“Do you feel like you’re getting more of a handle on things?” Phoebe asked, sitting down with our food—BLTs for both of us, with sparkling lemonade.

“Yeah. I do,” I said. It had been only a week and a half, though in some ways, it felt like an entire season had passed. “At least I know not to try to pet Jacques.”

“You’re doing really great,” Phoebe said.

“I mean, it’s not exactly a challenge to color in shoes,” I said. Phoebe and the other costume-shop employees, meanwhile, were sewing up a storm, making last-minute changes to the Into the Woods costumes. It was hard not to feel useless sometimes—that I didn’t know half of what the other costumers knew, and that there was no way I’d catch up in time to be a helpful colleague.

“No, but it does take patience,” Phoebe said, which made me think of my mom, the promise I’d made to her at the start of the summer. I took a deep breath and told myself to slow down, that I could beat myself up for not contributing enough later.

“How did you get into costuming?” I asked Phoebe.

“Godzilla,” came her immediate response.

I nearly spit out my lemonade.

“Come again?”

“I was obsessed with him as a kid. My dad showed me the movies, and I was so amazed by the suit. Have you ever seen it?”

I shook my head no.

“We’ll fix this,” she said, and pulled it up on her phone: The monster loomed over a cityscape, his skin rough and scarred seeming, his snout like a shortened crocodile’s, his eyes surprisingly expressive. There were three rows of stegosaurus spikes down his back that gave way to a long, powerful tail; his short arms reminded me of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

“Remember, this was 1954—no CGI, no animation. There’s a man in there, wearing the costume,” Phoebe said. “The first suit they made was too heavy to perform in, and the second one weighed over two hundred pounds. The poor actor. Later one of the other actors got shocked by lights in the fins. But the suit is also incredible. They used so many different techniques to build it—the fins, for example, were papier-mâché and then covered with rubber on top of that. The eyes and mouth were controlled by a brake wire from a motorcycle that ran out through the back of the tail. It’s this work of art. It changed how we think about costumes. It changed how we think about designing monsters. It made me want to work in the field.”

She was so good at talking about all of this. I squirmed, feeling once more like I knew nothing.

“Can I ask you something? Honestly, sometimes I still kind of can’t believe that Benna hired me.”