“So, I wondered if I could pick your brain.”
I brace myself. She’s going to ask about my dad. She’s going to ask how much I know. She’s going to ask—
“Mostly because of—well, you met Chloe.”
I blink. “Yeah. She’s great.”
And possibly my half sister, which is super casual and normal and not at all a thing I’m sweating out the pits of my dress wondering about right now.
Beth smiles one of those gentle smiles at me. “Well, you might have noticed she’s on the shy side.”
“Oh. Well. A bit,” I say, taking a gulp of my coffee. “But, uh—I guess my gauge for that is probably a little off, considering I could talk to a wall.”
Beth’s eyes light up, like I’m saying exactly what she wants to hear. “It’s so rare for her to start talking to people like that so fast, but you and Teddy really just seemed to pull her right out of her shell. It’s part of why I wanted to meet with you—I guess I was just … You seem so well-adjusted, so…” She searches for the word and settles on, “Confident. And I just want that so badly for Chloe. For her to feel like she can be herself around anyone, and not just me and her dad and her cousins.”
I take another swig of my coffee, which suddenly tastes a whole lot more bitter than three packets of sugar should.
“Oh … uh…”
It feels like my grip on reality is tilting. This isn’t what I expected. What I’d spent the last twelve hours preparing myself for. It’s so far from it that I can practically hear the universe laughing at me, and for a moment I can’t help the stupid, babyish thought that swells up in me like a balloon: I want my dad.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, willing it to go away. I’m supposed to be mad at him.
And I’m supposed to act like a normal person in front of Beth right now, so if I’m going to have a meltdown about this, it needs to happen some other time.
By the time I set my coffee back down, I’ve gotten ahold of myself. I square my shoulders and look Beth in the eye and summon Audition Millie, the one who grits her teeth and does whatever it takes to get through it. She’s not the best version of me, but she’s the closest I can get without letting myself feel all the things I shouldn’t let myself feel.
“I used to be shy, too,” I find myself confessing. “Like, really anxious. I mean—for a little bit. When I was younger than Chloe.”
Beth nods encouragingly. By the mercy of the Starbucks mermaid, she doesn’t mention the “Little Jo” incident we both know happened right around that time.
“I guess what drew me out of it was musical theater. I just loved it so much, and I knew that’s what I wanted to do, so … I just kind of pretended to be confident until I actually was?”
As I’m saying it, though, I realize that’s not strictly true.
“Or maybe it was more like—I knew I loved it, so then I found other people who did. And made a lot of friends because of it. And then it was easy to feel confident because I knew there were lots of people who had my back.”
Godammit, Audition Millie and her unintentional wisdom. Just like that I feel myself aching for my school friends all over again. The truth is, I haven’t even told them about the precollege thing yet. Between everyone ducking in and out of the city to see family and my hours at the internship, I haven’t seen any of them since the end of the school year.
But maybe that’s just an excuse. Maybe I haven’t told them because I know it’s not going to happen. That I’m never going to find my real mom, and I’m never going to convince my dad to let me go, and I’m not even sure if I—
“That’s what I want for Chloe,” says Beth, nodding at me. “For her to make friends with people who love the things she loves. I mean, you’ve met her. When she loves something, she loves it. And I love that about her. How passionate she is.” She looks me right in the eye, so carefully that I almost hold my breath. “And it’s why I wanted to talk to you—you seem the same way. Like you throw yourself into things you love. Just hearing you talk about all the classes you were taking, and that internship…”
I can’t help the happy flush in my cheeks that she remembered. I didn’t even get to talk to her that much the other day, but I must have left an impression.
“You just seem so in command of yourself. Unapologetic. I wish Chloe could push past enough of that anxiety to see the things she loves that way, too.”
There’s an idea I wish I could ignore right now in this deeply inconvenient moment, because it aches up my throat. The idea that maybe Chloe and I don’t just happen to be “the same way” because we’re both passionate. Maybe it’s because we’re both Beth’s.
I squash it down.
“Well—you probably don’t want her to be fully like me,” I say. “I can be, uh … a little dramatic.”
Beth takes a sip of her coffee. “What’s life without a little drama?”
I wince, thinking of the way I left things with my dad. “Well…” I shake my head. “Sometimes I feel like I traded in anxiety for being a diva.”
“Well, to that I’d argue that being a diva is its own form of anxiety.” Beth gives me a mirthful look. “God knows I drove my mother up the wall with it growing up.”
“I can’t imagine that.”
But I want to. And it surprises me just how much. Like maybe it would give some rhyme and reason to the Millie Moods, to have someone who gets it—the push and the pull of them, the way it sometimes feels like my heart is leading louder than I am, and how it never checks where it’s headed until after I’ve already crashed.
“Oh, you don’t have to imagine it. My mom’s coming to the next Broadway Bugs meetup, and she’d be delighted to regale you with tales of my teenage antics,” she says wryly. “I think she was secretly hoping Chloe would turn out the same way to give me some of my own medicine.”
I have to physically curl my toes into Heather’s boots and dig my heels into the floor to stop myself from interrupting, because it’s not about me, but in some ways it kind of absolutely is. Maybe she did get a kid who turned out the same way. Maybe it’s me.
“Sometimes I wish she were,” Beth admits. “Then I’d know how to help. It’s just been so hard on her, I think—especially now that she’s transferring schools.”
“She is?”
Beth clutches at her coffee with both hands, like she’s bracing herself for something. “Javi and I … Chloe’s dad,” she elaborates, even though I remember every single detail of her shindig like I’m some kind of Beth historian. “We got divorced a few years ago.”
Something in my expression must shift, because Beth waves her hand at me.
“We were high school sweethearts and then some stuff in college bungled everything and then we were … well.”
She pauses to think, and it’s only a second, really, but for me it might as well be an eternity. Some stuff in college bungled everything. Some stuff like getting involved with my dweeby, ridiculously earnest, Tolkien-stalking dad?
“Anyway, we married young. Too young.”