“Oh, Oliver. I almost feel sorry for you.” I slide my MetroCard out of my back pocket just as the M23 bus rolls to a stop in front of me.
Oliver swings his leg over his bike seat and lets out a laugh so sharp that a bona fide New York pigeon actually moves out of his way. “And why’s that?” he asks, repeating the words with a mocking tone.
I hop on the bus. The driver knows me, so I give her a nod and she holds up on asking me to sit down, setting the stage for my mic drop of an exit. “My best friend is a GeoTeen,” I tell Oliver. “Which means I’ve seen every corner of this glorious trash island, and I know all the fastest ways to get to them.” I wave at him with four dainty fingers as the bus doors close. “Toodle-oo.”
The look on his face is so simultaneously confused and intimidated that I close my eyes for a moment so I can burn it into my brain forever. And then I do what I do best—I get impossible shit done.
Because although Oliver has zero to no faith in my work ethic, I am nothing if not a hustler. Talent like mine isn’t the kind you’re born with. It’s the kind you fight for, the kind you run all over the city and wait in auditioning rooms for a bajillion hours for, the kind you sweat and bleed and cry for. Minor tasks like this are child’s play compared to trying to make it in musical theater.
So I’m back with the full catering order hooked in two enormous bags under my elbows within twenty-five minutes, so fast that Oliver with his measly first task of “take a Boomerang of the Highline for client’s Instagram stories” is laughably stunned to see me hand my list over to Steph right behind him.
“Where the hell are Ripley-Grier Studios?” Oliver mutters. “There are like, four of them popping up.”
I snort.
“What’s so funny?” he asks.
“I used to live inside those studios.” Back before my Millie Makeovers began and I put myself on lockdown until the worst of puberty was over, that is. “The real question is where the hell is Fun Fur All Daycare. It’s not showing up on Google Maps.”
“Upper East Side. Eighty-Fourth and Lex,” Oliver says without missing a beat. I raise my eyebrows at him. “It’s where we board our dog when we go away.”
I scowl. “You don’t live up there.” In fact, I know his precise cross streets, because we have an unfortunate mutual affinity for the bakery in between our apartments. It takes expert strategizing to make sure I don’t run into him.
“No. My dad does.”
“Oh.”
“Divorced,” says Oliver, waving me off. But his eyes skirt away from mine and back to his list with this extra jilt to them, like he’s not really looking at anything at all.
“Well.” I begrudgingly look over at his Check List. It mentions an audition for the next tour of The Lion King, which I know for a fact is being held in the Thirty-Eighth Street location. “She means this Ripley-Grier. Here. I’ll AirDrop it to you.”
“You don’t have my number.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re our stage manager. Of course I have your number.”
He shields his screen from my eyes, but not before I see that he has “Millie Price” in his phone as a contact, too, with a cookie emoji next to it. I’m about to ask, but we’re cut off by a delivery driver rolling his bike up on the sidewalk and dinging his bell at us.
“Thanks,” he says. “I guess I’ll, uh…”
My body is here, but my brain is already mentally calculating the time it will take me to get on the Q train to get uptown, and whether or not my bag will be big enough to smuggle said dog on the subway to get back.
“See you for the IKEA reckoning?” I ask wryly.
“Yeah,” he says. It almost sounds … friendly. “See you then.”
It’s not that I’m surprised. I know, objectively, that Oliver is a good person. Well—good to people who aren’t named Millie Price, at least. He volunteer tutors at the junior high down the street after school and makes a point of learning all the freshmen’s names and seems to have an actual arsenal of spare pencils that he is prepared to give anyone at any given moment.
And objectively speaking, I’m not the worst either. Cornelia Arts & Sciences’ theater department was an overly competitive hellhole when we first started high school—like, someone genuinely ripped the sheet music out of my binder ten minutes before my Seussical audition while I was touching up my makeup freshman year—and it’s been my aggressive mission to make it more collaborative ever since. I was the one who started setting up the mentoring program between upperclassmen and new theater freshmen, the one who suggested we start double-casting musicals—essentially making two versions of the show with two separate casts—so everyone would be able to get a chance to be onstage without getting cut. It was no easy feat to get a school as traditional as Cornelia to pivot, but somehow we pulled it off, and I’d argue we were all better for it.
Well, maybe not all of us. The Mamma Mia debacle between me and Oliver freshman year was just one of a zillion other moments we’ve been at odds. I think maybe what it comes down to is that we both like to be leading the charge, and even when our agendas match up, our ways of going about them almost never do. A scene transition will be weird and I’ll insist it’s a sound cue issue and he’ll insist it’s the actors’ timing. We’ll be tasked with fundraising for the department and I’ll say we should sell singing-grams for Valentine’s Day and he’ll counter that we should bump up the price of tickets by a dollar. At one particularly memorable cast party we ended up arguing over where we should get pizza delivery from, at which point everyone went over our heads and ordered from a third spot without telling us.
Sure, we could compromise. But there’s just always been this friction between us. Like we’re not just challenging each other but challenging each other’s authority. At some point it stopped feeling so personal and started to feel like keeping score—like every time he undermined me in front of the chorus and theater kids, I had to shoot something back to undermine him in front of the band and crew. It’s almost become an expectation. I feel like if either of us were going to give it up now, it would be admitting defeat.
Mrs. Cooke doesn’t mind it. Actually, sometimes I feel like she encourages it, since we keep each other on our toes. Very little slips through the cracks in the Cornelia theater department, with the two of us scrutinizing each other’s decisions under a microscope. Looking out for our classmates seems to be the only thing we agree on, even if it’s begrudging and we’ve never actually acknowledged it out loud.
That said, when it comes to having each other’s backs, we’d sooner pull a Javert and simultaneously nose-dive into the Seine.
And maybe some of that is my fault. Before the Mamma Mia thing even happened, our cringeworthy first encounter was … well. Not my finest moment. And as determined as I am to blot it out of my mind, it hasn’t changed the dynamic that’s evolved ever since. The one where Oliver is determined to outdo me, and I am determined to not be outdone.
Hence, his patented Stage Manager Scowl, and me taking a little too much pleasure from doing whatever I can to knock it off his face.