I let out an unexpected laugh. “Fair enough.”
The light starts counting down for me to cross, so we wave goodbye. But instead of going home, I head to the Milkshake Club, where they’re just setting up for the night. I make myself a shake and then make a second one with banana, sea salt caramel, and chocolate fudge sauce, which I plant in front of Carly at the desk where she keeps her calendar of bookings.
She takes it from me. “What’s this for?”
“I want to show you an act we should try out.”
Carly narrows her eyes at me from under her blunt, edgy bangs. “For the last time, Millie, I can’t pull in the Broadway cast of Six.”
“We’ll revisit that later,” I say cheekily. I pull out my phone and text her a link. “I think they’d be a good opener, or fun to test on a weekday. Just have a peek.”
Carly sighs, watching her phone screen light up. “Only because you remembered my rainbow sprinkles,” she says, taking a sip of her milkshake.
The call comes in a few minutes later—Madison hasn’t contacted anyone on the waitlist, so they’re holding my spot at the precollege. The relief hits me so hard that I sit on the stairwell in our apartment building just before our floor, waiting to reach some kind of equilibrium again. Waiting for it to fill up the empty this morning left behind.
A full minute passes, and it doesn’t change anything. My dad’s still going to say no, and I’m still working on borrowed time. But whatever this empty feeling is suddenly feels so much deeper than that, deep enough not to follow it down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“So … Coop’s dead to us,” says Teddy, power walking through the East Village later that night, the GeoTeens app open in his hand.
On the long list of “Moments Teddy Inconveniently Forgets He Is Tall,” attempting to keep up with him on a city street might be in the top five. “Coop’s definitely testing me.”
“But he did try to reverse it.”
“Yeah, but…” I purse my lips, which is a mistake, because I am half jogging to stay on his tail and need all the air I can get. “You didn’t hear him on the phone. I really don’t think he’s going to cave on this. And I’ve only got two weeks to get him on my side.”
“So maybe it’s time to—y’know. Get someone else on your side. Figure out which one of them is your mom.”
“I don’t know yet,” I grumble.
Then Teddy says out loud the very words I’ve spent the last week trying to avoid. “You could just ask.”
It’s true. There are so many moments I could have ripped the Band-Aid off all this. I could have used my real last name and watched to see if they’d react. I could have filed something on the internet to get a copy of my birth certificate. I could have just said to any one of these women, point-blank, I’m looking for my mom, did you happen to drop a baby with a Cancer sun sign and a Leo moon off at the doorstep of a deeply nerdy college junior in the early 2000s?
“I just…” I pick up the pace and it’s less like I’m trying to keep up with Teddy and more like I’m trying to outpace my own thoughts. “I thought I’d just know, you know? And it’s weird that I don’t.”
“Well, let’s recap.” He glances at his phone and takes a sharp turn onto Twelfth Street, so fast my hair flies behind me like a whip when I follow. “All three of them knew your dad.”
“Yeah. And all three of them are arguably kind of like me. Like—Steph’s an actress and even went to school for it, and is also, like. You know. Vain like I am. But in a cool, harmless way.”
“Tell that to the tube of your lipstick that exploded in my backpack when you stashed it in there last summer.”
“And Farrah—yeah, she can actually dance and I can’t, but I feel like we share the same bluntness, and her hair is the exact color of strawberry blond that mine would be if I didn’t dye it. And Beth loves musical theater, and she was a super moody teen, and she has a kid who is just as bad at dancing and weirdly passionate about things as I am—”
“Hey, how did the dance class with Chloe go, anyway?”
“Oh!” It’s a good thing Teddy is navigating, because I’m thinking out loud so fast he could lead me straight into a subway tunnel and I’d mosey on in. “Chloe has a crush on you.”
Teddy looks at me bewilderedly. “On me?”
“Yeah, you.”
“Huh.”
“Is that a bad ‘huh’ or a good ‘huh’?”
“That’s a ‘why would someone have a crush on me’ huh.”
Teddy’s concerning level of self-esteem aside, this is at least a somewhat promising reaction.
“Like, ParticularlyGoodFinders? Completely ignoring me now,” Teddy laments. “Hasn’t answered any of my messages. All I can think is she figured out who I was at one of the meetups and now wants nothing to do with me.”
“First of all, that’s ludicrous. You and I are the best-looking GeoTeens at those meetups and that’s a fact.”
Teddy sighs.
“And maybe…”
He waves a hand at me. “We’re getting sidetracked. The mom thing. You’ve hung out with them all at least once, and you said earlier all of them at some point seemed to reference something weird about college, and even with that you still don’t have any idea?”
I bookmark my Teddy-shaped pep talk in my brain for after we find the geocache, when he’ll actually absorb it. “No,” I admit. “But like, in my defense—none of them have recognized me, either.”
“Does that bother you?”
I scrunch my nose. “I don’t know.” Teddy’s slowed down enough for me to think straight, which prompts me to say something I haven’t really considered yet. “I guess I’m … relieved, a little. That they didn’t recognize me right away. I used to worry that whoever she was, she saw that stupid ‘Little Jo’ video.”
Teddy gives me a knowing look. “Would that be so bad?”
Now that I’ve said it out loud—this private, embarrassing thought I’ve kept to myself for so long—I’m not so sure. Somewhere along the way I got so focused on trying to settle on some version of myself that I actually liked that I lost sight of the reason why I was doing it in the first place. If I was doing it to lose something or find it. Parts of me that aren’t a part of Cooper, or Heather, or anyone I know. Things that maybe could only have been a part of her.
I blink the thought away. “I want her to see me as my best self, and that wasn’t it.” I say it firmly, pushing past it, but the next part still comes out unbidden. “I guess if I’m being honest, maybe I’m upset none of them have recognized me after getting to know me. Like, as Millie. Their kid.”
The worst part is I’m not even sure where to aim the frustration—at them? At myself? Instead it’s just kind of loose and shapeless in me, weighing me down but not giving me any sense of where to go.
“Well, maybe it’s time to just … pick one. And ask.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. “I want to get to know them, though. So I can be sure. Like, what if I’m wrong?”