“Make a wish,” says Heather.
I close my eyes, blow out the candles, and think to myself, Please let my dad not figure out what I just did.
Except after all the candles are blown out and I look around the room, my dad is nowhere to be found.
Heather takes the cake to start cutting and serving it, and I feel someone yank my elbow. By the time Teddy has pulled me out to the back hallway I’m so thrown that it feels like this is happening to someone else. It reminds me of one of the first and few times I ever had stage fright, about a year before “Little Jo.” Just before I was supposed to walk out it felt like my soul had just peaced out from my body. It’s like that, except my fingers and toes are tingling, like the blood doesn’t know how to flow through them anymore.
I push past the hallway and out to the back alley, but the humid air does nothing to help.
“I swear I didn’t invite them,” says Teddy. “Well, I invited Chloe, but I was going to walk her home, I didn’t think—”
“I know,” I say, pacing up the alley. “Farrah’s dating my aunt, apparently—”
“What?” asks Teddy, following close behind.
“And my dad’s already spotted both of them, and I’m so busted, but—”
“Does Coop know?”
“Not yet, but Teddy,” I say, stopping abruptly and reaching up to grab him by the shoulders. “Do you know what this means?”
“Murphy’s Law is real?”
“Steph is my mom.”
Teddy’s eyebrows fly into his mop of hair, and he sucks in a breath like he’s going to ask me how I know that. But then the wheels turn in his head and it becomes all too evident how I know.
“Is that … is that a good thing?”
It is and it isn’t. I take a step back from him and try to catch my breath, try to settle the atoms in my body that feel like they’re crashing into one another. It’s not that I don’t want it to be Steph, or that I didn’t want it to be Beth or Farrah. It’s that when I didn’t know, it could have been any of them, and this feeling in me … whatever it is. It could be dispersed. My mom couldn’t disappoint me, because she was all of them and none of them at the same time. I could see myself in all their good qualities, maybe, and just choose to ignore any of the bad.
The bad primarily being the fact that, for whatever reason, she didn’t want me.
I itch at my face, catching the unexpected tear that wells up in my eye before Teddy can see it.
“Yeah.” I put a little more force behind it, trying to convince myself as I say it. “Yeah. This is good.”
“You seemed to like her,” says Teddy. “Plus, she’s an actress. So maybe it all makes sense.”
Maybe it does. If I were in her shoes—if I’d gotten into Tisch, and was taking classes at NYU, and had my whole future ahead of me—what would I have done if I suddenly found out I was having a kid?
It’s a simple enough question, until I press down on it and it explodes into a dozen more, each of them heavier than the one that came before it. Like why she had me in the first place. If she knew she didn’t want me before or after she had me. If she’s wondered about me at all ever since. If she’s ever looked at me, Millie, and wondered even for a second if I could be the “Baby Price” she left with my dad seventeen years before.
I turn away from Teddy, pretending it’s to fix my hair. “So maybe it’s for the best.” I grapple for something to focus on, something to pull me out of the spiral, and when I find it I latch hard: “If there’s anyone who can get my dad on my side about Madison, it’s Steph.”
Teddy lets out a very un-Teddy-like scoff. I turn to look at him, and even he seems surprised at himself. But then he holds my eyes, and I see something defensive in them, like he doesn’t want me to call him out on it but he’s daring me to at the same time.
I can’t remember a time Teddy was ever feeling something I didn’t already understand. I can’t just let it go. “What?”
“Does everything really have to be about this precollege?”
I grit my teeth. “Well, that’s why we started this whole thing in the first place, isn’t it?”
Teddy gestures back at the club door. “So that’s it, then. You’re just gonna pull Steph into this and go.”
“I don’t … I don’t know that.” Honestly, even as it’s coming out of my mouth, it’s the furthest thing from my mind right now. “But you always knew I was going to go. You’ve known for months.”
“You only thought you were going to go then.”
“What, you didn’t think I was going to get in?”
Teddy rolls his eyes. “Please don’t make it about that right now.”
I dig my heels into the cement. My patience for Teddy may be fairly infinite, but given the already ridiculous circumstances of this doomed party, he sure is testing it right now. “What are you trying to make it about, then?”
“This whole thing—was it really just a means to an end? These other women aren’t your mom, and it’s just … over?” Before I can even wrap my head around what he’s accusing me of, he adds, “Like, what about Chloe?”
I shake my head, incredulous. “What about her?”
“She’s not your sister anymore, and you just drop her?”
“Who said I was going to do that?” I demand. “Did you not just see me introducing her to new friends? Getting her audition to Oliver?”
“Yeah, for now. But you’re leaving, and once she gets to that school, she’ll be on her own.”
“You’ve known Chloe for like, a week,” I remind him, the frustration reaching its boiling point.
“I’m just saying—”
“Are you worried about Chloe not having any friends when I’m gone, or are you worried because you never bothered to make any of your own?”
Teddy looks so stricken that I know I’ve cut right down to the heart of it, sliced it clean through. It’s a problem I’ve never really had to consider before—that you can know someone so well that you know exactly how to hurt them. Until now, I’ve never had a reason to try.
First it was my dad. Now it’s my best friend. I bury my face in my hands, all at once madder at myself than I am at him.
“Teddy—”
I’m interrupted by the sound of Heather snapping her fingers, appearing from behind the door back into the club. The open door.
If she heard any of what we just said, she doesn’t acknowledge it. “C’mon inside,” she says. “I saved you both corner pieces.”
The idea of eating cake right now makes my stomach churn. But Teddy looks all too relieved for an excuse to end the conversation, and after a few seconds pass and Heather is out of earshot, he starts making his way to the door.
“Teddy, I’m sorry,” I say, immediately going after him.
Teddy’s always been a notoriously fast walker, but it turns out even then he was holding back. I have to run to keep up with him as we make our way back down the hallway, my boots slapping the ground so loudly they have their own echo. He seems to remember that we’re about to make a scene before I do, and stops.