“Natalie?” He answers on the second ring, my name a question mark in his voice.

I immediately hang up.

Shit. What is wrong with me? Reid and I don’t FaceTime! Casual texting is new enough! Seeing him on my screen, sitting on his bed, his curls out-of-the-shower damp—it’s a new level to this truce I’m not sure I’m ready for. But we’re collaborators. And I can’t convey over text what I’m feeling when I hear his beat.

It’s Melted. It wasn’t even weird… until I panic hung up and made it weird.

My phone starts vibrating.

He’s calling back.

I check my hair in the mirror. I cannot explain why.

“Hey,” I answer. “What’s up?”

Reid’s eyebrows raise in amusement. “I don’t know. You called me.”

“Right.”

Cue a too-long beat of silence.

“Natalie?” Reid asks. “Did I freeze?”

“The beat,” I say. “I think I know what our quiet act two moment needs to be.”

“You had a breakthrough! Okay. Give me a second.”

Reid is in motion, off his bed and moving to his desk. It takes more than a second to get the setup right. I reach for my laptop while I’m pretty sure Reid is trying to balance me on a stack of books. The screen keeps going black with a flop. But after a measure, I’m set up to see Reid’s profile, his keyboard in the background.

“Okay. Hit me with the vision,” Reid says.

“ ‘Keep It In,’ ” I say. “Can we strip it down?”

Reid stops typing and looks at me. “Wait. Really?”

I nod. “I never considered reworking your lyrics because I always pictured a showstopper. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s the quiet, powerful moment Melted needs. Not sung. Spoken.”

Reid considers. “But… you’re so attached to the monologue.”

“I still am,” I continue. “It has everything I want to say—about Adina’s relationship with her powers, about the fear and anger that comes with reckoning with a climate crisis that no one else recognizes. But it doesn’t fit. Not anymore. So maybe we use the monologue as inspiration to rewrite it. Your music. My monologue-turned-lyrics.”

Another beat of silence.

“So what you’re saying—” Reid begins, a smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth “—is that you don’t think we should… let it go.”

I hang up.

Reid calls back immediately.

“I hate you,” I answer.

“Come on! You set me up for that,” Reid says, laughing. “It’s a great idea. A true collaboration.”

He shares a Google doc with me titled KEEP IT IN—redux.

I click into the file and watch Reid type in real time.

“I’m thinking we keep the accompaniment super simple,” I say.

“Agree. We have to be careful. It can be done right, or it can be the Les Mis movie.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I say.