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if she were washing them. It makes her appear nervous.
    Maya is not acting this fall. She’s focusing on her applications. She’s applying to the theater programs at Northwestern, NYU, and UCLA. She’s also applying to Stanford, which she feels is a long shot despite her good grades. Maya will also be directing one of the five student-directed plays this fall, but that is less important than figuring out where she will be next year, which school will let her become what she has always dreamed of becoming: an actor.
    When Maya acts, she is not nervous. Her fidgeting disappears.
    â€œIt’s the most relaxing thing ever. Ever, ” she says. In the many roles she’s had, from those in The Seagull to Caucasian Chalk Circle, Maya has a certain stage presence. Even playing the weird strung-out characters she prefers, she has an uncanny calmness. Eyes gravitate to her. It’s as if she’s not acting.
    Ms. Murphy says Maya writes like a dream. Ms. Murphy also says that Maya is the girl Ms. Murphy would have wanted to be in high school. An actor, a writer, someone smart and pretty. Maya invites this sort of admiration, and yet this is the same girl who, sitting in class now, has just put a sizable chunk of her hair into her mouth and is chewing it.
    Maya’s two older sisters often ask her why she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Her friends from Bourbonnais, the small town in Illinois where she grew up, wonder the same thing. All her friends in Bourbonnais have boyfriends. They all go with their boyfriends to their high school dances. Maya tells them that in Chicago, things are different. It’s a cultural thing. Here, students go to parties and hook up.
    In any case, the differences don’t matter to Maya. She doesn’t like going to parties, or to dances. She’d rather go to a play.
    In two months, Maya will turn eighteen. Despite the prodding from her Bourbonnais friends and her sisters, she doesn’t want a boyfriend. Not one at Payton anyway. The boys at Payton are “always there .” Like the two good-looking shaggy-haired boys sitting on either side of her, she’s with them all the time. They’re just friends. They hold no attraction for her.
    â€œI’ve gone through them all,” she says, “in my head.”
    A teacher hops onto a bench in the atrium and starts shouting instructions. No sunglasses, no gum, no iPods, no pagers. Cell phones, if they are brought, must be turned off.
    Some English classes are taking a field trip to Steppenwolf Theatre. After the buses drop everyone off at the theater, the students are herded to their seats. A Steppenwolf representative comes onstage and reiterates what is not allowed. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Cell phones, of course, must be turned off .
    The lights go down, the play begins: Athol Fugard’s “ Master Harold” . . . and the Boys . The performance proceeds with all the professionalism and attention one would expect of one of the country’s best theaters, and then, right in the middle of the climactic scene, from the back of the theater, brreeeiinnngg . A cell phone. No way. The students swivel their heads to see who could be so incredibly dumb. Somebody is in big trouble. Well, no. Jumping out of his seat and out the theater door to answer his cell phone is K. Todd Freeman, the play’s middle-aged director.
    Diana Martinez and Sandra are best friends. Suki used to be their best friend too. Last year it was the three of them, inseparable. Diana, Sandra, Suki. They hung out during school, they went shopping after school, and at night they talked on the phone for hours. Sometimes they’d coordinate and come to school the following day in matching outfits.
    But this year, something happened between Suki and the other two, and Diana is not sure what.
    â€œIt’s not like she told my secret or anything, it’s not like I told hers,” she says quietly as she shuffles