“How was your day, lady?” Lex asks.

“It was . . . a lot.”

“What did Ana do this time?”

“Plenty of annoying ish, but that’s not what I want to talk about.”

I’ve always been able to tell Lex anything. She was the first one I came out to—the only person at our school I bothered to tell I was a lesbian. She’s easy to talk to, but not because she’s the type who listens quietly. It’s because she’s aggressively supportive. Emphasis on aggressively.

“What the hell!” she yells once I finish filling her in on my day. “I knew that the Brockton Scholarship was kind of about favoritism a lot of the time, but that’s so shady.”

“I don’t think it was that bad,” I say.

“What?” she says. “You literally just described, like, some weird, backdoor bullshit.”

“No—I mean—” I sigh and fidget with my hands in my lap for a few seconds. “I was just saying that’s what I thought at first. I’m pretty sure I read too much into it. He didn’t actually say he would give me the scholarship if I auditioned for the show.”

“He doesn’t have to say that. He totally knows that everyone is desperate to do stuff for him.” Lex shakes her head, wrinkling up her nose like she smells something bad. “Plus, there’s no way he doesn’t know that you and Ana are the top picks for Brockton Scholar. You would be, like, the most desperate to do whatever he wants.”

“You’re making it seem super evil,” I say. My voice comes out louder than I meant it to. “This is a good thing! He finally noticed me, and he wants to get to know me better.”

Lex looks like she’s about to say something else, but she swallows it after giving me a sidelong glance. We lapse into silence. I lean toward my window and watch the landscape go by. You can see the cypress swamp beneath us through the floating network of roads. There’s a Green Witch van on the ground off to our right. I peer at it as we pass, wondering if it’s my dad’s crew. The Green Witch employees are tiny green and brown dots below us, barely distinguishable from the landscape around them. A tree bursts from the ground beside their group and grows into a full-grown cypress before they disappear into the distance.

“Mr. B definitely thinks you’re Latina,” Lex says suddenly.

“Yeah, maybe,” I say. “I mean, I think there’s one part for a girl who’s Black and not Latina? He could be thinking of me for that.”

“I guess. So . . .” She pauses, frowning. “You’re going to audition?”