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“I am?”

“Maybe you haven't noticed, but I'm pretty damn protective of her.”

“What? News to me.”

“Shut up.”

I flop onto my bed and squeeze my eyes shut. I am suddenly so, so tired.

“I just want to respond to something in a normal way,” I say. “Just one damn time. I want to relate to someone at the time I'm supposed to be relating to them.”

“You just wish that you'd jumped off your cliff at the same time as someone else,” he says.

I nod. I feel like he can see it.

“You don't have to feel guilty that you suffered alone,” he says. “That's not how this works. You don't have to apologize to us because you were unhappy.”

“Okay.”

“And you don't have to apologize for being okay without us.”

“But . . .” I want to need someone.

“Hey,” he says. “I'm not hanging up.”

“Okay. Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay.”

•  •  •

I'm listening over and over to the first minute-thirty of “At the Ballet” when I click over to Facebook. I haven't been on in a few days because it's depressing to see the Dykes posting pictures of themselves going out, lip gloss, kissy faces, dark-circle-smudged mascara to prove it's been a good night (at least Rachel doesn't have Facebook, she's pretty committed to the seventies thing). And it's depressing to see Ben with his new girlfriend, even though I don't technically care, and, even more depressing, Danielle smiling behind coffee cups and I'm
wondering like a damn creeper who's taking these pictures and if she's really single like her page says and why we're still friends. (Because we still like each other. Because we promised to stay friends. Which, obviously, explains why I haven't texted her and I didn't answer, a week after the breakup, when she texted me. I don't know why. I protect myself and sabotage myself at the worst times.)

I have a hundred thousand notifications, and I click and see they're all for the same thing—Etta Sinclair was tagged in a picture, twenty-six people liked a picture of you, eighteen comments on a picture of you . . . Natasha Metrovsky posted a picture of you.

I'm thinking it's some ugly outtake of a Rachel's bathroom photo shoot and how bad could it really be until I click and shit, that's a Photoshopped picture of me with a dick in my mouth, and it was Photoshopped well because Natasha has no life outside of buying bell-bottoms and faking hookups and stealing
my best friend
(who doesn't have Facebook, who hasn't liked the picture, who hasn't seen the picture, who had nothing to do with this, Rachel Rachel Rachel) and here are people from Saint Em's that I've never talked to, goddamn seniors, goddamn
freshmen
, laughing at me for taking this picture and
what a stupid whore
and Natasha's
I know, right, what a slut,
and who are these freaking
guys
going
lol look at that fat bitch, guy must have been desperate
and my
baby sister
commenting defending me and saying it's not real when how
the hell could she even be sure and oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

It's hard to practice singing when you're crying this hard but I do it anyway because I freaking have to get out of Nebraska and if this is a chance I will take it, I will take anything. I'm feeling it, okay? I'm
feeling this shit
, okay? Get me
out
.

OUR FIRST AUDITION IS IN
Bellevue, where I haven't been since the ballet company I was in before BN, a long time ago. I don't want to drive that far, and James has never been there (who the hell has never been to Bellevue?) and it's not like Mason can fit us all on his motorcycle so it's public transportation for us! Bianca's paranoid of being late so we're on it crazy early, seven forty-five on a Saturday, which at least means it's practically empty. Bianca yawns and folds up onto her seat and goes to sleep (I'm not sure I've ever seen her sit, she stands or she perches like she's about to jump up or she collapses into these helpless little heaps) and James nudges his backpack under her head and plays with her wrist, and Mason and I swing from the bars and sing “Santa Fe” and make Bianca smile in her sleep.

Please let me get through. Please let me get to a second audition.

Honestly, for a second I think I don't want to get in as much as I want
this
to never stop.

There's no one from my school on this bus. There's just my little group of show-tuney people. Mason tugs me into his waist and sings the romantic part (so much as it is) of “Santa Fe” to me, and I laugh with my head tipped back and feel pretty. He picks me up like it's nothing, my legs around his waist, and swings me around. “Ugh, so heavy,” he whispers, just to me, so obviously a joke, and I kick his back with my shoes and I
like
it, I like that joke, I like that he's so much taller and stronger than me that it's actually a joke, and I like myself so much for taking that joke. He just called me heavy and made me like myself. I didn't overthink it! How about that.

I kiss him, and he whispers, “Beautiful.”

Other people start boarding eventually, but none of them are from my school so me and Mason don't really give a shit, we keep singing and dancing (or whatever Mason calls what he's doing. How the hell did these people get through fifteen years of musical theater training without learning how to do a fox-trot?) and Bianca's awake now and embarrassed and blushing into her sleeves but that's better than letting her worry herself sick about the audition, so I keep being loud and obnoxious and I get down on one knee and sing all of “Memory” to a twelve-year-old boy until Bianca's switched from screeching “Ettaaaaaa!”
in horror to just cringing and ducking into her collar, and then I go up and squish between her and James and wrap my arms around her. “I'm sorrrry.”

She leans against me. “You're horrible.”

“This is how people get famous! Being horrible in public! How are you going to get famous sitting here all quiet, huh?”

“Who says I want to get famous?”

“These people, look at 'em, every single one of them knows I can do a kind of acceptable rendition of ‘Memory.' They have no idea how good
you
are!”

“I don't want them to!”

“Now that doesn't make any sense,” Mason says, so I don't have to, thanks, kid. “You always say all you want to do with your life is sing. Don't sing on the bus if you don't want to, but don't give Etta any crap about not wanting to do this when you grow up either.”

She shakes her head. “I don't, I don't.”

But I have no time to comment on that because the bus pulls over at the next stop, and who should board but Isabel, Natasha, Titania, Rachel. All four of them.

“Dykes,” I whisper urgently, as they're showing the bus driver their IDs with those practiced
we are totally humoring you by showing you our IDs because we are so much better than you that you shouldn't be allowed to ask us anything, hair flip
expressions. I shift James's backpack and shrink down behind it. “Dykes. Dykes. Dykes.”

“Did they see you?” Bianca whispers back.

“I don't know. Probably. They have crazy gay X-ray vision.”

“X-gay vision,” James says, just to be a dick, but he makes me laugh and I
hear
them stop showing the bus driver their IDs, and yep, crazy gay high-frequency hearing. I'm screwed.

I don't know what they're going to do, but I know that I'm not expecting it when they go sit down a few rows ahead of us all innocuously and start groaning about how tired they are. I guess they were out all night and are too hungover to drive. They're wrung out, wrinkled, sweaty, and Farrah-haired and white-sunglassed, limp and glamorous like tie-dye with the colors squeezed out.

“God, that girl Marie would not get off me last night,” Titania says, rolling her neck around until it cracks.

Natasha says, “She is so obsessed with you, I swear. But who could blame her, with those shoes.” That's really weird, why is Natasha sucking up to Titania?

“Such cute shoes,” Rachel says, and yeah, all right, that's messed up, because I know (a) shoes and (b) Rachel and those shoes are (c) hideous so she is (d) faking. So seriously, what ? Rachel's not queen bee anymore?

Did I do that?

(I'm not stupid. A part of me—a big part of me—knew that a lot of this shove-Etta-out bullshit had nothing to do with my rogue heterosexual ways and was just Isabel, Natasha, and Titania being opportunistic about shoving me out. They were
never my friends as much as we were all Rachel's, no matter what little anecdotes I can pull out, and it was so obvious that they wanted me out, that I was the thing between them and moving up a rank in our whatever, because I don't know, they were planning to put Disco Dykes on their transcripts, or because maybe they're the same status-obsessed female-stomping wannabes they always say are a symptom of the heterosexual patriarchy. I'm just saying, it's funny that Natasha did this whole paper last semester on how all subjugation of women at the hands of women is all actually because of guys and here they are using me sleeping with a guy as a nice convenient medium through which they can be dicks to me. Who's driving who, here, Miss Daisy?)

Anyway the Dykes keep chattering away—though not so much Rachel—about who they hooked up with (lying) and who they wish they'd hooked up with (understating) and who was there and who wasn't and what they're going to do tonight and oh my God
drinkiiing! Tina Turnerrrrr!
and I can't figure out why the hell they're not being mean to me until it hits me like a damn brick. They think they're making me jealous.

They think I'm sitting here wishing I were with them. They think I'm kicking myself for heading to an audition instead of creeping onto a bus at eight thirty after what I know from experience, lately, was a really disappointing club crawl.

The fact that I used to want to do this—that I used to really, genuinely love these girls, because they didn't have to
be my friends, I didn't even have to like them, because they were my
family
—makes something still feel a little uneasy in me, but I say
go away uneasiness
and I lean my head back and smile and rest my cheek on Bianca's shoulder. “Brave,” she whispers to me.

When I open my eyes, Rachel—just Rachel—is watching me. I smile at her a little.

She smiles back.

•  •  •

On the way into the high school where the auditions are, this boy I don't know, this boy from
Bellevue
, says, “Hey, Etta Sinclair! Want a hand?”

Bianca whispers, “What's he talking about?”

I rush her forward. “Never mind, sweetpea. Keep walking. Everything's fine.”

WE WALK THROUGH THE FRONT
doors of the high school—marked with just this one poster,
BRENTWOOD AUDITIONS, OPEN, 10 A.M.–2 P.M.
—and it's like Dorothy stepping into Oz. All of a sudden we're not in brown little Bellevue anymore with its awful guys. (I have chosen to believe that all Bellevue boys are as terrible as that one because I am mad, and if the Dykes at their all-girls school can decide that they'll never be attracted to a guy, I can make sweeping generalizations too, damn it.) We're in this mess of hallways that probably looks way more normal in its real life (though public school buildings will always be just so eighties' movies to me) but are now crawling with glitter and music and girls melting down by the bathrooms. There are roughly five hundred million times more people here than I was expecting. Which I guess isn't saying all
that much given that I'm obviously exaggerating but also given that for some reason I'd narrowed the auditionees down in my head to just me, Mason, James, and Bianca. Never mind the thirty other people we've been meeting with a couple times a week. Never mind that all of eastern Nebraska is here and not just tiny little Schuyler. I guess in my head I hadn't pictured central Nebraska high school high-powered theater geeks as so bountiful but man, if I were shopping for the precious few Midwestern gay boys I would be all over this shit. The ones inside here are all okay. The ones inside can stay.

Which probably explains the look on James's face right about now.

“Go talk to him,” Bianca whispers to him.

He startles. “What?”

She swallows and nods to the corner. “The tall one, blue hair? That's the one?”

“Bee . . .”

“It's just talking, right? We're allowed to talk. Ask him if he's nervous.” She twists the hem of her shirt in her hands.

“Are you . . . Okay. Stay with Etta.”

“I'm not five.”

He kisses the top of her head and gives this imploring look to Mason, who rolls his eyes and goes with him. Wingman! I like them. I like them most together.

“Oh my gosh I'm so nervous,” she says.

“Hey, hey, what? No no no, you're supposed to be the old
pro talking me down here.” Because Jesus Christ, when was the last time I was at an audition, day camp? There are so many people, and they're muttering to themselves and practicing steps on the floor and singing scales with their eyes scrunched shut and . . . holy shit.

“How many people are going through?” she says.

“Don't ask me things like I'm supposed to know them!”

“Why does that girl have sheet music? I thought we didn't need sheet music!”

“Damn it, Bee!”

“Hhhhhoh my Gosh. I need to sit down.”

“Hey, hey, yeah.” I sit her down on the floor and find a granola bar in my pocket and break off half so it will be less intimidating. “Have you had anything today?”

She shakes her head.