Fireworks

by Katie Cotugno

  I snorted. “You did not.”

  “I did!” Alex said, laughing. “For a long time it was the only way I could do my times tables, was if I sang ’em. My mom had to come in and have a meeting with the teacher ’cause I was disrupting the other kids.”

  “Well,” I said quietly, skimming my fingernail up the back of his calf. “You are very disruptive.”

  Alex shivered. “Quit it,” he said, smiling, in a voice that did not in fact mean quit it at all. “I gotta get up and walk around in a sec.”

  That got my attention. “Oh yeah?” I asked, teasing. “And why wouldn’t you be able to do that, exactly?”

  “Shut up,” Alex said, reaching down and lacing his fingers through mine. Thunder rumbled again, closer this time; I rested my chin on his shoulder.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, nudging my nose at his jawbone. He smelled like summer, like this place. “Tell me more about singing.”

  Alex smiled. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do,” he said, and now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows. “Well, not the only thing,” he amended, and I laughed, loud and rowdy. The thunder crashed over our heads.

  The girls went for frozen yogurt after rehearsal that afternoon, dashing through the fat Florida raindrops and piling into Kristin’s shiny white Volkswagen. “You should come,” Olivia told me, and it seemed like she meant it, but I found myself shaking my head. I still felt weird around all three of them together, like they blamed me for what had happened with Guy even if they weren’t saying it. Like I was dragging them all down.

  Olivia left me her car and I meant to head home and get in the bathtub, maybe see if Alex was around, but I dawdled as I packed up my dance gear, and soon the whole studio was quiet and empty, my footsteps echoing on the shiny floors. I liked it like this, I realized, peering at myself in the wall-to-wall mirrors. Everything felt very calm.

  On a whim, I started working through some of the dances Charla had had us learning earlier that day, turning pirouettes and popping my hips even though there was no music to guide me. I felt stupid at first, but it was easier to get into the groove of things when nobody was watching, and as I started the routine over again from the top I realized I was kind of enjoying myself. More than that, I saw as I watched myself in the mirror—I actually looked really good. Maybe Alex was right, that I could possibly belong here. Maybe he was right that I could have what it took.

  I don’t know how many times I went through our dances that afternoon—I stopped counting the minutes, lost in my own body and the rhythm of the steps. I would have kept on indefinitely, might have danced straight through dinner, but the next time I glanced in the mirror there was Charla standing in the doorway, watching me wordlessly with an expression I couldn’t read on her face.

  I froze cold, then hot, feeling my whole body flush not with exertion but with intense, bottomless embarrassment. I felt like an idiot. I felt caught. The last thing I wanted was to make myself vulnerable to her like that, for her to have the chance to find me lacking in a moment when I was actually giving it everything I had. “Uh, hey,” I said, pushing my hair out of my face and trying not to breathe too heavily. None of this was real, I reminded myself. “I was just—” I broke off.

  Charla nodded, and now I did understand the look in her eyes, or at least I thought I did. She looked excited, I thought as I stared back at her, cheeks still flaming. She looked . . . pleased.

  “Lock up when you leave” was all she said.

  EIGHTEEN

  “Is this our training montage?” I asked one afternoon as we headed out to the grassy patch of parking lot where we usually ate our lunches—Subway sandwiches today, turkey with lettuce, tomato, and light mayo that tasted weird and fake. “It’s like freaking ‘Eye of the Tiger’ should be playing every time I walk down the hallway.”

  Olivia grinned, put her fists up. “Feels that way.”

  We were rehearsing a song called “Higher and Higher” today, which I’d been dreading—I had a solo in the bridge section, and whenever we practiced it always turned into a three-hour odyssey, during which Lucas felt it was his duty to promulgate a long and comprehensive list of everything I was doing wrong both in performance and in life, including the way I stood on the floor and breathed oxygen.

  That section was one I’d been going over a lot in my spare time, though, working on it with Alex’s help, and today it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting—in fact, Lucas didn’t stop me at all. I made it through the rest of the song in skittish anticipation, waiting for him to realize he’d missed his chance to embarrass me, but he was quiet until the end of rehearsal, content to correct Ashley’s vowel pronunciation and leave me out of it.

  “‘Unreal’ tomorrow,” he called as we were leaving, which was Kristin’s solo. Then, almost as an afterthought: “Nice work today, Dana.”

  “Dana?” Olivia repeated, sounding surprised, as my head whipped around in disbelief.

  “Me?”

  “You,” Lucas said, sounding immediately annoyed again, which was how I knew he’d meant it. It was the first thing resembling praise he’d had for me since I got to Orlando, and I felt my face warm with pride. It didn’t mean anything, I told myself, trying to tamp down the big dumb grin I could feel spreading across my face. I was still unequivocally the worst one in this whole group. But for the first time, it felt like maybe I really was making progress. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I had no hope at all.

  I couldn’t sleep again that night, lying in bed watching the shadows cast across the ceiling by the yellow lights outside the window. I was still having trouble like this a few times a week, my nerves too jangly, my brain too busy to rest. I thought about heading over to Alex’s apartment to see if he was still awake, but I didn’t know how I’d explain that away if Olivia woke up and caught me gone. Finally, I got out of bed anyway, easing the door open and heading into the kitchen for a glass of water.

  I felt like I’d been lying in bed for a long time already, but Charla was still up, sitting on the couch in her Houston Ballet T-shirt and watching the TV on mute, clutching a mug of what smelled like ginger tea in one hand. “Did I wake you?” she asked, when she saw me come out.

  I shook my head. The sight of her there in the half-light made me unexpectedly homesick: my mom had never been particularly strict about bedtimes, and I’d spent probably hundreds of nights curled beside her as she watched 90210 and Melrose Place, soaps giving way to the news giving way to the late shows. Sometimes she’d get up and make us a snack, Ritz crackers with peanut butter or a sleeve of off-brand chocolate chip cookies. I’d barely called her at all since I’d been here. I promised myself that I would tomorrow. “I was already up,” I told Charla softly. “Besides, you’re not making any noise.”

  Charla smiled at that. “I like to make up my own stories sometimes,” she told me, motioning to the screen. “My mom always watched in Spanish when I was a kid, so I got in the habit.”

  I nodded. It was weird, but sometimes I actually forgot that Charla was somebody with a family, the same way I’d forget that Kristin had three sisters or how sometimes I’d go all day without thinking of my mom. It was like all of us existed in some weird vacuum in Orlando, like the rest of the world was in faded, muted watercolors and what was going on here stood out in sharp relief. It had taken a surprisingly short amount of time before it was hard to imagine a life outside this one.

  “Can’t sleep?” Charla asked now, scooting over on the sofa to make room for me. I sat down beside her, a little cautiously. She and I hadn’t spent a lot of time alone together, but I liked her, I thought—she was only about ten years older than us, and sometimes felt more like a big sister than an actual adult. In rehearsal, she was the opposite of Lucas, big on praise and thumbs-ups.

  “Nah,” I said. “I’m, like, an insomniac since I got here. It’s weird.”

  Charla nodded seriously, like she was giving more weight to that throwaway comment than I’d meant for her to, and righ
t away I wished I could take it back. “How you doing, Dana?” she asked, turning and pulling one long leg up onto the sofa, looking at me straight on. She’d washed her face for bed already, her hair spilling down over her angular shoulders. “You having fun here?”

  “Of course,” I said too eagerly, nodding fast like a puppet on a string. “I’m great.”

  “You looked good the other day,” Charla said. “When I saw you in the dance room. You’ve got real talent, you know that? When you’re on like that, you’re incredible to watch.”

  I shook my head even as I felt myself flush with pleasure—embarrassed by the memory, that feeling of having been caught with my guard down like that. Still, it wasn’t lost on me that the compliment was similar to ones I’d gotten from Alex, all his talk about watchability and the X-factor. Maybe he wasn’t talking completely out of his butt. Still. “I was just screwing around,” I muttered. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Charla said gently. “Diminish what you’re doing here, or make it seem like it doesn’t matter. The others certainly aren’t.”

  It was making me kind of uncomfortable to be the focus of all her attention. “How’d you start working with Guy?” I asked.

  Charla sat back against the cushions, took a long, quiet sip of her tea. “I had a couple bad stress injuries when I was still touring,” she explained, looking at me over the lip of her mug. “So I took some time off, started teaching at a studio in New York, working on some theater. And I had a friend who knew Juliet.”

  I nodded, picturing it—a life that had turned out differently, maybe, than Charla had expected. “Do you miss performing?”

  “Sometimes.” She shrugged. “Not as much as I would have thought. I didn’t have that special thing, you know? I blend in up there; I don’t stand out. Not everybody’s cut out to be a great performer.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was trying to tell me something or not, if I stood out to her or I didn’t. If she would have said this exact thing to Olivia or Ashley, if they’d wandered out of their rooms. Over the white-noise drone of the air-conditioning, I could hear cars whooshing by on the highway outside.

  “What about you?” Charla asked. “What would you want to be doing if you weren’t doing this?”

  I shrugged a little, shifted in my seat. “Everybody keeps asking me that lately.”

  “It’s a valid question.”

  “Because I definitely shouldn’t quit my day job?”

  It was the closest I could get to asking what she was really trying to say to me here, but Charla rolled her eyes. “Because I care about you,” she said.

  The idea popped into my head again: I used to think I’d be a doctor. It was kind of the same as choreography, I thought—learning a series of steps and performing them in the exact right order. But Alex had been wrong, that night in the car. That idea was even dumber and more far-out than the idea of touring with Tulsa MacCreadie. It was completely and utterly absurd. “I don’t know,” I lied finally, looking at the TV and not at Charla. “I guess I can really only picture myself doing this.”

  NINETEEN

  The following weekend, we were all invited to a pool party at Guy’s house on the other side of Orlando. Kristin started getting ready bright and early that morning, slinging an L.L.Bean tote full of self-tanner and Sun-In up onto the vanity in the bathroom and getting to work. “I’m going to crap my pants,” she announced when I came in to brush my teeth, the fact that normally she didn’t have two words to say to me apparently forgotten in the face of this momentous occasion. “I’m going to barf all over him. I’m going to crap my pants; then I’m going to barf all over him.”

  “What?” I blinked. Guy was rich, sure, but I didn’t see what there was to get so worked up about. “Who?”

  Kristin looked at me like I was insane. “Tulsa!” she replied. “Obviously.”

  “Relax,” Ashley said, dipping her finger into a tin of shiny pink lip gloss. “We’re going to be on the same level as him soon.”

  “We are not on the same level as him now,” I pointed out, then felt stupid about it. I didn’t like to think of myself as the kind of person to fall all over herself in front of a celebrity.

  Kristin wasn’t concerned about coolness, apparently. “I waxed my bikini line last night,” she announced, lining her arsenal of products up on the vanity. “Just in case.”

  “Just in case Tulsa MacCreadie wants to have sex with you?” I snorted.

  “I can hear you!” Charla called from the other room.

  “Dana’s too cool to get excited about Tulsa,” Olivia said as she brushed on waterproof mascara, plucking at a clump and flicking it away. “It’s not her style.”

  In reality, there was only one person I was really excited to see at Guy’s party, but I tried to keep my voice nonchalant. “Well,” I conceded, bumping her hip with mine, familiar. “I mean. He’s no Hot Rod Davison.”

  Olivia laughed.

  Guy lived in a gated community on the outskirts of Orlando, in a white stuccoed house with big fake Greek columns in the front of it. A fountain burbled away in the front yard. A housekeeper in an actual uniform answered the door, like something out of Jane Eyre, which I’d half read in English back in Jessell earlier that spring. “So nice to see you all,” she said brightly. “Follow me.”

  She led us through a living room outfitted with a shiny grand piano and into a sleek white kitchen, then down a short flight of stairs to a rec room with a massive pool table, plus a Pac-Man machine and a jukebox that lit up red and green and gold. “He lives here by himself?” I asked quietly, as we trailed her through the cavernous hallways. Ashley shrugged.

  “They’re out in the yard,” the housekeeper said, motioning at the sliding glass doors that led there. “If there’s anything you need, just ask.”

  In the back was a massive pool landscaped a million times nicer than the one at the complex, complete with a waterslide and a fake grotto like the one I’d seen on a late-night special about the Playboy Mansion. A stainless-steel grill was built into a low stone wall on one side of the yard.

  I hardly registered any of that, though, because Tulsa MacCreadie was standing at the glass-topped patio table, wearing sunglasses and drinking a beer. I looked fast, not wanting to be caught staring. Then I looked again. In person he was shorter than I’d thought he’d be, but just as handsome, perfectly curly hair and eyebrows like two dark, expressive punctuation marks across the top of his summer-tanned face. “Hey, Charla,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “How you been?”

  “Tulsa,” Guy said. He was wearing red shorts and a brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt like the dad in an eighties movie, big dark sunglasses on his face. “This is Daisy Chain.”

  Tulsa tipped his beer in our direction. “Ladies,” he said, though for one weird moment it seemed like he was actually only looking at me. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Olivia said.

  “Hi!” Ashley bubbled. For all her big talk earlier, Kristin was struck silent, her mouth just slightly agape.

  I frowned. It irked me, how Guy had introduced us all together like that, like we weren’t distinct people. “I’m Dana,” I blurted. “This is Ashley, Kristin, and Olivia.”

  Tulsa nodded without comment, taking a swig of his beer. I felt like an idiot.

  Olivia grabbed my arm and steered me toward the pool. “Be cool,” she muttered.

  “I was being cool!” I protested, feeling my face flame. “I just don’t like being part of some machine.”

  The boys turned up a little later, with Lucas in Juliet’s van. I could hear their noise before I saw them, felt my chest kick up the way it hadn’t even at the sight of Tulsa. Alex is here. He was wearing his swim trunks and a white V-neck T-shirt, his cheeks a bit pink from the heat. I was so relieved to see him that I wanted to bolt across the yard and catch him in a full-body tackle; instead, I held back, pulling a bit at the bathing suit Olivia had loaned me, feeling naked.
“Hey,” I said, trying to keep it casual in case anyone was watching.

  “You look really, really pretty,” Alex murmured, and I grinned.

  The boys had been to Guy’s a bunch of times before, and within ten minutes they were playing a noisy game of tag like it was just another day at the complex pool. Kristin sunned herself like a lizard on a rock. Her bikini was so small that I thought it was probably good she’d waxed every last hair off her body.

  For lunch, Guy’s chef grilled turkey burgers and hot dogs, plus steaks for the adults and vegetables for Tulsa. I stayed far away from Alex, not wanting anyone to get any ideas. “This isn’t so weird to you?” I asked Olivia, rubbing my bare feet through the rough Florida crabgrass—even Guy’s gardeners were no match for that.

  She shrugged. “We gotta get used to this kind of thing, I think.”

  I smirked. “If I’m ever used to a thing like this, you can throw me in the fancy pool.”

  I finished my burger and Diet Coke, then went inside to pee, blinking at the darkness of the house as my eyes adjusted. In the bathroom everything was made of marble with gold faucets—the sink, the huge sunken bathtub, and what looked like a second toilet, only without a seat. I stared at it for a minute, then washed my hands and went and got Olivia and Ash.

  “Come look at something with me?” I asked, leading them back to the bathroom. “What is this?”

  Ashley laughed.

  “It’s a bidet,” Olivia informed me.

  “A what?”

  “It’s for washing your butt after you poop,” Ashley explained. “It’s European.”

  “Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “Like, instead of toilet paper? That’s disgusting.”