“He loves you, though. He stopped our rehearsal for, like, fifteen minutes because you skinned your knee. When Ed fell doing a stage slide last week, Mr. B tossed him an ice pack and told him to ‘suffer for his craft.’ ” She does a startlingly accurate Mr. B impression on the last bit. It’s that tone of voice he always uses when he’s making a joke he knows is a little mean but is still going to get a laugh. I snicker, despite myself. I’m not sold on me and Ana being friends. She’s not going to win me over with a few good jokes. But still, that comment was funny.

“He’s just happy I did the show because he wanted to have a racially accurate cast,” I say, barely suppressing an eye roll.

“Racially accurate?” she scoffs. “Please. You’re not even Latina.”

“He hasn’t figured that out,” I say dryly. I shouldn’t complain about this to her, not when I’m reaping the benefits of his misunderstanding. It’s not like I’ve corrected him. I’m just trying to minimize my offensiveness in this show by not doing an accent. Still, it feels nice to talk about this with someone who gets it.

“The guy is so not woke that he’s basically asleep.” She puts on her turn signal, which makes an aggressively loud ticking noise, and shifts lanes. “He’s acting like he’s going to get an award from Don’t Hate, Educate for doing this show, but he still doesn’t know how to say my name right,” she says matter-of-factly. “And he’s totally fine with all the terrible accents people are doing in the show. Brittany is rolling her rs so hard in her song that she sounds like a lawn mower starting up. Which doesn’t even make sense because that character is not supposed to be Latina.”

I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of laughing, but that really cracks me up. I end up guffawing into my shoulder like a weirdo, trying to stifle the sound.

“You okay over there?” she asks.

“Yup. Yeah. Just . . . you know . . .”

“Laughing at my incredibly brilliant sense of humor?”

“Marveling at your wildly inflated ego?” I shoot back.

“Hey, be nice to me. I’m trying to win you over with my hilarious jokes. Here.” She holds one end of an aux cord in front of me. When I don’t take it immediately, she waves the cord back and forth until I grab it so she doesn’t crash the car. “I promised you could pick the music.”

“The stereo works in this thing?” I say, staring at the antiquated sound system skeptically. Like the rest of the car, it seems janky as hell. There’s a big knob missing, and it looks like a dog chewed on it at some point.