That Girl, Darcy

by James Ramos

  I found a spot in a corner to wait for Jake to arrive. I just hoped he showed up.

  “Nurse!” cried Ms. Wright as a small girl with big glasses came in. “With Juliet and the Capulets!”

  I didn’t have long to wait.

  “Romeo! With the Montagues!” cried Ms. Wright.

  I jerked my head up from my notepad to catch Jake as he swept into the room with a wide smile on his face. A few people cheered him on, and he graciously waved, greeting people and shaking hands as he made his way to the stage.

  I wondered, briefly, if he had taken up drugs between now and the last time I’d seen him.

  More people were arriving, and Ms. Wright was at the door, shouting, “Friar John, over there with the Chorus and the Apothecary!” I snuck up to the edge of the stage and whistled at Jake until I caught his attention.

  “Hey . . . Jake?”

  “Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Want to meet the rest of the cast?” He started waving at the other members of his group, who were huddled in a chattering cluster upstage. “Lady Montague, my ‘mother’; Abram, the family servant; Balthazar, my personal servant; and Montague, my ‘father’ and family patriarch.”

  I tried to act like I cared who they were, but at the moment I was more concerned with his mental well-being. Maybe he’d snapped. This could be the beginning of a psychotic break. How could someone go from looking like the world was ending to being happy-go-lucky again in the space of half an hour?

  I looked out across the stage at the kids on the other side, whom I assumed were the Capulets. Their group was slightly larger, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves much more than our clan. All of them, that is, except one, a tall girl with long hair and a severe expression. For half a second I thought it was Darcy, but it couldn’t have been, because Darcy’s hair was slightly shorter and layered. I frowned. Since when did I notice girls’ hair like that?

  “I take it that’s Juliet?” I asked, mostly to distract myself from that train of thought.

  Jake enthusiasm dimmed slightly. “The angry one? Yeah, that’s her. Well, she’s not angry, she just takes her acting very seriously.”

  I laughed. “How can you tell?”

  “She tried to kiss me earlier,” Jake answered, sounding both embarrassed and put off. “Full on the lips, too. She’s definitely method.”

  “Not to burst your bubble, but won’t the two of you be doing a lot of that?”

  “Yes, but there’s a time and a place for it, and in the middle of the hallway right after fifth period is not one of them.”

  Ms. Wright called everyone to attention, and I scurried back to my corner, whispering, “Good luck,” to Jake and the others before they dove into their first read-through—which, Ms. Wright explained, was exactly what it sounded like: they were just reading through the play.

  “Remember, folks, just read the words,” she told them from the stool she had perched on in the middle of the stage. “Don’t worry about the meaning behind them. The important thing for now is to start getting those lines memorized verbatim.”

  I jotted down notes while the cast practiced under Ms. Wright’s watchful eye. She listened with her own script in one hand, her other hand resting on her hip, a pencil dangling from her lip and another behind her ear. Every now and again she would stop them to correct pronunciation. They ran through act one half a dozen times before rehearsal was over. Jake, again, delivered in a fluent, natural voice, and Juliet deferred to her script a grand total of two times. She very much looked and sounded like she belonged in the fourteenth century. It was impressive.

  And creepy.

  Every so often I would catch her staring at Jake as if he was her long lost lover. He was right; she was definitely method. But deep down I hoped that she grew on him. She was pretty and obviously a good actress, so they had that in common. The fact that she was the literal Juliet to his Romeo couldn’t hurt, either.

  “Alright, great work people,” said Ms. Wright, sounding more like a coach than a teacher. “Keep it up, and remember, practice, practice, practice! Keep that diction. Enunciate those words. As I always tell my students, if the mouth don’t move, we don’t get the mood!”

  I waited for Jake, who had stayed behind to ask Ms. Wright a few questions. As we left, I asked him, “So, how do you feel about the play so far? Excited, overwhelmed, nervous?”

  “I’m actually really looking forward to being a part of this,” he said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I think this play is just what I needed.”

  I was sorely tempted to ask him what the heck was going on. He was in denial; he had to be. No way he’d forgotten Bridget that quickly. He had to be faking this. He still needed someone to keep an eye on him. But for now, I let him alone. Denial was the first step anyway, I heard. Sooner or later he’d break down, and when he did, I’d be there to help put him back together again.

  Chapter 17

  Operation Recovery was underway. I spent the entire week in distraction mode, never letting Jake out of my sight, and making sure to cram every moment we had with the two things he liked the most: skating and acting. Most of the time, we did both at the same time.

  “It helps to vary the setting you practice in,” Jake had told me before. “That way you get the lines down no matter what you’re doing; it frees you up for improvisation.”

  With that in mind we’d started going over our lines whenever and wherever we were, and today, we were skating.

  We didn’t go to the skate park. Lucas insisted that we hit some street terrain because he’d finally got that new lens for his camera and he wanted some dynamic new angles to record. So we caught the bus to Central Avenue, where another bus would take us to downtown Phoenix, as street as street terrain could get. Technically, skating was prohibited on private property, but so long as we didn’t loiter or get in anyone’s way we were usually left alone. And besides, who really could tell where private property ended and public began in a place as big as Phoenix?

  “At this same ancient feast of the Capulet’s sups the fair Rosaline whom thou so loves,” I said as Jake and I lounged in our seats toward the middle of the bus, next to a pair of girls and a few guys I didn’t know. “With all the admired beauties of Verona. Go thither, and with unattainted eye compare her face with some that I shall show, and I will make thee think thy swan a crow.”

  I had to keep reading from my script and my speech was choppy, but Jake didn’t criticize. It helped me when I translated what Benvolio was saying into modern English. Basically, here I was telling Romeo that I would show him girls way prettier than Rosaline.

  “When the devout religion of mine eye maintains such falsehood, then turn tears to fires,” he said easily. “And these, who, often drowned, could never die, transparent heretics, be burnt for liars! One fairer than my love? The all-seeing sun ne’er saw her match since the world first begun.”

  For clarity’s sake, I also translated Jake’s lines. Basically: there were no women more beautiful than Rosaline.

  I heard whispering from behind us, and looked around. “Jake?”

  “Yeah?”

  “They’re watching you.”

  “Who is?”

  I nodded covertly to the two girls were sitting two seats behind us, who were now pretending not to have been looking at Jake. The braver of the pair smiled.

  “Are you guys . . . quoting Romeo and Juliet?” she asked.

  I held up my script. “Rehearsing for a play. Well, he is.”

  “That’s so cool,” the girl said. She looked about our age. “Who are you playing?”

  “He’s Romeo.”

  The girl’s smile widened. “He looks like a Romeo.”

  I could see Jake blushing from the corner of my eye. Our stop was coming up, and I tugged the cord. “Nice talking with you,” I said as the bus stopped and Jake and I filed off the bus. Both of them waved, and as I got off I heard
one of them talking about how cute “he” was.

  One guess as to who they were talking about.

  Kyle and Liam were waiting for us at the Central stop. “What took you guys so long?” asked Kyle, waving a soda at us.

  “Sorry,” said Jake.

  “We weren’t even here that long,” said Liam, without looking up from his phone. “Elliott, is ‘sexiness’ a real word?”

  “Yes.”

  When we got to Central Station, we all were sure to carry our boards dutifully under our arms. There were tons of college kids riding their longboards downtown. But the station, at least, was a definite no trick zone; transit security here wouldn’t hesitate to confiscate a board the second it even looked like you might pop an ollie.

  Lucas was on the other side of the station with his bulky camcorder, filming a bunch of pigeons fighting over a Dorito.

  “Check this thing out,” he said, waving us over and hoisting his camera proudly. “Meet the .3x Ultra Fisheye. The Death Lens, as they call it. This sucker cost me an arm and a leg.”

  “And you film birds with it?” Kyle asked.

  “I think it’s awesome,” Jake said.

  “Wait till you see the footage,” Lucas said.

  We skated down Central. Aside from the college kids and the handful of tourists, there weren’t many people downtown on a Saturday. We pulled over to take turns flinging ourselves off a nice set of steps—six stairs, bare and wide—before finding a parking lot buttressed by a low rail to grind off of. I nailed a sweet nosegrind nollie flip—skating parallel to the rail, then flinging myself over it, slamming the nose of my board down and riding it out before bouncing away, flipping my board underneath me as I came down.

  “It’s in the can!” Lucas shouted. The whole time he’d been crouched level with the rail, almost underneath me as I’d gone over.

  We circled in the lot for a while, popping ollies or manuals, trying not to fall victim to the potholes and the rocks.

  “Tut, you saw her fair, none else being by,” I said as I wound around an old tire. “Herself poised with herself in either eye. But in that crystal scales let there be weighed your ladies love against some other maid.”

  I had to stop to pull my script out of my knapsack. “That I will show you shining at the feat, and she shall scant show well that now shows best.”

  The poetic way to say, “If you compared Rosaline to other girls I’m sure you’d see that she wasn’t all that pretty.”

  “I’ll go along, no such sight to be shown,” said Jake without breaking stride as he kickflipped over a moldy stack of newspapers, “but to rejoice in splendor of mine own.”

  Translation: I’ll go, but only to see Rosaline.

  We ran through the scene a few more times.

  “You aren’t half bad,” Jake said cheerily as we skated on. “You really should have auditioned for a role. I’m sure Ms. Wright would have cast you.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Eventually we skated to a Walgreens. I waited outside with Lucas while the others went in to buy water and snacks. He didn’t say a word. It was rare for Lucas get quiet for more than a few moments at a time, but he suddenly went stone silent. It worried me.

  “Hey, Elliott?” he said eventually. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something . . .”

  “What’s up?” I asked nervously. But Lucas smiled, and while it wasn’t quite one of his cavalier, devil-may-care smiles, it was still encouraging.

  “It’s about Nicole,” he said.

  “Oh no,” I moaned. “Is she bothering you too now?”

  “She asked me out, yeah.”

  “Sorry about that. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I said yes.”

  “Wait . . . what?” I must have heard wrong. I had to have heard wrong. Either that or this was some elaborate joke, which coming from Lucas wasn’t that surprising.

  “I said yes,” he repeated. Completely straight faced. Not a drop of humor in his voice. My jaw dropped. “I wanted to be the one to tell you. I know you guys go way back, and I wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything between you two. I mean, she said there wasn’t on her end, but I’d feel better hearing the same from you.”

  I cracked up. “Really? You and Nicole? I mean—no, of course there’s nothing between us; there was never anything between us. There won’t ever be anything between us. But really? You two? What’s that about?”

  This time it was Lucas who cracked up. “It’s about . . . I dunno, companionship.”

  “Companionship? Lucas, you’ve got more friends than anyone else I know.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about a real, intimate relationship. Don’t tell me you haven’t looked at some of the couples we know and wanted what they have.”

  “But you’ve had girlfriends before. And Nicole of all people? I wouldn’t think the two of you had anything in common.”

  “Look, bro, I know how you feel about her, but has it ever occurred to you that maybe you don’t know people as well as you think you do? So she’s a little intense. Being passionate is a good thing. She knows what she wants and she goes for it. I can appreciate that. People spend so much time looking for the perfect girl that they look past the right one. I’m not going to do that.”

  I shook my head at him. “Whatever you say.” I held up a hand, and we exchanged a fist bump.

  “So, we’re cool, right? No hard feelings or weirdness?”

  “Nope. I’m actually kind of relieved.”

  “You should hang with us some time. Maybe now that she’s not trying to jump your bones you can see that she’s a really cool person.”

  I wasn’t sure I was ready to play the third wheel again, so as the others came out of the store, I responded with an ambiguous, “Maybe.”

  “The cashier was totally flirting with Mr. Cheekbones here,” said Kyle.

  “And he didn’t even try to get her number,” added Liam.

  “No, she wasn’t,” Jake said bashfully as he offered me a water bottle.

  “Just as well,” said Kyle. “It’s not like he’s single anyway.”

  “Or is it?” asked Liam. “Are you and Bridget a thing or are you not labelling it?”

  Jake’s face darkened.

  “Why don’t we keep going,” I blurted. “I think there are some nice stairs up ahead.”

  “We aren’t anything,” Jake murmured.

  I tossed him a shocked look and everyone froze, staring wide-eyed at him.

  “What do you mean?” asked Liam. “Like, you were something but you’re not anymore, or you never were anything?”

  “Just forget it,” I said.

  “I don’t honestly know,” Jake admitted. He stared at the ground, kicking pebbles while everyone exchanged awkward looks.

  “Sorry, bro,” said Lucas.

  “We didn’t know,” said Kyle and Liam at the same time.

  Jake shook his head and squared his shoulders. “It’s no big deal,” he said with a forced smile. “It’s done, either way. C’mon, I came here to shred.”

  He dropped his board and kicked off. The others looked to me for a reaction. All I could do was shrug and skate after him. The others followed. So much for Operation Recovery.

  * * *

  Two days into the break, and Jake was still in denial. The only thing he ever wanted to talk about was the play. Watching him rehearse was its own show. It was hard to see him as my cousin when he was in his role; he simply became Romeo. And yet, there were times when I knew that the real Jake was seeping through. These instances were never more apparent than when he shared the stage with Juliet.

  The first time I noticed this was while working through act one, scene five The Montagues were crashing the Capulet party, and Romeo had just laid eyes on Juliet for the first time. Jake’s face was exactly the way it had been back at Lucas’s party when he’d first met Bridget; the wide eyes, the look of amazemen
t, the half-opened mouth. He froze, awestruck, as Juliet walked past with her entourage.

  “What lady is that which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?” he asked. He took a slow step forward, orienting himself to Juliet as she walked on, staring at her with such longing that there was no doubt in my mind about who he was really thinking about, who he was really seeing when he looked at her. “Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear, beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows as yonder lady o’er her fellow shows.”

  Watching from my seat, I noticed that the entire theater had fallen still as everyone braced for his next lines. “The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, and, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For ne’er saw true beauty till this night.”

  I looked to Tybalt, but he didn’t speak. Everyone seemed to have been caught up in Jake’s poetic delivery. The looks on many of the faces told me that he had just made himself a whole new set of admirers. Even Ms. Wright was wringing her script, hopping in place and smiling ecstatically. I looked at Jake, but he was in full Romeo mode now.

  Juliet, at the very least, seemed to very much enjoy his delivery, and was watching him approvingly.

  Maybe, I thought, there’s hope for Jake yet.

  * * *

  Four days into the weeklong break I learned that school being out didn’t free me from my obligations to The Quill when I got a text from Christian that had been sent to the entire paper staff. He wanted us all to meet at his house for a mandatory staff meeting. Whatever that meant.

  Lucas called me a few minutes after I’d read the text, offering to pick me up. I accepted, only to immediately regret it when I remembered that Nicole would probably be with him. I had to admit though, that I was curious as to how they were doing. I still couldn’t picture the two of them together, and I was convinced that they wouldn’t last the whole break together. Despite what Lucas thought, I knew Nicole as well as I knew him, and I was certain they were not compatible. Pretty soon I’d be helping him get over a relationship gone sour, too.