I smile quietly back at him, sensing that uneasy tension you feel in the aftermath of saying something more than you meant to say. “Well, I’m glad for that,” I tell him. “And I gotta admit, ‘Cookie Girl’ is a much better legacy than ‘Little Jo.’”
Oliver winces. “Once I made the connection, I tried running into you again that summer after we met. To apologize, I guess. I mean, I did some digging into the whole ‘Little Jo’ thing and read through the comments, and—”
“La la la,” I singsong, my fingers moving toward my ears. I’ve seen enough snippets of myself in YouTube compilations of girls yelling “Christopher Columbus!” at the end of that song to last me a hundred lifetimes.
Oliver shoots me a rueful look. “Yeah, well. It put your whole reaction in perspective. I just wanted to clear the air.”
I lower my hands. “So you put that emoji in there as a reminder of where to find me?”
At this, Oliver’s lip quirks upward. “At first. But I left it there as a reminder to avoid you, actually.” He moves his foot forward, nudging his shoe against my boot. “It became pretty clear after that whole Mamma Mia argument freshman year that we were probably not destined to be friends.”
“So that’s when the chance of us ever being friends went up in smoke? Because you sabotaged my ABBA dreams?”
I lean back on a chair leg so he knows I’m only teasing—it’s all water over the Holland Tunnel at this point—but Oliver takes a step closer, closing the distance.
“That’s just it. I was trying to help you, Millie. That was before Mrs. Cooke put us in charge of all those fundraising efforts. We didn’t have the budget. At least not the budget to make it decent, the way we do now.”
This, at least, we’ve always had in common—high standards for ourselves and what we put into the world.
High standards that led us to get more money for our theater department than they’d seen in years. We may have disagreed on how to do it a thousand times before we reached an idea we were both satisfied with, but hosting the monthly talent shows with bake sales outside the theater was the double punch we needed to get enough money for elevated sets and period costumes for every show we did afterward.
I take a sip of my coffee. “We did crush those fundraisers.”
“And nearly each other,” says Oliver wryly.
It’s quiet for a moment, Steph listening to whoever is on the phone and taking intense notes, the two of us both watching each other.
“Weird to think how much more we could have gotten done if we hadn’t been jerks to each other,” I finally say.
“I think we still kind of did,” Oliver counters. “I mean, why else would Mrs. Cooke team us up so many times? We push each other.”
“Off cliffs, maybe,” I say, snorting.
But Oliver isn’t laughing. “I was actually on board with a ton of your ideas, you know,” he says. “Like that mentoring program between the upperclassmen and freshmen. Just—sometimes things take time. And someone has to help execute them.”
“Wait, you had something to do with that?”
Oliver looks unexpectedly self-conscious, like he hadn’t anticipated me picking up on that so fast. “A bit.”
“But…” I blink, that year coming back to me in pieces. How we were told there were too many clubs and extracurriculars to get space for the mentoring program, and right before I was about to unleash the full throttle of a Millie Mood on the faculty, suddenly we had somewhere to go. “You got us the space booked for the mentoring program.”
I feel stupid for not realizing that before. One of the first things Oliver did freshman year was join student council, which basically made him our only advocate in getting the theater kids space in a school full of overachieving nerds.
“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “I also was the one who showed Mrs. Cooke how we could rotate the schedules to double-cast stuff without her having to spend extra time at school.”
I forgot how resistant she was to that at first. How she’d really refused to even entertain it. Now that we do double-cast all the shows, it’s almost a time-saver, if anything—we all rehearse together for the first two months and separate for the last two weeks, and if someone misses a rehearsal or needs extra help, their cast double can teach it to them later. Not only did it help a ton more students get featured and make the whole spirit of Cornelia less cutthroat and competitive, it’s gotten to the point where none of us can even really remember a time when we didn’t have that to our advantage.
And I guess we owe it to Oliver.
“I had no idea,” I say. I can’t even muster up a thank-you, because I don’t know if it would come close to covering it.
The lilt of his shrug tells me he understood it anyway. “You were right. The school needed a change.”
“Yeah, but you actually changed it.”
Oliver shakes his head. “You changed it. I just closed the deal.”
I wish I’d known. I’d gotten a lot of the credit for spearheading the new initiatives and cemented a lot of friendships while we were pushing for them. Friends that Oliver might have made, too, if we hadn’t been so busy undermining each other anytime we had an audience.
I swallow down the guilt, taking my half of the cookie and raising it to the air to cheers it. He lifts his up, too, our knuckles grazing, our eyes locked.
“Well, who knew?” My cheeks are just a little too warm. Probably from the coffee. “Turns out we make a good team.”
“Yeah, we do.” Oliver pauses, mulling something over. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about that.”
Before I can even try to guess at where that’s going, Georgie opens her office door, looking at both of us in turn.
“Which one of you is first?”
I glance at Oliver, but he doesn’t miss a beat. “Millie should go.”
I open my mouth to ask why, but Georgie’s already walking back into her office, the door open so I can follow. My eyes are still on Oliver’s, waiting for him to say something to psych me out or explain why he’s insisting on going second. But he’s still smiling the way he was before.
“Break a leg.”
I don’t realize I’m smiling back until it follows me all the way into the office, and Georgie seems momentarily disarmed to see it. No, not momentarily—fully disarmed, like I walked in with a baseball bat instead of a smile. She blinks at me, then down at her desk.
“Should I sit?” I ask warily.
“Yes. Yes, please sit.”
By the time she looks back up she’s entirely composed again. I sit in the chair opposite her desk, setting my bag and my notebook on the floor, and face her the same way I did at the interview when I first bullied my way into this gig. Back then I was all full of nerve and fire and a little bit of fear, but now all that seems muted. Like I’ve had some kind of metamorphosis, left that version of myself behind.
It takes me off guard, the ache I feel. I’ve turned myself inside out a dozen times over. It’s that this time, I didn’t mean to; it’s that this time, the change isn’t my clothes or my hair or my attitude, but something quiet, something bone-deep. Something I can’t change back, for better or for worse.