“What are you talking about, not auditioning for the musical?” I asked, hoping this was just a really weird joke I didn’t get yet. “We always do the musical. The musical’s the whole spring.” It was, too—because there were songs to learn and choreography to memorize, and because the orchestra and band were involved (sometimes too involved, like when we did City of Angels last year and the band had gotten way too into the jazz element of it all and Ms. Wallace had had constant fights with the band director about saxophone volume), the rehearsal time was longer. As soon as we struck the set for the Shakespeare play in February, the rest of the year was the musical. I had a serviceable soprano, but Stevie had a brassy alto with a belt—which meant while I was stuck singing love duets, she was usually getting fun, showstopping numbers, and sometimes I’d see her face as her applause just kept coming after she’d killed it, just waves of it rolling in as she kept trying to start the scene again but the audience wouldn’t let her. It was like seeing someone’s unfiltered happiness. “You love the musical.”

“I know,” Stevie said, but like she was trying to brush this aside. “It’s just—”

“It’s our senior year. And didn’t you hear we might do Follies?” Stevie was a fool for Sondheim, and I saw her flinch slightly as I said this.

“I might apply for this internship at my dad’s firm,” she said, in a voice that was trying for casual but not pulling it off. “I just think… since I’m going to be prelaw at college, I might as well start, you know?”

A cold, clammy fear gripped my insides. I couldn’t shake the visions of Dara Chapman, sitting at the lunch table but not getting any of the jokes, then not showing up at our parties, just slowly fading out. What if that happened to Stevie and me? Right when it was supposed to be our senior-year swan song, the celebration of all we’d worked so hard for? The thought of it was making me feel ill. I couldn’t let it happen.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I’m telling you now,” Stevie said. She raised an eyebrow at me and I knew, in that moment, that whatever she said, she was not 100 percent okay with the switch I’d pulled on her.

“Are you mad at me?”

“I’m not mad.”

“It’s okay if you are. Just tell me.”

Stevie looked out the window, taking a halting breath. “I don’t, like, need your permission…” She stopped and looked back at me. “I’m not mad,” she said again. “I just—you didn’t need to lie to me.”

“I didn’t!”

Stevie gave me a look that said come on.

“I didn’t,” I insisted. “I just didn’t tell you all the facts at that exact moment. What’s the legal term? Omission something?”