I nodded, telling myself to calm down. Emery did love to stir the pot—I should have remembered that. Also, why wouldn’t Mr. Campbell be posting the casting today like normal? It didn’t make any sense.
I held out my Dorito bag once again to Stevie and Teri, and Stevie reached for a chip, then froze. I figured she was just choosing carefully like always, until I looked up and saw why.
Beckett Hughes was walking through the lobby.
He had a two-by-four over his shoulder and was walking toward the shop, big over-ear headphones on. He nodded at all of us, but then locked eyes with Stevie and gave her a half smile. “Hey,” he said as he pulled his headphones off, draping them over the back of his neck. “Can we talk for a second?”
Stevie just blinked at him, looking stunned, and I jumped in. “We have class,” I said, my tone cool.
“Yeah,” Beckett said flatly as he looked around at everyone lounging in the lobby. “Clearly.”
I narrowed my eyes, about to say something when Stevie got up. “It’s fine,” she said, looking from me to Beckett, and I wasn’t sure which one of us she was talking to. “Just for a second.” Beckett smiled at her as they walked toward the shop hallway, her long hair swishing behind her, before they disappeared from view.
“I thought they broke up,” Erik said, frowning, also looking in their direction.
I exchanged a glance with Teri, who knew this saga all too well. “They did.”
Stevie and Beckett had dated almost all of last year—her junior year, his sophomore. They’d been flirting and circling each other all throughout Noises Off rehearsals, and they finally got together at the cast party. Beckett had been part of the theater department since his freshman year—not surprising, considering that his parents were award-winning Broadway playwrights. But he’d always been on the tech side of things. He had absolutely no fear of heights, and Mr. Ruiz, who ran the technical theater program, quickly realized this and Beckett became an expert at running the tension grid, the lighting floor at the very top of the theater.
I’d had a handful of boyfriends: Glenn, the cause of my breakup bangs; Eric; and Beau, who’d graduated last year and who’d played opposite me in City of Angels. Stevie had had a few short-lived relationships, but her relationship with Beckett, right from the outset, had been different. This wasn’t us exchanging phones to analyze text messages and figure out what some guy we were crushing on could possibly be thinking. This was real.
As they got more serious, it was like Stevie pulled a curtain across their relationship. I was always happy to talk about what was happening with her and Beckett, but at some point, she wasn’t. I didn’t get this at all—I still wanted to tell her everything, and sometimes for me, it was almost like what happened wasn’t as important as her reaction to it. The first time I slept with anyone (Beau), I drove to Stevie’s afterward, even though it was past midnight, and we stayed up for hours in her kitchen, eating whatever we could find in the fridge and talking about every detail. But the first time Stevie and Beckett slept together, she didn’t even tell me for three days, and even then, she didn’t want to go over every moment like I had. Which was fine—Stevie had always been a little more private than me, and it always took her a while to sort out her feelings. But it was also why, when she told me they’d broken up, I was so thrown for a loop—I hadn’t seen it coming.
The night before school started, Stevie showed up at my house, sobbing. I’d been in the middle of clearing the table, but my mom took one look at the situation and had relieved me of my chore—and what’s more, ten minutes later, knocked on my door bearing ice cream.
We’d gone up to my room, Stevie still hysterically crying, telling me that it was over with Beckett. She didn’t go into specifics, just told me that he’d broken up with her at the Boxcar Cantina, which had up until that moment been her favorite restaurant, but that I now understood was a place we’d never go again. I’d asked gently for details, trying to figure out what had happened: Had he given a reason? Did it have anything to do with Annabel, Beckett’s best friend, who I’d long suspected had a crush on him?
She didn’t answer any of this. All Stevie would say was that Beckett had broken up with her, and that it was over.
I had always liked Beckett a lot, but just like that, all my good friendship feelings toward him curdled. He was clearly the asshole here. He thought he could just dump my best friend out of the blue and suffer no consequences? Expect me to still be friends with him?
That was not going to happen. I was cool and aloof when I saw him, just so he would know whose side I was really on. Stevie and Beckett managed to be cordial to each other in the halls and when we all hung out in the lobby together. When Arcadia rehearsals started, it was clear they were going to be able to work together, which was a relief—you did not want to make an enemy of someone on the tech crew. (When Erik and Marco, who ran the lights, had a terrible breakup, Marco took it out on Erik onstage, the follow spot always just managing to miss him.)
Stevie never brought Beckett up or talked about him, but even so, I’d been worried she still wasn’t quite over him. This was why I had been so excited about the Zach Ellison development—and why I wasn’t thrilled that Beckett and Stevie were now having a random private conversation.
Mr. Campbell pushed through the lobby door, a stack of papers tucked under his arm. “Are you telling me your teacher isn’t even here yet?” he asked, grinning, as he took the stairs up to the second level two at a time. “What kind of operation is this? Class is starting, chop-chop!”
Everyone jumped to their feet, and I looked over at the shop hallway, wondering if I should go get Stevie, not really minding the fact that I’d have to break up whatever was going on with them. A second later, though, the hallway door swung open. She headed out, and I saw Beckett walking toward the shop, lumber back over his shoulder. I grabbed her stuff from the couch and walked over. “What did he want?”
“Thanks,” she said, taking her bag from me. “It was about tonight. His parents’ new play is in previews, and he wanted to know if I wanted to see it. He got an extra comp ticket.”
“Seriously?” I’d been hearing online speculation about Andrea and Scott Hughes’s new play for months now as anticipation had built. Their last play, about Edison and Tesla, had won the Tony, so interest had been high from the start. Stevie had told me about seeing Beckett’s parents—who she’d gotten to know, of course, over a year, along with his older sister, Emily—working on the play, the two of them sequestered in their dining room, sitting opposite each other, laptops open and mugs of coffee at the ready. When they had made the casting announcements—a mix of movie stars and veteran theater actors—I’d gotten even more excited, despite the fact that nobody knew what this play was about. Even the title, George & Suzi, didn’t provide much information. I lobbied my parents to get tickets, which had started selling out, but my mother had a policy of not wanting to get tickets to a show until it had been reviewed—despite the fact that if the reviews were good, then getting tickets got a lot harder.
“Yeah,” Stevie said with a shrug. “Since when… when we were together was when they were writing it. I guess they asked Beckett to offer me the ticket? But I have the dinner with my dad at nine thirty, which would be right in the middle of the second act, so…”