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Chapter 14

Sloane

There’s a version of me that only exists in Studio B, and she’s the one I like best.

It’s Thursday, late afternoon, and we’re running the second act of the showcase piece — a two-hander, me and a senior named Penelope, a scene that lives or dies on timing — and for ninety minutes I am not managing anything. Not Evan. Not the arrangement. Not the eight rules folded in my bag or the eighth one I don’t look at. I’m just in it, the way you’re in the game when the game is going right, every line landing where I set it down, Penelope feeding me and me feeding her back, and Professor Reyes in the dark of the house going very still, which is the only review from Reyes that means anything. She gets loud when she’s bored. She goes quiet when she’s watching.

She’s quiet.

We finish the scene and the studio holds its breath and Reyes says, from the dark, “Again. And Beckett — don’t protect the laugh. Let it cost her something.”

I do it again. I let it cost her something.

This time when we finish, Reyes doesn’t say again.

This is the version of me I’d introduce to people, if I introduced people to versions of me, which I don’t.

Reyes keeps us after.

She perches on the edge of the stage in the way she does, all sharp elbows and forty years of opinions, and she looks at the dozen of us scattered through the seats and says, “The showcase list goes up Monday.”

The room changes temperature.

Everyone knows what the showcase is. Officially it’s the department’s winter showpiece. Unofficially — for the juniors and seniors with MFA ambitions — it’s the audition before the audition, because the people who come to watch are not only parents and faculty. There are scouts. There are reps from programs. And this year, Reyes tells us, with the studied casualness of a woman dropping a bomb she’s enjoyed assembling, this year there’s a faculty observer coming from Yale.

I keep my face still. I’ve had practice.

“The lead in the second-act piece,” Reyes says, “gets the showcase’s center slot. Which means that person performs for the Yale observer for eleven uninterrupted minutes.” She lets that sit. “I’ll post casting Monday. Don’t lobby me. I find lobbying clarifying in the worst way.”

The center slot.

Eleven minutes in front of a Yale observer, in February, months before the formal MFA audition I’ve been building my entire junior year around. It’s not the audition. It’s better than the audition — it’s the audition with no pressure attached and everything riding on it, a chance to be seen by the exact eyes I’ve been trying to get in front of, on my turf, in a role built for me.

And across the seats, two rows down, Vivienne Park turns her head and looks at me.

She smiles.

I know that smile. I’ve been on the receiving end of that smile for two years — and most recently eight days ago, over Evan’s bare shoulder. That’s the thing this department is going to make me live with: I don’t get to file her under one heading. She’s the woman gunning for my Yale slot and she’s the woman I found my boyfriend inside of on a Sunday afternoon, and she’ll be two rows down from me in Reyes’s class until May, wearing the same smile for both. It’s the smile of a person who has already decided how a story ends and is being gracious enough to let you find out slowly.

She catches me in the hallway after, because of course she does. Vivienne doesn’t ambush. Vivienne arrives, warmly, like a gift you didn’t ask for.

“Sloane.” She falls into step beside me, all easy grace, the forest-green coat, the hair. “That scene was really good. Truly. You’ve gotten so much looser this semester.” A beat, perfectly placed. “I think it’s the boy.”

I don’t break stride. “Sorry?”

“The hockey one. Sorensen.” She says it like she’s pleased for me, which is the genius of her, the way the knife arrives wrapped in a compliment. “I think it’s good for you. You used to be so — guarded. Joyless, almost—no offense—very locked-up. And now you’re out at the bar with the team, you’re at the games, you’re —” she gestures at me, the looseness, the thing Reyes praised “— softer. It reads on stage. It’s working for you.”

“Thank you,” I say, because the only counter to Vivienne is to refuse her the reaction she’s fishing for.

What I don’t say — what I will not give her the satisfaction of saying — is that there is a particular audacity to Vivienne Park discussing my relationship with anyone, given that eight days ago she was the reason it ended. That she can stand in this hallway and praise the boy who replaced the boy she was sleeping with behind my back, and do it with a straight face, like the through-line isn’t her, like she didn’t personally author the before-and-after she’s now narrating back to me as a kindness. She knows I won’t bring it up. That’s the bet. Bringing it up would mean admitting it landed, and we both perform like it didn’t, and she counts on my composure the way Evan counts on my silence, which is its own small horror — that the two of them found, in each other, the only people on this campus who understand exactly which of my buttons not to press out loud.

“Of course, it’s a balance.” She tilts her head. “All that. The relationship, the games, the bar. It takes time. Energy. And the center slot is going to go to whoever’s hungriest, you know? Whoever’s got nothing pulling focus.” The smile again. “I just hope you’re not spreading yourself thin right when it counts. It’d be such a shame. You’ve got real talent, when you’re actually paying attention to it.”

And there it is. The whole move. She’s reframed the one thing that’s supposed to be protecting my bandwidth as the thing that’s draining it — and worse, she’s done it in a way I can’t argue with without arguing for the relationship, which I can’t fully do, because the relationship is a lie, which she may or may not suspect, and I can’t tell which, and not being able to tell is exactly where she wants me.

“I’m paying attention,” I say.

“I’m sure you are.” She peels off toward the costume shop, light as anything. “See you Monday. May the best actor win.” A pause, over her shoulder, sweet as poison: “I always do love watching you work, Sloane. You try so hard.”