I swallowed hard. What did this mean?

“Do you… want to do another day of callbacks?” Eric asked, a tentative note in his voice, and I drew in a sharp breath. We’d never done that before.

“I don’t… think so,” Mr. Campbell said slowly, like he was turning over the words in his head as he said them. “I’m just…” He looked around the room, then leaned forward. “I can’t say that recent events haven’t shaken my faith in this department. I’d thought we were all on the same page, that we valued the same things. Loyalty. Commitment. Dedication. And honestly, even having to wonder these things… it’s just making this decision harder.”

I looked over and caught Stevie’s eye, and then we both looked away, but it had been enough to let me know we were both thinking the same thing—that this was about Dara Chapman.

My stomach was in knots, because what were we supposed to do about this? If he’d just said he was having trouble casting the ensemble, or the guys, it would have been different. But this was all of us.

And then an even more terrible thought occurred to me—what if it wasn’t all of us? What if it was me?

“How long are you thinking?” Jayson asked. “I mean—when do you think we’ll know?”

“I’d say… Monday.”

“Monday?” I hadn’t even realized I was going to speak this out loud before it was already happening. I bit my lip and Mr. Campbell raised an eyebrow at me.

“Kat? You have a problem with that?”

“Just…” I took a breath. “It just seems like kind of a long time, that’s all. Maybe you could email it when you make the decision and that way we wouldn’t have to wait?”

“The list has to be posted,” Teri said, sounding scandalized. “It’s tradition.”

“Tradition,” Jayson, Emery, and Stevie sang together, throwing their hands up in the choreography from when we were all in Fiddler freshman year.

“Tell you what,” Mr. Campbell said, smiling at me as he shook his head. “If I finalize the casting tonight, I’ll email it to the office and have them print it out and post it sometime over the weekend. But no promises—I’m busy tonight.”

“Are you going to the premiere?” Aminah asked breathlessly. “The new Amy Curry movie?”

Amy Curry was the department’s most famous alumnus. I hadn’t believed it the first time I’d walked through the theater lobby, looking at the framed pictures from past productions, but there she was, at eighteen, with the lead in Hedda Gabler—the person that I’d seen in big blockbusters and small prestige movies and a few memorable episodes of a medical drama that ended in a summer-ruining cliff-hanger. If she wasn’t a star yet, she was getting there, and the fact that she was kind of from Stanwich (she’d transferred from California her senior year) and had gone to Stanwich High, had been a part of the Stanwich drama department like me… it somehow made it all seem more possible. Mr. Campbell had taught her when she’d gone here—his second year teaching in the theater program, and if we begged enough, he would sometimes tell us Amy Curry stories. He’d tell us about what a scandal it was when she got a lead role straightaway, since she hadn’t paid any of the dues that you usually had to—but her talent was just that undeniable.