The guy with the bass guitar finishes his solo, and the crowd goes wild with applause. A table of who I assume are judges hold up white cards with numbers on them. The audience gets even more excited.
She slides over in the booth. “Knock yourself out.” She pats the seat next to her, and I figure she’s inviting me to sit next to her, not punch myself in the head. So I sit.
She scoots the shot glass closer to her. “I’ve been in denial since the night of the festival,” she says. “Thinking I have some sort of say in all of this. It’s just … telling Tobin about his sister made all of this suddenly feel very real. Too real.” The tip of her finger curls over the lip of the glass into the amber liquid. “And I haven’t got the slightest idea what to do.”
I want to tell her to give in. I want to tell her to stop fighting her destiny. I want to tell her to agree to come with me. Instead, I say, “I don’t think you’re going to find the answers in the bottom of that glass.”
“Yeah, but maybe I’ll find some distraction. I want to forget for a while,” she says, holding the glass. She sighs and looks up at the girl on the stage. “That was supposed to be me, you know?”
“How so?”
“It’s funny,” she says, “that I’m here. This weekend. In Las Vegas. Trying to save myself. Because that was part of my original plan.”
A girl onstage goes to the microphone and starts singing. She’s good, but not half as good as Daphne.
“My plan was to be here for this very competition.” She points up at the sign over the stage. “All-American Teen Talent Competition. I was headed to the preliminary auditions for this competition the day Joe showed up in Ellis and told me I was coming to live with him. Before I met you. This was the plan. I was going to kill it at the auditions and make it past the preliminary round and end up here.” She laughs a little to herself. “I told Jonathan that I’d settle for second place, but that wasn’t true. I knew I’d end up here. Some big talent scout or college recruiter was going to see me sing and give me my big break. My big ticket out of Ellis Fields. Away from that small-town, nobody life.” She gives a short little laugh. “I didn’t know that the final competition was going to be at the Crossroads, though. That’s just kind of … weird.”
I nod.
“I guess it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have just sent you to Ellis Fields instead of Olympus Hills. I’d still be in this mess, and the plan would still have gone to hell.” She smirks like she finds it all pretty funny. From the way she’s talking so openly, I’d think she’s already had more to drink than a couple of sips.
“You know?” she says, seeming to speak to the shot glass instead of me. “Why the hell not? Let’s get good and drunk. My life is probably over anyway.” She picks up the glass, like she’s going to down it in one gulp. “Bottoms up!” she says, pinching her nose.
“No,” I say, putting my hand over the top of the glass, stopping her. “I’ve got a better idea for a distraction.” I set the glass on the tray of a passing server. “Come on.” I pull her from the booth.
“What are we doing?” she asks, but she doesn’t protest being propelled from the club out into the casino.
“You’ll see. First, we need some leverage.”
I tell her to wait outside the club entrance and I make my way nonchalantly to an unoccupied slot machine. I watch how a woman in a giant, tentlike dress uses the machine next to mine. Then I pull a quarter from my pocket and put it into the slot machine. I pull the lever and place my hand on top of the machine and send an electrical pulse into it from my fingertips. The woman next to me goes nuts as the entire row of slot machines comes to life, blinking and beeping and announcing a winner. “Jackpot!” she shouts. “Jackpot!” All eyes are on her as I pull a slip of paper from my own blinking machine.
Five thousand dollars. Not bad for my first attempt at the slots.
“What was that?” Daphne asks as I lead her back inside the club.
“I told you. Leverage.”
I walk right up to the table where the MC for the competition waits while the contestants perform on the stage. She’s a middle-aged woman who is sporting more cleavage than shirt.
“What are you doing, Haden?” Daphne whispers.
I lean in close to the MC, and she looks up at me, a bit more than startled. I set the slip of paper on the table in front of her. “How about a late entry?”
“I’m sorry, sonny. I can’t do that.”
“You’ve got to. You see my friend over there?” I gesture to Daphne, who stands very tentatively a few feet behind me. She probably thinks I’ve gone insane. “It was her dream to be part of this competition, but something came up that threw off her plan, something that was kind of my fault, and now I’m trying to make it up to her. And I need you to help me.” I smile at her in a way that, hopefully, doesn’t make her think of me as a “sonny” and slide the paper closer to her so she can see the amount of money she can redeem it for. “Just let her sing, please?”
“All right, honey,” she whispers. “Can’t say no to a boy with a smile like that. And this ain’t too bad, too.” She picks up the slip of paper and tucks it into the front of her shirt. “I’d think about telling you my room number, sugar, but it’s obvious you’ve got a thing for your friend over there.”
I whisper a few more things to her, and then when the latest contestant finishes and the crowd applauds, the MC heads up to the stage.
“What did you just do?” Daphne asks, quite accusingly.
I smile at her.
“What. Did. You. Do?”
“Seems we’ve got one more number for you all,” the MC says. “Daphne Raines, come on up here, hon!”
“What?” She balks at me. “I can’t. I don’t … I don’t even have a guitar!”
“Then ask that guy,” I say, pointing at one of the contestants. “Smile at him and he’ll give it to you.”
“I don’t know what to sing.”
“It’ll come to you.”
“There are hundreds of people here.”
“So?”
“This is crazy,” she says.