over his shoulder. I grabbed her stuff from the couch and walked over. “What did he want?”
“Thanks,” she said, taking her bag from me. “It was about tonight. His parents’ new play is in previews, and he wanted to know if I wanted to see it. He got an extra comp ticket.”
“Seriously?” I’d been hearing online speculation about Andrea and Scott Hughes’s new play for months now as anticipation had built. Their last play, about Edison and Tesla, had won the Tony, so interest had been high from the start. Stevie had told me about seeing Beckett’s parents—who she’d gotten to know, of course, over a year, along with his older sister, Emily—working on the play, the two of them sequestered in their dining room, sitting opposite each other, laptops open and mugs of coffee at the ready. When they had made the casting announcements—a mix of movie stars and veteran theater actors—I’d gotten even more excited, despite the fact that nobody knew what this play was about. Even the title, George & Suzi, didn’t provide much information. I lobbied my parents to get tickets, which had started selling out, but my mother had a policy of not wanting to get tickets to a show until it had been reviewed—despite the fact that if the reviews were good, then getting tickets got a lot harder.
“Yeah,” Stevie said with a shrug. “Since when… when we were together was when they were writing it. I guess they asked Beckett to offer me the ticket? But I have the dinner with my dad at nine thirty, which would be right in the middle of the second act, so…”
“Right,” I said, relieved that I didn’t have to get into it with Stevie about how hanging out with your ex who dumped you was never a good idea. “Ah well. Too bad.”
“The timing is crazy,” Stevie said, shaking her head. “Have you noticed that, how everything always seems to land on the same day?”
“I have!” Teri, who was walking ahead of Stevie, chimed in. “It’s weird, right?”
We hustled into class, dropped our bags along the wall, and then, like usual, took our seats on the floor. The acting classrooms were practically bare—there was a table pushed off to the side, some chairs, and a couch that we were only supposed to use for scene work but that, over the years, we’d all used for naps. Mr. Campbell was sitting in a chair he’d placed in the front of the room, just looking at us, and everyone quieted down in a hurry and sat on the floor in a loose semicircle as we looked up at him and waited.
As soon as I sat down, and the silence fell, I looked closely at Mr. Campbell, trying to read something in his expression. Did Emery know what she was talking about? Or were things decided already, the answer tucked somewhere in his pile of papers? But his expression revealed nothing—he was as impassive and hard to read as usual.
Mr. Campbell was thirty-eight, divorced, no kids. He hadn’t volunteered any of this information, but we knew how to google. He was an actor, too—when he was younger, he’d done lots of commercials, guest spots on long-cancelled TV shows, roles on all the Laws & Order. But at some point, he’d clearly switched his focus to theater—teaching, running the entire department, and directing. He did a reverse commute every day into the suburbs, returning after school was over to New York City, where things were much more exciting.
He always wore button-downs and dark pants, and never a tie except on show nights. He had a beard, dark hair he kept short, and black-framed glasses he was always perching on top of his head and forgetting about. “Don’t you think he looks like Paul Rudd?” I’d asked Stevie freshman year. “Young Paul Rudd or old Paul Rudd?” she had clarified, then had withdrawn the question when she realized it was redundant. We all spent a lot of time speculating about Mr. Campbell—about his acting career, about his personal life, about what his life in the city was like.
“You guys are obsessed with him,” Beckett had told us once at lunch last year, when Stevie and I had spent most of the time debating what, exactly, Mr. Campbell had meant when he’d said something cryptic, leaving rehearsal the night before. Stevie and I had looked at each other, a little guiltily, as Beckett had pushed back from the table to get some