I saw Stevie’s mouth twitch in a smile. “Lulu the dinosaur,” she said, giving the kid a nod. “Very cool.”
The little girl dropped out of sight again—apparently this was what she’d wanted to tell us—and Stevie turned to me. “Look, nothing’s decided about the internship,” she said. “We’ve got lots of time to figure it out.”
“Right,” I said, nodding. It was true, after all, even if when Stevie said figure it out, what I meant was talk her out of this bananas idea. But she was right—we had lots of time to sort it through.
Twenty minutes later, we’d had three more dinosaur updates, we’d seen one of Erik’s Stories in which his whole search history was accidentally visible in the background and now we had lots of questions about Erik, and Stevie had gone though all potential casting possibilities with me, even when I knew I was repeating myself and just needing reassurance. Just as we were debating whether to message Erik and let him know, the train loudspeaker crackled. “We are approaching Grand Central Station, our final stop. Please collect all your belongings when exiting the train.”
I glanced out the window just in time to see the outside world disappear as we went into the tunnel that would take us into the heart of the city. I sat up straight against the leather seat as everything else began to fade away in importance. Tonight was about Lear, and making sure I would get my part, and Stevie would get her part, and celebrating Stevie’s birthday. And now that I knew she was thinking of doing something as crazy as not auditioning for our final musical, the whole night seemed to take on even more importance. We’d go to this play and it would be amazing and Stevie would realize she had been crazy to think about quitting.
The train slowed, and then came to a stop, and all around us, people jumped to their feet, gathering up coats and bags (and, in the case of the little girl ahead of us, dinosaurs). I looked at Stevie. “Ready to do this, frond?”
She grinned at me. “You know it, frand.” She nodded toward the train doors, which had slid open. “Lead the way.”
CHAPTER 6
We waited on the train until everyone else in our car had gotten off, and then a few minutes more—I wanted to put as much distance between myself and Kathie Alden as possible. When the conductor walked through, saying, “Last stop!” very loudly, we figured it was our cue to go.
We pulled on our coats and headed out of the train. The first view of the station wasn’t particularly glamorous—a little overheated, and not much to see beyond the round trash and recycling bins in the center of the walkway. But I’d never minded, because up ahead, literally the light at the end of the tunnel, was Grand Central.
Stevie and I stepped out of the entrance to track eighteen, on the upper level, and walked a few steps out of the way. But then, we both stood still for a second and just looked up.
Because that was what Grand Central did to you. It made you draw in a breath and look around, taking it all in. The expanse of it, how big it was. The vaulted ceiling with the constellations painted on it, the way they seemed to catch the light and twinkle. The massive American flag hanging vertically by the south entrance. The digital time boards along the right side, above the ticket windows, where you could still buy tickets from an actual person, like you were Ginger Rogers in a movie from the 1940s. The people, bustling through and walking, like all New Yorkers seemed to, a beat faster than anyone else.
There were the marble stairways on either end of the building—with the Apple Store and restaurants on the top story, and on the bottom level, bathrooms and more restaurants and the lower-level trains. There were the Metro-North ticket kiosks, the Hudson News with its overpriced gum, and the Starbucks on the first level that was almost a secret, tucked away over by track thirty.
But best of all was the clock in the center. The clock was brass, and it sat atop a round marble information desk, so big that you couldn’t see all the way around it. Someone sat in the middle and answered questions, and there were pamphlets all around it, with information