“Not really.”
“Well, too bad!” I stuck my tongue out at him. “This is how I roll, suckaa. One arm!”
Holding my sword aloft, I flung myself forward onto my left forearm, rolling and flipping over until I arrived triumphantly back on my feet.
“Yaah-haah!” I cried, sword aloft. I felt like a lady Zorro or a pirate queen or something. I wished I could carry a sword all the time.
“That was pretty impressive,” Drew chuckled, slow-clapping as he walked toward me. “It was the ‘yaah-haah’ that really sold it.”
“Vocals are fundamental to selling stage combat, Drew.”
He laughed again, softly this time.
“Hey. Wait a minute. You’ve got something …” He gestured toward my face. I started patting myself. Oh, God, was there a bug on me? “Hold still.”
Drew stepped in closer, and now we were really close. Like acting-for-the-camera close. He lifted his hand to my hair and ran it through a few red curls before it came to rest on my cheek. I shivered as he stroked the side of my face. He cupped my chin and tilted it toward him and …
“What are you doing?” I asked suddenly. What was he doing? Was he trying to … kiss me? No. It couldn’t be. Not possible. And yet …
“Nothing!” he barked, jerking back from me. “There was a leaf in your hair.”
“Sure there was.”
“Exhibit A!” He held up a small green leaf with a flourish, thrusting it millimeters from my nose.
“Get that thing out of my face.” I swatted the leaf away with my non-sword hand, and it floated gently to the ground. “You sure took your sweet time getting that leaf out.”
“I was being thorough!”
“Were you trying to … kiss me?” I knew I shouldn’t have asked it. I regretted it almost the minute it popped out of my mouth.
“No!” he bellowed so loudly a few birds took flight. “Absolutely not! Are you deranged? Why would I try to kiss you? I don’t even like you!”
“I can assure you, the feeling is mutual,” I shot back.
“A person would have to be mentally unstable to like you!”
“Hey!” That stung more than I would have liked to admit. “You’re not exactly a picnic either!”
“Compared to you?” he snorted. “I’m a gourmet picnic. With champagne and strawberries and white linen napkins.”
“Your picnic would give people food poisoning!” I retorted. “And this picnic metaphor is stupid, and I refuse to participate in it anymore. Just keep your face away from my face and your lips away from my lips.”
“Fine!” he shouted. “No problem!”
“Great!” I shouted back. “In fact, not kissing you will be a true pleasure.”
“The pleasure, you harpy, is all mine.”
By this point we were standing inches away from each other’s faces. Drew was bright red and breathing heavily. But then he started to lean down toward me like he was going to …
“Dammit!” he roared, then leapt backward like I was in danger of scalding him, raking his hands through his hair until it was standing up in exaggerated peaks. “Satan, avoid! I charge thee, tempt me not!”
“Don’t quote Shakespeare at me!” I roared right back at him. “Don’t you dare! Avaunt, thou dreadful minister of hell!”
“You’re doing it, too!”
“You started it! So blush, blush, thou lump of foul deformity!”
“Lady, you know no rules of charity—”
“Villain, thou know’st no law of God nor man nor—oh, I’m not going to sit here and do Richard III with you! This is ridiculous. I wish I’d never even seen your stupid sword.” At that, I immediately started blushing. Stupid, stupid Cass. “Oh, forget it!” And with that I threw my sword to the ground and stomped through the woods, leaving him alone in the clearing. Thankfully he didn’t follow me.
What the hell had just happened? Clearly there was something much more dangerous than swords in that corner of the woods.
CHAPTER 17
Since whatever-it-was had happened—or almost had happened—in the woods, I’d been preoccupied with thoughts of Drew. And Taylor. Taylor! I had to see Taylor again. He was the only guy in Lake Dunmore I wanted to kiss. Hopefully he wasn’t super pissed at me. I had to get this summer back on track. I vowed to make things up to Taylor and to apply myself to making Drew miserable with renewed vigor. The only emotion of mine Drew deserved was disdain. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of our room with Heidi and Amy, I realized exactly what the next phase in our plan would be.
“Drew’s sleeping too well,” I announced suddenly. “Like, way too well.”
“Don’t you dare touch his eyes again,” Heidi warned me.
“Oh, ick, please don’t. That was gro-o-oss,” Amy agreed.
“What? No!” I scoffed. “I’m not crazy. I promised not to inflict any more physical harm. There’s more than one way to keep a shrew from sleeping, you know.”
“You’re so right. We need to keep him up or this’ll never work. Petruchio plays a trumpet to keep Kate awake in the play. Do you have a trumpet?” Amy asked.
“Um, no.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to steal Nevin’s trumpet?” Heidi said.
“Heidi, come on! Of course not! Besides, a trumpet would probably wake everyone up. I have no interest in missing out on any sleep myself. And if we did that, Drew would for sure know it was us.” I chewed my lip meditatively. “We need something smaller, that we can hide. And something that will only keep Drew awake.”
“Like a baby monitor?” Amy suggested. “You know, put one in Drew’s room, put one somewhere else. Where would we get a baby monitor, though?”
Inspiration struck. “Who needs a baby monitor when we’ve got walkie-talkies?” The same ancient walkie-talkies Drew was always carting around were currently sitting on one of the kitchen counters, waiting for his next excursion into the woods.
“How is a walkie-talkie going to keep Drew from sleeping?” Heidi asked.
“We put one in Drew’s room, some place he’ll have a hard time finding it. Like, um, in the ceiling or a floorboard or something.” Heidi looked skeptical. But this boathouse seemed pretty structurally flimsy—I was sure I could pry something open in order to stash the walkie-talkie. “Then we put the other walkie-talkie next to an iPod with speakers or something and we play an annoying playlist. We hide that walkie-talkie somewhere within range but far enough away that we can’t hear it. That’s good, right?”
Not to brag, but I was pretty impressed with myself. Not bad for a plan I’d just come up with on the fly.
“Not just good, Cass, that’s great. Ooo! I have iPod speakers!” Amy cheered, leaping up to get them from her dresser. “What do we want to play? Like One Direction or something?”
“Hmmm … maybe something that doesn’t sound like music?”
“What, like animal calls?” Amy asked. “Or cars honking?”
“Yeah! That way he might not assume it was coming from inside the room.”
“Crafty.” Amy nodded in approval.
“What about my Viva la Vuvuzela playlist?” Heidi suggested. “It’s music, but it’s not quite, um, traditional music. In a Western sense.”
“Vuvu-what-now?”
“Oh, you remember. Vuvuzelas. Those super annoying South Africa horn things from the World Cup like forever ago,” Amy reminded me.
“Oh, yeah. Why do you have that?”
“I think they’re interesting!” Heidi said defensively.
“Well, it’s perfect for this, so thank you.” I didn’t want her to get upset and rescind her iPod loan, but I was still confused about who would buy a Vuvuzela song. Or record one, for that matter.
“But what if Drew just turns the walkie-talkie off?” Amy asked. “This has to work. It’s the final phase in the Petruchio-shrewing-Kate plan. This’ll be the exact push he needs.”
“It’ll work,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “We’ll just h
ave to make sure the walkie-talkie is really, really well-hidden.”
“Drew’s leaving,” Heidi announced from her perch on the windowsill. “Like, right now. He’s walking toward the Bait ’n’ Bite.”
“We’ve got to act now,” I barked. “It’ll take him fifteen minutes to get there and back, tops. We’ve got to get that thing hidden.”
“Right,” Amy agreed. “Okay, I’ll guard the door. Heidi, you stay on alert at the window.”
“What do I do if I see him coming back?” Heidi asked. “Make a bird call? Ca-caw! Ca-caw!”
“There’s no way we’ll hear that from Drew’s room.” Amy shook her head.
“We’ll just be super speedy,” I said decisively. “Come on. Let’s go.”
Luckily, the house appeared to be deserted. After a quick trip down to the kitchen to steal the walkie-talkies, I snuck easily into Drew’s room, saluting Amy as she closed the door behind me.
His room was messier than I would have imagined. For someone who had lost most of his wardrobe in a freak washing machine incident, Drew’s floor was covered in an awful lot of crap. Sweatshirts and T-shirts and what looked like a fleece blanket were flung all over the place. Each corner of the room had its own haphazard stack of books and DVDs. Curious, I bent down to examine the top book on the stack closest to Drew’s bed. Hemingway. Typical.
Speaking of Drew’s bed, it definitely was a rollaway cot. He hadn’t been lying about that. The whole room had the cramped, awkward appearance of a closet that had been hastily converted into sleeping quarters. There was, I noticed, no real closet or dresser—maybe that’s why his clothes were all over the floor. Besides the cot, the only furniture in there was a straight-backed wooden chair. Very Harry Potter at the Dursleys’.
Now, where to hide the walkie-talkie? I kicked some stuff out of the way as I dragged the chair against the wall closest to Drew’s bed. The sloping ceiling was comprised of aging wooden planks. With any luck, I’d be able to wiggle or pop one of them up. I felt around, pushing and prodding the ceiling. Stretching to the side, I finally reached a plank that was as wiggly as a loose tooth. It creaked and groaned as I pushed it up, but I was able to get enough space to chuck the walkie-talkie into the ceiling above Drew’s bed. We probably should have tested this whole setup first, but I guess I’d just have to keep my fingers crossed that he’d be able to hear the Vuvuzelas. I carefully dragged the chair back to where I’d found it. Mission accomplished.
On my slog out the door, my toe connected with something solid in the fabric mass. I bent down to pick it up.
I pulled one of those old school journals with the black and white marbling out from underneath the fleece blanket. TAMING OF THE SHREW: SAD SUMMER was written on the front cover. I figured it probably wasn’t a personal journal, or anything, but I probably shouldn’t have looked at it. I just couldn’t resist taking a quick peek. I’d basically been pulling amateur backwoods Jack Bauer business on Drew all summer. In comparison, a little diary snooping was nothing.
Inside the journal, he’d taped printed copies of each of his monologues. Every single line was scanned and analyzed; key words were highlighted, margins littered with notes, references, allusions, and definitions. It was incredible. I didn’t think I’d ever seen someone approach a role with so much care and dedication. He had enough research in there to probably write a scholarly article about Petruchio. He may have been a jackass, but he was a prepared jackass.
I flipped to the next page, where he’d made some character notes in an untidy, miniature, nearly illegible scrawl. Typical boy writing.
There at the top was a list titled, “Why do I Marry Her?” It read: “Money, Winning, a Challenge.” I skipped the rest of the list.
Skimming farther down the page, a paragraph entitled “Why do I love her?” caught my eye. I read on:
Well, she’s hot. No, more than hot. She’s beautiful. But the messed up thing is, she’s the most beautiful when she’s angry. Sometimes I feel like I’m living just to piss her off, to watch her cheeks flush bright red and her blue eyes turn stormy. I love that she never takes shit from anybody. I love that she never backs down. Even when she’s wrong, which she usually is. I love that she’ll defend what she thinks is right, no matter what. Jesus … I’m supposed to be writing about Kate, not Cass. I’m having a hard time telling the difference.
Ho. Ly. Shit. I immediately dropped the journal like it had burned my fingers.
“Cass?” Amy knocked softly at the door. “Are you done yet? Hurry up. I’m getting nervous.”
“Yeah. I’m coming,” I stuttered as I hastily buried the journal under a pile of sweatshirts, scrambled to my feet, and got out of Drew’s room as quickly as possible.
“Did it go okay?” Amy whispered as she shut the door and quickly dragged me down the hall and into our room.
“Yup, yup, totally fine,” I answered quickly. I could barely hear myself over the sound of my heart beating. It was like reverberating through my ears.
“Hold up. Are you okay?” Amy grabbed my arm and pulled me to a halt.
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you’re having a stroke.”
“Guess I’m not as cut out for a life of crime as I thought. Ha-ha.” I let out a strangled laugh.
“Don’t tell me you’re going soft on me.”
“Never!” Man, I had to get it together. But how could I un-see what I had just seen? I could see I’m supposed to be writing about Kate, not Cass stamped on my eyeballs in that tiny, cramped, serial killer handwriting. It was impossible. And yet, I had seen it. In Bic pen black and white.
“God, I hope this works,” Amy sighed as she flopped onto her bed. “Like, personality-wise, he still hasn’t really turned it around.”
“We always knew this would take time. Just like in the play.” Good. This was great. Perfect. We should keep talking about the plan. Because that way I could forget what I’d seen in that notebook. “I’m sure by opening night it will have totally worked.”
“We should probably stop messing with him when the show opens.” Heidi chewed her lip worriedly. “I don’t want to do anything that will affect his performance.”
“We’ve got, what, a couple days till the show opens? Jeez, is that it?” I marveled at how short our rehearsal period had been. How could the show be about to open if Lola hadn’t even seen it? I had a sudden panicky thought that she’d show up at dress rehearsal, hate it, and insist everything had to change. “He’ll have a couple nights of restless sleep, then we’ll stop it all. Promise.”
Amy masterminded the setup of the other walkie-talkie, and whatever she’d done, it must have worked like a charm, because for the next few mornings Drew showed up to rehearsal in a progressively worsening mood. He’d also taken to nodding off between scenes. Despite Heidi’s worries, however, it didn’t seem to negatively affect his acting ability at all. He was turning in an excellent performance run after run. Playing against his Petruchio, I could actually understand why Kate would fall for him. Drew’s Petruchio was everything Drew was not—while Drew was insufferably arrogant, Petruchio was charmingly cocky. That’s what Drew was missing. A modicum of charm.
CHAPTER 18
The morning of dress rehearsal, faced with a spectacularly grumpy Drew, I just couldn’t resist saying something. “Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning.”
“The phrase ‘woke up’ implies that I actually slept,” Drew snapped.
“I’m sorry your luxurious single room hasn’t been providing you with the dreamless slumber you so richly deserve.” I pulled my red fireball of an ensemble off the costume rack. Drew grabbed his leather jerkin.
“Has anyone else heard some kind of a weird honking noise?” Next to me, Amy stiffened, arm frozen as she reached for her pink dress. “Like a bird or a horn or something?”
“Sorry, man, I haven’t,” Noah shrugged.
“It’s been driving me crazy,” Drew griped. “Seriously? No one’
s heard anything?”
Silence. Everyone I could see was shaking their heads. Amy’s shake looked a little too manic to be totally natural, but Drew was too preoccupied to notice.
“How is that even possible?” Drew continued. “Why would I be able to hear it, but no one else? That house is so small it doesn’t make any sense. Maybe it’s a bird that’s nesting right outside my window or something?”
“A bird, huh? Does it sound kind of like ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’?” Rhys asked innocently, positioning his velvet feathered cap atop his head.
Drew glared and stalked behind the curtain to the boys’ half of our makeshift dressing room.
“We’ll stop playing the music, tonight, though. Promise?” Heidi whispered, once we were on our own side of the curtain. “I don’t want to mess him up before the show opens.”
“Yes,” I hissed, “and shhh. That’s just a piece of cloth. So …” I mimed locking my lips and throwing away the key. She did the same.
Heidi, Amy, and I helped each other into our corsets and costumes, then applied makeup and tried to approximate some kind of Renaissance-suggestive hairstyle. Amy, of course, came up with an elaborate braided half-up half-down thing that looked absolutely flawless. Heidi pulled her hair into a low bun and tucked it into the golden snood that had appeared pinned to her costume. I pulled two small sections of hair back, bobby-pinned them so they’d stay away from my face, and decided to hope for the best. When all was said and done, I had to say, we looked pretty good. Amy, especially, looked like a princess—like Rapunzel from Tangled. I still pretty much looked like a splatter-painted fireball, but not a totally heinous fireball.
By the time we were dressed, the boys were already onstage. It looked like their costume boots had turned out to be much more slippery than they had anticipated. They were skating around the stage, trying to gain traction.
Once they had a few more minutes of boot practice under their belts, we started running through the show. It wasn’t our best work, not by any stretch of the imagination. Everyone seemed uncomfortable in their clothing, trying to navigate massive skirts and jumbo sleeves. And the boots were the biggest mystery factor of all. At one point Rhys slid four feet downstage and ended up in a split.
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