“Well …” I sigh, wishing I could do a bit more to comfort him. “I’m here if you ever want to talk. I’ve got experience in the gender department.”

He finally looks at me again, another smile on his lips. “Thanks, Neil.”

“Okay, okay, let’s move away from the gender talk.”

“Thank you.”

“If your stage fright is so bad, why do you want to be a singer?”

Wyatt puts his napkin down after wiping his mouth, and he stares at the lit candle, flickering in the middle of the table in a glass jar. “To be honest with you, I don’t even know if I want to be a singer.”

I mean, I guess that was just sort of an assumption I made when I offered the audition. “Then what do you want to do?”

“I want to be in music—don’t get me wrong. And a record deal could do so much for me and my family. But then I look at how pop stars are treated, how their fans act, how everything they do is under this microscope … it seems scary.”

“Well, getting a recording contract doesn’t guarantee you’ll be some ultra-mega-famous singer with millions of stans who stalk you on Twitter.”

“Yeah, I know. But there’s the unpredictability, you know? Honestly, I think I’d rather bomb than be ultra famous.”

“I can understand that.” My few experiences with the paparazzi and tabloids writing about me haven’t been fun. You wouldn’t even think the child of a hotel mogul would be that interesting, but the world loves to watch a fuckup.

“I’m just trying to do what I can to help my parents,” Wyatt tells me.

“Okay, but what do you want to do?”

“I don’t really know; I haven’t thought much about it.”

“Kind of sick that we’re expected to know what we want to do with the next sixty years when we’re sixteen, huh?”

“No kidding. I’ve already had to start submitting college applications, drafting scholarship essays, making sure I’ve got enough extracurriculars and volunteer hours for the admissions people to even give me a second glance.”

He really has to do all of that? Like I’ve heard of kids in, like, TV shows and movies having to work themselves to death just to get into a decent college, but I didn’t think that it was real.

Mom never really talked about college before, but it’s sort of an inside joke at Steerfield that a graduate has enough money to go to whatever college they want.

I guess not for Wyatt, though.

“Oh, ten o’clock.”

“What?” I glance at my watch. “It’s eight.”

“No.” Wyatt chuckles. “My ten, your four.”

“What?”

“Like a clock face?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Fowler?”

“Just look over your right shoulder!” he whispers.