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been watching.
    Andre came up onto the stage. “Excellent work today, everyone. Truly great job, Lucy.” He squeezed my shoulder.
    I couldn’t help glancing at Elyse out in the audience. Did I detect a hint of jealousy in her gloomy expression?
    Andre kept me a few minutes after to give me some notes, so most of my castmates were already gone by the time I packed up my things and left the auditorium.
    I was surprised to find Evan waiting for me in the deserted hallway.
    “Hey,” I said.
    He grinned and gave me a fist bump. “You killed it up there today,” he said as we walked to the parking lot.
    “Thanks. I had no idea everyone was watching.”
    “We weren’t at first, but how could we not be lured in by a beautiful girl shouting about giant cups of liquor and an old hag giving sex dreams to virgins? It was rad.”
    Beautiful girl? A deep blush warmed my cheeks.
    “So, Lucy, you’re single now, right?” Evan asked casually.
    “Um, yeah.”
    He nodded. “Would you go out with me this weekend?”
    “Go out?” I’d never been asked out on an actual date before. Ty and I had just sort of fallen together, growing closer as we spent time together at rehearsals and cast parties. There hadn’t been much of an official courtship period.
    “Yeah, you know, like I pick you up at your house and we go eat food together and maybe see a movie or something?”
    I’d never really thought about Evan that way, but maybe this could be good. “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
    • • •
    Saturday night, he showed up at my doorstep at exactly seven o’clock. He looked different somehow. Maybe it was the absence of his baseball cap or the fact that he was wearing a gray button-down shirt that I’d never seen before. Or maybe it was that I was looking at him differently now. He was no longer just Evan, the new guy who had an encyclopedic knowledge about sword fighting. Now he was Evan, the guy who liked me, with whom I was about to spend the evening alone.
    “You look really nice,” he said.
    “Thank you,” I said, glad Max had convinced me to wear a dress. “Want to meet my parents?” He didn’t have much of a choice, since my dads were standing right behind me, dorky grins on their faces. Luckily, Lisa seemed to be lying low tonight—I wondered if my dads had asked her to stay in her room or if she did it on her own.
    Evan’s smile melted to surprise for the smallest fragment of a second as he added up the me + father + father equation, but he pulled it together a lot quicker than most people did, and the friendly smile returned to his face.
    I introduced him to Dad and Papa, they all shook hands, my dads made the generic “treat our daughter well” remarks, and we were on our way.
    “You have two dads,” Evan said as we drove down the street.
    “Indeed I do,” I agreed.
    “What’s that like?” he asked.
    I had to admire his brazenness. My town was pretty liberal as suburbs go, and my family had always been welcomed and accepted in Eleanor Falls, but people rarely asked direct gay-parent-related questions. They either overcompensated and acted like two men raising a teenage daughter was as commonplace as blue jeans and whitening toothpaste, though we always knew it was all they were thinking about, or they waited until they got to know us well before building up the courage to ask about it. But Evan had learned of my unconventional family all of two minutes ago and already he was asking questions. It was refreshing.
    “It’s all I’ve ever known,” I said, shrugging. “It’s normal to me.”
    “Are you adopted?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “Not totally. I was half-adopted.”
    By the time I finished explaining the whole bio-dad/adopted-dad thing, we were at the restaurant.
    After we ordered, Evan picked the conversation right back up and asked the question that no one had ever asked me outright before. “Have you ever met your biological mother?” It caught me off guard.
    I took a sip of my