“It’s not that,” I said, starting to get annoyed. “And it’s not just for me. It might help you, too, not that you need it.”

“Wait, what does that mean?” Stevie asked, frowning.

“Come on,” I said, rolling my eyes at her. “You know you’re the best actress in the department.”

“It’s not true. You’re—”

“Not as good as you, and I know that, and it’s fine. It is,” I said firmly, knowing she was about to start arguing this. “But it can’t hurt, right? For Lear, for the musical…”

“Yeah,” Stevie said. She looked at me for a moment, almost like she was deciding something, then took a breath. “That might not actually… matter as much.”

My head whipped around to stare at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” she said, turning her clutch over on her lap, end over end, “that I’m thinking about… not auditioning for the musical.”

“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?”