I don’t want to push her by saying I could still be around. That this doesn’t have to be a goodbye. But it’s clear that we’ve reached a goodbye for now, if not a goodbye forever. There’s still this tug in me that’s afraid to move away from this moment and afraid to stay in it at the same time, but if I start asking more questions now, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to stop.
I ease up from her couch, taking my bag from the floor.
She stands up, too. “And Millie—for what it’s worth—I meant what I said about that program. It’s a waste of your talent and your time.”
I bite my lip, stopping at the edge of her couch. She’s already looking at me intently when I meet her eye, but this time, there’s no fight in her eyes. Just total certainty.
“You’re going to be a force, Millie.” She says it like she has enough power to will my future into being. “And maybe I’m not allowed to say that as your mom. But I am saying that as the best damn talent manager in the city.”
I smile. “Thanks. Really. I’m … I mean it.”
She nods. We both stand there like two people crossing each other on a bridge—hovering just a few more moments in between two different worlds that might never cross again. I might see her tomorrow. I might never see her again. Everything feels entirely possible and completely impossible all at once, and the moment is passing too quickly for me to even know how I feel.
Georgie puts some of it into words when I can’t. “I feel like there’s more I should tell you,” she says. “Things I want you to understand.”
I pull the notebook out from under the coffee table. “Write it down,” I tell her.
She takes the notebook from me. Gives me a faint, wry kind of smile that wavers just as fast. “When you tell Cooper, could you…”
I leave my hand on the notebook just long enough for her to know that I mean it out of kindness, and not out of spite. “I don’t know if I will,” I say quietly. “But Georgie … if you ever want to, you know where to find us.”
Her eyes fill with tears again, but this time there’s happiness in them, too. She nods. Sets the notebook in her lap. Watches me all the way out the door, and waves back at me as I turn to go—seventeen years and two pairs of matching green eyes and one strange kind of understanding settling between us, even if we don’t know what it is just yet.
It’s hard to know what to feel even as I go, but maybe I don’t need to know that either. Maybe it’s less about what we need to know and more about what we need to understand. And that much I always will. I walk outside and feel the sun on my face, feel my feet fall into rhythm with the rest of the sidewalk, and take myself home.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
By the time I reach home, I still don’t know how I feel or what I should do about it. So I don’t say anything about Georgie. Instead I hug my dad and I text Oliver to ask what else I can grab from his Check List, and he writes back, All good. Meet you at the theater tonight?
My dad is working and Heather is out running errands for the club, so I spend the afternoon in my room writing in an old notebook. I want to remember this, at least, in the weird blank-slate aftermath of it—when I’m still too busy processing to think of all the tiny, infinite ways this changes things and all the big, important ones that it doesn’t change at all.
When it comes time to leave, there’s no hour-long tortured search through my closet. I slide back on Heather’s boots and a flouncy dress and a bright red lipstick. I catch my reflection in the mirror, and for once, there’s no theme. No part I’m trying to play. I’m just Millie. Like the past few weeks have rattled my core enough that I’ve finally cracked enough surfaces of past Millies to let myself pop out.
Once I get up to the theater, there’s a short carpet you can walk before you go inside. I know better than to try to get on it—not that anyone would stop me (my curls are immaculate as ever), but I have every intention of walking my first carpet as a star, not an onlooker. So I stop and admire it all for a few moments. The nervous energy, the sea of voices, the sharp glitz of everyone’s outfits and the fierce passion in everyone’s eyes. Like catching a whiff of someday that will make it taste sweeter when it’s actually mine.
“Hey, you.”
I turn and see Oliver in the same outfit he wore to the interview two weeks ago, all buttoned down and handsome with his dark-wash jeans and the swoop of his hair. Only this time my appreciation for it isn’t begrudging. This time I let my eyes linger until they finally meet his, and the rising heat between us immediately crackles.
He recovers first. “It’s not too late to photobomb Ben Platt.”
“He wishes,” I say, tossing my curls back over my shoulder. It’s really just an excuse to step closer to him, and I can tell from his slight smirk that he knows it.
“Well, someone should preserve this. It is your first Broadway premiere.”
He holds out his hand to take my phone, but I shake my head, grabbing him by the elbow and pulling him in. “We’ll get one together.”
Oliver doesn’t protest, but he does flush as he catches his balance. “All right,” he says. “Make sure to get my good side.”
Then he wraps a firm hand around my waist to pull me in, and I’m the one flushing. There’s no hiding it either, confronted with both of our faces in the self-facing camera—Oliver’s quiet, conspiratorial smile and my wide, shameless one, both of our heads leaned in so my cheek is pressed to his chin.
We’re both still smiling when we let each other go, like we’re in on some inside joke that nobody else would find funny. Like we’re pulling one over on the rest of the world, even though the rest of the world is still bustling around us and aggressively does not care.
“Hey, look at that,” I say, pulling up the photo. “We’re hot.”
I’m not wrong. And apparently neither was that lady on the subway who thought we were dating. We do make a cute couple.
I sneak a glance at Oliver and can tell from the gleam in his eye he’s thinking of it, too. “A shame you cheated on me with all those Marvel actors.”
“Actors are overrated.”
“I dunno,” he says, looking me directly in the eye. “Some of them grow on you.”
My heart flutters like I’m one of a dozen doe-eyed ingenues on my Dream Roles list. Except this time I’m not acting it, but living it. Like I finally get the sentiment behind all those sappy power ballads, where the music in them actually comes from: not from some burst of creative genius or some big, sweeping feeling. But from the moments in between. The sneaky ones. The ones where you look up at someone and your heart understands something before the rest of you does.
Then Oliver’s smile falters, and he lowers his voice. “Hey. You’re … okay with the internship thing, right?”
“More than,” I assure him. “I shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
He shrugs. “You had a knack for it. I’d say if the whole Broadway thing didn’t turn out…”
I cross my arms, smirking.
“But of course we both know it will,” he finishes, smirking right back.