The Juliet Spell (14 page)
Authors: Douglas Rees
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Performing Arts, #Dance
We ate it, and then we did the dishes together and went back into the living room. Mom went back to her book, and I tried to do my English assignment, but I couldn’t pay atten.tion to it. I read all the way to the end of The Great Gatsby and didn’t even get that Gatsby died.
Then we went to bed, and I lay awake listening for Ed.mund. That was a long night. Milton had it right.
The next morning, Edmund came into the kitchen smil.ing.
“Give ye good morrow, fair ladies,” he said, hugging us both. “And a fair, rare morning it is.”
I was about as surprised as I’d have been if he’d come in wearing a suit of armor, a feather boa and a stuffed baby al.ligator on his head. More surprised, actually.
“You want some breakfast?” I said.
“I am near starved. A night on his knees can give a man an appetite!”
I got up and made him some bacon and eggs, feeling de.lighted that there was something I could do for him.
Edmund sat down beside Mom.
“So. You seem a lot better,” Mom said.
“My courage came back with the dawn,” he said. “Truly does the Bible tell us, ‘A night of weeping bringeth joy in the morning.’”
“Uh-huh,” my mom said. “You must be pretty tired, though.”
“I do not feel so. I should, but I do not. Miri, may we not do some work together on our parts today?”
“Sure,” I said. “Great.”
Edmund wolfed his food while Mom finished her coffee.
I started humming. A day being Romeo and Juliet with Edmund was exactly what I wanted.
But Mom, with a little nod, clued me to follow her out to the front door. There, she whispered to me, “He’s acting too cheerful. I think he may be having a huge mood swing. People do it under emotional pressure. Perfectly normal. Just don’t be surprised if he crashes again, or does something a little desperate.”
“Desperate like how?”
“You’ll know it if you see it, I think,” Mom said. “Call me if you need to. I’ll be home after three.”
She hugged me and left.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Edmund already had our scripts out.
“Shall we start with the balcony?” he said.
That morning was intense. Edmund was on fire. He kept turning every word, reading both parts, reading the lines differently each time. Or sitting with his eyes closed while I read the lines, his and mine. It was like he was trying to make Juliet’s moonlit garden real there in our kitchen.
After three hours of that, I needed to calm down, but not Edmund. He was all psyched about something, and unfor.tunately it wasn’t love for Miranda Hoberman.
“I feel as if Romeo is truly opening up to me for the first time,” he said. “Until this morning Dick Burbage’s work has been in my mind, and my hope has been to equal him. But now I begin to see my way to make the part my own. I see things that Burbage could never see, because he never played Juliet, as I have. Oh, Miri, I feel power in me.”
Power. That was the word for it, all right. Some strange energy was coursing through him, making him fly. Maybe it was Mom’s mood swing going full blast. Or maybe he was a genius.
The phone rang.
“Hi, it’s Drew,” Drew’s voice said. “Bobby and I want to work on our parts today. And I thought maybe you and Edmund would, too.”
“That’s funny,” I said. “Edmund and I are working now. Why don’t you ask him what he’d like to do?” and I handed over the phone. But I gave it to him backwards, accidentally. I wonder what Dad would have said about that.
We got the phone turned around, and Edmund held it like it was something live and squirmy.
“Ah, halloo?” he said into it. Then, “Aye, aye. ’Tis well thought of, dude. Aye, we shall be ready at twelve-thirty. Aye.” He gave me back the phone and I smiled into it.
“Sounds like a date,” I said, a lot more happily than I felt. I could have stayed on that balcony with Edmund all day. But, I told myself, it would be good for Edmund to have more rehearsal time with the guys. And I’d still be with him.
So I made us lunch and washed the dishes and right at twelve-thirty there was a knock on the door.
And it wasn’t Drew.
It was Vivian. She was wearing a slinky black leotard and a wispy little rehearsal skirt and a big, phony smile.
“Hi, guys,” she said. “Did Drew call back?”
I checked my phone. I’d had a call, but I’d turned my phone off without meaning to. Or, as Dad would have said, without my consciousness admitting to it.
And it had been Drew, calling to let me know that Bobby, damn him, had called Vivian and asked if she wanted to be in on what we were doing. And here she was to pick us up and take us over to Drew’s place. Lovely. This day was get.ting better and better.
Plus, Edmund’s eyes lit up like a wolf’s when he saw her.
“It’s so nice you can do this for me,” Vivian said as they went out the door. “I want so much to be a good Juliet, even though I’ll never get the chance to play her.”
“’Tis only what one actor owes another,” Edmund said.
Yeah, right, Edmund. You’re only thinking about her perfor.mance, I thought, and ground my teeth.
The five of us sat around in Drew’s living room, which was big and dark and furnished with tall green bookshelves and not much else except an old-fashioned sofa, and a line of wooden chairs that Drew had brought in from the kitchen table. The lowest row of bookshelves was wider than the oth.ers. They made a sort of bench that ran almost all the way around the room. There were a few big pillows stacked on the floor and in the corners of the shelves.
“Neat room,” I said, taking in all the books.
“We call it the Book Forest,” Drew said.
“’Tis like the Forest of Arden in As You Like It,” Edmund said.
“Like how?” I said.
“The Forest of Arden is no real forest,” Edmund said. “’Tis a magical place where anything might happen. So is this for.est, filled with the spirits of the trees from which the books were made and with the voices on the pages that whisper to the reader.”
“So cute!” Vivian said.
“Well, let’s see if we can do a little magic of our own,” Drew said.
But it wasn’t magic that happened in Drew’s living room. It was drama. Only not the one Shakespeare wrote.
It was supposed to be the kind of rehearsal where you make suggestions to each other. Then the polite thing to do is try them and see how they work. We started with Bobby and Drew, and Edmund reading in the extra characters in their scenes.
The first time Edmund tried to give Bobby a pointer about his reading, Bobby said, “Thanks,” and went on do.ing what he was doing.
The second time, Bobby shrugged and ignored the sug.gestion.
The third time, he said, “Look, Ed. I know you’ve done the play. But when I want your help, I’ll ask for it. Okay?”
“Your pardon,” Edmund said, and stopped making sug.gestions.
After about half an hour, Edmund and Vivian took over. That was when things went from tense to gamey. Vivian wasn’t even pretending not to come on to Edmund. And he wasn’t even pretending not to notice.
She rolled her eyes at him. He strutted, if you can strut sitting down, and tossed his hair like some supermodel in a shampoo commercial. I mean, they were ridiculous. Dis.gusting.
I was furious. I was hurt. And I wasn’t the only one. Bobby was looking at Edmund like he wanted to break his neck. And Vivian knew it and was playing up to Edmund even more.
Drew had said Bobby had a thing for Vivian. Apparently it was a big thing.
After a half hour of that, Drew said we ought to switch off, and suggested that he and Edmund do their scene where Drew makes fun of Romeo for being in love. But Bobby said, “I’d really like to work on the place in act one where Tybalt meets Romeo at the party. Drew, you can read Juliet’s old man.”
Drew agreed, and we went into that ill-fated in-your-face encounter.
Bobby put all his anger into that little scene, and Edmund played it as if it was the biggest joke since the last time Mer.cutio did standup at the Verona Comedy Club.
Neither of them were really acting the characters. They were just using them to tell how they felt about each other.
And Vivian was smiling this little cat smile.
I wanted to smack her.
Finally, when we were all nice and tense, Drew said, “There’s stuff in the fridge. Let’s take a break.”
Because some of us need to cool down.
We were sitting around with sodas when Drew’s mom came home. Ms. Jenkins was a tall, willowy woman with an ordinary face, except for her eyes which were glowing brown. There was something unusual about her, though. She was wearing beautiful green robes trimmed with gold lace, and a big silver cross around her neck.
“Everyone, I’d like you to meet my mother,” Drew said. “Mom, this is everyone. Vivian Brandstedt, Edmund Shake-shaft and Miranda Hoberman.”
“Hello, everyone,” Ms. Jenkins said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Edmund looked stunned.
“My mom’s a priest,” Drew explained. “How come you’re still in uniform, Mom?”
“A parishioner’s mother died today. At Bannerman. I gave the last rites,” Ms. Jenkins said.
“Are you okay?” Drew asked.
“Yes, thanks. But it was very sad. Except for her daughter the poor woman had outlived everyone she knew.”
“My mom fills in some Sundays at Episcopal churches,” Drew explained.
“Episcopal churches?” Edmund said. “What may they be?”
“The American name for the Church of England,” Ms. Jenkins said.
Edmund looked shocked. I could see he wanted to ask more, but he was afraid to. He didn’t know what pianos there were in this room, and he didn’t want to reveal that fact. But he stared after Drew’s mom like she was a fairy, a monster, a ghost or all three. Or maybe even a demon. Drew saw it.
When she went out of the room to change, Drew said, “My mom’s what’s called a working priest. That means she has a day job. But sometimes she substitutes for clergy who have parishes. And she’s on-call at Bannerman when some.body wants an Episcopal priest.”
“What’s her regular job?” I asked.
“She runs a yoga studio,” Drew said.
Edmund shook his head. A woman priest was too much for him to handle. His concentration was gone. Something had shifted and we all felt it. The rehearsal, or whatever this was, was over.
“Well, thanks, everybody.” Drew sighed. “I hope this helped. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
If tomorrow is anything like today, I thought, what tomorrow brings won’t be so good.
But as it turned out, I didn’t have to wait that long.
Chapter Sixteen
That night, after the three of us had eaten dinner and the dishes were done—without any assistance from any En.glishmen, by the way—Edmund yawned and stretched and went to bed.
That bothered me. I wanted to get him all to myself and warn him away from Vivian. But, I told myself, he’d been up all last night. He needed the sleep. Mom and I watched television together and went to bed at our regular time.
I fell asleep worrying about Edmund.
Then, at three that morning, I jerked awake with my heart pounding like a jackhammer. Someone was sneaking into the house, climbing in through a window. I could hear it.
I reached for my phone to dial 911.
And I heard Mom say, “Edmund, what the hell?”
And Edmund said something like, “Milady, did I wake ye?”
I got up.
Edmund was standing in the hall in his day clothes and his shoes were wet and had bits of grass on them.
“The next time, come in through the door,” Mom said.
“Aye, the window of me room is something too high,” Edmund said, smiling like a naughty little kid. “’Tis easy enough to go out so—”
“You don’t need to sneak out of here,” Mom said. “Just tell us where you’re going. Where were you, anyway?”
“Ah, I was ranging about a bit, milady. More than that I cannot say,” Edmund said.
He didn’t have to say. I knew exactly where he’d been. Vivian’s perfume was hanging on him fresh as new paint and twice as tacky.
Mom sniffed it, too.
“Hmm. More than that you don’t have to say,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Miri, go to bed. I have some things to discuss with Edmund.”
“I have some things to say to him, too,” I said.
“Yours can wait until tomorrow. Mine are clinical.”
I walked out into the living room and sat down.
“Miranda,” Mom said.
“Mom.”
“What?” Edmund said.
“Miranda, I want to talk privately with Edmund. Now.”
“Mom, there is nothing you can tell him that I don’t know about,” I said. “And as far as Vivian goes, I know a lot more than either of you.”
“I won’t speak of Vivian—or anyone—to the pair of ye. A man, a proper man, would do no such thing.”
