Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Like most things in his life, this is all Julia’s fault.

“Q,” she says to him in homeroom, twisted around so that her elbows are propped on his desk, “I think we should do the play.”

Quentin looks up from his book. For a second he thinks he’s misheard. “What?”

“The play.” She rests her chin in her hands. “We should try out.”

He can’t help it—he scoffs. “I’m not doing the play, Jules.”

“For real, though,” she says, and he can tell she wants to say more, but then Van der Weghe walks in and they all have to pay attention because he’s still in new school year mode and pretending that he gives a shit about his tenth grade homeroom class. Quentin slides his book into his lap and reads through the announcements.

He and Julia don’t have any morning classes together this year, so he doesn’t hear any more about it until lunch, when she slides in next to him at their usual table—back left of the cafeteria, near the doors to the parking lot—and says “auditions are in two weeks, that’s loads of time.”

“Auditions?”

“For the play,” she says.

“I told you, Jules, I’m, I’m not doing the play,” he says, and takes a bite of his sandwich for emphasis. It’s pretty bad.

“It’ll be fun,” Julia says.

“Yeah,” he mumbles around the bread in his mouth, “try humiliating.”

“C’mon, Q,” she says, but he stares at the table until she drops it.

They have science and English together after lunch, but Julia doesn’t bring it up again until they’re waiting for the bus together. The bus only comes once every half hour, and they never make it to the stop by 3:07, so they usually end up waiting until 3:40. He’s pretty sure she could get a ride from Mackenzie, if she asked, but he doesn’t want to bring it up. Then she might stop waiting with him.

“Do you think Sunderland’s really going to let us pick our own books for the novel study,” he’s saying, “because I think you and I could really make a case for The World in the Walls and it’s, uh, it’s literary value, I mean there are Tolkien scholars so there are definitely Plover scholars, and maybe my dad could drive us up to—”

“Why don’t you want to do the play with me, Q?”

He blinks. “Uh.”

Julia has her arms folded across her chest, and she’s looking down at the pavement. “It'll be fun. I know it will be.”

“For you, maybe.” He kicks at the leaves that have started to gather around the bench’s legs. “I wouldn’t be any good at it.”

“What makes you think I would be?”

“Uh, the you of it all?” He slumps back against the bus shelter. “When have you ever not been great at something?”

She scoffs. “I’m bad at loads of stuff.”

“Not true,” he says and she laughs and leans her head against his shoulder. He hugs her with one arm, and the dying embers of his awful middle-school crush on her flare ever so slightly. “You should do it without me.”

“I wanna do it with you, though.”

“Why?”

“Huh?” She looks at him.

“Why do you wanna do the play, Jules?” Julia has never cared about the school play before, except when they went to Mackenzie’s senior year drama showcase, and even then they were mostly making fun of it in the back row together.

Julia swallows. “I, um. My parents are, uh. My dad.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Mom’s talking about making him go to rehab.” She scrubs at her eye with the back of her hand.

“That sucks,” he says.

“Yeah.”

“Do you wanna stay over tonight? My dad won’t mind. He’s making meatloaf.” He really won’t mind. Dad loves Julia.

“I can’t stay over every night,” she says. “I dunno. I thought, if we did the play...rehearsals mean you stay late at school. And it does look like fun, really. Kady in my history class was in the chorus last year and she said it was great. Mostly you just hang out and watch the drama kids show off, and then you sing and dance a little. She got most of her homework done just waiting around.”

“Julia, I can’t sing. Or dance.”

“You can totally dance.” She shoves at his side.

“Learning music video choreography in your bedroom doesn’t count.”

“You probably wouldn’t even have to do that much,” she says. “Kady says they always need boys.”

“Oh, good to know it’s my gender they want me for,” he says.

“I really think you’d have fun.” She looks directly at him and her sad eyes are what clinches it. “At least do the auditions with me? I won’t feel stupid practicing if we do it together.”

“Yeah, cause I’ll out-stupid you,” he says like he’s still putting up a fight. Like she hasn’t already talked him into it, like she was always going to do.

“You have a nice voice, Q!”

He has an okay voice for Disney karaoke in his basement or road-trip singalongs with his dad, but whatever. Maybe it’ll do. For the chorus. “Fine, okay. But we have to find a song that doesn’t make me feel like a loser.”

“Yes!” Julia fully punches the air, which makes Quentin jump and fall off the bench onto his ass. “Oh, sorry!” she says, but she’s laughing. And well, that’s nice at least.

He starts regretting his decision basically right away, when Julia tells his dad over meatloaf that night that they’re doing the play and his dad looks so excited that Quentin is participating in something that he definitely can’t back out now. He keeps regretting it for two weeks while he and Julia trawl the depths of musical theatre YouTube and the CD section of the library to find a song that doesn’t make him feel like a dorky idiot. He’s regretting it right now, sitting outside the music classroom with Julia and a handful of other kids who are trying out. And the worst bit is that he hadn’t realized that they’d be going alphabetical by last name, which means that Julia’s going basically last and he’s going...

“Quentin Coldwater?” says the senior who’s helping with the auditions. She’s holding the door open as Marina Andreiski, who is beautiful and terrifying and in the twelfth grade and sang something that sounded like actual opera saunters out into the hall. “It’s your turn.”

...first.

He thinks he might throw up. Julia squeezes his leg reassuringly. Break a leg, she mouths. He stands up, clutching the sheet music that she helped him photocopy during lunch in his sweaty, sweaty hands. Oh, he really, really thinks he might throw up. There are people in the hall and they can hear everything in the room, and he’s going to walk out of there and they’ll all be looking at him which will be awful.

What if you just kill yourself right now, his brain says, and then you won’t have to do it, and it’s weird, but that’s kind of the thing that gets him through the door? Because honestly, that’s a pretty tame version of that thought. He can manage this version of that thought. He manages it all the way into the music classroom, and then the door closes behind him and he realizes what he’s done and it's too late to run.

“Quentin!” A voice is calling him from the piano at the front of the classroom. “I didn’t expect to see you here! Come on down.”

“Hi, Ms. Chatwin,” he says. He and Julia had taken one term’s worth of drama in their freshman year, and he’d had an, uh, terrible time is probably the best way of putting it. He’d fully pussied out of the final monologue presentation—the only reason he’d passed was Ms. Chatwin letting him do it alone after class had let out. She’d been really nice about it, but Quentin could tell that she’d just wanted it over as much as he had. “Uh. Julia wants to do the play.”

“Yes, I did see her name on the signup sheet,” Ms. Chatwin says. “Set your music down there, that’s right, open to the place you want to start. But I was surprised to see yours.”

“Yeah, uh, we do everything together, I guess?” He cringes as he says it. Sounds so fucking childish, when you think about it, like he can’t do anything without her to hold his hand. But Ms. Chatwin just smiles.

“Well, it sounds like you’re a very good friend to her,” she says. “Now, which bar?”

When they’d practiced, they’d used backing tracks from the internet, but Julia had said that they should have sheet music for the actual audition. At the time it had sounded smart, but now that he’s here, it’s hitting him that he can only kind of read music. Shit. “Uh,” he says, and points at a random spot on the page, “there?”

Ms. Chatwin smiles. “How about six bars, and then you start?”

“O-okay,” he says. And they start.

He likes the song he picked. The version they’d found at the library had been the old cast recording, but Julia says that there’s going to be a movie coming out soon, and apparently the whole play’s about a cannibal murderer? The song isn’t about murder, though. It’s about being in love with a very sad girl and wanting to help her. The guy on the recording has a really nice voice, and he sings it like he’s dreaming, soft and gentle on the high bits, a little floaty, and then like he’s waking up. It’s um. It’s pretty. Listening to it had made Quentin feel all tingly at the base of his skull. He’d thought to himself, I want that.

He starts out okay, but about twenty seconds in his voice freezes in his throat and he can’t make the sound come out. “Uh,” he squeaks, “um, sorry, I—”

“Quentin,” says Ms. Chatwin, “you’re all bunched up. Relax your shoulders. Unfold your arms. There. Now, try again.” And she starts the music over, with those bits at the beginning that sound like a ship bobbing on the waves. This time, the whole time Quentin’s singing, she makes these little comments, like “relax your jaw,” and “shoulders down, breathe all the way in,” and “open your throat, that’s it.” It feels fucking weird—like his whole body is the thing making sound, not just his mouth.

But the weirdest thing is it works. He gets through the soft bit, and when the waking up comes it comes so easy. And one day, I’ll steal you. It feels like he’s promising something to a person he’s never met. Shoulders down, throat open. It comes out like breathing. He’s got a bit of that tingly feeling again. And just like that, it’s done. “Um,” he says.

Ms. Chatwin is looking at him like she’s thinking about something. “Well done, Quentin,” she says, almost absently. “Pick up some of the sides on your way out, will you? You’ll need to come back tomorrow after school to read.”

“Uh,” he says again, “read?”

“Yes. For the callbacks. So I can see if I should cast you.”

“Oh,” he says, “Julia said you just had to sing for the chorus.”

“Yes,” Ms. Chatwin says, “for the chorus. I like to hear students read for the speaking roles, though.”

“Um,” he says again. His face feels hot.

“You don’t have to,” she says kindly. “But I’d like you to try, if you’re up for it.”

“Oh. Um. Okay,” he says, and then he has to come back to the piano to grab his music. “Uh, thank you?”

Ms. Chatwin smiles again. “See you tomorrow, Quentin.”

He feels weird and shaky as he walks out the door, sheet music and printed sides clutched in his hands. He makes it a little way down the hall before he has to sit down. Julia isn’t there. Why isn’t Julia there? Where is she?

“Hey,” says somebody beside him. “Hey, Quentin? Coldwater?”

“Huh?” He blinks. Oh. He’s not sitting where he and Julia were. He’s sitting with one of the other kids waiting their turn, a boy he doesn’t know. He’s tall and handsome, and he’s draped over the chair in a way that would be slouching if Quentin did it, but for him it looks effortlessly cool. He’s dressed way fancy for their school, too. He looks like he's stepped off the back of one of the anthologies in Sunderland’s classroom, the ones by Victorian poets who all died tragically of TB. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“I just wanted to say, you sounded good in there.” The boy smiles like he’s saying something ironic. “Rough start and all.”

“Oh.” God, he keeps saying that. He sounds like a fucking idiot. “Um, thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” the boy says, still sounding like he’s telling some kind of joke. “Sondheim was a good choice for you.”

“W—,” Quentin stumbles, “what are you, um. Singing.”

“Dancing Through Life,” he says, like that’s supposed to mean something. “It’s the right range, it’s Stephen Schwartz, and I know I’ll kill it. God knows, after last year’s travesty I should at least have a shot at the lead.”

“You want to play, uh,” Quentin looks at the printouts in his hand. “Uh, Pippin?”

The boy snorts. “God, no, can you imagine? No, I’m going in for the Leading Player.” He taps the sheet. “I figure I’m the most Fosse motherfucker in this dump, after all.”

“Um, yeah,” says Quentin, like he knows what any of that fucking means. “You’re super, uh, super Fosse. For sure.”

Something in the boy’s smile changes, but Quentin has no idea how to describe it. “You don’t know what any of that means, do you?”

“Not a fucking clue,” Quentin says. “This was my best friend’s idea. I didn’t even watch the play last year, I don't think.”

“Ugh,” says the boy, “don’t worry, you didn’t miss much. Chatwin’s take on Fiddler leaves much to be desired.”

“Uh, sure,” says Quentin. He definitely didn’t watch the play last year. “I’m just doing it for, um, fun. The chorus is supposed to be not a big deal.”

“No small parts, Quentin Coldwater,” the boy says.

“Only small actors.” It’s not the boy who says that, but rather an extremely pretty girl who’s walking up to them. She looks Quentin up and down with one sharp flick of her head. Her silky hair flows with the movement. She’s wearing heels. At school. “Very small actors, by the looks of things.”

“Margo,” says the boy, “be nice.”

“I’m always nice,” says Margo, and she smiles in a way that says she definitely isn’t. “Hi, new kid.”

“Uh, I’ve been going to this school for a year,” says Quentin, because he cannot ever shut his fucking mouth.

“I haven’t seen you,” Margo says.

“Yeah, uh, that’s on purpose,” Quentin says, and Margo smiles for real. It takes over her whole face and makes her look even prettier.

“Oh bitch, okay. Kitten’s got tiny little claws. I like you,” she says, before she holds out her hand towards the boy without even looking at him. “El, honey, I need to warm up.”

“Whatever my lady commands,” says the boy as he stands up. El. That’s his name. “See you tomorrow, Quentin Coldwater?”

What is with the full naming? “Uh, yeah,” he says. “See you tomorrow, um...?”

“I’m Eliot,” the boy says, and he does a little wink and a wave as Margo drags him down the hall. Quentin sits there, clutching his sides,  for a little while as the piano and the muffled sounds of singing play in the background. He has that feeling he gets, sometimes, when something’s happened and he doesn’t quite know what it was. If Julia were here, he’d ask her. If Julia were here, she’d know.

Julia, as it turns out, does not get told to grab the sides. She’s the last one to audition at all, after even Eliot, whose last name turns out to be Waugh, and it’s like, 6:45 by the time they’re done and getting her backpack from her locker. Quentin has been ready to go since 6:00. The sides are folded up in his bag, where no one can find them.

“It’s not a big deal,” Julia says. “It’s our first time trying out.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says.

“It’s probably mostly the seniors who get the speaking roles.” She tugs her jacket on. “And it’s gonna be so fun in the chorus. You and me!”

“Yeah,” he says again. “If we, um, if we’re both in the chorus.”

“Q,” she says, “we’re both gonna be in the chorus. They need boys, remember?”

And that, um, that stings. He knows she’s being encouraging, or at least she thinks she is. She means that it won't be that she gets picked and he doesn't. Which is like, objectively what usually happens. But it sucks that it doesn’t even occur to her that maybe he might be the one who's good at this. Or that Ms. Chatwin can see something in him that no one else ever has. So, you know. Ow.

“Yeah,” he exhales, “yeah, they definitely need boys. There were only like, six of us.”

“I know!” says Julia. “You’d think she’d pick a play with more female roles.”

“Like Legally Blonde?” Julia’s song had been from Legally Blonde.

“I’m just saying!”

While they’re waiting for the bus home, he says, “Hey, I, um, might have to stay late tomorrow.”

“Why?”

“Uh, AP American History,” he says. “There’s a group project, and my group wanted to start early and it’s the only day we can all meet. It'll probably take forever, you shouldn't wait for me.”

Julia wrinkles her nose. “Gross,” she says, “but good on you for getting on top of it, I guess.”

“You know me,” he says, “Good old On-top-of-it Coldwater.”

It’s fine that he’s not telling her about the callbacks, or the printed-out scenes from the script in his bag. It won’t be a big deal. He’s going to be in the chorus. They’re going to goof off and hang out during rehearsals, and he’ll feel a little stupid, but Julia’s right. They’ll have fun. Just the two of them, like always.

He taps his nail on the metal of the bench and tries not to think about how it felt when Ms. Chatwin said she wanted him to try. Him. Not Julia. Just him. He doesn’t know if it’s a good feeling. He might like it all the same.

Chapter Text

Quentin floats through the next day on a cloud of nerves. He hadn’t slept super well—he’d stayed up late looking at the two printouts of the script. Whispering the lines to himself, first one side of the conversation, then the other. Trying to imagine what it was going to feel like to say them at someone else. He barely pays any attention in class. It’s bad enough that, by English, Julia has to poke him hard in the back with a pencil to get him to respond to one of Sunderland’s questions about Poe.

“What’s up with you?” she whispers after he stammers his way through explaining the theme of ‘The Telltale Heart.’

“Nothing,” he says back, “I’m just tired.”

She eyes him suspiciously, but she drops it, and when the end of the day rolls around, she goes to catch their bus.

“Good luck with American History,” she says with a smile, and Quentin feels a little awful, but only a little. Then she’s gone, and it’s just him and his backpack on the way to the drama room.

The drama room is on the bottom floor, near the art classroom and the entrance to the library. Quentin hasn’t been in there in like, a year, but he remembers the looming, washed-out faces of the old posters on the wall, and the weird chairs with half-desks attached, like you’d find in a university lecture hall. There are a bunch of kids sprawled out all over, but he only recognizes some of them. Beautiful, terrifying Marina, Kady from Julia’s history class (who he kinda knows from the time she kicked his ass at intramural volleyball, which was also the only time he ever played intramural volleyball), that guy with the glasses who everyone says sells weed out of the third floor boy’s bathroom, and, oh, hey, handsome Eliot from yesterday is here too. He’s sitting with Margo at the back of the room, and he gives Quentin a little wave, which makes Quentin want to hide inside his hoodie. He absolutely cannot go sit with them. It would be too. Too weird. He can’t. Instead, he grabs a seat near the door, next to—

“Oh, hey!” he says before he can stop himself. “Alice!”

Alice Quinn is in AP American History with him. She’s smart in that effortless way that Julia is, so much so that it’s genuinely a little intimidating, but she doesn’t wear it easily. She looks about as uncomfortable right now as Quentin feels. She doesn’t smile at him, exactly, but she tucks a lock of blonde hair behind her ear. “Hey,” she says.

“You’re, uh, the play. Auditions. You’re trying out for the play. Too.” Hey, great job, Coldwater. Super regular conversation.

Alice looks at him for a second. “Yes.”

“Me too,” he says. You know, really killing it. Alice kinda laughs though, and not in a mean way but like she actually thinks he’s funny. So that’s nice. He’s about to try saying something else and see how that goes, but Ms. Chatwin stands up at the front of the room and all the conversation dies as the room snaps to attention.

“Hello, everyone,” she says, “and welcome to callbacks.”

There’s an intensity in the air that kind of freaks Quentin out. He looks down at the printed pages in his hands. They’re all crumpled from where he’s been holding them. Alice’s, by contrast, are smooth and pristine. This was a mistake, he thinks. He has a sudden, desperate longing for Julia’s presence. He should have told her. He shouldn’t have come.

They won’t be going in any particular order, Ms. Chatwin explains. Rather, she’ll be calling them based on what she wants to hear and who she wants to hear them with. The cast list will be posted tomorrow outside the drama room. It’s not surprising that she starts with the seniors—beautiful, terrifying Marina and a boy that Quentin doesn’t remember from yesterday. He doesn’t really pay attention to them. Instead, he looks around the room. Mostly, people are watching. Eliot is full on glaring at them, and Margo looks bored, though when she catches Quentin’s eye she winks at him like they’re sharing a joke. He feels his shoulders relax a little.

People get called up in different groups, mostly in threes. Kady and the weed guy (Josh? Maybe?) read a scene where she tries to talk him into killing his dad (another kid that Quentin doesn’t know), and then Eliot and Margo get called up to read the same one, with weed guy as the dad. Quentin doesn’t really keep that much track, but some of them stand out. Okay, Eliot stands out. Him and Margo, but Eliot is, uh. Really good. There’s this way he looks at the people he’s reading with, like all his focus is on them. Like they’re sharing something that’s private between them, that just happens to be in front of a room of people.

He’s so distracted that he doesn’t notice he’s being called until Alice kicks his leg and startles him. “Huh?”

“Quentin,” says Ms. Chatwin, as they make their way to the front, “would you read Pippin? And Alice, if you would take Catherine. Yes, that’s it, whenever you’re ready, Alice, you can start.”

Oh. Right. This is the point of the whole thing. Right, okay, um. He looks up from the script in his hand to meet Alice’s eyes. She also looks a bit like she’s going to bolt, and that’s weirdly comforting. They’re kind of in this together. He takes a deep breath and smiles at her, aiming for solidarity or something. Alice smiles back, and then she says “You’ve been lying in this bed for seven days now. What’s the matter with you?” and right away it’s clear that she has that same focus in her. There are all the sounds of the room around them, the rustling of paper, the shifting of bodies in seats, but her eyes affix to him from behind the thick frames of her glasses, and she waits.

He blinks. Oh, right. She asked him a question. “It’s nothing you could possibly understand.”

And so it goes. It’s not long, and he’s kind of surprised by how easy it is. It’s. Fun. That’s really the best word for it. It’s Alice’s scene, really, she has the most lines, and all he has to do is catch what she sends his way and throw it back to her when it’s his turn. He’s still kind of nauseous under it all, but mostly he’s just. Playing pretend with Alice. Reacting to what she says, even when he doesn’t have anything to say back. It’s fun. He’s having fun.

Alice pauses, and he realizes that he’s supposed to touch her hand, so he does, haltingly. He doesn’t know if he actually should, or if that would be weird, but Alice lets him. The moment feels longer than it is, and then she says “Pippin, this is such a large estate. I’m all alone here, and I can’t do all this work by myself. Couldn’t you help me, please?” and the scene is over. They’re still holding hands, kind of. They’re not the first ones to do this bit—Marina and that other guy didn’t hold hands this long—but this feels like the right way to do it. He squeezes hers and she smiles at him, and they go back to their seats. Or, they start to, but then Ms. Chatwin asks Quentin to stay up and read something with Kady where she’s his grandma. And that’s fun too.

He doesn’t do any more scenes, but he ends up staying all the way until the end of callbacks, just watching everyone else. Kids peter out slowly, so by 5:30 or so it’s just him and a handful of others. Alice is still there—she gets called up a few more times—as well as Marina, who stops Ms. Chatwin at the back table to talk to her about something in a hushed voice. Eliot and Margo, he notices as he's packing his bag, are gone. He hadn’t noticed them slipping out. Oh well.

The halls are overwhelmingly quiet, and it makes him hyperaware of the sound of his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. He hunches his shoulders on instinct, even though there’s no one here to look at him. It’s only in doing it that he realizes he’d been standing up straight before. He sinks deeper into himself.

Outside, the drizzle that’s been coming down all day has cleared, and the late afternoon sunlight is glinting off the puddles in the parking lot. The bus stop is deserted, and the metal of the bench is cold and damp against his jeans. His watch reads 5:45, so he’s just missed the bus. He reaches into his backpack and pulls out his book, then thinks the better of it and trades it for his AP American History textbook. That way if Julia asks what he’s been working on, he can bullshit something. There’s the sound of a car horn—probably somebody’s ride trying to get their attention.

“Quentin Coldwater!”

Wait, that’s him. He looks up. Pulling up in front of the bus stop is a compact red car, shiny with rainwater and also just generally shiny. The driver's side window is rolled down, and leaning out, sunglasses perched delicately on her nose, is Margo. She cocks her head and smiles, her mouth open and twisted with amusement.

“Uh, hi?” he says, once it occurs to him that she’s waiting for a response.

“Hi,” she says with that same amused tone. “Catching up on some light reading?”

“Just,” he sighs and hefts the textbook, “waiting for the bus.”

From inside the car he hears in muffled tones, “Does he need a ride?” and then, more clearly, “Do you need a ride?” This second one is clearer because Eliot, who is speaking from shotgun, has draped himself across Margo to stick his head out the window next to hers, like a cartoon character looking around a corner.

“Uh,” he says, “I’m okay, I mean, the bus is going to be here in, uh, twenty minutes and that’s like, not too bad, and I do have reading to do, so, uh—”

“Yes or no, Coldwater,” says Margo, looking at him over the rims of her sunglasses as she does. Her makeup is, like, bafflingly perfect for a school day.

“Uh,” he says. This whole thing seems kind of weird and he doesn’t actually, you know, know her, but the bench really is cold and damp, and he doesn’t actually give that much of a shit about AP American History. “Yes?”

“Then get in the damn car,” she says, and as if to emphasize her point, he hears the doors unlock. Eliot gives him a big, shiny smile.

The inside of Margo’s car is both extremely clean and kind of a shambles. Her purse is lying open next to him, and there’s a pair of high heels poking out from under the driver’s seat that he has to be careful not to step on. There isn’t a speck of dust or dirt to be seen, but there are CDs basically everywhere, and a physics textbook with some sort of pamphlet sticking out of the top that he has to shove over in order to sit down. He holds his backpack on his lap. He’s so aware of his body right now.

“Where to, Quentin Coldwater?” says Margo, and okay, what is that about?

“What’s with the full naming?” he says.

“Hm?”

“Are you, like,” he swallows, “bullying me?”

“No?” says Margo. “Are we bullying him, El?”

“I don’t think so,” Eliot says. The way they talk, it’s like they’re always making some kind of inside joke to each other. He turns to Quentin. “Are we bullying you?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin says.

“Then it’s settled,” Margo says, even though Quentin’s not really sure that it is. “I repeat my question—where to, Quentin Coldwater?”

“You can just call me Q, it’s fine,” he says.

“And yet, not the answer to the question I was asking, Q.”

“Uh, if you could drop me off at—”

“Wait.” Margo holds a hand up without looking at him. “Never mind.”

“Wha—” he tries to say, but she’s having some sort of silent conversation with Eliot entirely through the movement of their eyes.

“You should come with us,” Margo says finally, turning to face him.

“Uh,” Quentin says.

“We’re doing breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Eliot says. Now they’re both looking at him with a weird intensity that he really doesn’t know how to interpret. The only coherent thought he manages to grasp at is, like the movie?

“I, um,” Quentin says, “I have homework. And my dad’s expecting me at home.”

“And you always do what your daddy expects?” God, it’s like everything Margo says is an insult he’s too stupid to get. His scalp is prickling.

“Uh,” he says, “yeah?”

Her face splits into that sharp, pretty smile he saw yesterday, and she laughs, rich and real. “Oh my god,” she says to Eliot. “I get it now.”

“Margo,” Eliot says.

“I’m, uh, I’m right here,” Quentin says, mostly to remind himself that he does, in fact, live inside a body that is in this car.

“You sure are, sweetie,” says Margo.

“We can drop you off at home,” Eliot says. Quentin gets the sense that he’s not really speaking to him, though.

“That would be great, thanks,” says Quentin.

They do end up taking him home, and once they stop being so weird it turns out to be kind of nice? Really nice, actually. When Mackenzie has to pick him and Julia up for whatever reason, he rides in the back and she doesn’t really talk to him at all. And that’s fine, he gets that she’s doing him a favour, except it feels more like she’s doing Julia a favour and she’d rather he weren't there. Margo and Eliot don’t really ask him to contribute to the conversation they’re having, which seems to be about everything that’s ever happened in their lives and hops between topics faster than he can keep up, but he doesn’t feel excluded either. Every so often, there’s a spot where it feels like, if he wanted to, he could say something. He doesn’t. But it feels like he could.

Eventually the two of them get tired of talking, or at least put the conversation down so they can pick it up later, and Eliot pops one of Margo’s ten thousand CDs into the player. The sound flicks on, and a guy starts talking? Like he’s at an auction? Is this an audiobook?

“Is that an audiobook?” he asks, but then someone starts singing.

“It’s Phantom,” Eliot says.

“Oh,” says Quentin. Phantom, he thinks, sure.

“Oooh,” says Margo, “track six, El.”

“Whatever my lady wishes,” he says and clicks through to the sound of an organ and a thrumming bass. As soon as the woman on the CD starts singing, Eliot starts singing with her. Oh, Quentin thinks. He has a really nice voice. Like the guy from the murder play.

A man starts singing, and Margo joins in, and it’s clear they do this all the time. It feels kind of like when his dad plays Fleetwood Mac when they drive out to visit his grandparents, and they sing along together to Go Your Own Way, except, you know, they both sound way nicer, and also, you know, they have an audience. Not that they’re not clearly having fun, but also. He’s here. Can’t escape that.

When Margo pulls up out front of his house, he can’t help but notice the contrast between the bright red of her car and the uniform white-blue-grey of the neighborhood. “Thanks for the ride,” he says.

“Next time you’re coming to breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Margo says.

“It’s like, six PM,” he says and she laughs again. It takes him until he’s standing on the sidewalk and the car is disappearing off into the early evening to recognize that she said next time and also that Eliot had been smiling at him? Weird. Okay. He does have homework, though, so.

And if he lies on his back that night and stares at the ceiling thinking about holding Alice Quinn’s hand for a little longer than someone else would have and how it had felt so clearly like the right thing to do, that’s his business. He clenches and unclenches his hand. Shakes his wrist out. Nothing he does ever feels like the right thing to do, but that had felt right. Like the impulse had weight and meaning.

He and Julia catch the bus home together, but school is on the way to his dad’s work, so he usually gets a ride in. There’s no Fleetwood Mac today, just the radio and the election in November and his AP American History textbook in his lap, because surprise, he didn’t manage to get the reading done last night either. His dad keeps tapping on the steering wheel like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t manage to get it out until they’re parked across the street from the front doors, watching kids file in.

“You know, I’m really proud of you, Curly Q.”

Quentin looks up from a truly mind-numbing description of the War of 1812. “Why?”

His dad smiles at him. “Going out for the play. You know, putting yourself out there. It’s good.”

“Yeah,” Quentin says. “It was Julia’s idea.”

“You can give yourself a little credit, buddy.”

“Okay,” Quentin says.

His dad sighs. “Have a good day today?”

“I’ll try,” Quentin says.

All of the good feelings from yesterday have bled out, replaced with a kind of numb pre-disappointment that’s really a classic of his. It’s fine, he tells himself, it’s fine it’s fine it’s fine. The chorus with Julia, where it’s safe and it’s just the two of them and no one can see him. The chorus with Julia and she’ll make some friends and they might tolerate him too. The chorus with Julia and maybe those same feelings in a smaller dose. It’ll be good. It’ll be okay.

The day is nothing. It’s maybe less than nothing. It’s the opposite of school, he’s actively losing knowledge and life skills, going to Jupiter to get more stupider, whatever. He feels the bulletin board by the drama classroom like a tumor in his brain, pulsing and throbbing and constantly making him aware of it.

“What’s with you?” Julia asks him in science, after he drops their miscrope slide on the counter for the third time.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just, you know, nerves.”

“About what?”

“The, uh, the play,” he says.

“Q,” Julia says warmly, placing a hand on his arm, “it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna have fun. You’ll see.”

He repeats that to himself for the rest of the afternoon, the warmth of Julia’s voice failing to fill the hole in his stomach. We’re gonna have fun you’ll see, we’re gonna have fun you’ll see—a mantra to get him to 3:05 and the final bell. He and Julia both have English together last period, and he thinks Sunderland can tell that they’re both kind of elsewhere. She raises an eyebrow when the bell rings and Quentin jumps in his seat a little, but she doesn’t say anything. Julia waits for him at the door while he fumbles with his bag, and then squeezes his hand as they walk down the hall like they’re little kids again, on their first day of school. He can feel his heart in his throat. We’re gonna have fun you’ll see.

There’s a decent clump of kids piled up around the drama room door by the time they get there. He spots Kady chatting with that guy he has Spanish II with who doesn’t like him, Penny or whoever (which is maybe a little weird, Quentin didn’t see him anywhere at auditions, but whatever), and a good-looking guy who’s probably also in eleventh grade clearly trying to flirt with Margo on the stairs, but that’s not the real show. Th real show starts about thirty seconds later, when beautiful, terrifying Marina shrieks through her teeth in frustration and then storms off down the hallway, passing Quentin and Julia like an icy gale. Quentin has to jump back to avoid being slammed into. “What the fuck,” he mumbles.

“What’s her problem?” Julia asks.

“She’s in the chorus.” Eliot materializes behind them, and Quentin jumps. Again.

“Jesus, man,” he says.

“Sorry,” says Eliot, not sorry at all. “Marina’s just having a bit of a temper tantrum. Seems somebody else got what she wanted...” he trails off, looking extremely self-satisfied.

“Did you, uh, did you get the part you were hoping for?” Quentin asks.

“Oh,” says Eliot, “obviously. Not even a question, Q.”

“Quentin, come on,” Julia says, grabbing his hand and tugging him with her. He shrugs at Eliot as he stumbles after her. Eliot just waves.

There are two lists posted on the bulletin board. One says ‘CHORUS’ bolded and underlined, and the other says ‘CAST LIST.’ The chorus list is split up into four parts, sopranos, altos, tenors, basses. Julia runs her finger down the list of girls’ names, and sure enough, there she is. ‘JULIA WICKER,’ alto. Quentin watches her do the same with the list of boys’ names, run her finger down it once, then twice, then she turns to him. Her face has fallen. “Q,” she says, but he already knows that his name isn’t there. “Q, I’m sorry, I...Q?”

Her voice trails off, but Quentin isn’t looking at her, or at the CHORUS list. He’s looking at the other one. Right underneath ‘ELIOT WAUGH—LEADING PLAYER.’ His ears are ringing and his body feels distant. He thinks, again, absently, that he might throw up.

QUENTIN COLDWATER—PIPPIN.

“Q,” says Julia, and he can only barely hear her over his pulse pounding in his head, “what the fuck?”