by Kasie West
The blood seemed to drain from my face. I hadn’t even thought about what the audition would entail. “All day?”
“Roseville is about an hour away, and no matter when we audition, we have to stay until the end for results.”
“That really is all day.”
“Can you make it work?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure I could. “I’ll figure something out.”
The lobby of the spa smelled like chlorine and incense. The large windows behind the front desk framed the lake. I imagined that same view was visible from the massage room and the pedicure room and the mud-bath room. Well, maybe not the mud-bath room. That probably had no windows.
I stared at the prices in the leather folder the lady at the counter had handed me. They were way beyond my price range; even a simple forty-five minute massage was something I couldn’t afford to gift my parents. And that definitely wouldn’t fill up their entire day. I’d have to think of another way to keep them busy on the Saturday I auditioned.
“Thank you,” I said, handing the folder back to the woman.
“You don’t want to book anything?”
“No, I’m okay.” As I left, a group of older women walked in wearing swimsuits and talking about cold therapy.
I exited through the glass doors and down a wide set of wooden steps and back along the dusty path around the lake. I tried to think of other activities the camp offered. Maybe it was time to enlist the help of my sister. It was possible I’d need her to cover for me. But when I went back to the cabin, all I found was her phone on the nightstand. That worried me. She rarely left her phone. Was she bored without her documentary project? It really was time for me to tell her what I was doing. To suck it up and let her record me.
* * *
“Everyone stand perfectly still!”
When I finally found Lauren, she was on a paddle board, twenty feet from the shore with two other girls around her age. My sister was in the middle and trying to slowly stand along with the other girls. Two boards floated beside the one they now occupied, abandoned.
Lauren let out a squeal and they all fell in the water. She came up sputtering and laughing. “We are going to get this!” she said, climbing back up. “Again!”
“Huh,” I said. She didn’t need her phone or this project. If I believed in signs now, maybe I could believe the festival had always been meant for me. Maybe it was the thing that was helping me wake up, find myself, find my passion. I sure felt more alive lately. I smiled and walked away.
* * *
“I brought Oreos tonight to celebrate finishing the lyrics yesterday,” I said, walking into the back room of the theater and sitting on the side of the couch that I had been sitting on all week. I now considered it my side of the couch.
“Nice,” Brooks said. He was studying his messy guitar tab paper. He strummed a progression of chords. “Does that sound better?” He played a different one. “Or that?”
“I liked the second.”
He looked over at me and his eyes that were normally light and playful were dark and intense.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my smile immediately disappearing. I set the cookies on the ground next to the couch and moved to the middle cushion.
“Nothing.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Nothing new, I should say. I checked in with my dad’s caretaker today and he has a fever. It doesn’t sound bad, but for him, any sickness has a way of turning into some sort of secondary infection. I’m sure he’ll be fine, but it’s just one of those things that reminds me that my life is bigger than me, you know?”
“Yeah…Well, honestly, I don’t know. I’ve never had anything close to that in my life, but I can imagine.” I reached out and patted his arm, not sure what else to do. His guitar was a barrier between us. “Does he get sick a lot?”
“He doesn’t, but when he does, it makes everything harder.” He paused as if debating whether to share something with me or not. “I’m trying to convince my mom to go see him.”
“Why do you have to convince her to do that? Doesn’t she want to?”
He let out a heavy sigh. “I think half the reason she put him in a care facility is so she doesn’t have to deal with everything. The other half is so she can pretend he’s already gone.” There was anger in his words but also so much sadness.
My breath caught in my throat. “I’m sorry, Brooks.”
“It’s why my mom and I have been at odds for the last several years.”
“I can understand why.”
“You probably think I’m selfish for coming up here when I’m really all he has.”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t think that at all. I understand why you might need to get away from the pressure of all that for a little while. Maybe you hoped that if you left, she’d step up.” I suddenly understood why Brooks had snapped at Kai the other day, telling him he needed to take care of himself.
He strummed his guitar, even with my hand on his arm. “I need to stop thinking about it. Let’s just practice.”
“Are you sure? We don’t have to do this tonight.”
He kept strumming as his answer.
“Brooks, talk to me. This can wait.”
“I don’t want to talk. I want to work.”
“Then let’s work…I guess.” I pulled out the lyrics, which I had folded into a square, and unfolded them. He immediately snatched them from me and crumpled them into a ball. I gasped. “Why did you do that?”
“You don’t need them. You wrote this song.”
“Technically, I only wrote parts of this song…and we only finished it yesterday.”
He threw the crumpled ball over his shoulder. “You know you don’t need the lyrics. You’re using them so you don’t have to look at your audience.”
He was right; they’d been my crutch all week. I turned toward the boxes across the room, my head up. “Okay, fine. I’m ready.”
He sighed impatiently. “I’m your audience.”
“I won’t be looking at you the day of our audition. I’ll be looking ahead.” I gestured toward the boxes like they would be there at the end of the week, judging me.
“A person with a face will be your audience. You need to get used to it. Today, that person is me.”
Even though I didn’t think a beautiful boy with bright blue eyes and gorgeous hair would be my audience, he was right. I needed to get used to looking at eyes that would be looking at me. So I stared at him as he started to play.
“You missed your cue,” he said.
“I know.” Tears stung my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t do this right now. You’re snapping at me, and normally you have happy eyes and right now your eyes are super intense. And even though logically I get that it’s because you’re in a bad mood about really important things, it’s stressing me out.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, Brooks, seriously.” I stood. “Let’s just come back tomorrow.”
“Whoa, hold up.”
I had started to walk away and he jumped up and caught my arm before I could leave. He put his hands gently on my shoulders. “Look at me for a second.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“I’m sorry I’m taking my bad mood out on you.”
I shrugged.
“But that’s not why you’re leaving.”
I finally looked up, my brows drawn low. His eyes were no less intense.
“You’re leaving,” he said, “because you don’t want to look at me and sing. Doing that would make this feel real. You’re scared.”
“What if I can’t do this? What if I freeze up?”
“I get it. You don’t want to look stupid.”
Shay and Trent popped into my head with his words—an image of them kissing. “Yes�
�,” I said, knowing more than anything that’s how Shay had made me feel—like a fool. Like a naïve fool. My stinging eyes threatened to become actual tears, so I pulled away and sat on the floor in front of the couch.
“Avery, you can do this. You’ve been doing this all week. You sound amazing.” He joined me on the floor, shoulder touching mine.
“You’d tell me if you didn’t think I could do this, right? You wouldn’t just let me walk up there and do something I shouldn’t be doing.”
“Yes, I’d tell you. I promise.”
I leaned my head back on the cushion. The light overhead was a chandelier—tiered, with white teardrop jewels hanging from each level. I’d never noticed it before because the ceiling was pretty high. It looked fancy in this small room, out of place. “My best friend kissed my ex-boyfriend two days before I came here.”
“Um…Wow.”
“Telling you that makes me feel stupid. Maybe that will warm me up for singing.”
“Wait.” He turned, putting his elbow on the couch cushion and propping up his head. “Why would that make you feel stupid?”
“Because I should’ve seen it coming.”
“You should’ve? Does your best friend have a habit of betraying you?”
“No.”
“Your boyfriend? Does he?”
“No.”
“Then you most definitely shouldn’t have seen it coming. The only people who should feel stupid in that scenario is them.” It was quiet for two beats and then he said, “What did you do when you found out?”
“What could I do? It happened and I came here.”
“Pay phone girl?” he said.
“Yes, Shay.”
“Is that why she was so desperate to talk to you?”
“Yes, and I should’ve just talked to her, got it over with, let her apologize, because now it’s just lingering.”
He gave my knee two bumps with the side of his closed fist. “You’re allowed to be mad.”
“I’m not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like to be mad. And honestly, I don’t like it when people are mad at me.”
He nodded toward the door I had nearly walked out of minutes ago. “I was never mad at you. I’m mad at myself.”
“I know. I don’t like that either.”
He laughed. “Nobody is allowed to be mad ever?”
“In my perfect world.”
“Your perfect world sounds exhausting.”
I shook my head even though I was still lying back on the couch. “No, it would be amazing.”
“So you’re ready to forgive your friend because anger is better if nonexistent?”
I smiled. “Yes.”
He raised his eyebrows.
I smacked his arm lightly. “I mean, anger is better if nonexistent, but it’s not about that. She’s my best friend.”
“So then she should be the one to fix this.”
“There’s only so much we can do five hours away from each other without—”
“Internet,” he finished for me.
“Exactly. And now you officially know more about my summer drama than anyone.”
“More than your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I feel so special.”
“You are.” That was supposed to come out like a joke, to match his tone. It didn’t. It came out like a lovesick sigh. I cleared my throat. “Anyway.” My eyes went back to the chandelier. “Make me feel better about spilling my guts. What scares you, Brooks Marshall?”
He lay back, too, and stared up at the chandelier. Then he said, in barely above a whisper, “Hope.”
“Hope? Isn’t hope supposed to bring peace?”
“It was a joke.”
I turned to look at him. “No, it wasn’t.”
“I guess I don’t like to be disappointed, and it feels like the more I hope for something, the greater the disappointment will be when it doesn’t happen.”
“So you just, what, stop hoping?”
“I don’t know, I guess I sort of have, yeah.” His shoulder brushed mine lightly and he didn’t pull away.
“Hope doesn’t exist in your perfect world? That sounds exhausting.”
“It really is.”
I smiled over at him. “We’re super depressing.”
He chuckled. “Did you know there was a chandelier in here?”
“Saw it for the first time tonight. They probably just installed it yesterday,” I deadpanned.
“Yes, that’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I should sing now while staring into your eyes.”
This time he laughed outright. “Please do.”
Maricela and I walked toward the lodge to pick up her paycheck, holding Popsicles we’d just purchased at the snack hut. It was such a hot day that mine was already dripping down the stick and onto my hand. I tried to keep on top of it, my head sideways, but was failing.
“I’ve been thinking about your parent problem,” Maricela said. She was the only one I’d told I was auditioning and she’d seemed genuinely excited about it.
“Oh yeah, did you miraculously solve it for me? Can you kidnap them for the day? Hold them in camp jail?” The audition was happening the next day regardless of the fact that I still hadn’t thought of how to pull it off. My plan at the moment was to sneak away and make an excuse once I got home—I was in a kayak all day or at the pool or on some obscure excursion.
“No, I liked your spa idea.”
I slurped at the bottom of my Popsicle. “I told you that’s impossible.”
“My child, nothing is impossible,” Maricela said, and pulled an envelope out of her back pocket.
“What is it?” I asked, not wanting to grab it with sticky hands. But written on the outside, in scrolling letters, were the words Bear Meadow Spa.
“I got you two day passes.”
“How…You didn’t pay for them, did you?”
“I didn’t pay for them. We have employee reward points we can spend on ourselves or gifts and stuff for family. A couple of us pooled ours together.”
“A couple of you? Who?”
“Tia. Clay. Don’t worry, they won’t tattle.”
“Maricela, you guys didn’t have to do that. Save your points. I should just tell my parents.”
“Really? You’re just going to march in there and tell them the day before the audition? Risk them saying no? Risk them being mad you’ve been hanging out with a strange guy alone?”
“No. You’re right. I’m not.”
“What does your sister say about all this?”
I became preoccupied with a group of kids walking ahead of us yelling out different words: “Bird!” “Cloud!” “Dirt!”
“Eyelash,” I said.
“What?” Maricela asked.
“They’re playing the alphabet game. E is a hard one.”
“Are you avoiding my question?”
“Yes.” I smiled over at her. “Lauren doesn’t know.”
That news shocked her. “She doesn’t?”
“I know. I’m a horrible person. She made a couple new friends and for once she hasn’t been preoccupied with her phone. I’ll tell her if we get into the festival. That will make for a better documentary anyway.”
She nodded slowly.
“You don’t think that’s a good idea?”
“No, it was probably important for you to have zero distractions the last two weeks.”
“It was.”
“And it will be even more important for you not to be distracted on Saturday.” She tucked the envelope into my back pocket. “Give this to your parents. I already booked them from noon to eight. You can make up some excuse for the morning and then they’ll be busy all
afternoon and evening.”
“Thank you so much. This…” I patted my pocket. “This means a lot.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t get all sappy on me. It was free.”
“I know it wasn’t.” She could’ve used those points for herself or for her own family. “So just say You’re welcome, I’m the best.”
“You’re welcome. I am the best.”
As we neared the lodge, the half of my Popsicle that was left clinging to the side of the stick fell onto the dirt at my feet. “Frick,” I said.
“Have you ever eaten a Popsicle before?” she asked.
I laughed. “Shut up.”
“It’s just you’re really struggling.”
I kicked some dirt over the remains and looked around for a garbage can for the stick. Clay was leaving the lodge, envelope in hand, obviously having just picked up his paycheck. “Thanks, Clay!” I called out.
He changed direction and joined us. “For what?”
“For the spa thing. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome. Kill it at the audition, okay?”
Mari squeezed my arm. “Do you know this girl heading our way with a very serious look on her face?”
“What?” I first looked at Maricela and then followed her gaze to the lodge parking lot where someone was very obviously walking straight at us. “I don’t think so…,” I started to say, and then my cheeks went numb. “Shay.”
“Who?” Mari asked.
My initial instinct was to turn and run, but wasn’t that what I’d been doing all summer? So I stood my ground.
“Avery!” Shay said. Her serious expression turned into a smile when she saw me. “How lucky is this? I thought I was going to have to beg for your cabin number in the lodge, but here you are. You’re so tan!” I could tell she was nervous. She was my best friend, after all. And right now she was talking fast, her voice an octave higher than normal.
“What are you doing here?” It probably wasn’t the friendliest greeting but I was shocked. She had to drive nearly five hours to get to Bear Meadow from her house. And she didn’t have a reliable car. My eyes scanned the parking lot but I didn’t see her old blue Corolla anywhere.
