“It is nothing like The Wizard of Oz. It is like taking the yellow brick road and twisting it until it snaps in half and then you look inside and there’s a whole other world in that road that’s dark and deep and soul-exposing.” Asad’s face is solemn. “That’s it. We have to go.”

“You and me, we?” I’m surprised I can even get my sentence out when the only word bouncing in my head is we, we, we, we.

Asad nods matter-of-factly.

“Yes, you and me. It’s coming to Salt Lake in a few weeks.” A sheen of urgency covers his face. “I don’t want to oversell this, but after this play, you will never. Be. The. Same.”

He picks up our petri dish habitat and walks to the front of the room. On his way back, he holds out the dish, where three small and squiggly worms roll around on top of each other.

“Congratulations. Triplets!”

Before he reaches our station, one of the back-row football boys shoves Asad’s arm so hard that the petri dish flies toward me. I reach out for it, but not fast enough, and it hits the ground, the mealworms ejected into the air and onto the ground like small segmented stuntmen.

“Drama queer,” the boy says, just loud enough for us to hear. “Shouldn’t you be the one in the drag queen wig?”

Asad bends down to pick up the worms and the chips like he doesn’t hear the boy towering above him.

“Uh-oh,” the other jersey boy says. “You touched him and now he’s getting Homo erectus.”

Football boy high-fives another kid in a Viking jersey in the back of the room. Asad plunks the dish on the counter in front of me.

“I know, I know. What kind of parent drops their babies, right?”

“What was that about?” I ask.

Asad rearranges the mealworm in the dish without looking up.

“Oh, that? Nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing.”

“It’s just part of this little game we play where he makes my life hell, and in return, I let him.”

I grab the mealworm dish so Asad has to look up at me.

“Aren’t you the guy who told me to stick up for myself? And you’re letting those jock straps push you around?”

Asad shrugs. “Ava, I’m one of a handful of brown kids at a school whose mascot makes Attila the Hun look like Mother Teresa.”

“And I’m what? Running for prom queen?”

“That’s why we stick together outside the safety of our stage—survival,” he says. He holds up the petri dish so I can see the mealworms burrowing deep into the wood chips, their bodies pressed up against the plastic. “Now. What shall we name these little guys?”

We decide on Magical Mr. Mistoffelees, Rum Tum Tugger, and Macavity.