Mom grabs a stack of plates from a cupboard and hands them to me. Nev lurches off the stool to help. She grabs the leather place mats and sets them on the glass table, and then I add the plates, but my aim is off on the last one, and the ceramic plate teeters and then crashes to the floor, splitting into large gunmetal-colored shards.
The sound is like an explosion in the quiet kitchen. I crouch and pick up the pieces, fingers shaking.
Mom kneels beside me, her army-green silk pants bunching around her legs. “Nev, can you pass me the brush and dustpan? They’re under the sink.” She takes a chunk of ceramic from my fingers. “Baby, I’m not mad at you.” I know she doesn’t mean about the plate. She touches my cheek. “Why don’t you go upstairs and take a shower?”
I rise from my crouch in slow motion and start toward the stairs, when Nev chirrups, “Don’t forget your form.”
I take it from the island, and although I want to ball it up, I don’t. The second I arrive in my bedroom, I chuck the paper in the drawer that’s become a graveyard for forgotten things.
There’s no more doubt in my mind about what I will do.
I won’t risk my relationship with Ten.
I’ll get into the music business some other way—I’ll write more songs, get more demos recorded, send my work off to agents. If I break out on my own, it’ll be that much more rewarding.
I don’t need a contest to make me.
Especially one that could just as easily break me.
Dinner with Jeff and Nev is fun, in part because no one brings up the contest—if Jeff has any inkling I wanted to compete, he doesn’t mention it—in part because making up my mind has lifted a huge weight off my chest.
I’m dying to tell Ten, but I don’t want to do it over the phone. I settle on telling him tomorrow, before the Halloween party. I can’t wait to see the look on his face. Even if we don’t speak about the contest, ithasto be affecting him.
After father and daughter leave, Mom finally asks me why Nev begged her to sign the form. And I tell her everything. Although my mother’s face doesn’t betray her emotions, a stillness envelops her… envelops us.
“Are you sure, baby?” she asks as I climb the stairs toward my bedroom.
“A hundred percent.”
Finally, she smiles.
I pause, hand on the balustrade. “But if Nev asks, I sent it in, okay?”
“Won’t she find out the truth?”
“No. She’ll just assume I lost.”
Mom bites her lip. “As long as you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
53
The Beds We Make and Lie In
“Your face is all golden.” I swipe my thumb over Ten’s jaw to dislodge the face paint I plastered over my skin tonight to match my gold unitard. I’m supposed to be a CMA award, and he’s supposed to be a vampire.
Ten’s been acting a little weird since he walked into my house—he’s nervous. I think it has to do with his mother’s contest. He keeps staring at the discolored patch of wall in my room where Mona Stone’s poster hung until yesterday.
“I have something to tell—”
But I don’t get my announcement out, because Ten chooses that exact moment to ask, “Did you really lose your virginity to a stranger?”
My hands tumble away from his face. Heart blasting, I whip my head around to make sure my bedroom door is closed. Finally, I whisper, “What?”
“You said you lost your virginity, but you never had a boyfriend, so I assumed it had to be a random hookup.”
I shift my legs off his lap and scoot to the edge of my queen-sized bed. “I—I never… I never did anything.”
