“Do you not care about this? About what Mr. Campbell is thinking? About the Lear casting?”

“Of course I do,” she said, maybe too fast. “Of course. I care. I just…” She looked down and dropped her napkins into the trash. “Kat, I actually should—”

The door to the Starbucks opened and my eyes widened. “Look,” I said quietly, grabbing Stevie’s arm and nodding toward the door. “Speaking of.”

Dara Chapman was walking up to the counter, pulling off her beanie as she went. She turned her head and our eyes met across the bux. Both Stevie and I gave her hey nods—tipping your chin up first rather than down. Dara raised a hand in an awkward wave, then turned back to the counter, looking up intently, like she was studying the board of drinks. Stevie and I exchanged a glance, and I knew right away we were thinking the same thing: let’s go. When we’d stepped out into the chilly afternoon, I turned to my best friend. “Weird.”

“So weird.”

Until the start of the school year, Dara had been one of the stars of the theater program—and she and I found ourselves up for the same parts more often than not. I’d assumed this fall’s auditions for Arcadia would be no different. I really wanted Thomasina, but I was worried Dara would get it, and I was prepared for a marathon of callbacks, both of us duking it out. But Dara didn’t show up. We were all worried about her that first day, thinking that something awful must have happened. You weren’t supposed to be eligible for callbacks if you didn’t make the first day of auditions, but everyone knew that Mr. Campbell would make an exception for one of us if something had gone wrong. But the next day, at callbacks, we found out the truth—Dara was fine. Nothing had happened. She just hadn’t auditioned. She’d essentially left the theater program for no reason whatsoever, just in time for senior year, right when you get to the mountaintop.

When we’d asked Dara why she hadn’t auditioned, she’d just shrugged and said she wanted to try something else, which nobody believed. And as we started working on Arcadia, it became clear to all of us how hard it was to reconcile hanging out with the theater kids when you weren’t in the play. Dara didn’t know any of the inside jokes, she couldn’t chime in when we talked about rehearsals, and with every week, we all just seemed to have less to say to each other. Dara stopped sitting at the theater table at lunch as much. I’d heard she’d even joined mock trial as an alternate, and I saw her hanging out in the halls with people I didn’t know.