To say it had been a fight would be to do a disservice to the word “fight.” We’d had a terrible meeting with the headmistress after Mr. Campbell had basically blacklisted it, proclaiming that if you participated in my festival, you would not be considered for casting next fall. The meeting had been beyond intense, with me calmly stating my points while Mr. Campbell screamed about the fact that he wasn’t going to let his theater be used for amateur junk. The headmistress just arched an eyebrow and pointed out that it wasn’t his theater—it was the school’s.

In the end I’d prevailed. We would have a weekend in the theater in April, before musical rehearsals were in full swing. And nobody would be punished for auditioning. We’d been able to generate a lot of interest when we announced that Andrea and Scott Hughes were going to serve as playwriting mentors, and that Amy Curry, who would be in New York shooting a movie this spring, would also be helping out when she could. (Amazingly, we’d found the day after the party that she’d followed both me and Stevie on her private Instagram. We’d been able to transition that into emailing occasionally, but both of us were very careful not to bug her too much, hyperaware of don’t bother the movie star who for some reason is putting up with us.)

But after all the fights to get it off the ground, the original works festival was fun. I was getting to write my own stuff, which I was loving, and getting to act and direct. It definitely wasn’t as polished as the productions Mr. Campbell put on, but that was okay. I had ended up doing what my mother wanted me to do—changing the system. And I was just hoping it would turn out well and be able to continue even after I graduated, a small legacy that I could leave.

I hadn’t auditioned for any conservatories after all (my parents were thrilled). I’d applied to mostly liberal arts schools with good theater programs. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do yet. Maybe I’d audition. Maybe I’d direct, or keep going with playwriting. Maybe I’d take a different kind of writing course or I’d discover I loved something I hadn’t even considered yet—Russian literature or sports psychology or calculus (probably not calculus). But mostly, I wanted to try a lot of things. I wanted to see what there was to see.

The three tones sounded in the lobby—they meant that it was five minutes to showtime. I grabbed a program from the stack and started to head to my seat. As I crossed the lobby, I saw Mr. Campbell standing by the entrance, greeting the parents he knew, ushering people in. I met his eye and he looked pointedly away.