I’m Lysander, right?
“I’m Lysander, right?”
Mr Reyes: “Yes.”
“Yes. OK, um…‘You have her father’s love, Demetrius, Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him.’”
Mr Reyes: “Thank you, Jeremy.” He sucks in his lips in the angry/disappointed adult way. “Really excellent.”
Me: “Uh, ‘I am, my Lord, as well derived as he, as well possessed—’”
Christine: “I hate him. His English classes are awful. He can’t teach—”
Me: “‘And, which is more than all these boasts can be, I am beloved of beauteous—’”
Christine: “I’m seriously thinking about writing a letter about him to the Metuchen Home News/Tribune—”
I can’t tell if Christine likes me or she just hates Mr Reyes, but one way or another she’s talking, and you can’t beat that. I keep going, and every time I come to a sweet line in the read-through (and you know Shakespeare—the sweet lines are really sweet), I direct it at her, tilting my head so my sound waves ruffle some molecules on her cheek and she reacts in some imperceptible way that I might be imagining.
See, when I’m talking to girls, I develop an out-of-body consciousness, or unconsciousness. Everything means so much more. My posture, which is hopeless, gets a temporary lift as I arch my back. I can feel all my organs stacked in place and eyeball with pinpoint accuracy how far Christine’s leg is from mine, and when they touch just for a second I wonder if it’s her doing or my doing or chance. How can she not notice if our legs touch? How can she not notice my extremely unslick peripheral vision? How can she not notice my white socks, showing between my pants and shoes? (I have to fix that.)
“Lysander!” Mr Reyes snaps again halfway through some scene with fairies. I scramble with the script. Christine smiles, which doesn’t help me, and I try to smile back even though she might not be smiling at me, or she might be smiling at me in the wrong way, the eunuch way.
This is good. This is a step.
“‘Give me your hands, if we be friends, And Robin shall restore amends’,” Christine reads. The end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is empty without applause. It’s 5:30 and I’m sweaty in bad places.
“Reagggggh…” The cast collectively stretches, inching our chairs back. Some people have left during the reading but there’s still a dozen of us in the circle, including a napping Mr Reyes.
“Right, hmmmm,” he wakes up. “So that’s the play. Tomorrow we’re going to do scenes with Lysander and Demetrius. Maaaaaaaaa! We need everybody here, and blah blah blah—”
Scraping, chatting, yawning, we drown him in the dive for our backpacks. Here’s my last chance to talk with Christine. I’ve got to (1) give her the chocolate Shakespeare and (2) be slick about it—like I’m her friend but I could be more—and (3) leave the theatre with a flourish.
“So um, Christine,” I manage before she gets offstage, talking to the back of her head. In my left pocket, a fist clenches and unclenches. In my right, Shakespeare stands tall. “Did you hear anything about me, ah, giving you a letter?”
“Mm?” She faces me. That doesn’t sound like a good Mm.
“A letter, like…Well, in my math class this morning Jenna, who sits next to me, y’know, Jenna Rolan, said something about me giving you a letter and, like, I don’t even know you that well, so there might be, or have been, a misunderstanding.”
“I don’t understand.”
I don’t either, and that’s what I just said. Doesn’t she know what a misunderstanding is? I don’t say anything.
“You want to make sure that you didn’t give me a letter?”
“Well…”
“Why? What’s this about?” Christine leans her folding chair against her hip.
“Well, I just hate when rumours get started because they’re really hurtful, you know, and—”
“You didn’t, OK?”
“OK.”
“You didn’t give me any letter. Are you happy?”
“Well, I’m pretty happy—”
“Are you proud about not giving me a letter?”
Uh-oh. Against her hip, her chair twitches.
“Is that like your big accomplishment of the day? Not giving me something?”
“No, actually, I was—”
“Whatever.” Christine walks offstage and gets her backpack. I reach into my pocket for Shakespeare but—ewwww—fingers grab mushy chocolate head and sink into soup ringed by foil! Abort mission! Chocolate filth!
“Wait, Christine—”
But she’s already on her way out of the theatre. She seems to walk slowly, saying something to herself, maybe about Mr Reyes but more likely about me, I hope/fear, and then suddenly she’s at the door and she scowls back once, as if thinking, Well, figured as much—his name’s Jeremy. And then she’s gone as if, you know, a giant dragon coiled its way up from the floor of the theatre and decided to take her for its mate.
Fuck.
I should be pissed, right?
But, well…I’m weirdly relieved. It’s like I knew this would happen all along. It’s like I couldn’t handle anything else; it’s like this is the way the world works for me and, what do you know, it worked again. Failure justifies all my worrying and planning and strategising. I was right. I couldn’t do it. It’s almost as if I got away with something. My posture is back to being no good, my unslick peripheral vision has relaxed and I’m staring at the floor. I trudge to the bathroom to clean out my pocket.
Middle Borough has changed. While I was reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, industrious Student Unioners were putting up decorations for the Halloween Dance, these card-stock pumpkins. They look like they should have a Hallmark logo on them somewhere, taped to the walls, holding each others’ plump hands, dancing in circles. Pumpkins in love.
I go into the guys’ bathroom. I stand in front of the sink and turn my right pocket inside out. It’s not so bad; most of the Shakespeare stayed in the foil. I lick my fingertips as I remove it, soap up my hands and scrub the inner lining. It’s peaceful here: a cracked-open window, the click-clack of the soap dispenser…It’s like that moment just after you
