I crossed my fingers as I took the curving staircase down to the student center. It felt like maybe—hopefully—everything was lining up. In my experience, you didn’t get many moments like this, and I wanted to savor it. It was a Friday, my favorite day, in November—my favorite month. It wasn’t freezing yet, but there had been a bite in the air all week, the good kind of cold, the kind that made you dig for your thicker sweaters in the cedar closet and search for last year’s gloves, the kind that let you know that winter really was on its way.

The first semester of senior year hadn’t been quite as hard as we’d all been led to believe, which was a huge relief, since junior year had come close to doing me in. My bangs had finally grown out enough that I could tuck them behind my ears (never, ever get breakup bangs. You will regret them. Stevie and my stylist and all the people who answered my Insta poll had told me this, but I hadn’t listened), and I was wearing my new purple cashmere turtleneck sweater, the one with little puffs at the top of the sleeves.

And I was potentially less than an hour away from finding out if I’d gotten my dream role.

Cordelia, King Lear’s youngest daughter, was a great part, and I already had most of her lines memorized. I’d gotten chills the first time I’d read her speech to her father—the inciting incident that kicks off the whole play. Lear is dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters and demands they all pay homage to him, something her older sisters Goneril and Regan are only too happy to do, promptly telling the king what he wants to hear. But when it comes to Cordelia, she can’t do it. She can’t suddenly profess emotion on command. She has one of my favorite lines in the whole play: “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.” As soon as I’d read that, I knew it was the role I wanted.

And it was a real possibility I could get it—I was a senior, after all, and I’d been regularly getting leads since the end of my sophomore year. Nothing was guaranteed—I knew that—but I was still allowing myself to hope.

I’d been a part of Stanwich High School’s drama department since the first month of my freshman year. I had never acted before—never been in any of the plays in middle school—because I’d been dancing.