“Mia,” she says. “You had a fling with him.”
“I don’t think it was a fling to him. To him it was more like, he was trapped in an uncool musical with an uncool girl. I was the only person his age there. It was a game for him, as it turned out.”
“This guy is unbelievable. Switch!”
I hop in unison with her. The beat is picking up, and I’m thinking back to those long afternoon rehearsals. I played the prairie girl with a rope for a belt, so smitten. And Max would shove his thumbs into his pockets and play the goofy cowpoke. He couldn’t sing, but he really seemed to enjoy being in the show. It was fun, like we had this entire secret life together of being all in with stupid Oklahoma!
I fell for him hard. Daydreaming, name-doodling, social-media-orbiting hard. “My heart would just hammer to think about him,” I say. “The force of my crush on him could’ve powered a small nuclear sub.”
She starts us on oppositions, getting more core involved.
“I had this stupid idea that the production of Oklahoma! was the real him,” I continue, heart pumping. “I thought that I was the only person who knew the real him, and all the rest of his life was the false him. Wrong.”
“He was just playing you.”
“And then school was back in session, and it was the worst. Our texting had been sparse. That should’ve been an alarm bell. And finally I spotted him at lunch, sitting with his crew. And this happiness just filled me. I had this tray full of spaghetti, and I rushed over there. And he had this weird look on his face. And I started feeling all nervous, and then I wasn’t looking where I was going and I tripped and fell on my ass with spaghetti all over my shirt. And my face and hair. And the whole lunchroom erupted in laughter. I was mortified.”
“And Max?”
“He did nothing. He just watched. My friends rushed to my side, but it’s like he didn’t care at all.”
“Did you confront him?”
He came later and apologized, but I really think he was just jerking me around. He didn’t want to know me once cooler people were around. I was all, fuck off! Don’t pretend like you care.”
After our warm-up, we move onto my dance for my audition, a combination of contemporary and classical ballet moves we worked out, and Kelsey picked the music. There are a few combinations I haven’t been nailing, so we concentrate on those.
I’m dead on my feet an hour later. Luckily, it’s switch-off time. I seat myself at the piano and take Kelsey through her vocal warm-up. We’ve chosen Midnight Blue as her audition song, but we think if it goes well, the casting director might ask her to sing Blow, Gabriel, Blow, so we’re preparing that one, too.
Getting this show would be so major. As in breakout major.
People are saying it’s going to be the next Waitress. Maybe even the next Hamilton. The group behind it has had massive hits before, so who knows? Needless to say, the best actors are vying to get a part in this production.
Sometimes I’m afraid to hope for landing the part of confident, sassy Reno, like am I dreaming too big? But when people who know the show hear I’m going out for it, their eyes light up. It’s a very me part.
At home I eat rice and cheese and watch YouTube videos. I go to bed early to read, but eventually the evil phone is calling and I’m on Max’s Instagram feed.
Why I bother, I don’t know. I guess I have this desire to find out something vulnerable and sensitive about him. A post where he isn’t perfect, either. Where he shows his belly.
Some of the posts are familiar to me from late-night Instagram scrolls, or let’s just call them drunk scroll.
There’s Max with the captain of his yacht. They’re standing in front of a giant steering wheel and Max’s hair is all windblown, his cheeks are kissed by the sun and he’s in a perfectly worn-out T-shirt with some sort of rugged tan shorts, making the captain look like a sad vision of manhood indeed. Caption: Rough weather ahead. Prepare the martini shakers.
There’s a series of pictures of him kissing a short woman with dark, curly hair—definitely not a supermodel. Caption: Happy Saturday. So not the Max Hilton type. I always felt sure it was one of his fans.
I scroll past Max sitting in the front row of some basketball game next to the coolest movie stars ever. Caption: Down five points! Judging by the outpouring of sympathy in the comments, you’d’ve thought he was a child trapped in a mine shaft hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface.
There’s Max the fierce entrepreneur, hands planted on a drafting table, necktie loosened just enough that you can get a hit of his corded neck, and from that infer an entire body of muscular perfection. He’s surrounded by fiercely photogenic twenty and thirty-somethings in an array of genders, set against the grunge-chic background of his “studio complex.” Caption: Never feels like working when you’re doing what you love.
There’s an arty shot of a woman in an elevator, head tipped back against the panel, as if in pleasure—you can’t see her face because of the light from the elevator chandelier reflected just above her, but a man’s hand is planted on the panel next to her. Caption: This elevator has everything it needs except a well-stocked liquor cart.
Max at work, surrounded by models, and they’re all laughing their heads off—one guy is doubled over. Caption: Shoot crew made my day.
I definitely feel like that caption lies; if you study the picture long enough, you can see that their energy is directed at him, like he said something funny. He made the shoot crew’s day, not the other way around, but Max is clever like that.
It made him a dangerous enemy.