Where I End and You Begin

by Preston Norton

  He looked at Wynezra for some sort of explanation. But as far as Wynezra knew, Holden was talking about a tree. Or Warwick Davis. She glanced desperately at me for clarification.

  “Isn’t that your little sister, Ezra?” I said. I nodded my head hintingly at Willow.

  “Uh, I guess so,” said Wynezra. Her momentary panic subsided into a smoke screen of cool indifference. “Like I give a shit.”

  She sat down.

  Willow had been ignoring me for months. So I was just a little bit shocked that she seemed genuinely hurt.

  Holden was baffled. He glanced from Willow to Wynezra. Since Wynezra had been acting weird all day, he returned his concern to Willow, who was honestly kind of like a little sister to him. “Did you actually sign up, or is this a detention thing?”

  Willow shrugged uncomfortably, indicating this was definitely a detention thing.

  “Holy shit,” said Holden. “What did you do?”

  “Holden, mi compadre,” said Ziggy. “We don’t ask people what they did here. What they did is in the past. We only ask what they’re going to do. Think forward, not backward.”

  Then he directed a sad glance at Wynezra.

  “And you should always give a shit about your little sister.”

  Wynezra’s arms were folded in a knot. She gave a shrug that only seemed to emphasize the lack of shits she gave.

  Jayden Hoxsie—sitting on the exact opposite end of the circle from Willow—gave a douche-y snicker and winked at Willow.

  “Bitch,” he whispered.

  “Yeah, fuck you, too, Hoxsie,” said Wynezra.

  Wynezra seemed to have forgotten that she was not Wynonna Jones, who took no shit from nobody, but rather Ezra Slevin, shit depository personified. Or, at least, quiet and submissive witness to any and all shit flung anywhere.

  Jayden Hoxsie bolted up from his seat so fast, his theater chair thundered up and down.

  “What did you say?” said Jayden.

  Wynezra didn’t back down.

  “Well, what I said was ‘fuck you, too,’” said Wynezra. “But what I meant was, go buy a shirt that fits, you irrelevant fucktrumpet. No one wants to see your knobby little nipples.”

  By the time Jayden started charging Wynezra, Ziggy intervened like a giant human rubber band, slingshot into the fray.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” said Ziggy, hands raised. “Let’s cool our jets, yeah? Just simmer on down now. Yeah, that’s it. Let’s not get detention all over our detention.”

  Wynezra sat down, not giving a microscopic fuck more than she did fifteen seconds ago. Jayden, meanwhile, looked like an irritated cat—spine arched, face pulled back, every hair on his body an exclamation point. Finally, with great suppression of douchery, he managed to sit down without spouting a lame insult out of his douche nozzle.

  Let me just say: I had never seen me act like such a badass in my entire life.

  It was just a little bit discouraging to remind myself that it wasn’t me.

  Holden, looking like every truth he knew in the world was false, sat down quietly. I started to sit down—a seat away from Holden—but Imogen swiftly butted in front of me. Stole the seat. Winked and wobbled her head at the seat between her and Holden.

  I sighed and sat down.

  It was only now—after Willow’s presence had fully settled—that I was able to absorb everyone else in attendance. There were fourteen other kids—eighteen of us total—most of whom were not terribly surprising. The ones I recognized included:

  Tucker Cook—local redneck and aspiring pyromaniac. He was a wiry, freckled, blond-haired menace who got in trouble last year for “having a Harry Potter fight” with his older brothers in the school parking lot. What they were actually doing was shooting one another with Roman candles. But, to be fair, Tucker kept yelling, “Stupefy!” and “Avada Kedavra!”

  Daisy Munk—she was huge. And I don’t mean fat. She was Piles Fork’s very own Brienne of Tarth. She was devastatingly huge, and even more quiet. So when the entire football team decided that slapping Daisy’s ass was fun, she said nothing. When it became their new official side-sport, and they started keeping score, keeping tally on a whiteboard in the boys’ locker room, she said nothing. When she finally reached a breaking point, grabbed running back Nick Swenson’s arm, and broke it on the nearest doorframe, she said nothing. When rumors started spreading that the violence was the result of months of sexual harassment, and she was asked to testify at a school board meeting…Well, you get the idea. With no victim testimony, there was no way to hold the boys accountable, and only Daisy was punished.

  Sebastian O’Hara—an urban legend. Most of it was speculation and hearsay, but the “story” was that he was in a relationship with a boy named Oscar who went to Trinity Christian Academy. When it came out among Oscar’s peers that he was dating a boy, he became the target of a vicious—sometimes even violent—bullying campaign. One incident left Oscar hospitalized with a broken wrist, fractured rib, and a concussion. The headmaster dismissed it as “falling down the stairs”—but thank actual God for the three boys who “witnessed the accident” and reported it immediately! What followed was something out of a slasher film. For the next several weeks, Sebastian stalked those three boys—reportedly wearing an antique rubber Captain Kirk mask that he ordered online. If you’re familiar with the fun facts of the 1978 horror classic, Halloween, that’s exactly what Michael Myers wore—only spray-painted white. Sebastian didn’t bother spray-painting his; it was scary enough on its own. Sebastian cornered those boys individually—in dark neighborhoods, hallways, isolated public restrooms, etc. Of course, these were only rumors, but in no variation of this story did those three boys walk out of the situation without serious psychological trauma.

  Patrick Durfee—Willow’s ex-boyfriend. I actually liked Patrick. I mean, he was kind of a wiener—gawky, skinny to the point of resembling a fragile baby bird—but he was always nice and polite. And he was a freshman. He earned major points for being Willow’s age. And for the fact that, ever since Willow broke up with him, I kept discovering unfamiliar cars in my driveway. God, why couldn’t we revert to a matchmaking society where older brothers chose suitors for their littler sisters?

  Ziggy hoisted himself onto the lip of the stage and sat facing us, suede Supra Stacks dangling. Meanwhile we, his theater class—allegedly all detention kids, here by coercion or threat—were scattered across the red theater seating like the last survivors of a grueling game of checkers. Ziggy had us go around the room—top to bottom, left to right—stating our name, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and our favorite Shakespeare play. (What a loaded question.) Some people took this very seriously. Imogen, for example, wanted to be an obstetrician—whatever the hell that was—and her favorite Shakespeare was Much Ado about Nothing. Then there were others, such as Tucker Cook, who wanted to be a wizard, and his favorite Shakespeare was The Lord of the Rings.

  “Lord of the Rings isn’t Shakespeare,” said Ziggy.

  “What?” said Tucker. “Yeah, it is.”

  Willow was the last person in the circle. She wanted to be “happy” when she grew up—how very emo of her—and her favorite Shakespeare was “Romeo and Juliet, the DiCaprio version.”

  “All right, my turn,” said Ziggy. He clapped his hands together and ran a Keanu Reeves hand through his Keanu Reeves hair. “Well, not to toot my own horn, but I’m doing what I wanted to do when I grew up. That is, operating dangerous machinery at school, hanging out with all you cool kids, and making some Shakespeare magic. And, not to be clichéd or anything, but my favorite Shakespeare is Hamlet. Can anyone quoth me some Hamlet?”

  “To be, or not to be?” half a dozen kids muttered in unenthusiastic chorus.

  “To be, or not to be?” said Ziggy. “The ultimate existential question. What most people don’t realize—people who only know that line out of context—is that Hamlet is contemplating suicide.”

  Sebastian had whispered something to Daisy that made her la
ugh—something I had never seen her do before. At the words “contemplating suicide,” however, they both went silent.

  “Now, a lot of people think Hamlet is just a whiny little tool,” said Ziggy, “but you need to understand where he’s coming from. His dad was murdered by his uncle. His mom has gotten remarried to that very same uncle! Who wouldn’t be upset? If you ask me, he has every right to complain—even if it’s just through the fourth wall to an unseen audience. At first, he’s listing off the pros and cons of death, and honestly, it’s mostly pros. He compares death to a ‘little sleep,’ which doesn’t sound so bad. But then he wonders: Do we dream when we’re dead? And if so, would they be bad dreams? Nightmares? The fact of the matter is that our existence after death is unknowable, and it’s that sense of the unknown that truly scares him. The only thing greater than that unknown is the inevitability of death. So, if we all die, does it matter when? Does it matter how? Does it matter if our life is taken by another human being? Are we merely prolonging the inevitable? Hamlet is asking the big questions, and he’s not just asking them for himself. If you ever get a chance to read his soliloquy, note that he never says ‘I’ or ‘me.’ Never. So, when he says ‘to be, or not to be,’ he’s talking about life itself. He’s asking whether or not people should exist.”

  Ziggy interlocked his fingers. Stared infinitely at the floor, through an invisible portal in time.

  “When I first read that,” he said, “I was going through some heavy stuff in my life. I asked myself, ‘Should I exist? Do I have a reason for my existence?’ And honestly, I couldn’t think of one. Not one single reason. But somehow, that didn’t make me want to end things the way I thought it would. Instead, it made me want to find a reason for my existence. That was the start of a quest for me. Just as I hope that this introduction to Shakespeare will be the start of a quest for you.”

  Ziggy hoisted his legs onto the ledge and stood up. Tucked his hands behind his back and paced, exploring the generous stage space.

  “Twelfth Night may not be as heavy as Hamlet,” he said, “but it tackles some themes: the thin line between love and suffering, the ambiguity of gender, the folly of ambition. Although this is mostly told in the form of a hilarious love triangle.”

  Ziggy went on to explain the nuts and bolts of Twelfth Night: a shipwreck separates Viola from her twin brother, Sebastian. (Yep, a fictional Sebastian. Three guesses who gets his part.) Viola thinks Sebastian is dead. She disguises herself as a man, takes on the name Cesario, and gets a job serving Duke Orsino, who she decides is a hunk, a hunk of burning love. Duke Orsino, however, has his sights set on the wealthy countess Olivia. The Duke asks Cesario—aka Viola—to woo Olivia for him. Olivia, however, has a thing for Cesario and confesses her love to “him.”

  This is the main story of Twelfth Night. But there’s also a weird side story in which Olivia’s steward, Malvolio—who is kind of a pompous dillweed—gets pranked by other characters in Olivia’s social sphere into thinking that Olivia has a thing for him. The cast of characters in on this Elizabethan-era episode of Punk’d includes: Olivia’s chaotic uncle, Sir Toby Belch; her rich would-be suiter, Sir Andrew Aguecheek; her servants, Maria and Fabian; and her melancholy jester, Feste.

  Basically, everyone hates Malvolio, and you would, too, if you knew him, and he is about to get what was coming to him

  “Now that we’ve got that out of the way,” said Ziggy, “let’s talk about auditions. They’re happening right now.”

  The entire circle’s reactions ranged from “Huh?” to “Shit” to “Sweet baby Jesus on a unicorn in outer space.” That last one was unspoken, but I could see the essence of it in Imogen’s eyes.

  Okay, maybe I was projecting. That’s what I was thinking. But to be fair, Imogen didn’t seem like she wasn’t thinking it. Her dilated pupils were like tiny screaming mouths.

  Ziggy walked offstage, vanished behind a frumpy red curtain, and returned with a Proustian stack of typed pages. They were divided intermittently by sheets of construction paper, separating individual scripts.

  “Here’s how this is going to work,” said Ziggy. “I’m gonna pass these scripts around. Then I’m going to give you five minutes to collect yourselves.”

  “Five minutes!” said Imogen, in a high-pitched, last-dying-words sort of way.

  “Then you’re going to tell me which character—or characterrrssss—you’re interested in. If you’re interested in any. And then you’re going to read—or dare I say, recite—the lines of your choosing. Then I’ll decide the role that I think you’re best suited for. This will all be very fast-paced, and I’m sure many of you will think I’m an unfair, authoritarian douchemonger, but we’re about a month behind schedule, so that’s how we’re gonna roll. Any questions?”

  The entire theater was a mausoleum of silence. Ziggy hopped down from the stage and was already handing out scripts. If there were any questions, they were transmitted in the form of Morse code through our rapidly escalating heartbeats.

  He handed the final script to Willow. She accepted it like a copy of her own obituary.

  Imogen turned to me and gripped me rather insanely by the shoulders. Her eyes were canvases of painted madness.

  “I need the next five minutes exclusively to myself,” she said, all in one breath. “Is that okay?”

  It was a Shakespearean miracle is what it was.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, shrugging casually.

  I hadn’t even finished saying “sure” before Imogen hugged me, and then slid off her seat and plopped herself on the floor. Seeing as we were in the front row, she immediately set to spreading the pages across the cold, painted concrete, drilling her focus into every line underneath the name Viola.

  The miracles didn’t stop there. Holden raised a bored hand and asked, “Is there a bathroom? I have to take a massive number two.”

  “Good god,” said Sebastian. “You wanna tell us the texture and consistency while you’re at it?”

  “I would if I was a fortune-teller,” said Holden. “Rain check?”

  He winked at Sebastian, who proceeded to make a visible retching motion with his face.

  “Out the door, around the corner to the left,” Ziggy said, pointing in an ambiguously leftish direction. “The toilet paper’s running low, though, and I forgot to buy more, so wipe with trepidation.”

  Holden was already jogging to the bathroom, shouting, “YOU’RE FIRED, ZIGGY.”

  After Holden reached the door and slammed it behind him, Ziggy chuckled and said in a low voice, “There’s a brand-new twenty-four-pack under the sink. I just wanted to make him sweat.”

  That comment seemed to push the imagery in Sebastian’s visual register into meltdown mode. He gagged.

  Meanwhile, I looked at Wynezra, and Wynezra looked at me, and the words our eyeballs said were “We should talk.” We both stood up with our scripts and wandered nonchalantly up either aisle of stairs leading to the back of the theater. At this point, I was becoming quite skilled at not walking like an idiot in heels. We stopped several feet apart, backs facing the stage, staring vaguely at the same faded, blood-colored wall.

  “I need you to get me the role of Duke Orsino,” I said.

  “Oh my god,” said Wynezra. “Why, pray tell, do you need the role of Duke Arsenal?”

  “Or-sin-o!”

  “Whatever!”

  “I need it,” I said, “because it will get me close to Imogen.”

  “Oh gaaawwwwd,” said Wynezra.

  “Imogen is obsessed with this play. She’s determined to be Viola, and I’m sure she’ll get it. She’ll put everything into this role. And that entire role revolves around her fawning over the Duke. We agreed to help each other, right? I need you to do this for me, Wynonna. Will you help me, or won’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No?” I said. I wondered if I was mixing up her meaning with a double negative. “No, you won’t…not help me?”

  “No, I won’t help you, Ezra! Not with th
is. I’m sorry.”

  “You have to help me! We made a deal. I help you, you help me.”

  “It’s not that I won’t help you. It’s that I can’t help you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. You have to know what I mean by now. Don’t make me say it.”

  “Say what?” I said. I was thoroughly perturbed at this point. “That you’re selfish, dishonest—”

  “I’M DYSLEXIC,” Wynezra screamed quietly through her teeth. Or my teeth. Once again, I faced the bizarre sensation of a stranger doing things with my face that had never been done before. In this case, I was staring at a version of Ezra Slevin who looked like he could kill me.

  And then the words sank in.

  “Dyslexic?” I repeated. I couldn’t hide the shock in my voice.

  “Seriously?” said Wynezra. “You sat through an entire day of my classes. There’s no way you didn’t notice.”

  “I mean, they were mostly lectures…” I started to say. But I remembered all too clearly Wynonna’s Kryptos-wannabe class schedule. The cipheric text messages.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Wynezra, nodding furiously. “Shit is right. That is what I’ve had to deal with every day of my entire fucking life. At least, until we started jumping bodies. It may be your consciousness, Ezra, but it’s stuck inside my brain. And my brain was not built to read. Ever.”

  As I processed what she was saying, I became acutely aware of the stack of pages—filled with words—clutched in my now-sweaty grasp. My eyes wavered ever so slightly.

  Wynezra noticed.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Look at it. Soak it all in.”

  I lifted the stack of pages. Slowly, like a spacecraft on an alien planet, my gaze lowered onto the first page.

  TLEWFT NHIGT

  Atc 1, sence 1. Dkue Osrno’is Pcalea

  Etenr DUEK ONISOR, CRIUO, adn oehtr Ldros; Msuicanis anettnidg

  DEKU ONISRO

  Fi misuc be hte food of lvoe, paly on;

  Gvie em excsse oi ft, taht, srufienitg,

  Duke Orsino’s line—I’m sure it was his—went much further beyond that, but I had to look away, because the letters were moving. The entire page looked like it had been printed on the surface of a small ocean that I was gazing down at from a helicopter view. It was swaying and flowing in such a way that it left me dizzy trying to decipher it.