I snorted. “Seems like a solid plan. Definitely something to bank on.”
“I’m serious,” she wheedled. “I mean, not about the Tulsa part. Well, maybe about the Tulsa part! But mostly about needing your best-friend services.”
I hesitated. It was tempting, if only for the chance to spend some extra time with her. Olivia was headed to Georgia Southern University come the middle of August, while I’d stay here, living at my mom’s and working whatever job I could get. It was fine—it wasn’t like I’d ever harbored any delusions about going to college, and I knew Olivia and I would still be friends. It would just be . . . different. “I wish,” I said finally. “We’ll do a road trip later this summer or something, once I find another job.”
Olivia sighed theatrically. “You’re very boring,” she said, but there was no heat behind it. She always got why I had to work.
“I am,” I agreed, leaning all the way back the same way she had earlier, my long hair pooling on the floor. Olivia had used the crimping iron on it before the party last night, though now it was mostly frizz. I probably ought to have gone up and showered before dinner, but I was comfortable where I was: the basement smell of air-conditioning and deeper down of mildew, the hum of the dehumidifier working away in the corner near the laundry room. The shelves were stuffed with games and toys we hadn’t touched since we were little—Connect Four and a bin full of Barbies, plus a Fisher-Price dollhouse we’d played with until we were way too old for it, swearing each other to secrecy. It felt peaceful down here. It felt safe.
“Later this summer,” I promised again, as Junia closed out her hour by imploring her studio audience to Live Life Forward!, everyone bursting into riotous applause. My hangover was mostly gone, just the faintest pulse behind my eyeballs. “Unless, you know, you’re too famous by then.”
“Obviously,” Olivia said, thrusting her chin into the air with great fanfare. Both of us laughed out loud.
“You want me to drive you home?” she asked after dinner. We’d had pork chops and orange carrots, debated the merits of Whitney Houston versus Madonna as optimal audition material. As we loaded the dishwasher, she was leaning toward Celine Dion.
I shook my head. “I can walk it.” It wasn’t actually that far at all from Olivia’s house to mine, five blocks up and four blocks over; we’d been on the same bus route since kindergarten, which was how we’d become friends to begin with. Still, you’d never have mistaken them for the same neighborhood. On Olivia’s street, the houses were small but impeccably tidy, proud flowers lining neatly paved front walks and freshly washed minivans tucked under the carports.
My street was . . . not like that.
The TV was flickering blue when I let myself in through the side door, my mom on the sofa with her bare feet up on the coffee table. The curtains on the windows were pulled tightly shut. “I’m home,” I called, but I didn’t get an answer. I thought she might be asleep. Something smelled rotten in the kitchen garbage, so I tied the bag off and brought it to the alley outside, glass bottles clinking together inside the plastic. My mom’s grubby white terrier, Elvis, sniffed around my feet.
I was putting another trash bag in the bin when my mom came into the kitchen and gasped, grabbing on to the counter for balance. “Jesus Christ, Dana, you scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry,” I told her. She was wearing one of my tank tops and a pair of denim cutoffs, her hair scooped into a stubby tail at the crown of her head. Also, she was drunk. “I said hi when I came in.”
My mother ignored me. “Do you have any cash on you, baby?” she asked, her gaze the tiniest bit slow to focus. “I want to run out and grab something for dinner.”
I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said again, cringing at how bitchy I felt, but also sincerely doubting that what she was after was money for food. I didn’t have a job anymore, I reminded myself. I couldn’t be floating her all the time. “I already ate.”
My mom rolled her eyes at that, knowing I’d been at Olivia’s; she’d never liked the Maxwells. She thought they were snobs. “Well,” she said, “good for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for the third time in thirty seconds. Then, even though it was barely dark out, the endless start-of-summer twilight still visible out the kitchen window: “I’m gonna go to bed.”
I shut the door to my bedroom behind me and sat down on the sagging mattress. I thought about Olivia leaving in the fall. I considered my last paycheck from Taquitos, sixty-five dollars and a handful of change that was all the money I had in the world, and imagined the future stretching out in front of me in a wide, flat expanse of nothing but this. Finally, I got up and went for the phone in the hallway, stretched the cord all the way back to my room.
“Hey,” I said when Olivia answered. “You still want me to come?”
TWO
A tropical storm hit central Florida the afternoon of Olivia’s audition in Orlando, thunder bellowing and lightning skittering across the horizon like the sky itself was cracking open, like all hell was literally breaking loose.
“I thought it would be fancier,” I said, squinting through the torrential rain at the huge stucco building, the wipers on Olivia’s scruffy little Toyota barely up to the task of sluicing water off the windshield. Guy Monroe’s studios were tucked away at the far side of an industrial park off I-4 and, from the outside at least, resembled an airplane hangar more than any concert venue I’d ever seen. “Didn’t you kind of picture it fancier?”
“Honestly, I was trying not to picture it at all,” Olivia confessed, both hands still gripping the steering wheel hard enough to rip it out entirely. She’d already put the car in park.
“Uh-oh,” I said. I’d figured this might happen—for a person who’d been performing as long as she had, and who loved it so enormously much, Olivia was plagued by crazy bouts of stage fright. She’d practically climbed the curtains before her senior solo in the spring chorus concert a couple of months earlier, leaving me running backstage and threatening to sing the whole thing for her in a Donald Duck voice before she pulled it together and knocked it out of the park. “You nervous?”
“Something like that,” Olivia said, staring at her locked white knuckles instead of over at me. “Maybe we should just go home,” she suggested, her voice artificially bright. “I don’t really need to be doing this. I’m supposed to go to college in September, remember? Education is very important.”
I snorted. “Education is very important,” I agreed, though as of this summer I was personally done with mine once and for all—and, I reminded myself, glad about it. “But there’s no way I’m letting you turn around now. Sorry. We have to go in.”