“Oh, boo-hoo,” I say, still trying to bite down the jealousy that is practically steaming out of my pores. “You could’ve taken the crosstown bus.”
“I don’t know the bus system because usually, there aren’t deranged Kristin Chenoweth wannabes stealing my bike helmet.” He walks away from me, but I’m hot on his heels and he knows it. He angles back for just a moment to point a finger at me. (This is becoming somewhat of a habit of his.) “If this is how it’s gonna be, then game on.”
The nerve of him. “What game? You’re the one who gave me bogus cross streets,” I remind him.
Oliver stops on a dime, so fast I almost barrel right into him. “Well if I did, it wasn’t on purpose!”
We’re so close that I can practically feel the heat of his sweat like it’s my own. Any person in their right mind would back up, but if Oliver won’t, I’m sure as hell not going to first. “Oh, good. In that case I accidentally hid your helmet behind some trash,” I say through my teeth.
Oliver throws his hands up in the air, just barely missing yet another insufferable hipster on their phone. “You’re impossible.”
“Well you’re hypocritical.”
“You’re both going to be in a whole lot of trouble if you don’t take care of the next task on your Check Lists.”
We jolt to attention on the sidewalk, where Steph is standing with her arms crossed and faint amusement on her face. The heat of my humiliation is so immediate I wince like I’m stepping back from a fire.
“Sorry,” says Oliver quickly. “I…”
“I get it. First day. Getting in the groove. And Georgie sure didn’t make it easy, pitting the two of you against each other like this,” she says.
Shit. Shit. Now this woman who might be my actual legitimate mom thinks I’m an actual legitimate brat. I stare down at Heather’s boots, trying to pull myself together, but I can’t do it fast enough.
“Take a breather. You’re both doing a great job.” Steph pauses for a second, clearly waiting for me to look back up, but I can’t. If I do I’m going to do something stupid like cry, and make the whole thing even worse. “And then once you’re ready, you can head down a few blocks to get the bar cart—they accidentally had it shipped to my building. It should be right in the main hall. Here.”
I hear the jangle of keys. Out of the corner of my eye I see Oliver take them from her, along with a piece of paper that must have an address.
“It’ll be heavy. A two-person job. And you’re probably going to have to sneak past our very protective landlord.” She takes a step closer to us. I tip my head up just enough to see the earnest look on her face. The way she’s acknowledging I helped her with a moment of weakness this morning, and now she’s trying to help us with ours. “But from what I’ve seen, the two of you are more than ready to handle it.”
“We’re on it,” says Oliver.
I purse my lips and bite down on them before my eyes can sting with the stupid tears that are clogging my throat. “Yeah. We got this.”
She smiles at me, and only me. “Good. See you in a bit.”
I know deep down that she’s not judging me for what just happened, but it doesn’t matter. She saw it. And she doesn’t have the context of the last three years of what Mrs. Cooke dubbed “The Oliver and Millie Show,” so she doesn’t understand that I’m not actually like this, that I’m only like this when it comes to him.
“Millie?”
It’s Oliver. I can feel a Millie Mood rising like a tide behind my throat. I blink, hard, letting myself squeeze out exactly one tear, and then scratch at my face to get rid of it as if there were an itch on my nose. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
I take off, but he touches my arm. For a moment we’re both so still that it feels like the entire day of running around just crashed into us from behind. He must feel it, too, because it takes a second for him to speak.
“Uh … it’s the other way,” says Oliver.
I don’t say anything. Just nod and start following him down the street, then across it, and down the next one he leads us down. It’s ten minutes of silence and me thought-spiraling into a hole where Steph decides she hates me. A hole where I’ve already convinced my mom not just once but a second time that I’m not worth being in her life.
“You’re being really quiet,” says Oliver.
I don’t dignify this with a response. At least, I’m trying not to. The thing is that “being really quiet” isn’t exactly in my repertoire.
“I don’t like it,” Oliver mutters.
He probably thinks I’m scheming. I wish I were scheming.
“I just…” I don’t know why I’m saying it, only that it spills out anyway. “I want Steph to like me.”
This takes him visibly off guard. “Georgie’s the one in charge of us,” he says, pulling out Steph’s key to let us into the building.
“Yeah.” I shake my head. “I don’t … Let’s just … get the package and go.”
He pauses, his hand still midway to the apartment building’s front door. “I really didn’t mean to give you the wrong cross streets. I guess I just remembered wrong.” I don’t have to be looking at him to know that there’s something else he’s going to say, something waffling between us. “I … don’t spend as much time up there during the school year.”
I take a breath, and just enough of the Millie Mood goes with it that I can look him in the eye. It’s something I don’t appreciate that much in Oliver, even though I know—he’s honest. By the book. Not just about the little things, like cross streets and bike safety. But about the way he feels. He’s never been the kind of guy who’s hidden stuff out of pride. Hell, I saw him crying during English once when the sub got lazy and made us watch Dead Poets Society a third time. For someone who is careful not to let me know too many details about his life, he’s never been anything but honest about the ones he does.
Which is how I know for a fact that he doesn’t just dislike me. He means it.
And how I also know that the whole cross streets thing really was an accident. Even if it was a shit one.
“Well,” I say, hedging some line between comforting and insulting. “Anything above Fourteenth Street that isn’t a theater is overrated anyway.”
Oliver shakes his head, but I catch the small smile. “The princess of the West Village.”
“The queen of Lower Manhattan,” I correct him as he unlocks the door.
This earns me an eye roll. “Let’s just—agree to stay out of each other’s way, okay?”
I elbow him in the side. “So you do acknowledge I’m worthy competition.”
“I acknowledge that you’re annoying as hell,” says Oliver, which is to say yes.
I’m brightening considerably as we stroll through the main hallway of Steph’s building, a typically cramped entrance not all that different from mine. Before I can start imagining her living in it, and by some extension imagining me there, too, we’re interrupted by the sound of a door rapidly opening.