, a massively irritated expression on his face. “First of all, you’re four minutes late to be in here,” he said, none of the cheery preamble we’d gotten from Charla. Clearly, he was not interested in knowing our hopes and dreams for Daisy Chain. “So let’s not waste any more time. You,” he said, nodding to Kristin. “Scales.”
I blinked, taken aback. Still, Ashley had told us at lunch that Lucas was supposed to be the best voice coach on the East Coast outside of New York City. He’d trained Tulsa from the time Tulsa was twelve. Maybe this was just how it was done.
Kristin sang her scales, then Olivia and Ashley, Lucas starting at one end of the keyboard and working higher and higher each time. I listened eagerly, trying to suss out everyone’s place here in spite of my ignorant ears. Kristin was a gunner. She was here to be the favorite, to stand out. Ash seemed more reserved. And Olivia was somewhere in between—capable and calm under pressure, with a voice that smoothed out the rough places in the harmonies, filling in the cracks.
And me?
I’d never sung scales before, but it didn’t seem terribly difficult; I tried to imitate what the others had done, ahh-ing along with the runs up and down the piano. Lucas didn’t say anything while I was singing, but when I was finished, he took his hands off the keys and placed them in his lap. “Remind me again what kind of training you’ve had?”
I shook my head. “No training,” I admitted.
“Right.” He raised his eyebrows. “So you can’t sight-read.”
I shook my head again.
Lucas sighed. “And you’ve never sung harmony before?”
“Like I said, I’ve had no training,” I said, more snappishly than I meant to.
He eyed me for a moment. “So you did,” he said, his voice quiet, and right away I could tell I’d made an enemy. I glanced over at Olivia for reassurance, but she was looking down at her feet. Kristin and Ashley were watching me, though, and I felt my face flame, red and embarrassed.
Once warm-ups were finished, Lucas handed us all binders full of lyrics for the songs we’d be learning over the next couple of weeks, ran quickly through each of our individual parts, then jumped right into the intro of a purring ballad called “Only for You.” I gave it my best effort, but it didn’t take more than a few minutes before it was clear to everyone, me especially, that I was by far the worst singer in Daisy Chain.
“Stop,” Lucas said, cutting us off mid-chorus. He took his hands off the keyboard entirely, the sudden silence startling and huge. “Stop, stop, stop. Dana, come on, pay attention. You’re not hitting your harmonies at all.”
“I’m not?” I asked.