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seeming inconsistency in her behavior.
    Annie shrugs again. “He said he had things to do during eighth period.”
    And just like that, she is back to being herself. The world crashes back into place around me, and I feel like an idiot.
    We head to study hall to pass the time until the final bell. Leticia and Diane wave us over to their table, and we swerve to join them. After a minute, Billy and Kelly sit down in the last two seats at the far end.
    I drop my eyes without meaning to and feel Annie’s glance of concern from beside me. I look at her and make a disgusted face, and she gives me a sympathetic smile. Kelly Nolan is the girl Billy started dating about five seconds after he told me that it wasn’t “working out.” She is lovely and petite with gorgeous red-blond hair that she often wears twisted up in some seemingly quick and casual way that I could never pull off even with a team of professional hairdressers to help me. She is one of those girls who don’t ever seem to have a bad hair day or a zit or to even once make a regrettable clothing purchase. One secretly suspects that she never gets her period or goes to the bathroom, either. We hate her on principle, even though she is actually perfectly nice.
    And really, I don’t even care that they are together. I don’t want Billy. I want Ryan Halsey. Ryan is twenty times the boy Billy is. Fifty times. Possibly a hundred. And I am way more interesting and intelligent than Kelly Nolan. But I don’t really want to watch them making kissy faces at each other all through study hall, either. It’s kind of insulting.
    Even though I know she has a test to study for tomorrow, Annie spends the whole period drawing me little stick-figure pictures to distract me from our lovebird tablemates. I end up being shushed twice by the teacher on duty for laughing, and by the time the bell rings I have stopped feeling at all weird or uncomfortable or vaguely and stupidly inferior.
    Sometimes I love Annie so much I can hardly stand it.
    Usually Annie sticks around on Mondays both to keep me company and to make actual use of study hall, because her house is always filled with small, loud children in the afternoons, her little brother and sister and their seemingly infinite number of small, loud friends who apparently do not have homes of their own to go to after school, and so it’s impossible for her to get any studying done there. I stick around because I am tech director for the fall musical this year, which rehearses Monday and Wednesday afternoons.
    I love musical theater, have loved it fiercely and unwaveringly ever since my parents took me to see a local community theater production of
Pippin
when I was five. I’ve experimented with being onstage a few times over the years (most memorably as Teresa the Turkey in our fourth-grade Thanksgiving assembly, which I don’t think I will ever entirely live down), but as much as I love and appreciate the music and the singing and the acting, my true devotion is for the secret magic that happens behind the scenes. Even at age five, what most captivated me was the seamless shifting of the sets and the mysteries of how what was obviously just an empty wooden floor with some curtains around it could be transformed into another time and place so convincingly that everyone in the audience completely and absolutely believed it.
    And since Mary Chang, who was the reigning queen of backstagery for the past three years, is now off enjoying her first year as a college student at Syracuse University, Mr. Henry came to me when this year’s show was announced and asked me to be the new tech director. Which (as Mr. H. is fully aware) has been my not-so-secret ambition since freshman year, and I am determined to make him proud.
    The set this year is, of course, the most challenging one we’ve ever attempted. We’re doing
Sweeney Todd,
which, in case you are somehow unfamiliar with one of the best Sondheim musicals EVER, is about an insane