Page 35 of In What World

She’s mine, I think again.

Whatever that means.

11

Marlowe

Dallas isn’t inthe costume room. Or his office. Or the dressing room.

“Those little fucking liars,” Cilla mutters.

“Don’t swear,” I remind her.

“What happens if I do?” she asks with her cat-that-got-the-cream grin. “I get detention? I bet Dallas will get me out of it the same way he used to back in the day.”

“That wastrue?”

“My talent couldn’t be wasted sitting in a random classroom for an hour when I was supposed to be rehearsing,” Cilla says. “Don’t worry, I still suffered. He made me do community service in the mornings instead. I actually planted flowers along the back of the school once. I did a great job.”

We walk the halls side by side, not working very hard to fly under the radar. A few students pass us and do a double take, probably wondering when Ms. Covington-French made such a drastic transformation. Or maybe recognizing me as famous?They do have the same gigantic posters here, but this time they’re all of Mars.

“Wow,” I say when we get close enough to view them in detail.

They bring the reality of this place into sharper focus. We’re in the world where I made it in acting, and Cilla is the one assistant-directing Dallas’s shows at WRHS. Even though a part of me feels vindicated to know another version of me created a successful career in acting, there’s also a part of me feeling stripped bare as I stare into my own eyes blown up to quadruple their size.

“They chose good pictures of you. Or excuse me, ofMars,” Cilla admits. “I’m sureMarsrequested photo approval.Marsprobably had her own team retouch them.”

Her repeated use of Famous Marlowe’s stage name is intentional. She wants to show me how strange it sounds. I’m not the me who picked it. And I didn’t pick her stage name either.

“Is that what you did for the posters of you up in our school?” I ask her. When she doesn’t answer, I nod in satisfaction. “I knew you didn’t look that good naturally.”

She coughs out a “Wow” that attempts to be casual, but even I can recognize I’ve gone too far. I can be harsh, but I’m rarely mean. Not intentionally, at least. Not like Famous Mars can be.

“No, no,” I say, confused by the way my long-standing boundaries with her have suddenly blurred. I can’t remember how to do our usual rapport. The loaded conversation we had with our doubles has done some kind of factory reset on my attitude, and I’m still waiting for my system to reboot and restore all of my usual annoyance and frustration with her.

“I just mean…you look so perfect on the posters,” I explain.

“And in everyday life, you’ve realized I’m hideous?” she asks.

“Oh, shut up. Fishing for compliments is beneath you. You know you look beautiful.”

It’s a simple word. One that gets used so often it hardly has meaning anymore. But I’ve never called her beautiful before, and it makes my whole body go tight, anticipating the teasing that’s sure to follow.

Instead, that familiar blotchy redness crawls up her neck.

I’ve affected her.I, Marlowe Jenkins, have made the famous Cilla Cove blush by calling her beautiful. It’s not a revelatory thing to say, and not an original way to put it either. If I went on her Instagram right now, I could find a hundred comments that praise her beauty in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

“Not to be too One Direction about this, but you don’t know you’re beautiful? That can’t be true,” I insist.

“Please be even more One Direction about this,” she replies gamely. Her voice has gotten closer to the version of her I knew all those years ago. There isn’t any of that self-satisfied flourish she does in her interviews. There’s even a hint of a Midwestern accent waking up again, flattening hera’s ando’s.

“When I first cut off my hair, I went even shorter than it is right now, and my students started calling me Harriet Styles,” I admit, getting an immediate cackle from her. “It was right after his album came out in 2022. They wouldn’t let up. The way the current kids tease me about constantly wearing sweater-vests is nothing in comparison. For the end-of-the-year assembly, I gathered four of my favorite coworkers and we did a performance to One Direction’s ‘Best Song Ever.’ ”

“Were you Harry Styles?” she asks.

“Is water wet? Of course I was,” I say. “The kids were all so shocked by my commitment that none of them knew if it wasworth it to make fun of me anymore. Not that they were necessarily making fun of me then. It was right on the cusp. But with moves like this”—I do my best boy band–like dance move spin—“they were forced to give up Harriet Styles and return to Ms. Jenkins out of fear I might break into song again.”

Cilla cackles once more. “You’re dancing more than the actual members of One Direction did.”