by M. L. Rio
I had expected the place to be mostly empty, considering the day (Sunday) and the amount of work we all had to do before the twentieth (staggering). But the Bore’s Head was surprisingly crowded, our usual table commandeered by a gaggle of philosophy students who were arguing loudly about the significance of Euclid of Megara’s cross-dressing habit.
“What are they all doing out?” I asked, as Meredith led me to a small table on the opposite side of the room. “Don’t they have homework?”
“Yes, but they don’t also have half a play to memorize,” she said. “Our perspective’s a little skewed.”
“Must be,” I said. “Let me get us a drink.”
She sat and pretended to look at the cocktail card (as though we didn’t know it by heart) while I slid between chairs and stools to get to the bar. The guy to my left—a third-year dance student, I thought—gave me a dirty look when I asked for a pint and a vodka soda with lemon. He shook his head as I paid and lifted his glass to his mouth without a word.
“Thanks,” I muttered at the bartender, and carried both drinks across the room, careful not to spill anything on myself as I dodged outstretched ankles and chair legs and wet spots on the floor. Meredith accepted her vodka gratefully and sucked half of it down before we said another word to each other.
Our conversation was unexpectedly awkward. We made superficial, silly remarks about our speech assignments and the upcoming masque, all the while acutely aware that we weren’t really alone. Ours was the third of five tables in a row, and the small groups seated on either side of us had grown suspiciously quiet when we sat down. (They were almost all girls, I noticed, and all Dellecher students. Had girls always whispered so much? I couldn’t decide if it was a new development or something I simply hadn’t noticed. Admittedly I had never before been worth whispering about.) Meredith finished her drink and I jumped on the opportunity to get her another one. While I was waiting for it, I considered buying myself a shot. I couldn’t help wondering how differently the night might have been going if we actually had some privacy, and decided that if everything proceeded in the same dreadful way, I’d suggest we finish our drinks and head back to the Castle, where we could at least lock a door or escape to the garden and breathe a little more freely.
When I sat back down Meredith smiled at me with obvious relief.
“It’s weird, not being at our normal table,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even sat on this side of the room.”
“We haven’t been in much,” she said. “I think we forfeited our claim.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the philosophers, still debating Euclid’s possibly homoerotic obsession with Socrates. (It sounded like wishful thinking to me.)
“We can probably win it back,” I said. “If we got everyone down here we could storm the beach.”
“We’ll have to arrange that.” She smiled again, but the smile was uncertain.
Her hand rested on the table, and in a moment of rare bravery, I reached out and set my own on top of it. Four of her fingers curled around two of mine.
“You all right?” I asked, in a stage whisper. “I mean, really all right.”
She stirred her drink around. “I’m trying. In spite of what everyone thinks, I’m sick of the staring, too.” I couldn’t keep my eyes from darting toward the other tables. “It sounds callous but I don’t care. I don’t want to just be the dead guy’s girlfriend anymore.”
I wanted, immediately, to let go of her hand. “And you want to be what?” I said, without thinking. “My girlfriend?”
She glared at me, surprise wiping every other emotion off her face. “What—”
“I’m not Richard’s understudy,” I said. “I’m not going to step in and play his part now that he’s left the stage. That’s not what I want.”
“I don’t want that either. That’s exactly what I don’t want. Jesus, Oliver.” Her eyes were hard—green bottle glass, sharp-edged and brittle. “Richard and I were done,” she said. “He was a bastard and a bully to me and everyone else and I was done with him. I know nobody wants to remember that now that he’s gone, but you should.”
I lowered my voice. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just—maybe it’s because you’re you, and I mean, look at you—but I don’t understand. Why me? I’m nobody.”
She looked away, biting hard on her bottom lip, like she was trying not to cry, or maybe not to scream. Her hand was limp and cool under mine, as if it were no longer connected to the rest of her. The tables on either side of us had stopped talking altogether.
“You know, everyone calls you ‘nice,’” she said slowly, expression drawn and thoughtful. “But that’s not the word. You’re good. So good you have no idea how good you are.” She laughed—once—a sad, resigned sort of sound. “And you’re real. You’re the only one of us who isn’t acting all the time, who isn’t just playing whatever part Gwendolyn gave you three years ago.” Her eyes found mine again, the echo of that laugh lingering around her mouth. “I’m as bad as the rest of them. Treat a girl like a whore and she’ll learn to act like one.” Her shoulders inched up, barely a shrug. “But that’s not how you treat me. And that’s all I wanted.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, then looked up at the ceiling. It was the only safe place to look, the only place I knew I wouldn’t find five other sets of eyes staring back at me. “I’m sorry,” I said again, wishing I had never spoken, wishing I’d had the sense to sit there with her and marvel at the fact that she wanted to sit there with me, and not ask why. It should have been so easy, but nothing between us ever would be. If this was what we wanted, we’d played foully for it. We could leave the bar and escape the scrutiny of other students, but locked doors didn’t matter when it was Richard watching us.
Meredith seemed weary more than angry. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry, too.”
“So, where does that leave us?” I asked, afraid to put too much hope into the question. Courage, man, Romeo told me again, the lying bastard, the hurt cannot be much.
“I don’t know. Nowhere.” She pulled her hand away. “Let’s just go back to the Castle. Better there than here.”
I stood and gathered our empty glasses in bashful silence. I helped her into her coat, let one hand linger on her shoulder. She didn’t seem to feel it, but at the table next to ours, I heard one girl mutter to the others, “Fucking shameless.”
But shame burned hot on my face and neck as I followed Meredith out into the deep December darkness. The first flurries of snow danced against a black sky, and I found myself hoping they would tumble down in millions, stick fast, and bury everything.
SCENE 15
The schedule for our midterm speeches was posted on the call-board in the crossover on Monday. I was slated to go first, during what ordinarily would have been rehearsal time on Wednesday afternoon, and Wren would follow me. James and Filippa were scheduled to read at the same times on Thursday, Alexander and Meredith at the same times on Friday.
Snow had fallen thick and fast from Sunday night through Tuesday morning, doing its best to fulfill the reckless wish I’d made on the way out of the bar. Our feet and fingers were perpetually numb, our cheeks and noses rosy pink, ChapStick suddenly a valuable commodity. On Wednesday Frederick and Gwendolyn ushered us into the drafty rehearsal hall, where we shed scarves, coats, and gloves and were subjected to a rigorous warm-up exercise of Gwendolyn’s selection.
I rushed headlong into my speech while Wren waited in the hallway. “I’d play incessantly upon these jades / Even till unfencèd desolation / Leave them as naked as the vulgar air” forced me to slow down, and the strength of the imagery carried me more steadily through “How like you this wild counsel, mighty states?” when I felt obliged to gather speed again. At the end, I was winded but weirdly elated, relieved to be someone other than myself for a while—more willing to go to war than face my own ugly, meager demons.
Frederick and Gwendolyn were both smiling at me—Gwendolyn’s mouth a bold slash of her dark winter lipstick,
Frederick’s a small, creased bow.
“Very good, Oliver,” Gwendolyn said. “A little hurried at the top, but you fell into it very nicely.”
“I found it entirely persuasive,” Frederick told me. “Which argues great success on your part.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’ll get the rest of our comments in your mailbox tomorrow,” Gwendolyn said. “But I wouldn’t worry. Have a seat.”
I thanked them again and went to sit beside their table, gulping down water from the bottle under my chair while we waited for Wren. Gwendolyn summoned her from the crossover, and when she appeared, I was alarmed by how small and frail she looked.
“Good morning,” she said, her voice only an echo in the cavernous room.
“Good morning,” Frederick said. “How are you?”
“All right,” she said, but I didn’t believe it. Her face and hands were pale, dark circles showing beneath both her eyes. “A little under the weather.”
“With this sort of weather, everyone’s under it,” Gwendolyn said, and gave her a wink.
Wren tried to laugh but lurched into a deep cough instead. I glanced uneasily at Frederick, but I couldn’t see past the glare on his glasses.
“What do you have for us today?” he asked. “Lady Anne, isn’t it?”
“That’s right.”
“Lovely,” Gwendolyn said. “When you’re ready.”
Wren nodded, then squared her feet on the floor, ten paces back from the table. I frowned across the room at her, unsure if it was my imagination or if she was trembling.
Wren: “I would to God that the inclusive verge
Of golden metal that must round my brow
Were red-hot steel, to sear me to the brain!
Anointed let me be with deadly venom,
And die, ere men can say, ‘God save the Queen!’”
Her words rang high and clear under the vaulted ceiling, but they wavered, too. She continued bravely, her small body contracting even smaller under the crushing weight of Anne’s pain—I didn’t doubt that she felt it as intensely as if it were her own.
Wren: “This was my wish: ‘Be thou,’ quoth I, ‘accursed,
For making me, so young, so old a widow!
And, when thou wed’st, let sorrow haunt thy bed;
And be thy wife—if any be so mad—
As miserable by the life of thee
As thou hast made me by my dear lord’s death!’”
Her voice cracked, the sound too harsh to be an actor’s affectation. She struck her chest hard with one fist, but whether it was a wordless expression of her grief or a desperate attempt to dislodge whatever was choking her, I couldn’t tell. Gwendolyn leaned forward on the table, brow creased with concern. But before she could speak, Wren’s voice came stammering out again, broken and disjointed. She was bent almost in half, one hand still on her chest, the other digging violently into her stomach. I froze in my seat, gripping the sides of my chair so hard my fingertips went numb.
Wren: “Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again,
Even in so short a space, my woman’s heart
Grossly grew captive to his honey words
And proved the subject of my own soul’s curse,
Which ever since hath kept my eyes from sleep,
For never yet one hour in his bed…”
She stopped, faded out, and swayed on the spot. She blinked ponderously and murmured, “… sleep.” I knew she was going to fall, but I was too slow leaping out of my chair to catch her before she crumpled to the floor.
SCENE 16
I returned to the Castle an hour later, the cold gnawing at my limbs even as I climbed the stairs. I was still shivering (or maybe shaking, like Wren, a symptom unrelated to the temperature outside) when I appeared in the library doorway. James and Filippa were on the couch, noses buried in their scripts until they heard me come in. Stale shock must have lingered in my expression, because they both jumped to their feet.
Filippa: “Oliver!”
James: “What’s wrong?”
I tried to speak, but at first no sound came out, lost in the clamor of immediate memories crowding my brain.
James grabbed both my shoulders. “Oliver, look at me,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s Wren,” I said. “She just—collapsed—in the middle of her speech.”
“What?” He spoke so loudly that I flinched away from him. “What do you mean, collapsed? Is she all right? Where—”
“James, let him talk!” Filippa pulled him back a step and said, more gently but still white-faced, “What happened?”
I told them, in a monologue fraught with awkward stops and pauses, how Wren had keeled over in the rehearsal hall, how after an abortive attempt to revive her, I’d gathered her up off the floor and run full tilt to the infirmary with Gwendolyn and Frederick close on my heels, struggling to keep up.
“She’s stable now, that’s what they said. She was just opening her eyes when the nurses shoved me out. They wouldn’t let me stay.” The last piece I said, apologetically, to James.
He opened his mouth, moved it wordlessly, like a man speaking underwater, then said, suddenly, “I have to go.”
“No, wait—” I reached for his arm but only brushed his sleeve. He was already out of reach, moving toward the door. He gave me one pained look, trying to communicate something I didn’t have time to grasp, before he turned and dashed down the stairs. When he was gone the adrenaline drained out of my body all at once and my knees buckled. Filippa guided me into a chair, but not the nearest one—not Richard’s.
“Just sit here awhile and be quiet,” she said. “You’ve done enough.”
I grabbed her wrist, squeezed it much too hard, in a strange fit of despair. Wren had lost her grip and slipped so quickly I couldn’t catch her, and now James had vanished, too, out the door and into the night, like water trickling through my fingers. I was reluctant to be left alone, more reluctant still to let another friend out of my sight, as though one or the other of us might simply disappear. Filippa sank to the floor beside my chair and rested her head on my knee, saying nothing, simply waiting until I didn’t need her there anymore.
After ten minutes or so I let her go, but it wasn’t until Alexander and Meredith arrived that I felt like standing up again. I told the story to them, more coherently, and we spent an hour clustered close around the fire, not speaking much, waiting for news.
Me: “Do you think they’ll go ahead with the masque?”
Filippa: “They can’t cancel it now. People would panic.”
Alexander: “Someone else will have to learn her part. No one will even know it was supposed to be her.”
Meredith: “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m sick of all this mystery.”
We retreated into silence, watched the fire, and waited.
It was midnight before James came back. Alexander had slumped sideways on the couch and fallen asleep—his face ashen, his breathing shallow—but the girls and I were awake, bleary-eyed and restless. When we heard the front door open we all sat up straighter, listening for footsteps on the stairs.
“James?” I called.
He didn’t reply, but a moment later he appeared in the doorway, snow clinging to his hair. Two vivid red spots glowed on his cheeks, as if he’d had his face rouged by a little girl who had no idea what was too much.
“How is she?” I asked, pushing myself off the couch to help him out of his coat.
“They wouldn’t let me see her.” His teeth chattered, making his words quiver and stall.
“What?” Meredith said. “Why not?”
“I don’t know. Other people were in and out and back and forth like it was Grand Central Station, but they made me sit in the hall.”
“Who was there?” Filippa asked.
“Holinshed, and all the nurses. They brought a doctor in from Broadwater. The cops were there, too—that guy Colborne and another one, Walton.”
Alexa
nder had woken at James’s entrance, and I looked straight at him. His mouth made a grim, hard line. “What were they doing there?” he asked, eyes on me.
James fell heavily into a chair. “I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me. Just asked if I knew what she’d been up to lately.”
“Well, it’s exhaustion, isn’t it?” Meredith said. “Fatigue. She’s had this terrible … experience, and she comes back here to have everyone skirting around her, and on top of that five hundred lines to learn. It’s a miracle the rest of us are on our feet.”
I was only half listening. Walton’s words bounced around my brain like a stray pinball. My money’s on the cousin. I sat quietly at the table, folded James’s coat, and clutched it in my lap, hoping nobody would pay any attention to me. Keeping Colborne’s ongoing investigation secret from the rest of them no longer felt fair, and I doubted I’d be able to maintain my silence if anyone asked me even an unrelated question. Alexander watched me like a hawk, and when I risked lifting my eyes to meet his, he shook his head, just barely.
“What do we do?” Filippa asked, looking from James to Meredith.
“Nothing,” Alexander said, before either of them could speak, and I wanted to ask, Is that your answer to everything? I wondered how many ways he could use that word, and if my soul would squirm and shrink away every time he said it. “We carry on as usual, or they’re going to want to ask all kinds of questions we don’t want to answer.”
“Who?” Meredith said. “The police?”
“No,” he said, swiftly. “The school. They’ll pull all of us in for fucking counseling if we get any more jumped up than we are.”
“We have every reason to be jumped up,” she said. “One of our classmates is dead, and another one’s just had some kind of nervous breakdown.”
“And how do you think that looks?” he asked. “I get that we can’t pretend not to be affected by it, but if we all start acting like we killed somebody, they’re going to start to wonder whether we did.”