And because I’d already been rude to them and flipped off an innocent bystander that afternoon, I added: “Margot was really good.”

Just like that, they brightened again. My parents love Margot. She was my savior, as far as they were concerned. When she came over last week to help me pick an audition song, it was the first time I’d had a guest in months. Mom brought us hurricane popcorn and Dad asked if she wanted to stay for dinner and a movie. In my previous life, my parents might have looked twice at Margot’s Monroe piercing, eyebrow piercing, and KEEP CALM AND KISS MY ASS T-shirt. But not that day. That day, she was Saint Margot, and she had come to save us all.

Footsteps bounded down the stairs, followed by a slap as Josie skipped the last two and landed on the linoleum. “Last year at lunch,” she announced, “Paul Manley kept barking at some girls who walked by his table, and Margot told him he was doing it because he was insecure about his penis.”

My sister always took conversations to new and interesting places.

“How do you know? You weren’t even there last year,” I said. Although I had to admit, that did sound like Margot. And Josie was a freshman now and had her own bustling social life, so she probably knew way more Eagle View gossip than I did.

Josie shrugged. “It’s true. And he probably is insecure, because I read that—”

“All right,” Mom interrupted. “I’m all for my girls talking about penis insecurity, but not before they set the table.”

“Seconded,” Dad bellowed, already halfway out the patio door.

Once we’d finished dinner, Josie and I started on the dishes while my parents bundled up to take a walk, talking about the beauty of Pennsylvania Novembers. My parents were both born and raised in Hawai‘i, so it baffled me how much they appreciated the landscape here. They moved a year before I was born, when Mom got a job as a comparative literature professor at a small liberal arts college nearby. I used to be incredibly grateful for that decision, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the Kira Dobrow Ballet School. Now, I dreamt of packing up, moving to Honolulu, blending in with all the other half-white, half-Japanese girls there, and never setting foot in Pennsylvania or Eagle View ever again.

“Plate me.” Josie held her hand out for the plate I was over-rinsing. “So if you get in, will you actually do it?”

I thought we’d exhausted musical talk at dinner, but apparently not. “Like I said a gajillion times—maybe.”

“Alina.” Josie groaned. “You need to get over it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Did you really want to spend your whole life measuring your boobs and disinfecting your gross feet and dancing to music written by white men who’ve been dead for literally a hundred years?”