“We’ll pick back up tomorrow, then.” Glory smiles. “You were great today. My best assistant so far.” She hands me another peppermint as payment, and the wrapper crinkles as I slip it into my pocket.

I start down the hallway, but Glory calls my name and I turn back to look at her. “Let me know,” she says, “if there’s anything you need. Okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Thanks.” Glory looks like there’s something else she wants to tell me, so I wait for a second, but then the phone rings. She turns to answer it, and I head on down the hallway.

Val and Lex may have been laughing when they came through the door, but the tension mounts during dinner. Everyone is thinking about auditions. Jude cracks jokes and tries to keep things light, but we’re all nervous.

Val says she’s too freaked out to eat. She keeps going over her monologue again and again. I watch her mouth the words to herself as she rearranges chicken fingers on her plate.

Lex is fidgety. He’s playing with his scarf. His silverware. His napkin.

We’re all counting the minutes. It’s that weird combination of being excited and terrified. The one we all crave, but somehow never get used to.

By the time we get cleaned up and head down to the big red barn, we’re all just ready to get the whole thing over with.

We gather up out front. Waiting. Jude tries to keep us entertained. Distracted. He tells us the buildings that make up Whisper Cover were part of a working farm, back in the day, and this really was a barn. The outside doesn’t look like it’s changed much since then. “There’s a joke Willa loves to tell,” he says with a laugh. “She says that some poor farmer probably spent his whole life shoveling horse shit out of this barn, and now theatre people spend every summer shoveling it back in.”

We all giggle, and I’m grateful. Because it helps break the mood a little bit.

Willa shows up just then. She’s wearing high-heeled boots and a long, sweeping skirt. Those jangling bracelets. And she has a huge silver key ring in one hand.

“All right, my lovelies!” she announces with a grand flourish. “It’s showtime.”

My stomach is in knots, at least until she opens the theatre door.

It’s funny how there are places I could walk into completely blindfolded and still recognize, just by smell alone. My favorite pizza place back home. My kindergarten classroom. As soon as Willa pushes open the door to the barn theatre, the scent of something so familiar hits me. It’s sawdust. And paint. Old wood. Musty curtains.

It’s home.

I breathe it in, and I start to relax. Because this is where I belong.