“I’m ready for the first applicant.”
Oliver’s face goes slack. My back is turned to whoever just walked out of the back office, but his big Millie scowl was, for a moment, aimed directly at her instead.
“After you,” I say graciously, feeling the smirk curl on my face.
Oliver is on his feet so fast that he looks like a toy soldier in our ill-fated ninth-grade production of The Nutcracker. (Apparently trying to add modern dance and Billie Eilish songs to a historical classic is a no-go among the boomer grandparent crowd.)
“Yes, uh—I’m Oliver Yang. Hi. Thank you for…”
I turn to catch a glimpse at whoever just inspired the light to die in Oliver’s eyes, but her back is already turned to head into her office, and Oliver is bolting to keep up. I watch until the door shuts behind him and leaves a merciless silence in its wake.
It’s just me and Steph. Just me and a woman who might know more about me than I’ve ever fathomed knowing. I watch as she deftly types something into her MacBook Air, then shakes the curls off her shoulders again in a gesture that seems so familiar to me that I can’t not account for it, like I’m peering at some potential grown-up version of myself through a microscope.
“Don’t let Georgie scare you,” says Steph, pointing a thumb at the closed door.
“Oh, I’m not…”
Here for the interview, I’m going to tell her. As fun as it was to endure a bonus round of Millie versus Oliver before pirouetting out of his life forever, I have no desire to run around a talent management firm and watch other people’s dreams come true while I’m still trying to manifest my own.
But she’s watching me so intently that I realize right then that if she really is my mom, I need time to think. To dig. To understand why she did what she did. I’m not going to be able to interview her and leave it at that.
Plus … she said paid. Which means if I play my cards right, this might be a two-for-one deal: I get to dig into the inner workings of Steph Fedotowsky on my own time and potentially make enough money to pay for the first semester at Madison to boot.
The decision is made before my brain can even fully process that there’s a decision at all.
“… scared of much,” I finish.
Steph smiles conspiratorially at me. “Good answer, hon,” she says with a wink. Then she leans back in her chair. “To be honest, when you walked in I assumed you were a client.”
My ego was already swollen enough from the security guard, but now it might burst. “Yeah?”
“Sure,” she says. “I’ve been around long enough to sniff out a fellow actress.”
I scootch to the edge of the cushy chair. “You’re an actress?” I ask, as if I don’t already know. As if Teddy didn’t help me pull up YouTube videos of her professional reel, where she played everything from a chokingly hilarious Kate Monster in an off-Broadway production of Avenue Q to a heart-wrenching Ilse in a community theater production of Spring Awakening.
But even if I’d only seen one of them, I’d know she’s talented. Like, mega-talented. Talented enough that I’m still confused about why she’s working in a talent agency when she should be on stage making angels weep.
“When I can be,” she says, with this dainty little shrug.
“Did you go to school for theater?”
She bites at her lower lip, an old habit of mine that used to have my dad buying a new Lip Smackers lip balm every month of the year. “I did,” she says, seeming amused at my interest. I guess most of the people who come through here aren’t exactly chatting her up about it. I continue to stare, prompting her to say, “I went to NYU.”
“Tisch?” I ask, referring to one of the performing arts schools there.
“You’re thinking of applying?”
I mean, yes, duh, since I was old enough to use Google and immediately searched for the top musical theater schools in the country (even at six I had a plan). But I suppose that’s off the table now—even Tisch can’t beat out Madison. The precollege may be a much newer program, but it’s turned out so many new Broadway elites in the past few years that there’s no way to justify not going.
“Yeah,” I lie anyway, because I’m already ten steps ahead of this conversation, wondering which buttons I can press to get her to talk about my dad. “What was it like?”
“Oh, man. Hell,” she says, with this kind of affection that I understand all too well. You have to be a certain degree of masochistic to survive in theater. “But also just so great. The training there—it’ll turn you into a whole different person.”
I’m already a pro at reinvention, but I keep that to myself.
“And also just—the friends you make there? You make them for life. We’re all still in a group text. It’s wild where everybody ended up.”
There’s this wistfulness in her voice then, and it rubs me in this way I don’t love. Like I’m feeling sorry for her. That’s not how I want to feel about her, how I want to feel about this person who might be half of me.
“Where do you want to end up?” I press. I need to know that there’s something in her that still cares about this, because there’s something in her that did.
Only then does Steph look over at me, mildly indignant. “I’m thirty-seven,” she says. “This is where I’ve ended up.”
My cheeks burn. “I didn’t mean…”
She recovers faster than I do. “I just mean—performing makes me happy. I’m lucky to do it when I can. But statistically speaking, not everyone’s going to make it.”
I’m not sure whose disappointment I’m feeling in that moment, mine or hers. “Well.” Shit. I try to figure out how to pivot this conversation back to NYU, back to my dad, without further making an ass of myself.
For once, Oliver does something useful. That’s the exact moment the office door all but spits him out. He stands there for a moment, looking like he’s just walked out of a trench.
“Uh—she’s ready for you,” he finally tells me.
“Right now?”
Steph nods her head, clucking at Oliver sympathetically. “Georgie moves fast. I’d hurry it up.”
“Got it,” I say, walking toward the door before the last nerve ending of my brain committed to common sense can wake up and stop me.
The office I walk into is somehow more staggeringly beautiful than the room I just left, with chairs in deep purples and dark maroons, windows almost as high as the walls, and an old mahogany desk big enough for my entire friend group at school to eat lunch at. Behind the desk is a woman typing something furiously into a laptop, dressed in a sharp navy blazer and enormous jewelry, her strawberry blond hair in unrepentant, wild curls.
She glances up at me, except it feels less like a glance and more like that time as a kid when I walked straight into a glass door. I can count on one hand the number of people who stop me in my tracks—like, Barbra Streisand, maybe—but for some reason I know to be on top of my game with this woman before she opens her mouth.
“Oh,” says Georgie. She doesn’t even give me an up-and-down. Just shakes her head once. “No.”
I’m used to brutal rejections. It comes with the territory. I once got typed out of a call for young Cosettes and young Éponines and sent packing before I even opened my mouth to sing.