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“Temple. And NYU,” he said slowly. “I guess I could.…”
“I thought about it when I only got in two places,” I said, remembering the very long, sleepless night I’d spent on my laptop, trying to figure out if I had any options and if I could do anything in a year to help myself. “But the most I can really do at this point is get good grades and then transfer. I wouldn’t be able to change my application all that much. It’s not like I have a musical to write.”
“Yet.”
“Yet,” I acknowledged with a laugh.
We drove in silence for a beat, Russell’s fingers tapping restlessly on the steering wheel. “I don’t know,” he finally said, his voice hesitant. “It’s strange to even consider not starting next week—like stepping off the path. You know. All my friends are going to school—most have already started—”
“Mine too.”
“But if I had a year—to work on a new show…” It was like I could practically see his wheels turning. “Is it crazy that never occurred to me until you said it? Am I just very stupid?”
I laughed. “No, I think it’s just the funnel we’re all put through. It’s probably the same with you, but my whole life, it’s been do this to get that so you can get into college. It’s like you’re on a treadmill and you’re not encouraged to ever get off or look around or go wander.”
“Exactly!”
“Didi was thinking about maybe taking a gap year. And her parents lost their minds. Like even the thought that she might not go right to college really freaked them out.”
“So what did she do?”
“She’s currently at Colgate, stealing her roommate’s Twizzlers.”
Russell nodded. We slowed down—I could see there was roadwork ahead, everyone being pushed over into the left lane. “What about you?” He looked across the car at me. “How are you feeling about starting tomorrow?”
“It feels—too soon. Like, we’re here now, in the middle of the desert, and tomorrow I’m going to be in Connecticut? I want more of a transition or something.”
“Fun fact!”
“Bring it on.”
“I’ll play that one next.” When I just stared at him, he shook his head. “Musical joke. Never mind. But! One of the reasons it’s called ‘jet lag’ is that it didn’t exist before planes. When you would, like, cross the ocean to get to Europe, you’d have enough time to be fully adjusted by the time you arrived.”
“Unless you hit an iceberg.”
“Well, exactly. But… is it going to be hard, tomorrow—seeing your mom?”
“I won’t be seeing her tomorrow. She did offer to get me from the airport, but I said no.”
I waited for the surge of anger I always felt when Gillian came up, the one that I invariably pushed away a second later and pretended I wasn’t bothered by. But for the first time in a long time, it didn’t come. I could feel the vestige of it, an outline. Like a crime-scene chalk drawing, representing something that once had been there but wasn’t any longer.
I looked over at the window—this normally would have been the moment I would have played with the button, pressing it up and down. But there really didn’t seem to be much point to that with nonautomatic windows. What was I supposed to do, crank it up and back down again? Russell glanced over at me, like he was waiting for me to say more. I just gave him a shrug, and he gave me a nod—like he was somehow letting me know that when I was ready to talk more about it, he’d be here.
* * *
We headed down the highway, the desert unspooling before us. There were rest stops and service stations, but they were getting fewer and farther between, and most of the signs now were telling us when the next service station was—so that we could prepare accordingly.
And as we drove, an idea was flitting around in my head—and not going away, to the point where I absorbed very little of Russell’s favorite song from A Little Night Music, and when he asked me what I thought, I struggled to find an answer.
“It’s okay,” Russell said, shaking his head. “We don’t have to keep listening to these. I might have hit you with too much Sondheim. It actually helps if you can read the lyrics while listening—”
“I don’t want to stop,” I said, and saw a flicker of relief pass over his face. “I was just thinking… has anyone ever made a musical of Theseus’s Sailboat?”
“No. I kind of think we might be the only two people who’ve ever read it.”
“Don’t you think it would make a good one, though? You did say that musicals can take place over one night. There could be a great love ballad when they first meet. And the campers could have their own songs. And the cat, too.”
“The cat?”
