by Luna Lacour
When Romeo and I danced at the masquerade, we had no recognition of the past deceit or anger or tear-shed. We were in love, instantly infatuated. The violins swelled, my heartstrings sang.
When we kissed on the balcony, the white light replaced with a gentle cobalt, I felt transported to some place different and new. Tyler had become a stranger; a foreign face; a truly besotted boy that I was madly, deeply in love with.
I watched him from behind the curtain as he held Mercutio, overwhelmed with emotion. A shrieking bellow swept over the entire theater. I covered my mouth as he battled with Tybalt; the final drop of his sword taking one of the Prince’s nine lives.
I sobbed at the news of Romeo’s banishment. I was genuinely wrapped in grief.
Romeo wailed when he learned of my death, collapsing to the ground, shouting a defiant roar to the stars.
In the tomb, the lights formed a Halcyon triangle over my frozen frame; every part of me was twisting. Tyler’s lines pelted like arrows; his warm hands clutching my own with an anguished desperation.
When he kissed me, his hands fell on my face; my eyes fluttered open, my own fingers reaching up to touch his cheek.
I leaned up, our lips parting briefly as he looked at me with eyes that rang of impending death.
It worked. The subtle twist caused a wind of gasps from the audience.
He leaned down, kissing me again. It was organic, off-script; it was gentle and timid. I pretended to believe that he was acting; that as he ran the lines he was simply falling into the part of a mourning lover. But when he collapsed onto my chest, the paroxysm of his entire frame causing my body to tremble, I knew it wasn’t an act. His hot tears dampened my shirt; I could feel them, warm, on my skin.
He wept. He broke sobbing, quiet as death, in front a sea of several-hundred faces, and there was nothing I could do about it. I could only hold him.
My Romeo looked up. One last glance, one gentle press of his warm mouth against my own.
And with a kiss, he died. I could feel the stinging tears pool as I cradled him in my arms; my own sobs as genuine as if he had actually stopped breathing. I could barely take in air; choking on the words as I drew the dagger from his sheath and held the tip to my clothed chest.
Another sob, another shattering cry. Not even for the sake of the part I was playing. Not Juliet; not the role of a wife, a devoted partner.
I had played a role in breaking Tyler Dawson’s heart.
One last breath, my final line, and I fell onto his chest with the lights gradually dimming.
When the lights went out, and the curtain closed, all I could hear was the shared sound of our thudding heartbeats in the darkness. Awake, but not really. Dead, but still sentient. Still breathing. Still alive.
The audience stood, and the applause was triumphant. We all took stage once again, all holding hands, all bowing with a practiced grace.
I was glowing. When Will took the stage, tears brimming his own eyes, and thanked the audience for coming, I was overwhelmed. Floating. Everything, in the words of Shakespeare, felt much too sweet to be substantial.
Afterwards, we all shared an emotional hug. I smiled at Will, hugging him, and nobody thought anything of it. We were all embracing him. We were all suspended on our own exhilaration.
I searched the crowds with Tyler, finding Marius along with Vivian. His father hadn’t come, and I could see the disappointment. It was mutual, shared.
Mine too was nowhere to be found.
“What was the excuse?” I asked, and Vivian appeared startled. When she said nothing, and Marius touched my arm gently, I pulled away. “No. Don’t. I’m not even going to bother.”
Tyler softened, his hand on my wrist.
“My folks and I are grabbing dinner,” he said. “You’re welcome to come.”
I smiled. He did, too. They were small, but it was enough.
“I’d really like that,” I told him. I told myself not to start crying.
We all walked to this little pizzeria down the street, sharing pizza sliced thick with melted provolone. It was simple. It was wonderful.
Inside my pocket, my phone vibrated. A message from Will. A photograph of the empty stage, still drenched in honey-colored light.
Will you wait up for me? I asked him.
A moment later, he responded.
Always.
After dinner, I stood with Tyler outside, reclined on the old brick-siding; my phone still in my hand. It vibrated again, and he glanced at me. It was hard to read exactly how he was feeling; not thrilled, but not angry either.
“It’s him, isn’t it?”
I glanced at the ground, sighing quietly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s him.”
He smiled, then sighed, then glanced at his parents through the restaurant window. Both of them still had the dizzy-eyed look of newlyweds.
“You should go,” he said. “I mean, you can go if you want.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” he said. But his look was still heavy.
As I turned around, he called out again.
“We’re okay,” he said. “We’ll be okay. Just so you know. I don’t think I’ll ever understand, and I still think it’s shitty, but I miss you. That’s all.”
I threw my arms around him, hugging him tightly. He laughed, wrapping his limber arms around my waist and pulling me closer. His clothes were damp with sweat, skin covered in a faint sheen. Our faces were both still covered in stage makeup – pale faces, blush-powdered cheeks. A few people that passed by gave a second glance; sharing smiles as if they thought we were just another silly young couple. In love without any real idea of what it meant to actively live the word.
The cab ride seemed to take ages; the traffic and pedestrians congesting the streets like clogged arteries. But when I saw Will, waiting on those steps, I had forgotten that such a thing as time existed. Even with the sound of his clocks; the working one, and the frozen ones, and the one he wore on his wrist.
He took my chin in his hand, and kissed me.
“You were brilliant,” he said. “My shining starlet.”
I stood on my toes, hung my arms around his neck, and kissed him again beneath the streetlight. It would have made a perfect photograph.
We stayed up all night, playing board games and flipping through old photo albums and watching videos. Some we sat through, glued to the screen, while others only served as background noise to our needy bodies. Slow, savoring kisses.
That night, we made love gently. Slowly. We were two boats rocking on a gentle ocean, our eyes remaining locked, our fingers intertwined.
I touched the chain that hung around his neck, the ring an ornament.
“Tell me something,” I said. “Tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” he said. “I love you.”
Maybe it was foolish, but I didn’t go home that night. When I discovered that my father had left that morning for a business-related gathering across the country in the City of Angels, I decided to spend the weekend with Will. We saw Phantom of the Opera, ate gelato with comically tiny spoons. We climbed to the top of the Empire State Building, our lungs aching, totally out of breath.
I lifted my camera, and snapped a picture to the backdrop of a city that never slept. A blur of lights and life. The last photograph taken of us together.
That was the Last Good Day, before everything came crashing down.
The silence when I first stepped through Trinity’s doors should have been taken as a sign, but I was oblivious. My only thoughts were of how there were only a few weeks left before I could leave all of this behind me; Trinity Prep, mandatory chapel, all of the wary, glaring eyes that, on that morning were looking at me in a particularly harsh manner. One girl muttered something under her breath, another simply stared.
I went to my locker, and I should have suspected something when I struggled to open the door. Marius, who had trailed along behind me, had to yank it open with both hands.
/> When the door swung open, a littering of papers fell out; Xeroxed papers, all of the same thing. The same message.
I knelt down, picked it up, and as I stood – leaning against the locker – I was immediately draped in vertigo. Everything started spinning.
“What is it?” Marius asked, alarmed. “Kaitlyn?”
He took one of the papers, looked down at it, then covered his mouth.
“No,” he nearly choked. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Each movement seemed to slow down; I fell to the floor, on my knees, still holding the paper while trying to read what it said. To keep the words together without the letters drifting apart. To try to stomach what exactly I was looking at without surrendering to the faint tingling in my head; the impending feeling that I was about to fade out.
It was a photocopied entry from Marius’ journal. My picture had been super-imposed, and the handwriting was entirely detectable. It was a long entry; the words scribbled in a way that told me he had written it while the influence of a heavy night spent drinking.
It spilled everything. Absolutely everything.
Kaitlyn Laurent: The Lure, it said. My only love, my only vice. The only thing I can’t seem to quit, no matter how much I hate it.
She hates me, too.
It went on to detail the terms of our bet, and how Marius had so badly wanted to win. It then started to become hazy, unclear; the ramblings darker, more disturbing, more upsetting than I even wanted to be confronted with.
But mostly - it was terribly, horribly sad.
I’m not the monster that she things I am, it read. But here’s the thing, you can’t change peoples’ minds. She had the idea of who I was from the very beginning; I couldn’t change it.
He didn’t want to hurt me, it said. He wouldn’t have actually slept with me; it was a ply, a grenade. Something to evoke enough nerve so that I would actually make the jump into seducing Mr. Tennant. So that he could give me the money.
His reasoning, as the journal entry ended, was that he understood. He understood that just as I would have never changed my mind about the man or person that Marius St. Vincent was – I would have never taken the money without feeling as if it had been earned.
So we played the game.
I won.
But I didn’t really win at all.
“Marius,” I said. My mouth went sour. The words fell in a sickeningly dead quiet. “What did you do?”
I stood up, grabbing him by the collar. All of the papers that he had been scrambling to collect fell like slow-falling snowflakes from his hands; drifting coolly, as if they were nothing, over the hallway floors. But at that point, other lockers were opening; more papers came flooding over the tiles.
“I didn’t do anything,” he insisted, practically a yelp. “I didn’t do this, I swear.”
“Then who?” I asked. “Who did it, then? Because that’s your journal entry. That’s your handwriting.”
Marius stared at the ground; no emotion, not a single line, was etched on his face. If he was about to cry, it would have been then.
I waited for the small hint of him reaching some kind of breaking point as his hands gripped a fistful of papers. More of them were sprawled across the hallway. Passing students picked them up, their jaws dropped, and they stared in silence.
But he swallowed, and shuddered, and just kept staring into the tile as if the ivory-scrubbed marble would make everything go away.
“I thought you found your journal, Marius,” I said, kneeling down. “Why would it have gone missing?”
“I did,” he told me. “It didn’t go missing. It was in my bag the entire time.”
I realized that the answer was so very, very obvious. Piper. Piper had taken his journal, copied the pages, then slipped it discreetly into Marius’ bag without him giving a second thought.
Who else had she sent the entry to?
A teacher turned the corner, and everyone started pushing the papers back into their respective lockers; I could barely register a single thought except for one:
Will.
Turning to Marius, every part of me rigid, I slapped him straight across the face. The sound echoed; a red mark branded his cheek. I didn’t care.
Before the bullet could be shot, I jumped up and turned the corner, ran out the doors, and bolted for the theater. I immediately started forming my apology, trying to figure out what to say even though every coherent sentence seemed to crumble immediately after piecing itself together.
I reached the door, tried to pull it open. I couldn’t. It was locked.
It was never locked. Will was always in the theater before class started.
He wasn’t there.
A voice crackled over the intercom; more sets of eyes scattered and fell on my horrified expression.
Kaitlyn Laurent, the voice said. Please come to the Administrative Building immediately.
Thank you.
I didn’t move. Not because I didn’t want to, or was too startled; too afraid to know exactly what was even happening - but because I couldn’t. I stood by the theater, watching a faint figure bolt across the evergreen lawn.
When he reached me, Tyler was out of breath, and I couldn’t say anything except:
“It’s all over. I’ve ruined everything.”
Tyler didn’t respond, even though he could have. He could have thrown it in my face. He could have told me, clear as water, love won’t save you - but he didn’t.
Instead, he held me against him, took my hand, and led me to my fate.
TWENTY
The administrative building was nothing but several offices condensed together within an old, renovated church. It had been left aside when Trinity Chapel was built, and instead of tearing it down, officials decided to use it as a permanent residence for Admissions, and for the Headmaster. It still retained the old stained-glass, although some pieces had been replaced during the construction years back. The entire architecture still resembled a holy place.
I stopped Tyler at the front door, my hand on his chest.
“You can’t go any further,” I told him. “I don’t want them questioning you if they don’t plan to. If you stand around here, they’ll wonder.”
I paused, glanced around. Waited for a couple to pass before speaking again.
“You know nothing, alright?” I told him. “If anyone comes to you, you know nothing.”
“You don’t need to protect me,” he said. “I can protect myself. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“Just go, okay?” I told him. “Get out of here. Don’t think about me. Think about yourself, Tyler.”
The doors were solid wood. The windows were so small, and I was so petite, that I couldn’t see what was going on inside the building; if there was anyone waiting outside the Headmaster’s office.
When I turned, Tyler was still standing there. His hands were shoved into his pockets, his bag was on the ground. He looked like he was about to cry.
“You can say it,” I told him. “You were right.”
He pressed his lips together, shook his head, wiped his eyes even though there weren’t any tears to wipe away.
“These violent delights have violent ends,” he quoted. “And in their triumph die, like fire and powder - which as they kiss, consume.”
I touched his face, and I knew that he was already aware. I hugged him, waved goodbye, and told him that I’d find him later. I tried to ignore that final look on his face, as if there wouldn’t be one.
Inside, the stone walls were covered with orbs of red and yellow sunlight; the rays sending streams of colors across the room. It smelled of furniture polish and printer ink; dust danced visibly in the air. Everything was quiet save for the sound of fingers working against a keyboard; the receptionist glanced at me, then motioned down a small hallway. Those walls were hung with various portraits, but I didn’t look at them. I stared at my shoes; scuffed, unpolished. I wished that the floor would open – a sudden sinkhole - and suck me into
the ground.
The Headmaster’s office was vacant, the door open, with Mr. Whitman already waiting for me. His quarter was at the very end of the building, and had the most stained-glass out of everywhere else. The desk – in place of where a podium would have been – was a dark, rich mahogany. From behind, all of the sun-bathed images depicted in the glass seemed to make him appear like he was truly above us. We were all below.
Piper’s father looked a lot like her; the same basil-green eyes, the same fair skin. His hair was a powdery brown; a natural cocoa sort of color. He didn’t share Piper’s penchant for bleached locks.
“Kaitlyn,” he said. “You’re welcome to sit down.”
I took a seat in one of the small, leather-upholstered chairs that sat in front of the desk. I could barely contain my breathing – rushed, clenched like a cramp inside my chest. Everything hurt. Every movement, every inhale, was a sharp stab.
Mr. Whitman withdrew one of the papers from his lap, and slid it across the desk. I glanced at it, then to the floor, then to him.
“I’m looking to understand the nature of your relationship to Mr. Tennant,” he said. His tone was mild, as if he was speaking to a friend. “I’d like to know if there’s any truth to the allegations that the two of you have been engaging in inappropriate conduct.”
Is that what they wanted to call it? It was so cold, so textbook.
My stomach sank.
“It’s just a piece of paper,” I said. “It’s nothing, Mr. Whitman. And besides, I know who wrote it. My step-brother, Marius. Why isn’t he down here with me?”
All I could think about was how the theater door was locked. Will wasn’t inside - and if not, where was he?
I took the paper, held in my hands, and pretended to re-read the lines that I had already seen.
“Where’s Mr. Tennant?” I asked. “Have you spoken to him, too?”
Mr. Whitman shifted in his seat. He clasped his hands together, took a deep breath, and motioned for me to return the piece of paper; I placed it gingerly on the desk.
“I am going to be very frank with you,” he said. “I have it it under good authority that you and Mr. Tennant have been having an affair, Kaitlyn. I’m giving you a chance to come clean.”
