Alfie looks relieved. “Yeah. We did.”
“We?”
He opens the door to reveal the others out in the hall. All four of them. They file in a little sheepishly. “Sorry,” George mumbles, sinking onto the bed and giving Hugo an awkward pat on the back. George looks deeply solemn, but then he always looks solemn, as if being born first instilled in him a certain seriousness of character. “This is rubbish, isn’t it?”
“I can’t believe it,” says Isla, spinning the desk chair around and sitting backward in it, her chin resting on her forearms, her dark eyes fierce and protective. “How could she do that?”
Hugo gives them a smile, but he can feel it wobble with effort. “It’s okay,” he says. “I’m fine. Really.”
Poppy is still standing near the door, absently twisting the ends of her box braids. She fixes him with a skeptical look, as if she can see straight through him. Which she usually can. “Hugo.”
“Really,” he says again. “It’ll be fine.”
There’s a long silence, in which Hugo stares at his hands to avoid watching the rest of them exchange glances. Finally, Alfie shrugs. “I never liked her much anyway,” he says, which makes Hugo laugh in spite of himself, because they all loved Margaret. If anything, they thought she was out of his league.
But still, one by one, they join in.
“Yeah,” says Oscar, who has been hovering on Alfie’s side of the room, never one for drama. He generally tends to prefer the world of his video games to the real one, but now he runs a hand over his twists, cracking a grin. “She was the worst.”
“A real monster,” Isla agrees, trying to keep a straight face.
“Remember that time she spilled her drink on you, Pop?” asks George, and for a moment, Poppy hesitates. Of all of them, she’s the closest with Margaret, and Hugo can see that she’s torn. But in the end, she nods.
“I still haven’t forgiven her for that,” she says gamely. “And now I never will.”
They carry on like that for a bit, and Hugo does his best to smile, but he’s still thinking about everything that happened and about the itinerary in his hands, and it isn’t until Alfie chimes in that the idea occurs to him and a plan begins to form.
“Don’t worry, mate,” Alfie says merrily, reaching out to give Hugo’s shoulder a little pat. “There are other Margaret Campbells out there.”
Mae claps a handover her eyes as she presses Play, but the moment the film begins, she can’t help peeking through her fingers. There’s the familiar swell of music, then the black screen with the wordsmae day productionsscrawled across it, and then—
She punches at the keyboard of her computer, and the window disappears.
Clearly, this is ridiculous. She’s probably watched the film a thousand times, and she’s not even sure that’s an exaggeration. Just a couple of months ago, she’d been practically gleeful about it, filled with a fizzy lightness when she imagined all the praise that would be coming her way. Most of all, she was certain the members of the admissions committee at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts would see its brilliance. How could they not?
All her life, people have been telling Mae she has talent. She was nine when she made her first short (a stop-motion film about a muffin named Steve who falls in love with a bagel named Bruno), ten when she started hanging around the high school’s A.V. club in the afternoons (too overzealous to realize that her mockumentary about the older kids wouldn’t get a warm reception), and eleven when she got her first real camera—a beautiful Canon DSLR with a 35-millimeter lens and 1.8 f-stop—for her birthday (after threatening to hock all her possessions to pay for one).
So far, she’s gotten by on passion and determination and an unwillingness to take no for an answer, drafting friends as actors, talking her way into shooting locations, and watching YouTube tutorials for new tricks. Now she was supposed to graduate into the big leagues, finally getting a real education at the best filmmaking school in the world, which is the only thing she’s ever really wanted.
It just never occurred to her they might not want her back.
She sets her jaw and faces down the screen again. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to watch since the letter came, the one informing her that she’d been accepted to the university—just not to the film program. But she knows it’s time. If she’s ever going to have a shot at transferring, she’ll have to make another audition film. And if she’s going to do that, she’ll have to figure out what went wrong with the first one. She doesn’t mind learning from her mistakes; in fact, she’s desperate to. She just hates the idea that what once seemed so shiny and impressive will now inevitably look different to her: a bruising collection of flaws and mistakes that will surely hurt even more than the rejection.
Still, she grits her teeth and presses Play. But as the first image appears—a time-lapse shot of clouds on one of those perfect spring days in the Hudson Valley, the sky so blue it almost looks like a special effect—there’s a knock at the door.
Mae half turns, pushing her glasses up on her nose. “Yeah?”
“Want to come down and help me with dinner?” Dad asks, poking his head in. “Not with anything important, obviously, since none of us are quite over the Great Mashed Potato Incident of last Tuesday. But you can always do something menial, like grating cheese, or…” He pauses, noticing her computer, where the screen is still frozen on the clouds. “Ooh,” he says, walking over. “I love this part.”
“It’s not…,” Mae says, quickly shutting the laptop. “I’m not…”
But it’s too late. He’s already sitting down on the edge of her bed, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, ready to watch. Right then, with the late-day sun coming through the window, the resemblance between them is clear. They’re both short, with matching freckles and light brown hair and fair skin. Even their reading glasses have the same prescription.
When Mae was born, her dads did a coin toss to decide whose last name she would get. They’d already agreed to keep the bigger question—which one of them was her biological father—a mystery. But as she got older, it started to become pretty obvious whose swimmers had won the race. Her other dad—Pop—is tall and broad-shouldered and athletic, with jet-black hair and deep blue eyes, about as different from Mae as can be. “Well,” he always says when she trips over her own feet or struggles to reach a high shelf, “at least I won the damn coin toss.”
Dad claps his hands. “Come on,” he says a little too cheerfully. He’s still wearing his signature tweed blazer, though all he had today was a faculty meeting. “Let’s roll tape.”
Mae shakes her head. “I think I need to do this alone.”
