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fumble for my own bottle and take a sip.
    It’s time to get hydrated and get serious.
    “Do I know you?” Jordan says, and I realize I’m staring at him, that my wide-eyed scanning of the last hour has finally met an audience who is looking back.
    “Oh sorry, I—”
    Twin girls bump past me, and I turn to survey a Broadway audition studio teeming with a grab bag of multicultured children, black and white and red and tan. Many of the girls are practicing their splits, and a boy is posed on a skateboard, and two other boys are juggling balls back and forth.
    “Do we have to juggle for this audition?” I say to Jordan suddenly. What am I doing here?
    His Mommy returns, holding that boiling thermos of Jordan-water, and snaps to me: “Can I help you?” But not in an “I want to help you” way, like, at all.
    “Oh, I was just”—I straighten up and drop my bookbag, by now pulling my shoulder into an ache—“wonderingif we had to juggle for this audition. Or do the splits. I just see a lot of kids—”
    “Well, Jordan is on vocal rest,” his Mommy says, squeezing a packet of honey, pulled from her purse, into his water. There appear to be several lemons, as well, in that purse, and a whole mess of lozenges.
    I’ve got lozenges too, I think to myself, and I don’t even have to deal with an overbearing mom.
    “What’s vocal rest?” I say, and Jordan pipes up, breaking some rule I’m sure, and says, “I’m sorry, do we know you?”
    “Well, you’re Jordan Rylance, right? I’m N-n-nate F-f-foster”—pull it together, Nate—“and I go to General Thomas Junior High, across town, and—”
    The very mention of my lower-income school makes Mrs. Rylance go white, like I’d robbed their house or poisoned their poodle (they’re so obviously the type of family with a poodle, probably named Killer or something cutesy).
    “Well, it’s nice to meet you,” Jordan says, reaching out his hand. I shake it, and when he pulls away, his mother—her eyes still locked on me—unsnaps a keychain-Purell and vigorously douses Jordan in it, practically giving him an entire hospital bath.
    “Jordan, baby,” she says. “Shh. Save it for the audition.” She brightens her face. Artificially. “So, what are you singing, Nate ?”
    “Oh, gosh, probably ‘Bigger Isn’t Better’ from the Broadway musical Barnum .”
    “I love that song,” Jordan says. “I used to sing that song when I was a kid.”
    His mother stands up and says to me, like I was caught teasing Killer the poodle, “Okay! Have you signed in yet? You should sign in, because they’re very backlogged and we wouldn’t want you to miss your spot,” and literally turns me around and gives me a teeny shove toward a young woman behind a table in the far corner of the hallway.
    “I’ll see you later, Jordan,” I call back, pushing through the canopy of children—what if there were a fire or something?—into my place in line.
    I see the important young blonde woman behind the check-in table talking to the mother of the girls who bumped past me before. “Are they twins?” the blonde woman says. “They’re so cute.” And their mom has the nerve to say, “Are you looking for twins for the play?” and the young woman says, “Oh, I don’t know, I’m just an assistant in the casting office.”
    There is so much to be confused about here.
    A small tree, something that looks native to the palm family, sprouts from behind the woman, distracting me further: Do palm trees grow in New York? Is this a land where anything is possible, even tropical indoor plants? And are girls even allowed at an audition for the character Elliott?
    When I finally reach the front of the sign-up line, the juggling brothers have tossed a ball into a framed show poster of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , and it crashes to the floor, scattering glass everywhere. The non-twin girls shriek, and the blonde casting assistant woman leaps up, and maybe I should just go. Maybe this is a