“Half the school is in love with him, you know,” Lucy says. “You’ve got a lot of competition.”
Asher gives her a dirty look.
She grins, leaning her head on his shoulder. “Not me of course.”
He grumbles something under his breath, but his face softens slightly anyway.
“I’m not trying to be with him,” I tell her, my gaze falling to the journal again.
“Then what was the point of all that lamenting?” Asher asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. I’m not surewhatI want, and even if I did know, is it worth ruining our lives over?
Sutton seems to have had a change of heart, but that doesn’t changeme.
Doesn’t he know I’m not worth the trouble?
Asher cocks his head to the side, then reaches into his pocket, pulling out a granola bar. He tosses it at my head, and I swing to the side, barely avoiding the hit. “Mom said to make sure you’re eating, by the way. She said you looked like you’d lost weight in your last video call, and she was worried. Ballistic, actually, is the better word here. She’s terrified of you wasting away at this school, and I don’t know why, but for the love of fucking God, don’t make me be on the receiving end of her hysteria again.”
I smother a grin, leaning down to pick up the bar. She’s right—I have lost a pound or two, but that’s mostly been from the stress of adjusting to school, not anything to really worry over.
Mostly.
Still, I appreciate Asher for changing the subject.
29
SUTTON
“You weren’t kiddingabout the selection this semester,” Quincy mutters, making a note in the journal she cradles against her tan slacks. “Using auditions as midterms is brutal. I don’t envy you picking Desdemona or Iago.”
“I’m thinking Schroeder for him,” I tell her, pointing at the pale kid down front chatting with a couple ofCurators.
His brown eyes find mine for a moment, and he gives a slight smile, clearly still riddled with nerves from his earlier audition.
“He wasn’t bad,” she agrees, taking a sip of her bottled green tea. “Although not super villainous. Don’t you think that requires a certain aura?”
“A little coaching would push him over the edge, I bet.”
We sit through half a dozen more auditions, each of them worse than the last. I’m struggling to keep my eyes open when Elle finally appears at the stage stairs, wearing a brown dress with a cream-colored, long-sleeved shirt beneath.
Flanked by Meg and Lexington, she giggles at something the pair says, and I suck in a silent breath against the sight of that smile on her face.
For him of all people.
Shifting in my seat, I watch as she leaves them and takes her spot in the center of the stage.
I don’t know why it matters or why my eyes can’t help but catalog everything about her—the exact way her hair falls over her shoulders, the neutral expression she maintains, how her chest puffs out proudly when she clasps her hands behind her back, waiting for her cue.
I’m in trouble here.
“Elle Anderson, reading for the part of Desdemona,” she announces, the clarity in her voice and its projection more than a little startling. I’m so used to her low rasps and stolen words that this mask is a new one. “‘O good Iago, What shall I do to win my lord again? Good friend, go to him; for, by this light of heaven, I know not how I lost him.’”
The blood ceases movement in my veins as her voice, strong and bold, erupts in the auditorium. My pen slips out of my hand as I take her in, admiring the way the stage lights illuminate her silhouette, basking her body in an ethereal glow that adds to the scene.
A hush falls over the audience. It grows so quiet I can hear a drop of water fall off a pipe backstage.
There’s no pause needed for adjustment, no warm-up necessary. Elle slips directly into Desdemona’s lines as if stepping into her skin. She flips the hair off her shoulder and cuts across the stage, commanding our attention as she continues.
