Oliver nods thoughtfully, a quiet acknowledgment that this particular topic has reached its end. After a moment he shakes his head, blinking himself out of some train of thought.
“So … why do you want the internship?”
I can’t begin to explain why, but there’s this moment when I suck in a breath that I think I’m going to use it to tell him the truth. And the jarring thing isn’t that I might tell it—the jarring thing is that I think I might want to. Maybe it would even be a relief. I’m flying blind out here, but Oliver is nothing if not a boy with a plan. That, and he just trusted me with some piece of his history. It feels natural to trust him with mine.
The trouble isn’t really whether I trust Oliver with it, though. The trouble is I’m not sure if I trust myself.
“The, uh—the industry experience, mostly,” I say, staring down at the last remnants of my fries. “And the money. So I can use it for the precollege.”
Oliver doesn’t say anything for a moment, but I can feel him watching me. “I don’t believe you.”
The words aren’t heated. More curious than anything. Enough that I look back over at him, curious myself.
“Why’s that?”
He smiles that barely smile again. “You’re a great actress, Millie, but a pretty bad liar.”
“Ha!” I exclaim, seizing the words like candy out of a piñata. “You admit I’m a great actress.”
Oliver rolls his eyes, leaning in. “It’s an objective fact,” he says teasingly.
The tips of my ears burn. I always thought getting a genuine compliment from Oliver was some kind of white whale, but now that I actually have one, it’s like it doesn’t know where to settle in me.
“Well,” I mumble, “it wasn’t always.”
I’m not expecting Oliver to say anything. It does sound like compliment fishing, after all, which would be precisely on brand for me. But instead he takes a sip from his fountain drink.
“Look, I know you’re sensitive about that whole … ‘Little Jo’ thing.”
Neither of us has uttered those words one time in the past three years. I’m surprised he even remembers enough to say them.
“Am I?” I ask, my eyebrows flying up in warning.
He puts his hands up in mock defense. “I guess I’m just wondering why you never did anything after that. You’re all talk at school, but have you ever actually gone out for anything in the city?”
“I did when I was a kid, but now I have to bide my time,” I say defensively. “Wait until the smoke has fully cleared from the meme aftermath.”
“Screw that,” he says. “Embrace the meme.”
“Embrace it?” I scoff. “How?”
“Get on TikTok.” I’m expecting this to be a throwaway suggestion, but when I raise an eyebrow, Oliver doubles down. “You’re not just a good singer, Millie—you’re funny. And you’ve made enough bizarre costume changes in the last few years that I’m pretty sure your closet is bursting with clothes and props. You could do so much with everything you already have.” He’s on a roll now, so impassioned that he’s not even looking at me but just past me, like he’s seeing something all fall into place. “Like—that semester you dressed all emo? Or that other one you dressed like you were on the track team? Make them characters or something. Have them sing in their own styles. Make it a whole series or start the next Ratatouille: The Musical. It’s open season.”
It’s weird—every time I was making all those “costume changes” I was counting on the fact that people were noticing them. They were a flashy distraction. A way of making my actual self invisible in plain sight.
But Oliver wasn’t just noticing them. He was seeing past them, down to the person I was even before we met. And for some reason, it doesn’t feel half as mortifying as it probably should.
“What?” he asks.
I realize I’ve been staring at him. I shake my head.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just … you’re gonna make a good manager, is all.”
He looks back down at his burger wrapper, but not before I see the smile quirk on his face. “Tell that to my brothers.”
“Sure. Right after I force them to fork over that Pippin video so I can AirDrop it to half the school.”
Oliver groans, grabbing both of our baskets and trash. “You’re the worst.”
I hop off the chair, following him to the counter. “You love it.”
Oliver sighs, which is the closest thing to a concession I’ll ever get.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The running list of things Teddy drags me along to find that weekend include and are not limited to: a piece of paper with a code on it to get free GeoPoints; a shiny piece of fool’s gold; a keychain with a corgi’s butt on it; and a heap of free kids’ Clif Bars so large I had to physically drag Teddy away from them before he took more than five (GeoTeens is here for that sponsorship money).
By Sunday afternoon, our feet are aching, we are both slightly sunburned, and we are wrecking our dinner by eating Clif Bars on the High Line.
“I should go,” I groan. I think we’ve gotten enough steps to break Heather’s Fitbit. I’m so tired I could curl up under the gelato counter behind us and take a nap. “I’ve gotta get to Farrah’s dance class.”
“You know, I think my money’s on her.”
“Why’s that?”
He whips out his phone, revealing not just that a LiveJournal app has the audacity to exist, but that he has fully downloaded it.
I gasp. “Teddy, no.”
“Teddy, yes,” he says, clicking it and pulling up my dad’s page. “So there are pretty much no posts after the whole Smirnoff Ice debacle, but what we didn’t look at were posts from before. Like, posts from the summer.”
I scoot over closer to him, squinting at the screen as he scrolls.
“There’s really just a few. Like, some nerdy stuff, another one mooning over Beth, and one about how he and Steph got into a fight over whether they should watch a bootleg DVD of Rent or some horror movie about aliens called Signs.”
“That all tracks,” I say, my sigh implied.
“But he doesn’t really mention Farrah. She’s out of town most of the time, right?” says Teddy. “So like, of all the people to disappear off the face of the earth and surprise your dad with a kid … she’s kind of in the best position for it.”
I bite down on my lower lip, trying to remember everything we read in the initial posts. “I guess so. But…”
But so many things. But the way I feel like Steph and I understand the tug of our ambitions in a way that very few people do. But the way I talk to Beth so easily, like we’ve known each other for years. But the way Farrah could instantly cut down to the heart of my dancing woes before I could begin to articulate them myself.
“I dunno,” I finish, at a loss.
But Teddy’s already distracted from his phone, his eyes skimming the park. “Hmmm.”
I straighten up, trying to follow his gaze. The GeoTeens staff who were overseeing the Clif Bar stash have long since left, so there’s nothing but tourists and skyline. “What are you looking for?”