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really
    hafta pee!
    We had always talked about going to Wildewood together. Everything, everything we did was together, everything—and now, there he was, walking into a red-brick building, popping back out to give his name to another, different clipboard person, getting his info packet, and disappearing again.
    Gone.
    My dad lugged my bags into my dormitory while I looked at a map of the campus and got my own info packet from a counselor.
    “Do you want to come around with me and see the dance studios?” I asked, when my father returned. “They have five different theaters, too.”
    He looked at his watch.
    “Come on, Dad,” I pleaded. “You can take me to lunch and see what the cafeteria food’s like.”
    “I want to beat the traffic home, Sarah. Your mother wants me to look at some tile this afternoon.”
    “But she’s done with the floor.”
    “This is for the backsplash.”
    “You can’t even walk around a bit, stretch your legs?”
    He patted my shoulder. “I’d better be going.” He gave me a kiss and got in the minivan.
    T HE DANCE studios were a cluster of rooms on the ground floor of an old stone building, with windows set high in the walls and doors open to the warm June air. There was no one around, so I went in.
    The floors were scuffed, but the mirrors glowed and the pianos were baby grands—nothing like the battered uprights that had stood in the corners of Miss Delilah’s rooms. I tapped a little, in my boots, then strolled down the hall to look at the girls’ changing room. It had a large mirror outlined in lightbulbs and it stank with the familiar smell of sweat and shoe leather. I flipped a switch to turn the bulbs on and looked at myself in the glass; the too-bright light made me look older. I stared at my short, nearly black hair, the heavy eye makeup, the knee-high boots with bare legs, the purple suede mini, the glitter nail polish.
    No one at Wildewood has ever met Sarah Paulson, I thought.
    And none of them ever would. Here, I could be Sadye through and through. I could work my big nose, my gawky-sexiness, my height, my Broadway obsessions. Everything that made me out of place in Brenton would make me special here. I would let my Bigness out. Not just to Demi.
    To the wide, wild world.
    “Sadye, Sadye, Sadye,” I whispered to the girl in the mirror. “Show me what you can do.”
    * * *

S OMEONE WAS playing piano in one of the studios. “Big Spender.” The song from Sweet Charity . It requires horns—it’s a hooting, bawdy number sung by a posse of down-and-out girls who get paid to dance with men at a seedy club—but the piano arrangement sounded pretty good. I went down the hall and looked in.
    A boy my age sat at the baby grand. He was Asian American, medium weight, and looked to be about my height. Shaggy black hair and a long oval face. A wide nose that might have been broken once. Sharp eyes and a faded blue T-shirt. He was looking down at the piano in complete concentration. I could see his back muscles working through the thin fabric. He had almost no hair on his arms.
    I walked up to the piano and leaned over it, watching him play.
    He didn’t look up, but I could tell he knew I was there. He was sweating slightly in the heat.
    I’d never seen a guy my own age play the piano. It was like sex and musical theater fused together.
    A bead of moisture slid down his neck.
    “I think Charity is one of the great underrated musicals,” I said, when “Big Spender” ended. “But I don’t know about that Christina Applegate version. I like Shirley MacLaine better.”
    “They’re all too old.” The boy glanced up at me but played a few chords from what I think was “Rich Man’s Frug” with his right hand. “Gwen Verdon and Debbie Allen were too old, too.”
    “Did you see Christina? I only have the album.”
    “I live in Brooklyn,” he said. “I go fairly often if I don’t spend my money on pizza.”
    “How was she?”
    “Good. She was good. But I think