Liam opens his mouth to object.
“No. Listen. If we tell her, she’ll go nuclear.”
Not only that, she’ll tell him about that list. The one I never should’ve helped make. The one I lied about.
“We have to give her time to cool off. Let her process the breakup. Move on. And then I’ll figure out how to tell her we’re...”
What are we? He likes me, and I like him, but what does that even mean?
“Seeing each other?” he offers. His lips curl into a gentle smile. “Together?”
“Together.”
Me and Liam. Together.
Maybe I’m dreaming. Maybe a Leko fell from one of the electrics and hit me on the head, and I’m actually dying on the stage of the theatre and this is all a hallucination as my brain runs out of oxygen.
But then Liam leans in, and his nose brushes mine, and we’re kissing again.
What a way to die.
31
“You’re acting really weird lately,” Bowie says.
“No I’m not.” I hand over a pair of tickets to the sophomores who signed up for the banquet.
“Hm.” They arch an eyebrow as they close the cash box. The GSA is still a cash-only operation. The Theatre Department mostly uses iPads and credit card readers for our ticket sales, but we also deal with about a hundred times more people than the GSA does.
“You sure you don’t want to borrow one of the department’s iPads?” I ask them as we have to turn away yet another student who wants to come to the banquet but only has a debit card.
“It’s fine.” They frown. “I said we should get one, but Cheyenne started going on about rainbow capitalism and credit card companies.”
“Ugh. They’re the worst. Where are they anyway?”
“Campus tours. You know they applied to, like, all the Ivies?”
I shake my head. Why would anyone want to go to a stuffy Ivy League school?
I mean, yeah, Yale’s School of Drama is kind of famous, but NYU is still better.
“Well, it’s still not fair you have to do all this on your own.”
“I’m not on my own. Or I wouldn’t be if you’d pay attention.”
“I am paying attention!” I straighten out the pile of tickets and adjust the folding sign on our table.
They switch to sign. “Did something happen?”
Yes, something has happened. It’s happened again and again. Every day at TJ’s after we’ve run lines. And in Liam’s crappy Toyota Corolla as it idles down the street from my house, because Jasmine absolutely cannot see us kissing when he drops me off.
“Nothing happened,” I say, but clearly I doth protest too much, because Bowie narrows their eyes.
“What are you two talking about?” I stop signing to find Cam hovering in front of the table.
“Nothing,” I say automatically.
Philip steps up next to Cam and passes over an ice cream sandwich. Cam thanks him with a little kiss on the cheek, then starts peeling it open.
