The Juliet Club

by Suzanne Harper

Men were deceivers ever, Kate thought, choking down another bite of sandwich. Yet another point that William Shakespeare got exactly right—

  Then Sarah cried, “Oh no, look who just came in!”

  Kate turned.

  It was Jerome, laughing as he sat down with a group of friends halfway across the room.

  Kate whipped her head back around and stared down at the table, blinking.

  “I’m soooo sorry.” Sarah’s voice oozed with sympathy.

  Kate knew she meant well, but still she gritted her teeth with irritation. “That’s perfectly all right. It doesn’t bother me at all to see Jerome. In fact, I have decided that the entire experience of dating him, even though it turned out to be a waste of time on one level, has actually, on another level, taught me a very valuable lesson.”

  “The importance of knowing five ways to kill a person without being caught?” Annie suggested.

  “It taught me,” Kate replied, “that romance is merely an illusion. On one level, it seems real, but on a higher, more evolved level, it is nothing but a projection of our own imaginations.”

  “Kate, you know that you only start going on about levels when you’re upset,” Sarah said. “And no one ever understands what you’re talking about, either.”

  “I,” Kate said, enunciating as clearly as possible, “am never going to fall in love again.”

  “Don’t be silly, Kate, you’re just upset right now.” Sarah patted Kate’s arm, then unwrapped another packet from her lunch. “Oh yay, chocolate chip. Want some?”

  As she offered Kate and Annie the cookies, she added, “He just wasn’t worthy of you, that’s all.”

  “Jerome isn’t worthy of dating a slug, let alone someone like you!” Annie agreed hotly. “He’s a worm, he’s slime, he’s the lowest of the low! In my opinion, you are well rid of him!” She grabbed a cookie and bit into it so viciously that crumbs sprayed across the table.

  “Shh.” Kate glanced around the lunchroom. She certainly didn’t want Jerome, or anyone else, to hear this conversation. It might make him think that she cared about him breaking up with her, which was so absolutely, completely, emphatically not true. “The concept of love is merely a distraction to a calm and ordered mind. From now on, I intend to focus on more important things—”

  “Yessss,” Annie interrupted, her eyes glittering with evil intent. “Like sweet, sweet revenge. Speaking of which, I’ve had a few thoughts—”

  At that moment, the Practically Perfect Ashley Lawson strolled over to Jerome’s table, carrying a cafeteria tray that held only a large salad (no dressing) and a bottle of sparkling water. Her glossy black hair flowed past her shoulders in gentle waves. Her simple T-shirt and blue jeans somehow looked as if they came from the pages of Vogue. A little ruby ring glinted on her right hand.

  “I don’t even want to know what kind of dark, evil pact she’s made in order to look like that!” Annie hissed.

  Ashley slid into the chair next to Jerome with a demure smile that revealed an adorable dimple. He gazed at her as if she were his last hope of heaven. Kate tried to look away, but she couldn’t. She was transfixed. It was like watching one of those reality shows on TV and being too stunned by the sheer awfulness of it all to turn the channel.

  Kate saw the Practically Perfect Ashley Lawson feed Jerome a french fry.

  “Nauseating,” Annie said. “I’ll probably have to have my stomach pumped.”

  Kate watched Jerome brush a stray lock of hair from Ashley’s practically perfect forehead.

  “I predict that she dumps him in a month,” Sarah said loyally. “Then he’ll realize how stupid he was to break up with you!”

  Kate saw him lean over to put his arm around Ashley’s shoulders.

  “Faithless, fickle, and false,” Annie muttered darkly. She sounded like a witch trying out a new curse.

  Kate forced herself to look away.

  “I said, I’m glad he broke up with me,” she insisted. “Weren’t you listening?”

  “Listening, yes,” Annie said. “Believing, no.”

  “Look,” Sarah said, “I know you miss Jerome—”

  “Miss him?” Kate cried bitterly. “On the contrary. O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!”

  Sarah and Annie were being totally supportive, of course, the way true friends should be when one of their own is trapped in a web of despair. Still, they couldn’t resist glancing at each other and rolling their eyes, just a little.

  “Let me guess.” Annie sighed. “Shakespeare.”

  “Yes, and it happens to be incredibly appropriate to the present situation,” Kate answered.

  “Why is that?” Sarah asked helpfully, as Kate knew she would.

  “Titania says it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she awakens from a spell and realizes that she’s fallen in love with a man who has the head of a donkey.” Kate paused meaningfully. Her friends looked at her. She sighed and decided to spell it out. “In other words, she realizes that she’s fallen in love with an ass.”

  “Oh.” Annie grinned. “Wow. It’s almost as if she knew Jerome personally.”

  Sarah snickered, and Kate felt a little grin tug at the corner of her mouth. It was the first time she had come close to smiling in four days.

  She felt the black weight of gloom lift just a little bit.

  Then she saw Jerome lean forward to kiss Ashley on the cheek, and her heart turned back to ice.

  Act I

  Scene I

  That afternoon, Kate went home from school and found her parents sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table. Her father was drinking a cup of strong black coffee and rapidly tapping his foot, a sign of either great excitement, too much caffeine, or (probably) both. Her mother was sipping the herbal tea that she claimed kept her mind sharp and her outlook serene. Despite the tea, she was looking at Kate’s father over the rim of her mug with a familiar expression of barely repressed irritation.

  Kate stopped in the doorway and looked from one parent to the other with grave suspicion. Although her father only lived ten miles away, her parents had made avoiding each other into an art form.

  “What’s going on?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong? No! Quite the contrary!” her father cried. “In fact, I have some wonderful news! Fantastic news! Amazing, stupendous, fabulous news!”

  Her mother started to roll her eyes, caught herself, and took a calming sip of tea instead. “I never should have encouraged you to get involved in that community theater,” she murmured. “Just tell her, Tim.”

  “All right, all right.” Kate’s father was so happy that he didn’t even stop to give his usual lecture about Why Enthusiasm Is the Most Underrated Virtue in Our Modern Age of Cynicism. “You remember the writing contest I suggested you enter last fall?”

  “Which one?” she asked. Her father was constantly handing her entry forms that required that she write an essay, a poem, a short story, or, if all else failed, an advertising slogan. “There was that haiku contest. And I remember writing a ten-minute play over winter break—”

  “No, no, no, the contest sponsored by the University of Verona!” he cried. “Surely you remember? The university that’s holding a series of seminars on Romeo and Juliet? One of which I was asked to teach? Because I’m considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Shakespeare?”

  He looked questioningly at his daughter and ex-wife. They looked blankly back.

  “I don’t know why I bother to tell anyone about my life, I really don’t,” he said, rather sulkily. “It’s quite clear that no one listens to a word I say.”

  Her mother pursed her lips. “Well, you do say so many words, Tim. It’s hard to keep up.”

  He opened his mouth to respond, but—just in time—Kate remembered dashing off ten pages on nature imagery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, right before the deadline. “Oh, wait. Got it. I stayed up until three A.M. to finish the essay. I fell asleep the next day in history.” She frowned. “And I f
ailed a pop quiz in chemistry.”

  “Petty concerns that will soon recede into the mists of time!” he said, waving a hand dismissively. “Minor problems that will soon be forgotten! Sacrifices that you will soon see were well worth making! And why is that, you ask?”

  He waited. Kate obediently gave him his cue. “I don’t know, Dad. Why?”

  “Because you won!”

  “Really? That’s great.” Kate opened the refrigerator to get a soda. Considering the number of competitions her parents and teachers urged her to enter, it would be strange if she didn’t win a few here and there.

  “Congratulations, honey.” Her mother refilled her cup. “A humanities prize will make your college applications a little more well-rounded.”

  “Zounds, Emily, is that all you can think about?” Her father began pacing around the kitchen. “Her college applications? How prosaic! How pedestrian! How—”

  “Practical,” her mother pointed out austerely.

  “But surely the more important point is that Kate gets to go to Italy!” He stopped in mid-pace to add, rather anticlimatically, “I told you it wasn’t a waste of time to start reading the sonnets to her when she was eighteen months old!”

  “I never said it was a waste of time,” her mother said crossly. “I just thought picture books were more age appropriate—”

  “Wait, wait, wait . . . I get to go to Italy?” Kate had only left Kansas three times in her life: to visit her grandmother in Chicago, to go to summer camp in Missouri, and to accompany her mother to a constitutional law conference in New Jersey that was, unbelievably, even more boring than it sounded. “Italy. As in Europe.”

  “Yes!” Her father bounced a couple of times, beaming at her. “Congraulazioni! We’ll leave the day after school ends! We’ll stay in an actual villa! And for four glorious weeks, we will experience the genius of Shakespeare and the splendors of la bella Italia!”

  “You’ll be there for a whole month?” Her mother’s cup clattered into its saucer. “But what about that class in advanced rhetoric at the University of Kansas this summer? Remember, Kate? We signed you up ages ago—”

  “Emily.” Her father stopped bouncing, lowered his head, and frowned ferociously, a theatrical expression that Kate privately called his King Lear look. “This Is a Once In a Lifetime Opportunity.” He thundered out the words, dramatically pausing between each one to make sure they heard the capital letters. This technique was invariably effective with his students (especially the freshmen), but Kate and her mother were far too used to it to be cowed.

  “But she’ll get college credit for the rhetoric class,” her mother said.

  “Which she will also earn for studying in the Shakespeare seminar,” he countered triumphantly.

  “Seminar?” Kate had a sinking feeling that she wasn’t remembering the details of this contest with perfect clarity. “What seminar?”

  “That’s the prize: as one of the Shakespeare Scholars, you will have the distinction, the honor, the privilege of studying Romeo and Juliet in the heart of Verona, where the play is set!” Her father’s eyes were shining as if he had just caught sight of Shakespeare himself. “You’re going to learn so much, even though your class is going to be taught by”—his face darkened—“Francesca Marchese.”

  There was a brief, fraught silence.

  Then Kate’s mother sighed. “Oh, lord.” She got up to add hot water to her mug. “Now I know what you’ll be obsessing about for the next month.”

  “I do not obsess about that woman,” her father said with cold dignity. “She is not important enough to even think about for more than a minute, let alone obsess about.”

  Kate and her mother carefully avoided catching each other’s eye. Kate had grown up hearing stories about the infamous Professoressa Marchese, a tenured literature professor at the University of Verona and her father’s most bitter rival.

  The problem was that, although her father was very well known in Shakespearean circles, his triumphs were constantly trumped by Professoressa Marchese, who seemed to specialize in academic one-upsmanship. If he was asked to lecture at a prestigious conference, she was asked to chair it. If he was interviewed for a national magazine, she was interviewed on prime-time television, and during sweeps week to boot. The year he finally published the book that he had been working on for a decade, Professoressa Marchese came out with a volume that actually hit the bestseller list for one awful month. Her father had stormed around the house, sputtering with outrage, and Kate had developed a recurring nightmare in which Professoressa Marchese turned into an evil witch and chased her through a library.

  And then, just last year, the unthinkable had happened: Francesca Marchese had published The Shakespeare Secret, an outrageous novel based on the life of Shakespeare (about which almost nothing is known). Given the lack of actual facts, she had felt free to set forth the proposition that Shakespeare had been the leader of a covert group of alchemists who had discovered the key to immortality and that he had, in fact, never died, but still lived among mortals, collecting material for his next play.

  It was total nonsense, of course, but that didn’t keep it from hitting the bestseller list in seven countries, selling millions of copies, and making Francesca Marchese both an international celebrity and very rich indeed.

  The mere memory of that black year made Kate shudder.

  “I’m sure she’s perfectly nice,” her mother said drily, noticing Kate’s shiver. “In fact, you’ll have to tell me what she’s really like. I’d love to hear the truth after listening to your father’s paranoid fantasies for twenty years.”

  Her father made a tetchy sound, but Kate was focused on the most important aspect of what her mother had just said.

  “You mean I can go?”

  “Oh, of course you can go!” Her mother sighed. “Honestly, what kind of mother do you think I am?”

  “Thank you!” Kate hugged her mother as her father did a silent victory dance next to the refrigerator.

  A month in Italy! Kate sat down and stared dreamily out the window. Golden sunlight on ancient stone buildings. Olive groves and lemon trees and blue, cloudless skies. History and art and music and really good cappuccinos . . . and pasta! Her mouth watered at the thought.

  Later that night she called Sarah on her cell phone, patched in Annie, and told them the good news while downloading Italian language lessons onto her iPod.

  “You are so lucky.” Sarah sighed. “A trip to Italy is the perfect way to get over—” her voice dropped meaningfully. “You know.”

  “I know what?” Kate asked, honestly puzzled.

  “You know,” Sarah insisted. Then, when it became clear she had to be more explicit, she said, “Jerome.”

  “Oh, right. I’m already over him,” Kate said. “I haven’t thought of him in hours.” She smiled complacently as she realized this was, in fact, true.

  But Sarah wasn’t listening. “I know exactly what will happen! You’ll meet some incredibly handsome and romantic Italian guy—”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Kate said.

  “—and you’ll both fall in love at first sight—”

  “Hold on—”

  “—and Jerome will become nothing but a distant memory!”

  “Not distant enough,” snapped Annie, who continued to harbor hopes for revenge. “I still think we should have put itching powder in his jockstrap and reformatted his iPod with Broadway show tunes.”

  “You have a true genius for retribution, Annie,” Kate said.

  “Thanks,” Annie said, gratified.

  “But if I did any of those things,” Kate added firmly, “it would imply that I still care about Jerome, which I don’t.”

  “Fine,” Annie grumbled. “But I agree with Sarah. An Italian romance is just the thing to put Jerome in his place. Imagine it, Kate,” she said in a low, thrilling voice. “You’ll come back tanned and glowing and elegant. You’ll absentmindedly begin speaking Italian in the middle of conversations. Som
etimes you’ll forget yourself and casually mention Roberto—”

  “Roberto?” Kate interrupted.

  “Or Enrico or Raffaele, the name’s not important!” Annie said impatiently. She took a deep, calming breath, then went back to weaving a hypnotic spell. “You will wear a simple gold necklace that he gave you as a symbol of his undying love. You will exude an air of soulful mystery.” She finished with the solemn authority of an oracle. “You will be transformed.”

  For a few seconds, the air vibrated with the power of this prophecy.

  Then, somewhat spoiling the effect, she added, “And that’s when Jerome will realize how completely stupid he was to break up with you!”

  “Yes! It will be just like a movie!” Sarah said happily.

  “Listen,” Kate interrupted. “I am going to Italy to study Shakespeare, not to fall in love.”

  The cell phone thrummed with silent disappointment.

  “In fact,” she went on, “I consider myself lucky to have dated Jerome—”

  “Because you found the state of complete boredom restful?” Annie murmured.

  “Ignoring that,” Kate said. “No, because it means that I have realized at a young age the folly of love! Now I can renounce romance and focus on doing something better with my life. Something important.”

  “If you say so,” Annie said, sounding completely unconvinced.

  “Well, I think it’s terribly selfish,” Sarah said grumpily. “After all, while you’re in Italy, we’re going to be slaving away at the Burger Barn and spending boring afternoons at the pool, just hoping to live vicariously through you. And I know you, Kate! You’re going to send us e-mails about literary analysis and subtext and character notes. It’s so unfair!”

  So then Kate had to spend fifteen minutes cajoling her friends into a better mood by promising to e-mail them constantly about everything except Shakespeare, take millions of photos, and buy them lavish gifts.

  But there was one matter on which she would not budge. No matter how they begged and pleaded, she refused to consider the possibility of romance. After all, she had finally found the cure for crushing heartbreak and bitter betrayal. It was Italy, where she could lose herself in the study of great literature and history and art and music—in everything, she promised herself, except falling in love.