Our eyes met. I was grinning so hard my cheeks hurt, and then he was grinning back, and even then I knew it wasn’t something he did often. That I was witnessing something rare.
And it sounds dumb, but for a second I forgot about the fringe vest and the dyed hair and the shiny new teeth. I forgot about first impressions and the casting directors who’d patted me on the head and the impossible distance still standing between me and making my dream come true. For a second, I could already see it. Out in the sprawl of empty audience seats, in the glare of stage lights, in the faded glow-in-the-dark tape at the edge of the stage: not just a dream, but a promise. One that I knew how to keep.
Then Oliver opened his big dumb mouth on a stage in front of all our future peers and said, “Oh! You’re the girl from the ‘Astonishing’ video.”
He could have physically shoved me off the stage and it would have hurt less. “No, I’m not.”
He nodded. “You are. You’re—”
“Shhh,” I said, less walking over to him than sprinting.
“—‘Little Jmmmf’!”
Which is what “Little Jo” sounds like when you reach up and shove your hand over a strange boy’s mouth in a desperate attempt to get him to shut the hell up before he destroys your entire high school reputation. Which, yes, may have been a little extreme. But tell that to a thirteen-year-old girl clinging to her last shred of auburn-dyed dignity.
Oliver tore himself away from me, his face the picture of shock. “What the hell?”
It was that precise moment that the school guide and our future physical education teacher poked her head out from behind the wings.
“Excuse you, young man. Mind your language,” she snapped at him.
Oliver’s mouth dropped open, but right then I was a little too preoccupied by my own horror to appreciate his. “Of course,” he stammered. “I just—”
By then the school guide had already walked away, leaving us on the stage with a handful of classmates trying to figure out what had caused the commotion. Oliver turned to me, and the first iteration of his Stage Manager Scowl was born—the tight lip, furrowed brow, blazing scowl that would go on to be aimed at me more times than I could count.
“What is the matter with you?” he hissed.
I cut a glance back at the other kids. “You’re the one flapping your big mouth about the ‘Little Jo’ thing.”
“I didn’t realize it would be a crime to recognize someone from the internet,” he said, taking a cautionary step back from me and rubbing his sleeve over his mouth.
“I don’t want people to recognize me.”
Oliver was incredulous. “What, you think you’re some kind of celebrity or something?”
No. I didn’t think anything—I knew things. And what I knew was that I’d been memed and cheek-pinched and made fun of all through the musical theater corner of the internet. What I knew was that there was a tweet roundup about me on a website for theater geeks. What I knew was that if this Oliver kid blew it for me now, I’d never be able to outrun it.
But by then I was in the full swing of a Millie Mood, and it didn’t leave me any room to explain. I was mad, Big Mad, mad at this stupid blabbermouth boy with his stupid smug confidence and the way he was looking at me right then like I had just lost my last marble.
“Yeah, that’s it. I don’t want people asking for my autograph,” I sniped at him. “It’s such a burden trying to avoid all my fans.”
Oliver was apparently immune to sarcasm. “Wait, seriously?”
“No. God,” I said, gesturing wildly in some combination of exasperation and sheer disbelief. “I’m not that much of an egomaniac.”
“Well, whatever you are, just—stay away from me, okay?”
The Millie Mood was already shifting in that whiplash-y way it always does, like a big tide just got swallowed by an even bigger one. It pushed all the anger right out of me, ached all the way up my throat, stung at my eyes. Oliver would say it himself later: You just need people to like you. Like, all the time.
Oliver noticed I was starting to cry before I did, because he muttered a low “Shit” and seemed to drop some of his guard. But it was too late.
“No problem,” I spat out. I wasn’t very adept at comebacks then, Oliver being my first actual adversary and all, so that’s all I said before I pointed myself toward the back of the theater, stalked up the aisles to the exit doors, and left.
And that was the first of the encounters that would come to define all subsequent ones over the next three years: me pushing too hard, him pulling too fast. An unstoppable force and an indestructible object. Our spats are now so legendary I’ve heard rumors that some of the underclassmen started to unofficially choose “winners” and tally up our scores.
Except now the tallies are anything but unofficial. Now we’re neck and neck for an actual internship, and everything counts.
Usually one of us looks away first. That’s how we can tell who’s winning and who’s not, without a sophomore marking it down in the Notes app on their phone. But this time neither of us does, and it feels like we’re hovering in between the kids we were then and whatever we are now—like this moment was a bookend to that one, the universe seaming itself back together after we spent the last few years tearing it apart. A quiet ending. A second chance.
It’s the first time I feel a pang of regret about the internship. There’s no way we don’t blow it all over again—and I don’t need any kind of Millie Mood to know that the fallout will feel much worse.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I’m afraid to blink, to miss even one moment of staring out at the expanse of Carnegie Hall from the stage. I’ve been here before, way up in the highest balcony seats to see the New York Pops two Christmases ago, but nothing really prepares you for the enormity of it—the sweeping gold ceiling, the blaze of endless glittering lights, the height of the audience seating. It feels like you could throw out a note here and have it echo into eternity. Like the entire hall is still pulsing with years and years of music suspended in its walls.
“Okay, Saundra stand-in over here.”
I wander over to where the woman pointed, still gaping out at the theater as she gestures to clip a body mic to my dress. I lift my arms to let her.
“And Phil stand-in over there,” says someone else.
“Wait, no,” says Oliver, ducking away from a crew member. “We’re stand-ins, we’re not getting mic’d.”
“They just need us to talk into them for sound,” I remind him.
Oliver runs a tight ship between the cast and the crew at Cornelia. He must know that’s going to be a whole part of the process. But Oliver’s always been stage-shy—he notoriously refuses to do the before-curtain speeches introducing the shows, leaving it to one of the other kids.
But then the other crew member dealing with Oliver turns back to me. “What? No. We need you to sing.”
If a heart could salivate at the idea of something, I’m pretty sure mine just did. “Seriously?” I ask, half convinced someone is playing a trick.
Oliver, on the other hand, goes so pale I’m pretty sure the blood just evaporated out of his body. “Absolutely not.”