Douglas Rees - The Juliet Spell

And I lit the match.

There was a quiet whoosh and orange flames licked up all over my little volcano. The red cube burned. It was pretty. Very theatrical.

But it was casting too much light. And for some reason, the light was coming from over my head.

I jerked my head up and saw a bright white glow hanging about three feet over the table, right over my flame.

“Aaah?” I said. Or something like that.

And with the bright light came a sound like a low bass note that turned into a sort of rumbling thrill, something like an earthquake.

Everyone in California knows what you’re supposed to do when a quake hits. You stand in a doorway. And that’s what I did, even though this was no quake and I knew it. I clutched the door frame with both hands while the white light suddenly filled the whole kitchen, so bright I couldn’t see anything. There was a bang, and the light was gone.

My baking dish was shattered. It lay in two exact halves on the floor. Smoke curled up from each one of them, but there was no crust. They were clean as a pair of very clean whistles.

But that was not the main thing I noticed. No, the main thing I noticed was the tall young man standing on the table in the middle of my glass round. He was about my age, and for some reason he was dressed in tights and boots and a big poofy shirt like he was supposed to be in a play like, say, Romeo and Juliet.

He even looked a little like Shakespeare.

Long hair, a bit of a beard…

I screamed.

www.miraink.co.uk

To Carol Wolf

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

HISTORICAL NOTE

QUOTES NOTE

Acknowledgments

“Miranda Hoberman.”

That was me. My turn. My chance. My audition. Now. With all the cool I could muster, which felt like exactly none, I left my seat and climbed up onto the stage.

Down in the front row, Mr. Gillinger glared at me, looked at my audition sheet and glared at me again.

“You’re reading for Juliet?” he drawled in his deep voice.

“Yes,” I gulped.

“Very well, go ahead.”

Bobby Ruspoli grinned, sizing me up. He was already Romeo, and everyone knew it. It just hadn’t been announced, yet. Mr. Gillinger would post his name along with the rest of the cast on the theater office door tomorrow or the next day. But we all knew he was Romeo before the play was ever announced, the way people in drama know who’s going to get what, when the fix is in. So with that weight off his mind, handsome Bobby was checking out every girl who might be his Juliet.

As if I wasn’t nervous enough. As if I hadn’t been studying this part every day since it had been announced that we were doing Romeo and Juliet. As if I hadn’t spent the last week lying awake nights worrying and thinking about how to do this moment better, I had to have Bobby checking out my boobs and butt. As if—

“Begin,” Mr. Gillinger commanded.

Bobby shrugged, inhaled, the way he’d seen real actors do in some of the acting DVDs we’d watched in class, and announced:

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

Then he looked up, like I was hanging from one of the Fresnel lamps that were glaring down on us, instead of standing right in front of him, shaking.

“But soft! What light is this that through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick and pale with grief

That thou her maid art far more fair than she….”

He rattled off the next nineteen lines of the speech exactly the way he had done them all afternoon, racing down to:

“O that I were a glove upon thy hand, that I might touch that cheek.”

My turn. My line: “Ay me!”

I know, it sounds lame. But I said it like I wanted to die. Because that’s how Juliet feels right then. But had it been too much?

Bobby went on, “She speaks.”

Out in the auditorium, someone giggled.

Bobby continued.

“Oh, speak again, bright angel, for thou art

As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,

As is a winged messenger of heaven

Unto the white upturned wond’ring eyes

Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,

When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds

And sails upon the bosom of the air.”

Me again. My first real line in the scene. The one everybody knows—usually wrong: “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

You probably thought Juliet was asking where Romeo is, right? Wrong. She has no idea he’s anywhere around. He’s just been thrown out of the party her father was giving. He’s gone. She’s asking why the guy’s name has to be Romeo, and the next lines make that clear.

“Deny thy father and refuse thy name;

Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,

And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.”

“Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?” Bobby asked the invisible balcony where Juliet was supposed to be standing. Me:

“’Tis but thy name that is my enemy;

Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.

What’s a Montague?—”

“Thank you,” Mr. Gillinger said. Like he was saying “Thank you for shutting up now, please.”

“Auh?” I said. I was kind of surprised. That was an awfully short audition.

“Let’s see. Next. Vivian Brandstedt. Also Juliet, right?” Mr. Gillinger said.

I got down off the stage. I was done. I could leave. But I wanted to see what the rest of my competition looked like.

I went to the far back of the auditorium and moved into a corner seat.

Vivian Brandstedt slithered up onstage and began to play Juliet like she’d been the hottest babe in Verona. It was funny, except that Vivian really was a hot babe, so nobody thought it was funny but me. Certainly Bobby didn’t. He fluffed his lines twice. Of course, it was hard for him to talk with his tongue hanging out of his mouth like that.

Mr. Gillinger let Vivian go on all the way to the end of the scene. He even read the nurse’s offstage lines to keep the thing going to the point where Juliet says,

“Good night, good night. Parting is such sweet sorrow That I shall say good night till it be morrow.”

And Vivian wasn’t bad. She just read it like she was tossing Romeo down her panties and her room key.

Why, why, why hadn’t Mr. Gillinger let me read the whole scene? Was I that bad, or was I so good that he didn’t need to see any more of me? Or was Juliet pre-cast like Romeo?

There was a noise down at the end of the row and a shape came toward me. Drew Jenkins.

He sat down beside me and whispered, “You were good. You get it.”