also USC and College of the West and Bates, Vanderbilt and Colgate, Scripps and Tulane, Columbia and NYU. Now that I wasn’t following my dad’s exact plan, I’d decided I might as well have as many possibilities as I could.
Though I hadn’t started to narrow them down, more and more I was liking the idea of staying closer to home. I was just getting to know my siblings, after all, and even though it had only been a few months, things were undeniably better with my dad. And even though I knew this wouldn’t stop if I was at school in Los Angeles or Evanston or Nashville, I didn’t have a huge need to get out of town. I decided that I’d just see how I was feeling when the acceptances—or rejections—started to roll in.
I needed to take a minute, just to get centered, so I stepped out of the greenroom and into the hallway. I walked slowly up and down, rolling my shoulders back and taking deep breaths. I was always fine once the show had started and all this anticipatory energy burned off. It was just in this moment before that it helped to get out of my own head.
I stopped in front of a poster that had been hung up. The Scriveners, it read. An Original Works Festival. Short plays written, directed, and starring Stanwich High School students.
I smiled as I looked at it. It had all been a fight—even getting this poster hung up in the hallway had been what my dad would call a knock-down, drag-out—but Kat had done it, in the end. And I was so proud of her for pulling it off.
The festival wasn’t until next month, but getting it off the ground had been the biggest challenge of all. Mr. Campbell had not taken kindly to the idea of someone coming in and putting on a show that he wasn’t in charge of and hadn’t sanctioned—especially not when it was being spearheaded by Kat, who he’d been pointedly ignoring ever since she turned down assistant directing. It was essentially the cut direct, something I’d read about in old novels but had never seen someone employ in real life, or modern day. But through lots of fights, she’d prevailed. I was acting in three of the plays, and was directing one. I knew it was going to be a huge success.
And even though it was still very hard for me to do, I was trying not to think too far ahead. Right now, the furthest out I wanted to plan was this summer—and someone had to plan it, since everyone had very different ideas, and none of them were compatible. My mom wanted me to come with her on a gallery tour of the Catskills—she’d been acquiring a lot recently. I was pretty sure it had something to do with finally getting New York Night number three, now hung in the spot that had been reserved for it all those years, completing the series. After she’d gotten it, she’d starting acquiring for the Pearce in a different way. It was like she was less locked into what my grandmother would have chosen. She was even thinking about getting a separate space, or a different wing, for emerging artists. She was still figuring it out, but it had been a revelation to me that no matter how old you get, it’s hard to shake your parents’ expectations.
Matty was making big plans for what he was calling the Sinclair/Lampitoc Sibling Summer (Winter) Friendship Fun Tour. He was determined that we should all go to Australia and New Zealand—possibly Fiji, too—and the rest of us had a suspicion it was just because he liked how absurd it sounded.
And as for me, I’d been looking into internships and assistant positions for me and Kat, something we could do together our last summer before college. The Williamstown Theatre Festival had a great one, and Amy thought she might be able to get us PA jobs on her upcoming film. There were some summer stock theaters in Pennsylvania and Tennessee and Ohio… we didn’t have to make any decisions yet, but it was fun, for the moment, to just look at all the opportunities and know we had options for a truly epic summer.
I turned away from the poster and saw Beckett walking down the hallway toward me, dressed all in tech crew black. I gave him a smile, and he gave me one back.