Look Both Ways(26)

“No problem,” I say, but I’m really confused now. I’m clearly missing something here, but if there was a rule about doughnuts, wouldn’t my family have told me?

“Get inside,” Solomon says. “The designer’s here, and focus starts in ten minutes. Brooklyn, stick with Courtney today, okay? She’ll show you what to do.”



“Okay,” I say, and when Courtney doesn’t roll her eyes, I know I’ve taken a step in the right direction. I make a big show of attaching my wrench to my belt as I follow her into the theater, and she actually smiles at me. I consider asking her about the doughnuts, but I don’t want to look completely stupid in front of her again, so I keep quiet.

Focus sounds like some sort of relaxation exercise my mom would be into, but it turns out to mean pointing the lights in the right directions and attaching gels, thin pieces of plastic that diffuse and color the beams. Courtney and I are assigned to the lights on the second catwalk, and the designer stands onstage, waving his hands around to indicate where he wants us to point them. I’m pretty slow and clumsy with my wrench, and my first couple of lights take so long, I can see the designer getting frustrated. But Courtney is surprisingly patient with me, and after a while, it starts to get easier. Every time one of the guys on the crew walks by, he smiles at me, which is a distinct improvement over the way they’ve ignored me all week. Courtney keeps snapping at them to leave me alone, and I wonder if maybe she’s a little jealous.

By the time the day is over, I’ve successfully focused a bunch of lights by myself. As I leave, Solomon says, “Good work today,” and I actually feel like it’s genuine. It’s the first time I’ve left the theater with a feeling of accomplished exhaustion instead of humiliated exhaustion, and all I want to do is tell Zoe about it.

I check the electronic call board on my phone and see that she gets out of Midsummer rehearsal in twenty minutes, so I head over to Haydu to wait for her. The dance studio has a window set into the door, and through it I see the woman playing Titania, queen of the fairies, doing a monologue in the center of the room. Zoe and the rest of the fairies are running and leaping and spinning around her, gorgeous and graceful. When the choreographer stops the girls, Zoe leans over and says something to Livvy, who laughs. It’s so unfair that all these people get to spend entire days in this room with her while I’m stuck in the catwalks.



Rehearsal finally ends, and everyone puts on their shoes and gathers their things. When Zoe heads toward the door, my hand flies up to make sure my hair looks okay, and then I immediately feel ridiculous. Why would she care how my hair looks?

“Hey!” she calls when she notices me. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d see if you guys were done before I went to dinner.”

“Aw, thanks for waiting,” she says, like I have this whole other group of friends I could be eating with instead.

“I forgot my wallet,” Livvy says. “Meet you guys there?”

“Sure,” I say. As I watch her go, I wonder if being alone with Zoe will feel different now that we’ve connected on such a deep level. I wait for my friend to give me a hug or say something about how much she enjoyed our conversation last night, but she just heads toward the dining hall like everything’s totally normal. I rack my brain for something fascinating to say.



“You guys looked really good in there,” is what I come up with.

It’s not exactly insightful, but Zoe smiles. “Oh, were you watching? How much did you see?”

“Not that much,” I say. “There was a lot of leaping and spinning. It looked exhausting.”

“It was,” she says. “I could eat, like, six sandwiches right now.”

None of this feels any different from how it would’ve felt yesterday afternoon, which is a little disappointing. I’m trying to think of a way to tell her how much last night meant to me, when she says, “Hey, where were you this morning? I woke up at eight-fifteen, and you were already gone.”

“I left early so I could get doughnuts for the lighting people.”

Zoe stops walking. “You brought doughnuts?”

“Yeah. I thought—”

She smacks me on the arm. “Brooklyn! We talked for hours last night! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“Tell me who it was!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

Zoe claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh God,” she says. “You don’t know about the doughnuts, do you?” She sounds gleeful and horrified in equal parts, and my stomach drops like it does when someone says, We need to talk.

“I don’t know what about the doughnuts?” I ask. “Just tell me.”

“When you bring doughnuts in the morning, it means you hooked up with someone the night before. It’s like insurance. If you give someone a doughnut, they’re not allowed to ask you questions, and if they find out who it is, they have to keep it a secret. I can’t believe nobody told you.”



Everything starts to click into place. The way Douchebands reacted when I said, Why wait when doughnuts are involved? Solomon’s comment about following the rules. The way every guy who passed me in the catwalks today made a point of smiling at me. I stepped up and claimed those doughnuts like they were an accomplishment. I am officially the biggest idiot in the world. I can’t believe my family told me about all the best nooks for secret sex but didn’t bother to warn me about this.