He turns to me, the phone forgotten. “It’d be weird to try to, like … geocache a fellow GeoTeen, right?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Isn’t that just stalking?”
“Technically, no. Legally, probably.” Teddy blows out a breath, leaning back on the bench and forgetting that he is perilously tall until he almost seesaws himself right off of it. “I haven’t seen ParticularlyGoodFinders on the message board for days.”
“Ah. Right. Your GeoCrush.”
Teddy’s too distraught to remember to protest.
“I take it she hasn’t been messaging you, either?” I ask.
“No,” he says glumly, biting off the end of another Clif Bar with his back teeth. “Maybe I’m just a big GeoGeek.”
“Aw, Teddy,” I say, wrapping an arm around his shoulder. “You’re just a regular geek.”
He doesn’t lean into me the way he usually does, all tense and gangly. “A regular geek with no friends.”
“What am I, chopped liver?”
“You’re chopped precollege,” says Teddy miserably. “You’ll go off to California and forget all about me.”
“Theodore Rex Granger, please.”
I’m expecting him to make some kind of blech noise the way he usually does when I use his actual name—only his grandparents call him Theodore, and he’s scarred for life from the week they babysat him as a kid and refused to let him eat sugary cereal—but he doesn’t say anything. When I turn to fully look at him, there’s something wobbly in his expression, some line crossed between rambunctious dog and sad puppy.
“Teddy…”
My phone buzzes in my lap.
“It’s Coop,” says Teddy.
I move the phone toward my bag. “I can call him back.”
Teddy plucks the phone from my hand. “You can’t avoid him forever.”
“I’ll call him—”
“I hogged you the whole weekend. It’s Coop’s turn.” Before I can get another word in, Teddy swipes the phone to answer the call. “Millie’s phone, this is Theodore speaking.”
I groan and extend my arm out for him to give it back.
“Ah, yes, I think she can squeeze you in between appointments. Here she is now!” he says to my dad before finally forking over the phone.
“You’re a terrible assistant,” I tell him.
Teddy salutes me. “Catch up with you after class?”
I hold the phone away so my dad doesn’t hear me say, “If I haven’t broken my legs and possibly Chloe’s in the process, sure.”
As Teddy bounces off I consider the phone for a second, watching the seconds tick by on the call. It’s been almost a week since I last talked to my dad. I’ve never gone that long without talking to him in my life.
“Hey, Mil-a-mille.”
I immediately feel my chin start to quiver. It’s his nickname for me, the one that he only ever uses when it’s just me and him and Heather—a play on my actual first name, Camille, buried so deep in the History of Millie that I’m pretty sure even Teddy’s forgotten.
It makes me feel like a little kid again. The thoughts that have been swirling like a tornado in my brain over the last week are settling, and now I’m standing in the eye at the loudest thought in the center of it all. I really, really miss my dad.
If it were a normal Sunday, we’d be making pasta right now. It’s Heather’s only night off from the club, so she makes the sauce, and I head over to Chelsea Market for fresh bread, and Dad boils the water because he can’t be trusted to do much else without daydreaming and accidentally setting the apartment on fire. Then he and Heather have red wine while I have cherry soda and we go around the table and talk about everything we did that week.
I clear my throat and blink hard. It’s probably for the best he’s gone right now. There’s nothing I could tell him the truth about anyway.
“Hey, Dad,” I say, my voice bright. “How’s Chicago?”
“Uh—sunny?” There’s a beat. “I think?”
I frown, pushing myself off the bench and grabbing my dance bag so I can start heading toward the train. “Are you holed up in your hotel room avoiding all of humanity again?”
“I’m on the phone with you, aren’t I? You’re still humanity.”
Typical Cooper Price. Without me or Heather, he’d probably never leave our apartment for anything other than the occasional Lord of the Rings trivia night.
“Dad. Go outside! Go make some friends!”
“I went to the museum,” he protests.
“Some friends living in this century.”
“Touché. So? How’s the internship going?”
“It’s going,” I say, narrowly dodging a group of kids on their skateboards as I walk down the stairs from the High Line to the street.
“Setting new standards for budding audition monitors everywhere?”
I wince. It’s become clear over our texts this week that my dad thinks I’m interning with a casting agency, and I haven’t exactly corrected him. I figured on the slight chance that he has kept tabs on Steph over the years, he might put two and two together and figure out I’m up to no good before I can get up to anything at all.
“Just, uh, doing my best,” I say noncommittally. “But walking over to dance class now.”
“Right! Heather mentioned you’d already had your first class.”
“Did she mention I nearly grapevined into a group of dancers like a human wrecking ball?”
“She did say something about your habitual use of hyperbole, yes,” says my dad with a laugh. “But you’re powering through?”
“One poorly landed jeté at a time.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “But yeah. I think it’ll help get me up to speed. So—thanks for, uh…”
“’Course,” says my dad. “And hey, it looks like the class will wrap up just in time for college auditions to start.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I checked the admissions schedules for NYU and Pace and Marymount—you might want to start figuring out which weekends you want to do which, so we can space them out.”
This is the closest Cooper Price will ever get to being a certified Stage Dad™, and only because he loves himself an organized itinerary. It would be sixteen kinds of precious if there weren’t a rock plummeting in my stomach.
“Well, I mean … if I’m going to those auditions,” I say carefully.
“I thought those were in your top five?”
“I mean, yeah, but—the precollege.”
“Oh.” My dad doesn’t say anything for a moment, and I can practically see that bewildered Dad face he gets sometimes from all these miles away. “So you’re…”
I stop walking and hover on the edge of the sidewalk, out of people’s way. I press the phone a little closer to my ear.
“I mean, I thought we were leaving it open for now, right?” I don’t want to fight with him. I’m not even particularly sure how to fight with him, considering the one time I tried we ended up having a blowout in the middle of the Milkshake Club. So I keep my voice even, try to stave off the Millie Mood. “Since we don’t have to decide yet?”