by Ted Michael
She was also, as far as I could tell, a perfectly nice girl. Which made it impossible to out-and-out hate her. Which was annoying.
Alicia glided up to Ms. Yowell’s desk. And then two important things happened:
1. She glanced over at me. Well, not at me, it took me about two seconds to figure out, but at the guy sitting next to me. Jonathan Renault, basketball player. At that moment he was tapping his pencil against his desk rhythmically, chewing on his bottom lip, agonizing over why he was expected to care about that darned Mr. Darcy, but then, almost like he could feel Alicia’s eyes on him, he looked up. He saw Alicia, and the tapping stopped. The lip chewing stopped. He smiled. And she smiled back. It was one of those shared smiles like a current of electricity passing between the two of them.
And then?
2. Ms. Yowell said, “Yes, that would be fine,” to answer the question I hadn’t heard Alicia ask, and Alicia looked away from Jonathan quickly and handed Ms. Yowell the stack of bright blue papers she’d been clutching to her chest, stealing one more tiny peek at Jonathan as she slipped out of the room.
Interesting, I thought. Very interesting.
The blue papers turned out to be flyers, announcing the auditions for the school play.
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, it read in big loopy letters. SATURDAY, 9 A.M.–12 P.M., BHS LITTLE THEATER. There was a bunch of clip art arranged around the words: a rose, a sword, a crown, a heart, a cartoony illustration of two people kissing. ACTION AND SWORD FIGHTING! the flyer read farther down. ROMANCE! COMEDY AND DANCING! EVERYONE IS WELCOME! COME TRY OUT!
Most of the people in my class crumpled up that flyer and tossed it in the trash on their way out, or it ended in that layer of forgotten papers in the bottoms of their backpacks.
Not me, though. I folded the flyer carefully and stuck it in the front of my notebook, where later that night, after practice, in the privacy of my bedroom, I took it out again and stared at it every few minutes while I was doing my homework. I was thinking. About Alicia Walker making flirty eyes at Jonathan Renault. About what Becca had said about how life was going to keep passing me by. Keep passing me by, she’d said, as if life had already been speeding around me like a Winnebago in the slow lane.
Which was true, I had to admit. Because, for all my extracurriculars, there were times late at night when I stared up at my ceiling, my muscles aching, my alarm set for five in the morning for some practice, and I wished that I could just quit everything and be the type of girl who went to the mall with her friends on a Thursday afternoon. A person who had relationships. A boyfriend. A life.
I glanced at the flyer again. COME TRY OUT, it said. And another word caught my eye.
ROMANCE. Alongside the faces of a boy and girl. Kissing.
I sighed and fired up my laptop.
. . . . .
Much Ado About Nothing, the Internet informed me, was actually about a lot of somethings.
I tried reading a copy online, which was easy to find, but I didn’t understand much, because here’s the thing: Much Ado About Nothing is Shakespeare. It was written in the year 1600 or so. When I got to this point on the first page of the script: “I pray you, how many hath he killed and eaten in these wars? But how many hath he killed? For, indeed, I promised to eat all of his killing,” my eyes started to cross a little, but then I thought, life is passing you by—don’t be a wuss, and kept on reading.
About fifteen minutes later I switched to Netflix and found a film version. I stayed up way too late that night watching it. The women in this film (Emma Thompson before she was Nanny McPhee and Kate Beckinsale before she was a vampire) run around all tan in floaty white dresses, eating fruit, and dancing and saying stuff like “Hey, nonny nonny!” Denzel Washington plays a prince, and Keanu Reeves plays his evil brother, which someone will still have to explain to me, but finally I started to get the gist of the story.
It’s about how this woman, Beatrice, can’t stand this guy, Benedick, and he can’t stand her, either. Every time they’re together, they bicker and mock each other and talk about how they never want to get married, because the opposite sex is dumb. But their friends play a trick on them and get them to think that they’re actually in love with one another. Which they end up being, by the end.
And at the end, they kiss. It says so, right there in the script. I checked.
Benedick: Peace! I will stop your mouth. [Kisses her.] it says.
That was good enough for me. Becca said I needed to strategize on this first kiss scenario, and strategize I did: I was going to get the female lead in the school play. Ryan was going to be the male lead, because that’s what he always did. And then we would kiss. Ryan and me. Kissing.
Here’s how it played out in my head: Ryan would be standing in the spotlight, which would cast a halo-like glow around him, all dressed up like a prince, and he’d give me this sexy half smile as he approached. “Peace,” he’d murmur. “I will stop your mouth.” And on the word mouth he’d look down at my lips, then up into my eyes, and his arms would come around me and he’d lean and kiss me. There’d be sweeping music. There’d be fireworks. He’d pull me closer, and the rest of the world would fade away, leaving just him and me alone there on that stage. And finally, at some point, he’d pull back, and he’d smile, and he wouldn’t say anything but I’d be able to see in his eyes that the kiss had blown him away.
Okay, so it was a silly daydream, and trying out for the school play was a long shot. I’d never been in a play before, if you didn’t count a disastrous stint in the church nativity play in third grade where I’d dropped the baby Jesus doll right on its head in front of everybody. I’d watched the drama crowd, which was a pretty tight clique at my school, and they always looked like they were having so much fun together. But I’d never for one second thought I could get up onstage with them. I wasn’t like Alicia Walker. I was mousy-haired, my body was kind of straight up and down, and I was way more tomboy than girly girl. I wasn’t the leading lady type.
But I wanted that first kiss. So I was going to try.
. . . . .
“Jolynn Dalley?” Ms. Golden called out.
The drama group, every single one of them, turned around in their seats to stare at me as I lurched to my feet at the back of the theater, where I’d been kind of hiding out since the auditions began. I made my way down the aisle and up onto the stage.
“It’s Jo, actually,” I warbled when I got there, blinking against the lights.
Ms. Golden shaded her eyes with her clipboard to get a better look at me. I had a sudden understanding of what an ant under a magnifying glass must feel during its final moments of life. I had a flashback to dropping the baby Jesus, like the whole world was watching me, alone there on the stage, waiting for me to mess up. I swallowed. My stomach heaved. I always got a bit queasy right before important stuff, like the PSATs or a big soccer game, but this was hands down the most excruciatingly nervous I’d ever been. This is a mistake, I thought. I shouldn’t be here. I don’t know what I was thinking. I have to go. Quick, before I puke.
I opened my mouth to say all of this, or maybe to just go ahead and puke, but then Ms. Golden said, “All right, Jo. Why don’t you read from Act Four, Scene One, around line two hundred and eighty-one, with . . . Ryan, why don’t you read for Benedick?”
Someone handed me a script. I flipped to the right page, my heart like a drum solo, all runs and crashing symbols, as Ryan Daughtry in the flesh loped up onto the stage to stand next to me. His brown eyes were sparkling and curious, like he’d never seen me before. He probably hadn’t really seen me before. Out of the two thousand students who went to our school, I’d been barely a blip on his radar.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hi.” I was staring at him. I needed to stop staring at him, but even now, on this bare, black-painted stage, wearing a simple gray tee and faded, holey jeans, he looked like a rock star. He was even better looking close up, all thick dark lashes and stellar cheekbones and full, perfect lips
.
He glanced down at his script. “I think you have the first line.”
I scanned down the page but couldn’t seem to find it. I frowned at the script. “Uh . . .”
“Here.” Ryan leaned over and pointed at the part of the page where my line began.
His breath smelled like cinnamon.
“Oh. Thanks.” Heat rushed to my face. I cleared my throat, tried to focus on the words. “Why then, God forgive me!”
“What offence, sweet Beatrice?”
“You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about to protest I loved you. “
“And do it with all thy heart,” Ryan said.
“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest,” I murmured, suddenly wanting to look anywhere but right at him.
Hello, irony, I thought. I’d been standing next to Ryan Daughtry for all of thirty seconds and I was already blurting out that I loved him. It was too much.
“Okay,” called Ms. Golden from the audience section before I could get out the next line. “Very nice, Jo. Can you try it without the British accent?”
Holy crap, was I speaking with a British accent? Suddenly I felt like an idiot for the hours I’d spent in front of my mirror for the past two nights, watching Emma Thompson on my laptop and trying to match her performance, her facial expressions, her gestures, and the way she said the words so crisply like she was tasting them as they came out of her mouth. I must be doing some kind of horrible impression of her.
“Come, bid me do anything for thee,” implored Ryan.
I gulped in a breath and glanced down at the script. “Kill Claudio,” I read. I tried to remember the story: Beatrice was mad because this guy Claudio just accused her cousin Hero of being a slut and left her at the altar. Heck, I’d be angry too.
“Ha! Not for the wide world,” Ryan said with a short, sharp laugh. He was really good. He was definitely going to get the part of Benedick.
“You kill me to deny it. Farewell,” I said.
“Tarry, sweet Beatrice.” He put his hand on my arm, pulling me closer to him. His face loomed inches from mine, cinnamon and brown eyes and too much.
I promptly lost my place on the page. Why were the words so freaking tiny? “Uh . . .”
Silence. The iambic pentameter swam in front of my eyes. “Uh . . .,” I said again.
Someone in the audience snickered. I could hear whispering, then another giggle. I glanced up at Ryan. He seemed to be trying to stifle a pitying smile. They were all laughing at me. Even my crush was laughing at me. For a minute I wanted to throw myself into the orchestra pit and crawl out again, oh, sometime around graduation.
But then a slow anger boiled up in me. I was trying, dangit. I had never done this sort of thing before, and it was Shakespeare for crying out loud, and all things considered, I was doing okay.
And then I decided this: I was going to finish the scene if it killed me. There was no point in being nervous, I thought. These people weren’t my friends, so what did I care what they thought of me?
I jerked away from Ryan. I picked a line farther down the page and ran with it. “O! That I were a man! What! Bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor,—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!”
Ryan tried to say something, but I kept going right over his line. “O! That I were a man for his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving.”
Ryan looked startled. This time he was the one fumbling with the script. “Tarry, good Beatrice. By this hand, I love thee,” he stammered.
“Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it,” I said, and just for a minute there, I got it. Beatrice’s frustration. Her fury. Her sadness. It all made perfect sense.
Take that, Benedick.
Silence again. I glanced down at the audience section and saw the drama crowd sitting there, staring up at me, stunned. Then Ms. Golden boomed out, “Very good, you two. You can sit down.”
. . . . .
The cast list went up on Monday morning.
I sent Becca to go read it for me. I couldn’t suffer the added humiliation of walking up to that piece of paper, taped to the door of the auditorium, past all those drama people who I knew would smirk and whisper as I went by. I couldn’t let them see my pathetic, crestfallen face when I didn’t find my name on that list.
It’s for the best, I told myself as I watched Becca turn the corner toward the theater. It really was a stupid idea. How lame is it to get your first kiss from a play, anyway?
Becca came back looking solemn. Even though I was expecting bad news, my stomach dropped.
“So what, I didn’t make it?”
“Sorry, Jo,” she said. “I think you’re going to have to miss some soccer practice. Coach is going to be furious.”
She grinned.
“What?”
“You got Beatrice!” she crowed.
I stared at her, stunned. “You’re punking me.”
“Nope. It’s right there at the top of the page. Beatrice, niece to Leonardo,” she said. “Jo Dalley. You did it!” she called after me, because I was already sprinting toward the auditorium.
The drama people were all crowded around the door, all right, but the looks they gave me were friendly enough, even some congratulations thrown in there as I weaved my way to a spot where I could read the sheet.
My mouth dropped open.
For two reasons, really.
1: Becca wasn’t yanking my chain. I was Beatrice. Somehow I had just landed the female lead in the school play. And Becca was right; my soccer coach was going to be ticked. I was going to have to quit, like everything, just so I could make it to rehearsals. My parents were going to wig.
But reason 2 was so much more interesting. Because one line down from my name it listed the role of Benedick.
Eric Bradshaw.
Ryan Daughtry, it turned out, had been cast in the role of Claudio.
I was going to have to kiss the wrong guy.
. . . . .
The first read-through was a joke. I was super frustrated by the ridiculousness of the whole thing: first, my crazy-stupid idea that I could get the guy I liked to kiss me by acting like I was an actress. Ha. Then, that I somehow actually managed to pull it off, and now I was going to be expected to act. Ha ha. And finally, that I wasn’t going to even kiss Ryan. I was going to kiss Eric, a guy I didn’t know. Ha ha ha.
I’m hilarious.
So we all sat around a big table in the drama classroom with highlighters and pencils, and Ms. Golden went through the script cutting some of the longer bits out in order to get the show down to under two hours, because I guess Will Shakespeare was a little wordy, and we highlighted our lines. The mysterious Mr. Bradshaw sat at the other end of the table from me, and when he caught me looking at him he wiggled his eyebrows up and down playfully, and my stomach did a clenchy thing, and I thought, for the umpteenth time, this is all a huge mistake.
Ryan Daughtry sat by Alicia Walker. She was going to play Hero, my cousin. Which meant that she was going to kiss Claudio/Ryan. Again.
Sometimes the universe just isn’t fair.
When we got to reading through the play, I stumbled over the lines. I didn’t know what I was saying most of the time, and my mortifying British accent kept making the occasional appearance. There was nothing of the big brave moment I’d had at auditions. I sucked. By the end of the read-through, I was convinced that Ms. Golden must have realized that she’d made a huge mistake casting me. I started thinking about how I was going to grovel my way back onto the soccer team and go crawling back to my piano teacher.
After the read-through was over, I didn’t stick around to chat with the cast. Call me chicken, but I fled.
&n
bsp; “Jo, wait,” someone called after me as I was making my lame getaway in the parking lot. “Wait!”
I stopped.
Alicia Walker floated up to me and smiled. She had very nice teeth, perfectly straight and even and white. Of course she did.
“Can I walk with you?” she asked.
“Um, sure.”
We walked.
“So you were kind of nervous in there,” she observed.
Um, duh. “I guess,” I mumbled.
“Don’t be,” she said, like I had a choice whether or not to be nervous. “You’re going to be an amazing Beatrice.”
“Come on,” I said miserably. “I was a disaster.”
“Hey. You got the part for a reason. You were good at auditions. You were” she insisted when I laughed out loud. “Fine, you’re a newbie, but you have a kind of strength about you, a kind of fire, you know, that’s very Beatrice.”
“You should have been Beatrice,” I said.
She shrugged. “I wanted Beatrice, actually. I’m sick of playing the delicate flower all the time. Shakespeare always has a weak woman and a strong woman in his plays. So far I’ve played Juliet (weak), Bianca (so weak), and Desdemona (oh my God smother me now).” She sighed. “I actually faint in this play, did you catch that? My fiancé accuses me of sleeping around, and I collapse, and everybody thinks that I die from shame. Do you know how weak you have to be to die from shame? You, on the other hand, get to go around raving about how if you were a man, you’d tear Claudio’s heart out of his chest and eat it, and I just sink to the floor. Oh, dear,” she exclaimed softly, flailing her arms. “Whatever shall I do?”
“But you get to kiss Ryan Daughtry,” I said. “That’s a perk, right?”
Alicia rolled her eyes. “Just between you and me, Jo,” she confessed. “Ryan’s not a very good kisser.”
Inconceivable. I stared at her.
“But you and Ryan were dating last year, weren’t you?” I asked.
She grimaced like she found the idea totally embarrassing. “Oh that,” she explained. “That was the verisimilitude.”
“The what?”
