I frowned. “Ryan?”

“Ryan Camper,” Teri said, shaking her head. “My boyfriend.”

“Oh right,” Stevie said, glancing over at me and then immediately away again. “Your boyfriend from—camp. I thought he lived in Maine?”

“He does,” Teri said, smiling as she spun the R charm on her necklace. “But he still might have some friends around here. Remember, I told you how he comes into the city sometimes to do his modeling?”

“You should absolutely set Stevie up with one of Ryan Camper’s friends,” I said, widening my eyes very slightly at Stevie. “Especially if they’re models.”

“Um… I don’t know…,” Stevie murmured. I popped the top on my Diet Coke and offered her the first sip, but she shook her head. I took a grateful gulp—was there anything better than cold Diet Coke? Stevie knew my hierarchy: fountain was ideal, then cans, and then if you had no other option whatsoever, bottled.

“Hey, how’d the project go?” I said, turning to both Stevie and Teri, both of whom shook their heads in unison. Stevie and Teri were in AP English together, which I was very jealous of. The only non-theater class Stevie and I had ever had together was sophomore year PE, in which we’d both almost failed because we’d spent the whole time talking and almost no time memorizing the rules of volleyball. “That bad?” I asked. I held out the Dorito bag to them again, feeling like they both could use a snack.

This group project had seemed doomed from the start. Teri never wanted to be the one in charge, or the one making any decisions, and Stevie avoided confrontation at all costs—so, fairly predictably, their terrible third partner, Bryce, had taken over and was counting on them to do all the work, despite the fact that he hadn’t even read the book, and still seemed to believe The Mill on the Floss had something to do with dental hygiene.

“Well, the two of us had planned on doing the class presentation,” Teri said.

“You know, since we don’t think George Eliot is a man,” Stevie continued, annoyance creeping into her tone.

Teri nodded. “We’d practiced and everything. But then Bryce jumped up and just started talking.…”

“You should have told Bryce to knock it off! And also that he might want to try, you know, reading the book,” I said, and Stevie snort-laughed, my favorite kind of her laughs, since it meant that she’d been caught by surprise. “Did you?” I asked, looking at my best friend, who just shook her head.

I wasn’t surprised. Stevie didn’t like drama, or arguments, or yelling—at least, not offstage. It had shocked me to see she was always the one volunteering for any scene where you got to scream and cry and rage—her hand was always the first in the air in Scene Study when we were doing Mamet. Offstage, though, she liked things quiet and calm, everyone getting along, whereas I never minded a little volume.