But I guess there was no world where that was going to happen, whether Beth really is my mom or not. It was always going to be just me.
We’ve just reached our stop when my phone buzzes in my pocket. A text from Steph that she must have sent to me and Oliver while I was in the tunnel. How did the “stand-in” gig go? I heard there was a … mixup, she wrote, with a winky face.
Ha, Oliver wrote back. I take it that was on you?
I might have fed some incorrect info to the tech team about Miss Millie to see if we could get her a little action.
I grin like I’ve just gotten a Tony nomination. I wish she’d still been in the office so she could see the look on my face when I got back that day, but Oliver and I ended up working so late taking pictures of Georgie’s client at the rally that she was out by the time we came back. Well, mostly working. I guess we didn’t need to be out as long as we were, but time just got away from us.
Oliver responds again before I can. Well, she rocked it. But her actual Carnegie debut better include this.
He’s attached a GIF of the dancers in Mamma Mia hopping around in their giant flippers on the dock. I laugh out loud, the sound of it getting swallowed up by the station.
“So how do you talk to your crushes?” Chloe asks, hot on my heels.
“Pfft.” I wave a dismissive hand, flipping my hair over my shoulder. “That I can’t help you with. I can confidently say I’ve never had the time.”
But even then, my laugh at Oliver’s text lingers in the back of my throat the rest of the way home—and for the first time in the history of ever, I fall asleep looking forward to seeing him the next day.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Before bed last night I texted Steph back profusely thanking her. She wrote back with a wink and said, I know you didn’t take this internship to perform, but just a reminder from one actress to another—take all the chances you get! You never know where they’ll lead.
I’m still staring at the text and trying to stop myself from screenshotting it for posterity the next morning when my phone rings.
“Is this Millie Price?”
“Sure is,” I say, admiring my reflection in a coffee shop window. My summer outfits have taken on a degree of lawlessness, now that I’m not seeing my classmates every day. Instead of making them fit a theme, it’s been a little of this and a little of that—Heather’s boots, a cute sleeveless black dress that survived the goth phase, a scrunchie from the nineties grunge phase. I’ll have to figure out what the next one is before my first semester kicks off, but I don’t mind the hodgepodge for now. “What’s up?”
“This is Becca from the New York branch of the Madison admissions office.”
“Oh—hi.” I pull the phone away from my face. It’s eight forty-five on a Monday morning. “The deadline for the deposit isn’t for another two weeks, right?”
“Well, yes. For people who have confirmed their acceptance. I was calling because it seems as though you tried to reverse your decision to decline acceptance.”
When we were little kids Teddy and I did the ice bucket challenge in the middle of Washington Square Park with enough ice to reasonably concuss someone. Even that wasn’t half as jarring as this. I stop dead on the sidewalk.
“Decision to what?”
“I have here in my records that you declined your acceptance last week when you were contacted about the deposit.”
“I wasn’t contacted.”
“Well, nobody picked up at your primary number, so we called the secondary one on your form.”
Shit. Shit. I made my cell phone the primary number, but I put my dad’s down as an emergency contact.
“In any case, we received a message last night asking us to reverse the decision … and I’m afraid the circumstance is a little unusual.”
About as unusual as an otherwise healthy sixteen-year-old girl forgetting how to breathe in the middle of a busy sidewalk, and yet that’s happening, too.
“I didn’t—I’m not—I’m coming,” I blurt.
“Be that as it may, I’m worried someone has already been in touch with whoever’s next on the waitlist.”
This conversation is veering so quickly into disaster territory that my brain can’t keep up.
“But they might not have been?” I ask, swallowing down the molten panic threatening to rise all the way up my throat along with the Eggo waffles I ate for breakfast.
“I need to check with the secretary when she gets in tomorrow. I just wanted to verify with you first, before I pursued the matter any further.”
My dad must have really thought I wasn’t going to go. He must have just said no without asking me and then tried to fix it before I found out.
I don’t know what feels worse: the fact that I might have completely lost this opportunity I worked so hard for, or that my dad really doesn’t know me well enough to understand how much it means to me.
“Well, I—I’m coming.” I blink and already there are big thick tears streaming down my face, like the few drops of rain that tap the ground before the sky erupts. “Can you let me know as soon as you can?”
“Of course. We’ll be in touch.”
It’s not a Millie Mood. It’s a full-on Millie Meltdown. I’m crying on the street like a walking cliché, except it’s not the understated, dainty “girl in a rom-com” kind of sniffle. It’s hiccup-y, snot-nosed, red-faced crying, the kind where you forget where you are or that you did a perfect cat-eye this morning or that you are standing smack-dab in the middle of the most crowded and least empathetic city on earth.
Someone grabs my shoulder so firmly that if my wits were about me I’d assume I was about to get murdered. What happens is much worse: I look up and through the stream of tears, make out Georgie Check.
“Off the street,” she says, steering me into the building.
“I—I can’t just—”
I’m trying to tell her I need to get a handle on myself first, but that’s obviously not going to happen anytime in this century. She’s not listening to me anyway, continuing to nudge me forward past lobby security and into a miraculously open elevator. I try to muffle my crying but then it comes out in these big gulping noises that make me feel like a beached sea creature.
It’s fine. It’s fine. Actually, this makes things easier. If there’s no precollege there’s no reason to have this internship, and this spares me the trouble of figuring out how to tell Georgie and Steph that I’m out. Georgie will fire me and I’ll just slink away, pretend all of this never happened, give up this ridiculous stupid search for my mom and—
“Are you okay?”
Somehow we are in Georgie’s office, and I’m sitting in her chair.
The words are clipped enough that I can tell she wants to know if something colossally terrible has happened, like I’ve witnessed a crime or gotten kicked out of my apartment, which would maybe be reasonable circumstances to justify this brand of tears. So I nod, because I am technically physically okay, even if I emotionally want to crawl under Georgie’s desk and use her carpet as a Kleenex.
“Here.” It’s my Check List clipboard, but Georgie moves today’s list under several blank pages before handing it to me. “Just write it down.”