Hold Still

by Nina LaCour

  “Yeah.”

  Neither of them looks mad.

  “What are you here for?” Amanda asks.

  “We’re going to a play.”

  “You should come see us sometime.”

  “Okay,” I say, wondering if I will.

  “That would be great,” Davey says, and he seems so eager.

  “Yeah, it would,” I say. “I will.”

  I’m not sure how to end this conversation, and they don’t seem to know how to, either. I take a step backward, toward the door.

  “I still listen to that tape you made me. Like all the time.”

  “You do?” Davey asks.

  “Yeah.”

  I look at Amanda. “And I listen to the Cure CD practically every night.”

  She smiles.

  “Okay,” I say. “Well, my friends are waiting, so I should probably ...”

  They both nod, their heads moving at the exact same time.

  “Have fun,” Davey says, and I walk out to the sidewalk.

  4

  Dylan explains that the theater department at Dolores High is really well known throughout the city. It got a grant a few years ago from a rich retired actress in Pacific Heights and they used the money to build a brand-new theater where the old gym used to be. It’s obvious when I walk in that this isn’t your typical high school play. It’s swarming with people, all dressed nicely. A woman at the door is handing out programs. I open mine and find a picture of Maddy, looking serious and graceful, staring intently into the camera.

  I show Taylor.

  Dylan beams.

  “She’s really cute,” Taylor says to her.

  Dylan looks like she would like to smile wider, but it wouldn’t be possible.

  “I know,” she says, practically crooning.

  We find three seats next to one another in the third row. I sit between Dylan and Taylor. When most of the seats are taken, I see Dylan’s group of friends walk in, the kids we hung out with in the park that afternoon.

  “Hey, look,” I say to her. She sees them and waves, but she doesn’t get up. She stays sitting here with Taylor and me, and that makes me really happy, and I can hardly stand how right this feels, sitting here between them, waiting for the lights to dim and the curtain to rise.

  I return to the program and see I also recognize the actor playing Romeo.

  “Hey,” I say to Dylan, pointing at the head shot. “This is your friend, right? The one who liked the waitress?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan says. “He’s really good, too.”

  Then someone chimes a bell, and the audience goes quiet, and the room turns black. There is the rustle of the curtain rising, and then a light shines on three people onstage.

  They open their mouths and speak in unison: “Two households, both alike in dignity in fair Verona where we lay our scene . . .”

  I settle back in my chair.

  The Capulet and Montague men fight on the stage with real swords that crash when they make contact. Dylan’s friend enters.

  “Is the day so young?” he asks Benvolio. He says, “Ay me, sad hours seem long.” He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, “O, teach me how I should forget to think!” I, for the first time in my life, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.

  It seems like forever before Maddy comes onstage. I can tell that Dylan’s getting impatient, but I’m content listening to Romeo talk about his sadness, even if it is just over some girl who doesn’t love him back. But then the scene changes, and the nurse and Capulet’s wife are asking for Juliet, and Maddy walks onstage, all confidence, in a long white dress with a gold sash, and asks, “How now, who calls?”

  Dylan reaches over and squeezes my wrist, and points her head at Taylor like I need to let him know right now that this is Maddy, the one and only amazingly beautiful and talented Maddy, onstage right in front of us. So I do. I lean over to Taylor’s ear, and he tilts his face closer to mine, and I whisper, “That’s Maddy.”

  He leans closer to me then, and when he says, “Yeah, I saw her picture, remember?” his lip grazes my earlobe and my body fills with light.

  Romeo and Juliet meet; they fall in love. That girl Romeo was heartbroken over vanishes from his mind. All the actors are so good. They know all their lines, they really seem to feel everything. Juliet drinks the poison. We know she’s faking it, but her nurse doesn’t. She cries, “She’s dead, deceased. She’s dead, alack the day!” And Juliet’s mother doesn’t know it, either. She echoes the nurse, her voice loud and shrill, “Alack the day, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead!”

  “Are you okay?” Dylan whispers to me. I look down and see my hands shaking.

  I put them in my lap. I nod. Yes. I am okay.

  When the real suicides come, I remind myself that these are actors. I gaze up at the stage lights as Romeo looks down at Juliet’s body. When he declares, “Here, here will I remain, with worms that are my chamber-maids. O, here will I set up my everlasting rest,” I think, This is just a boy who was in love with a waitress at an all-night diner on Church Street. “Eyes, look your last. Arms, take your last embrace! and lips, O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death!” I try not to think of Ingrid. I try not to see her arms drip blood into her bath-water, see her body stretched out in her bathtub, letting in death. Romeo drinks the poison and I try to picture him without his costume, sitting in a diner booth, wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

  When Juliet wakes to find Romeo dead, Maddy’s voice is so full of feeling that it’s all I can do to not listen to the words. And I realize that even though I know what’s coming, I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see a girl thrust a knife, even a fake knife, into her own body. I look over to Dylan, hoping for something. Her gaze is fixed on the stage, fixed on Maddy. She is riveted.

  Taylor reaches down and squeezes my hand. I start filling my mind with words, any words; I try to remember the old biology facts but I can’t hear them, something about dominant genes? Blue eyes and brown eyes? And as I’m trying to remember, Taylor leans over and whispers, “Turn around. Look at everyone.” So I do. Mothers are dabbing their eyes with tissues; fathers are blinking hard. The girls our age are wiping their cheeks with the sleeves of their sweaters and the guys are shifting in their chairs uncomfortably.

  And Taylor whispers, “I think this is a sign of a good performance,” whispers, “Do you ever go to that Shakespeare festival in Orinda? It’s outside, and whenever my mom takes me I’m always freezing my ass off by the end,” whispers, “I saw a version of Henry the Fifth that they made into a western. Henry, the king, wore a cowboy hat,” whispers, “Caitlin. You can look now,” whispers, “It’s over.”

  After the play we wait in the theater as most people leave.

  “Caitlin,” Maddy calls, coming toward me. We hug, and when we step apart she says, “I’m so glad that you came! Thank you so much for coming.”

  “You were amazing,” I say. “I never really liked Shakespeare before tonight.”

  Taylor shakes her hand and says, “You should have seen all the people crying. You were really good.”

  We all walk outside, and Maddy and Dylan are greeted by more people, and Taylor and I just stand off to the side and wait for them. Then the crowd dies down, the rest of their friends leave, and Dylan and Maddy start kissing. A couple of random men walk by and stare at them. Taylor stares at them. I stare at them.

  Taylor looks at me and raises an eyebrow.

  “Um,” I try. “They don’t get to see each other that much.”

  “No, it’s cool,” Taylor says. “They seem really into each other. I like your friends.”

  “I like your friends, too,” I say. Then, to clarify, I say, “Well, at least I like Jayson.”

  Taylor laughs. “Yeah, Jayson’s like a brother to me. He’s like my best friend in the world.”

  It’s starting to get really cold. I pull the sleeves of my mom’s sweater down
over my hands. I glance over at Dylan and Maddy. They’re still making out.

  Taylor and I stand and look at each other awkwardly. I hear Maddy and Dylan murmuring. Then Taylor and I, at the same exact moment, step into each other, and kiss.

  5

  Taylor brings the map. I bring the notecards and the speakers for my iPod. Mr. James asks for volunteers to go first and Taylor and I both shoot up our hands. We hate public speaking; we want to get this out of the way.

  “Taylor, Caitlin. I’m glad to see you’re so eager.” He takes a seat in the front row, like one of us, and looks genuinely excited.

  Taylor and I shuffle up to the front. I try to ignore the cheerlead ers glaring at me.

  It’s been a little over a week since Taylor and I kissed at the play. Since then, we’ve talked on the phone six times, hung out—with Dylan and Jayson, of course—during three lunches. Kissed once before first period in the parking lot, three times in the hallway after precalc, and every day after school. On Tuesday during break, Bethany, Henry’s ex, was talking to Taylor as he waited for me near the English hall, and when I walked up, he said, Bethany do you know Caitlin? Bethany hardly glanced at me and shook her head. Well then, Taylor said, meet my girlfriend, Caitlin. And he touched my arm, right below the elbow, and Bethany said hi, but I hardly noticed.

  Now I plug the speakers into the socket below the chalkboard and attach my iPod to them. I turn to a song by a French singer, Edith Piaf. My mom is obsessed with her. The recording sounds all scratchy and old, which is perfect. It isn’t nearly as old as Jacques DeSoir, but it sets the mood.

  Taylor and I hang our huge map of Europe up in front of the chalkboard.

  He looks at me for the cue to begin. I nod. He clears his throat and looks down at his notecard.

  “Jacques DeSoir,” he begins, “was many things: a mathematician, a citizen of France, a lover of snails, and a pirate.”

  The class laughs a little. In a good way. I look down at my notes and say, “Born in the port town of Nice, he was always fascinated by water. In fact, he began his first mathematical pursuits by timing the seconds that passed between each wave on the beach that was close to his house. He got so obsessed that his mom had to come get him by the water after dark all the time, and the people of Nice nicknamed him garçon de l’océan, which, translated, means, ‘boy of the ocean.’ ”

  I glance at the class and everyone actually looks pretty interested. Mr. James gives me a grin and a thumbs-up.

  Taylor says, “We have this map of Europe, and all the tacks here represent the places that Jacques DeSoir went on his travels. His travels began innocently. He would just work on the boats that people sailed, mostly cargo boats, and do his crazy experiments at night.”

  “But then,” I say, “he fell in with the wrong crowd.”

  Everyone laughs.

  We go on, with Edith Piaf singing French songs in the background, and Taylor and I telling little stories about Jacques DeSoir as we get to each tack on the map. We don’t talk too much about actual math, but Mr. James seems okay with that. After about fifteen minutes, we end and people clap, and I turn off my iPod, and Taylor takes the map down. We go back to our seats. Then other people start going up, and most of them just have these hurried-looking poster boards. A couple people have sloppy PowerPoint presentations. It takes them longer to get their computers set up than it does to go through all of their boring details about their mathematicians’ lives. By the time everyone else is finished, I realize that no one spent nearly as much time on their presentations as we did. Actually, I’ve never spent as much time as we did for any other assignment for school.

  After class, Taylor says, “So do you want to hang out later?”

  And even though the idea of just hanging around with Taylor sounds really good, I say, “Actually, there’s something I need to do.”

  6

  The DMV is a squat, plain building, but to me it looks like a shiny brochure of some distant tropical place, like it’s saying, Just peek inside and see all the good times you’ve been missing.

  I made an appointment for a driving test a few weeks ago. I didn’t know if I would show up, but here I am, walking through the glass double doors, passing the security guard and all the people lined up who didn’t make appointments. The driving instructor’s name is Bertha and her hair is an orangey-pinky-red—a color that definitely does not exist in nature. She hardly glances at me from over her clipboard, just says my name and starts checking little boxes. She leads me out a back door to a little car and gestures for me to get in the driver’s seat. I settle in as she slams the door to her side.

  Just then I realize: I probably should have practiced.

  Besides driving with Taylor that one day, I haven’t driven for months, and back when I did, it wasn’t very often. My dad took me out to the Safeway parking lot early in the mornings on a few weekends, and my mom took me on the freeway one time and said, “You’re doing great!” But for the whole ten minutes I was on it, trying to go exactly sixty-five, she was holding on to her seat cushion like it was a life raft. And then there was Sal, my driver’s-ed teacher. He was what you might call an underachiever. He took me out one morning and we drove around Los Cerros, and once he saw that I stayed within my lane for the most part, and used my turn signal and all that, he said, “Looks like you can drive, dear. Why don’t I just sign off here that we’ve done our fifteen hours and we’ll call it a day.”

  So I guess it’s understandable that I feel a little nervous sitting here with Bertha, as I try to remember how a three-point turn works, and when it’s okay to turn at a red light, and probably most importantly, which pedal is the gas and which is the brake.

  “We’ll just drive up along here,” Bertha says, gesturing with her clipboard toward a perfectly empty, straight street. “Then we’ll hang a right, you’ll do a three-pointer for me, and we’ll head back along this way.”

  “Okay,” I say, but I don’t move. I’m wondering: gas or brake? gas or brake? I try to remember what my dad taught me in the parking lot. I can remember that most of the mornings were clear and warm, and that he was wearing his tennis jacket, and afterward we got hot chocolate from 7-Eleven, but I can’t remember which side the brake is on.

  “You can start the car now,” Bertha tells me.

  “Oh, right,” I say.

  I look down at my feet and remember how my dad told me it was hard to describe all the things you do when you drive, that once you start doing it, your body just does it for you and you don’t think about it anymore. I hear Bertha shift in her seat and get the feeling that she’s about to say something, and I decide just to do it. I put my foot down on the left pedal and hope that it’s the brake. I remind myself of how smooth it went with Taylor that day, how I hardly had to think about it at all. I turn the keys in the ignition and miraculously, the engine comes on and the car doesn’t move. I shift into drive, press the right pedal and off we go.

  I do just what Bertha says. I drive down the quiet street; I do my three-point turn, which is really so simple, almost nothing; then I drive back to the DMV’s back door and park.

  I turn the car off and remember to pull up the emergency brake.

  Bertha checks more boxes on her clipboard and makes a few comments. Then she turns to me and says, “Congratulations.”

  She tells me to follow her back inside, and as we walk through the building I am filled with love for the DMV with its low ceilings and dirty floors and lines of impatient people, and most of all, Bertha, who risks her life daily so that people like me can be granted access to the wide-open roads.

  “You know you can’t drive with another minor in the car for a full year, correct?” Bertha says.

  Her eye twitches. Is she winking at me? I think she is.

  “Sure,” I say, just to make her happy.

  She hands me the paper off her clipboard and tells me to go wait in line. I wait and wait, and then I get my picture taken. I catch a glimpse of it on the screen. I
think I’m blinking, but who cares? Before I leave, I get a new piece of paper, a temporary license to last me until the real one comes in the mail. I go outside and sit on the curb and call my mom for a ride home.

  When she shows up, I stride over to her side of the car.

  She rolls down her window.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she says, looking at me quizzically.

  “Close your eyes,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Close your eyes!”

  She does.

  “Hold out your hands.”

  She opens her eyes, puts the car in park, then closes them again. She lifts her hands to the window. I set my temporary license on her palms.

  “Open!” I squeal.

  She stares into her hands, blinks, beams up at me.

  “When did you . . .” she starts, but she doesn’t finish the question, just unfastens her seat belt, opens the car door, and gets out. She stands beside the open door and gestures, grandly, from me to the driver’s seat.

  “Thank you,” I say in a very formal tone, and take my rightful place behind the wheel.

  When I get home I call Dylan, but she doesn’t answer.

  I hang up and call Taylor. He answers and I say, “I just got my license.”

  “You didn’t have your license?” he asks.

  “No. I told you, remember?”

  “I guess I forgot. But, hey, that’s great. You’ll have to take me out soon.”

  I hear a beeping, and look down at the phone and see it’s Dylan.

  “I gotta go now,” I tell Taylor. “Just wanted to tell you.”

  “So you’ll take me out soon?”

  “Maybe,” I say. Then, “Yes.”

  I click over to Dylan. “I know you think that cars are the downfall of humanity, but I got my license today.”

  “That’s awesome! Congrats. You want to drive me to school tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.” But then I get nervous. “But my car’s a stick. And I’ve hardly driven it. I passed the test on an automatic.”

  Dylan says, “I can drive a stick. I’ll walk to your house in the morning so we can drive together. That way, if you keep stalling in an intersection, I can take over.”