“It’s human geocaching,” says Teddy.
“No. No, it’s obviously a Mamma Mia,” I realize, sitting up ramrod straight.
Usually Teddy groans at my musical theater references—particularly the ABBA-related ones, because his mom is so obsessed she owns their entire discography on vinyl—but he chimes in without missing a beat. “It’s a Millie Mia. Here—”
“No,” I say, pushing the phone back toward him so fast that it stuns us both. I stare down at it like it might burst into flames. “I … I shouldn’t. I mean—it just feels kinda—wrong.”
Teddy hesitates for a moment before putting the phone down. “You sure?”
I’m not. It’s going to take at least three hours of melodramatic belting in my room and some of Teddy’s Reese’s Puffs to be sure, if even then.
The thing is that I need someone to talk to about it, but there isn’t a someone I can. My dad has always sidestepped the topic like he’s allergic to it, and my aunt says my dad never actually told her who my mom was. I took their cues growing up and never discussed it much either. Not even with Teddy. The secrecy aside, it just always kind of left a bad taste in my mouth to think about, let alone say out loud.
“Yeah. I’m sure.” I click out of all the tabs in that window, bringing my mountain of jobs back up. And then, without necessarily meaning to, I add, “She didn’t want me. It’d just be a waste of both our time.”
It’s not like I haven’t had the thought before. I know the shape of it. I’ve followed it through. But as Teddy shifts away and closes the app on his phone, the thought does something it’s never done before—it reaches out and it tugs, and I’m not sure how to let it go.
CHAPTER THREE
LiveJournal deep dive aside, I know precisely three things about my mom. The first is that she knew my dad in college. That’s something I don’t really remember anyone telling me, the same way I don’t ever remember being told about my mom situation in the first place—it was just something I grew up already knowing. The second thing is that she didn’t tell my dad about me until I was well and fully born, at which point she showed up to the apartment with me in a stroller with only my inherent baby cuteness and a very surprised twenty-one-year-old Cooper Price to keep me alive. (At least, that’s how my dad tells it.)
The third thing I know is this: she is, in some way, a theater person.
Scratch that. There’s a fourth, somewhat related thing. She royally screwed me over in seventh grade.
Because here’s what happened: my dad, bless his ridiculously well-intentioned parental heart, took a video of me playing Jo in Little Women in our middle school’s junior version of the musical. It was my first-ever lead, and I was showered with both praise and a milkshake larger than my head, so it was safe to say I was drunk on the attention—enough so that I sat by my bedroom door just in case my dad and my aunt said other nice things about me after I went to bed.
And they did. I was happily soaking it in like the vain little sponge that I was (okay, am) when there was this pause, and my dad said something to Heather along the lines of “I guess it’s in her blood.” Heather, in that supportive big-sister way of hers, was like, “You can’t sing for shit.” At which point my dad was like, “No, her mom…”
I couldn’t see him, but I could still feel the vague gesture he made as he trailed off. By then my ear was so close to the door I was in danger of falling through it.
“Let’s just say this theater thing was inevitable,” he finally said, with this sigh at the end that made it clear he hadn’t meant to say anything at all.
Have you ever been distracted by a shiny thing and not noticed a full-fledged avalanche is coming down to bury you? Because that’s what happened to me, metaphorically and emotionally speaking. I was so busy hoarding that shiny nugget of information that I fully zoned out during the next part of the conversation, in which my dad said he was going to post the video to YouTube. Had that actually registered in any meaningful way, I would have forbidden him—even at twelve, I had a precise plan for my future social media image, and it did not include a video of me in braces and a training bra screltching at the top of my tiny lungs—but baby Millie was so distracted by the mom comment that she let it happen.
In 99.99 percent of cases, that would have been the end of it. It would have gotten twelve views—one from my grandparents and eleven from my dad—and died in internet obscurity like every other precocious theater preteen’s YouTube performance. But because I was born under a particularly weird star, instead it got shared to a Reddit page, and then in some private Facebook group for theater students, and then tweeted out by Sutton Foster, a.k.a. Jo March from the original Broadway cast. It went the theater-kid version of viral.
And it has haunted me every day since.
Up until then, I’d had some modest success auditioning in the city. I’d played kid roles like Baby June in Gypsy and a Lost Boy in Peter Pan in respected off-Broadway theaters and was starting to get callbacks for Broadway productions and generate interest from agents. But “Little Jo” cast the kind of shadow I couldn’t shake. For weeks, any time I went on auditions in the city, I was “Little Jo.” I was cooed at and complimented and hair-ruffled, but I could sniff out adults patronizing me like an FBI dog. I watched the video and understood: I was plucky, I was adorable, but I also was bad. No twelve-year-old should have been attempting to scream out the notes to “Astonishing,” and it showed. The song’s strong beginning did nothing for the end, which was so excruciating that I’m surprised my dad was able to use a spare hand to record instead of covering his ears.
All this was embarrassing enough on its own. But the most embarrassing thought came a few weeks later—that if my mom really is a theater person, there’s a chance she might have seen it, too. Which would mean the only real impression she’d ever have of me was one that the internet mercilessly mocked.
Within the year I dyed my hair a darker shade of auburn, and the first of my routine Millie transformations began. The first was admittedly ill-advised—I had a six-month punk phase, abruptly followed by a six-month hippie phase and subsequent athleisure, fifties vintage, and full VSCO girl phases, leading into the nineties grunge one I’m about to finish when I figure out whatever’s next. I maintain that I’ve looked mostly decent in all of them, but that wasn’t so much the point as it was to be completely, utterly, and thoroughly unrecognizable as “Little Jo.”
I’ve come a long way since then. Practiced enough that nobody in my school can match me vocally. Spent every single night rehearsing monologues in mirrors and watching YouTube videos of the greats. Stood in every rush ticket line to see not just Broadway stars, but every single one of their understudies, absorbing all their tiniest movements and micro-expressions and vocal tricks to try to search for my own. Never let myself get distracted while my dad was filming anything he might be senseless enough to upload, and did my best to shove the whole mom comment out of my mind right along with the rest of it.
But most importantly, I’ve avoided auditioning for the main stages in the city ever since. I need enough time to pass to scrub the memory of the old me out of everyone’s brains. When I throw myself back into the ring, I’m going to do it so fully reborn that nobody will ever utter the words Little Jo within a mile of me again.