“Ready?” I ask.
Teddy starts humming “Mamma Mia” under his breath in response. I nudge my shoulder into his to clam him up, but he just gets louder.
“Look at me nowwww, will I ever learn—”
“Apparently not.”
“I’m sorry,” he protests. “I don’t know how, but I suddenly lose control!”
I yank the back of his suspenders and he cackles, stumbling backward like a very tall noodle, and that’s when the door to the lobby opens and a woman who can only be Beth holds it for us.
Weirdly, it’s more like I recognize her from a feeling than any of the badly cropped photos Teddy was able to find on Facebook. There’s this innate kindness to her that’s giving off a real “hobbits being neighborly in the Shire” vibe, a reference I can make only as a hazard of being Cooper Price’s daughter. Her eyes are warm and already a little crinkled from laughter, her honey-brown hair so thick that it’s bursting out from under her newsboy cap, her cheeks full and dimpled. She seems like the kind of person who likes tea more than coffee and has multiple go-to blogs for DIY projects and gives really good hugs.
“Do I spy some fellow Newsies out on these here streets?” she asks in an exaggerated New York accent, putting a hand on her hip.
Teddy, having refused to watch both the theatrical and movie versions of Newsies despite the fact that they are both masterpieces and readily available on my Disney+ account, becomes instantly useless.
“Uh … yeah. Yup. We, uh—” I reach for a reference. “We smelled a headline.”
I can hear Teddy holding his breath in an effort not to mock me, but the smile on Beth’s face is big enough to knock a moon out of orbit.
“Welcome, welcome,” she says, ushering us in. “You’re the first to arrive. New Bugs?”
“Yeah,” says Teddy, following me in.
“You picked a good day to join, my friends. Newsies is in my top five favorite musicals. We’re pulling out all the stops.”
Beth leads us on a short walk from the lobby to the building’s rec room, which is basically a testament to 1899 prepubescent newsboys who can also casually do backflips and tap dance for reasons never explained in the plot. There’s a video screen playing the movie version on silent while the original Broadway cast album plays “Watch What Happens” from an iPhone speaker in the corner, and on the table there’s an array of themed snacks—a chip-and-dip station labeled “Seize the Lays,” a chicken app dubbed “Wings of New York,” a cake that just has the word STRIKE! written on it in giant red lettering.
“Oh my god,” Teddy mutters. “It’s like walking inside your brain.”
He’s not wrong. But I’m too distracted to fully appreciate it, following Beth close behind so I can compare little bits and pieces of myself to her. We’re both short. We’re both obsessed with musical theater. And I’ve already decided I like her, which has nothing to do with how alike we are but everything to do with me hoping to find out more.
“I’m Beth, by the way,” she tells us. “The host of these little shindigs. And y’all are…?”
“Millie and Teddy,” I answer for him, because somehow there is already half a slider in his mouth. “I’m a Broadway fan, and he’s … really into free food.”
Teddy gives her a thumbs-up, amping up the incorrigible tall-boy charm that he figured out how to use on adults as far back as trick-or-treating, when he’d scam extra candy out of half the block.
“Well, you’re both in the right place, then,” Beth chuckles. I can tell she’s going to ask us some more hospitable questions like what brought us here or what school we go to, but I cut her off before she can.
“So how long have you been doing these?”
“Broadway Bugs meetups? Hmm, probably a few years now,” she muses, unwrapping a set of napkins to lay out. I see some plates and utensils next to them and start unwrapping them with her, which earns me another wide smile.
I try my best not to make it sound like an interrogation, but I figure we’ve got five minutes before the people not dropping in to sniff out their biological moms start to flood the place. “Are you like—in the industry, or…”
“Oh, heck no,” says Beth, with a self-deprecating laugh. “I’m a social worker. I just love Broadway, is all.”
“And you never wanted to perform?”
“In community theater, sure,” she says. “There were some groups in college I did for a while. Lots of them come to these little meetups now.” She leans in like she’s letting me in on a secret. “Meetups are more fun for me than rehearsals, anyway. More time to chitchat, find some buddies to see shows with. It’s a good excuse to bring people together. Speaking of, what brought you here?”
“Um…”
“Oh, look who it is! Right on time,” says Beth, her eyes flitting back toward the door.
There is an overall-clad, braces-faced teenage girl standing there, her long dark hair still swaying like she was just in motion before skidding to an abrupt halt. For a moment I’m relieved to see someone in our generation here—she looks close in age to me and Teddy—but before I have any notions of her making this less awkward, she stares at us and then back at Beth with what I can only describe as panic, self-consciously shifting the newsboy cap settled on top of her head.
“Chloe, this is Millie and Teddy. Y’all, this is my daughter, Chloe.”
Teddy’s eyes are already on me before I find them. Daughter?
“Hi,” Chloe squeaks, her eyes so wide on us that she looks like one of those squirrels in Central Park that scamper out into the bike path and don’t know whether to flee or stand their ground.
Beth straightens the newsboy cap on Chloe’s head with the grace of someone who is used to smoothing over awkward situations. Someone who laughs easily and fills up silences and knows how best to fit herself to make a cluster of people into a group.
And then, weirdly, I’m not thinking of either of them. I’m thinking about my dad. How there must have been a once upon a time when he was one of the people Beth put at ease. He doesn’t have a ton of friends—he’s the textbook definition of an introvert—but it isn’t hard to imagine her drawing him out the same way. It isn’t hard to imagine him falling for her.
It is a little hard to imagine him thinking it was socially acceptable to put a song from Armageddon on a mixtape for her, but there’s only so much of these parental blasts from the past I can be expected to swallow.
Beth nudges Chloe over to the snack table, where Teddy and I are standing. “So you and your dad had a good time with your—”
“Yes,” Chloe blurts, anxious to interrupt her. “We had a good time, um—”
“You should have seen her,” says her dad. “The fastest kid on the—”
Chloe turns around and blurts something in rapid Spanish to cut off the man who walked in behind her, just in time for him to share a knowing look with Beth. Through the haze of the word daughter swirling all over my head like a storm, I manage to connect the dots that he and Beth must be married.
Or were married. Because once Beth makes her way over, the vibe seems much more friendly than romantic.