I walk in through the front door to find Ava and Ruby on the sofa, both looking two blinks from sleep, but I’d texted them to wait up for me, and they have. Madi’s working, so I’ll have to fill her in later.
I settle on the coffee table across from them, and I realize immediately that something is up. I still have bright pink hair and I’m wearing the newly thrifted prom dress I found with Grandma.
“Neither of you looks surprised to see me dressed like this.”
Ruby and Ava exchange a look. Ava clears her throat. “That’s an interesting outfit, Sami. Why are you dressed like that?”
I look back and forth between them, my eyes narrowed. “How much do you know?”
Ruby shrugs. “Your show tonight was the best so far.”
“And how do you know that?” I ask.
“I was there.”
A flutter of disappointment whispers through my chest. “Josh told you?” I really hadn’t expected him to.
Ava shakes her head. “We figured it out a while ago. One of us is always at your shows. We wear wigs and do it incognito since you weren’t telling us about them for some—”
“—idiotic reason,” Ruby interrupts.
“I wasn’t going to say ‘idiotic,’ but basically,” Ava finishes.
I look between them again, this time with my jaw slightly dropped. How the . . . ?
“So why didn’t you tell us?” Ruby demands.
“I wasn’t sure you’d understand,” I say.
“What’s to understand?” Ruby asks. “You’re an amazing performer. We watched you all the time in college. We already knew that.”
“That’s the thing.” I’d been trying to formulate this explanation on the way over. “In college, I did the whole hyper-sincere singer-songwriter thing. Slower. Kind of folky. Acoustic. That’s what nice girls do, right?” I extend one of my feet in my Doc Marten boots. “This is not that. This is loud and fast and angry.”
Ruby gives the bottom of my heel a light kick, and I put it down. “It’s also smart and funny and super relatable. Yeah, it’s different. But it’s so . . .you.”
I hold my breath for a few seconds before puffing my cheeks and blowing out the air. “That’s what made me nervous. I know you didn’t feel like it was healthy for me to stew over Bryce, but I had to get all that anger out. I wasn’t over it when y’all were ready for me to be over it.
“I felt embarrassed about that, so it went into lyrics that weren’t even remotely mellow enough for the music I wrote in college. I wrote song after song, shoving everything I hated about that breakup into the music. It turned into angry, anthemic rock. But it feels way safer to perform that up in front of strangers who wouldn’t understand how true all the songs are.”
“Are, present tense?” Ava asks. “Or were?”
Almost on instinct, I glance toward Josh’s condo, like I can sense him through the wall. “More and more past tense.”
Ruby nudges my foot again, and I look at her, fighting a smile when she waggles her eyebrows at me. “It’s like that?”
I shrug. “It’s something. I don’t know what yet.”
“I like him,” Ruby says. “More and more every time I talk to him.”
“Same,” I confess. Ruby and Ava both grin. “You’ve really been wearing wigs to come watch me?” I couldn’t let that all the way in at first because it felt too big, and even now, just the idea that they’ve been quietly showing up is threatening to squeeze my eyeballs.
“Ruby uses a blonde wig and Madi and I share a brown wig,” Ava tells me.
“I go as Madame Fifi Lacroix,” Ruby says, flipping her pretend blonde hair.
“Just Ava,” Ava says. “But brunette.”
“I love you guys.”
