Everybody Knows Your Name by Andrea Seigel

I.”
    â€œDone. See you out there.” Mila presses the lever to go into her dressing room. But as I’m turning from the door, she pokes her head out. “One more thing. Don’t think differently of me as a person after you see me onstage.” Then she shuts the door.
    â€œWhat?” I say to myself.
    The contestants haven’t been allowed to watch each other in individual rehearsals, so I have no idea what Mila or anyone else actually sings like. We’re going to be seated on the side of the stage during performances because Catherine says they want to “capture the experience of newness on your faces. Like those videos on YouTube where a fat-headed baby gets a load of a sneeze for the first time.”
    â€œMaggie,” Ford calls as I’m continuing down the hallway. I look over.
    â€œNo one really calls me that,” I say, but in a friendly way. I’m feeling very friendly all around this evening.
    â€œWell, maybe I’ll be someone by the time this whole thing is over.” He catches up to me. “Look at you,” he says, meaning my hair.
    â€œWell, look at you too.” They’ve put him in a jacket, kind of like the shape of a letterman one, but in black satin, and a pair of jeans that are tighter than what I’ve seen him wear of his own choosing. His hair is also maybe a little higher than usual in the front.
    He leans against the wall, his body turned toward me, and for some reason this reminds me of how guys will stand against a locker while they’re waiting for you to get your books. It makes me start to run through a theoretical idea of what it would be like if we’d met at school. What would I think of him? What would he think of me? The answers are hard to sort out because we met on top of a weird hotel in the middle of the night in disorienting circumstances. So everything I come up with just seems imaginary.
    â€œDo you have anyone out there to see you?” I ask. He’s got to have someone in the world. I mean, relatives, friends, someone.
    He keeps his eyes on me. “No. Doesn’t matter. I’m excited.”
    My mom’s out there in the third row with McKinley’s mom and one mature, leathery girlfriend of a contestant. I know she’s got to be very, very thrilled right this second, the theater filling with people talking around her and the neon lights running along the stage and top 40 playing in surround sound, even from the rafters.
    And I get this jolt of excitement too, this feeling of something really being about to happen. It comes over me like the world’s most forceful crush. It makes me want to say crazy things to Ford that have no basis in reality. Things about how I wish I could have met him in what I’m imagining as his South (which in my head is mostly based on having read Where the Red Fern Grows in elementary school) because I wish I could already know him. That doesn’t make any sense, I know, but it’s kind of like that feeling of seeing something you really want in a window, so you just want the glass to drop away.
    The air feels like it’s whirring or buzzing around me.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” Ford kind of smiles and tips his head back to look at me out of the bottom of his eyes, like he does.
    â€œIf only we could . . .” is all I can think to say. That’s it. I don’t have the rest.
    â€œCould what?” he asks, but now he’s really smiling at me like he knows something I don’t. The music in the theater gets louder in the background. There’s applause.
    I don’t know how he could have some idea of what I was going to say when I don’t even have a clue, so that makes me say to him, “What? What is it?”
    The stage manager comes running down the hall, yelling that the show is about to start and she needs the girls lined up for our introductory walk and waves. The air is quivering, if air can quiver.
    I