Starry-Eyed (40 page)

“
Come, bid me do anything for thee
,” implored Ryan.

I gulped in a breath and glanced down at the script. “
Kill Claudio
,” I read. I tried to remember the story: Beatrice was mad because this guy Claudio just accused her cousin Hero of being a slut and left her at the altar. Heck, I'd be angry too.

“
Ha! Not for the wide world
,” Ryan said with a short, sharp laugh. He was really good. He was definitely going to get the part of Benedick.

“
You kill me to deny it. Farewell
,” I said.

“
Tarry, sweet Beatrice
.” He put his hand on my arm, pulling me closer to him. His face loomed inches from mine, cinnamon and brown eyes and too much.

I promptly lost my place on the page. Why were the words so freaking tiny? “Uh . . .”

Silence. The iambic pentameter swam in front of my eyes. “Uh . . .,” I said again.

Someone in the audience snickered. I could hear whispering, then another giggle. I glanced up at Ryan. He seemed to be trying to stifle a pitying smile. They were all laughing at me. Even my crush was laughing at me. For a minute I wanted to throw myself into the orchestra pit and crawl out again, oh, sometime around graduation.

But then a slow anger boiled up in me. I was trying, dangit. I had never done this sort of thing before, and it was Shakespeare for crying out loud, and all things considered, I was doing okay.

And then I decided this: I was going to finish the scene if it killed me.
There was no point in being nervous
, I thought. These people weren't my friends, so what did I care what they thought of me?

I jerked away from Ryan. I picked a line farther down the page and
ran with it. “
O! That I were a man! What! Bear her in hand until they come to take hands, and then, with public accusation, uncovered slander, unmitigated rancor,—O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market-place!
”

Ryan tried to say something, but I kept going right over his line. “
O! That I were a man for his sake, or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue, and trim ones, too. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman with grieving
.”

Ryan looked startled. This time
he
was the one fumbling with the script. “
Tarry, good Beatrice. By this hand, I love thee
,” he stammered.

“
Use it for my love some other way than swearing by it
,” I said, and just for a minute there, I got it. Beatrice's frustration. Her fury. Her sadness. It all made perfect sense.

Take that, Benedick.

Silence again. I glanced down at the audience section and saw the drama crowd sitting there, staring up at me, stunned. Then Ms. Golden boomed out, “Very good, you two. You can sit down.”

. . . . .

The cast list went up on Monday morning.

I sent Becca to go read it for me. I couldn't suffer the added humiliation of walking up to that piece of paper, taped to the door of the auditorium, past all those drama people who I knew would smirk and whisper as I went by. I couldn't let them see my pathetic, crestfallen face when I didn't find my name on that list.

It's for the best, I told myself as I watched Becca turn the corner toward the theater. It really was a stupid idea. How lame is it to get your first kiss from a play, anyway?

Becca came back looking solemn. Even though I was expecting bad news, my stomach dropped.

“So what, I didn't make it?”

“Sorry, Jo,” she said. “I think you're going to have to miss some soccer practice. Coach is going to be furious.”

She grinned.

“What?”

“You got Beatrice!” she crowed.

I stared at her, stunned. “You're punking me.”

“Nope. It's right there at the top of the page. Beatrice, niece to Leonardo,” she said. “Jo Dalley. You did it!” she called after me, because I was already sprinting toward the auditorium.

The drama people were all crowded around the door, all right, but the looks they gave me were friendly enough, even some congratulations thrown in there as I weaved my way to a spot where I could read the sheet.

My mouth dropped open.

For two reasons, really.

1: Becca wasn't yanking my chain. I was Beatrice. Somehow I had just landed the female lead in the school play. And Becca was right; my soccer coach was going to be ticked. I was going to have to quit, like everything, just so I could make it to rehearsals. My parents were going to wig.

But reason 2 was so much more interesting. Because one line down from my name it listed the role of Benedick.

Eric Bradshaw.

Ryan Daughtry, it turned out, had been cast in the role of Claudio.

I was going to have to kiss the wrong guy.

. . . . .

The first read-through was a joke. I was super frustrated by the ridiculousness of the whole thing: first, my crazy-stupid idea that I could get the guy I liked to kiss me by acting like I was an actress. Ha. Then, that I somehow actually managed to pull it off, and now I was going to be expected to act. Ha ha. And finally, that I wasn't going to even kiss Ryan. I was going to kiss Eric, a guy I didn't know. Ha ha ha.

I'm hilarious.

So we all sat around a big table in the drama classroom with highlighters and pencils, and Ms. Golden went through the script cutting some of the longer bits out in order to get the show down to under two hours, because I guess Will Shakespeare was a little wordy, and we highlighted our lines. The mysterious Mr. Bradshaw sat at the other end of the table from me, and when he caught me looking at him he wiggled his eyebrows up and down playfully, and my stomach did a clenchy thing, and I thought, for the umpteenth time, this is all a huge mistake.

Ryan Daughtry sat by Alicia Walker. She was going to play Hero, my cousin. Which meant that she was going to kiss Claudio/Ryan. Again.

Sometimes the universe just isn't fair.

When we got to reading through the play, I stumbled over the lines. I didn't know what I was saying most of the time, and my mortifying British accent kept making the occasional appearance. There was nothing of the big brave moment I'd had at auditions. I sucked. By the end of the read-through, I was convinced that Ms. Golden must have realized that she'd made a huge mistake casting me. I started thinking about how I was going to grovel my way back onto the soccer team and go crawling back to my piano teacher.

After the read-through was over, I didn't stick around to chat with the cast. Call me chicken, but I fled.

“Jo, wait,” someone called after me as I was making my lame getaway in the parking lot. “Wait!”

I stopped.

Alicia Walker floated up to me and smiled. She had very nice teeth, perfectly straight and even and white. Of course she did.

“Can I walk with you?” she asked.

“Um, sure.”

We walked.

“So you were kind of nervous in there,” she observed.

Um, duh. “I guess,” I mumbled.

“Don't be,” she said, like I had a choice whether or not to be nervous. “You're going to be an amazing Beatrice.”

“Come on,” I said miserably. “I was a disaster.”

“Hey. You got the part for a reason. You were good at auditions. You
were
” she insisted when I laughed out loud. “Fine, you're a newbie, but you have a kind of strength about you, a kind of fire, you know, that's very Beatrice.”

“You should have been Beatrice,” I said.

She shrugged. “I wanted Beatrice, actually. I'm sick of playing the delicate flower all the time. Shakespeare always has a weak woman and a strong woman in his plays. So far I've played Juliet (weak), Bianca (so weak), and Desdemona (oh my God smother me now).” She sighed. “I actually faint in this play, did you catch that? My fiancé accuses me of sleeping around, and I collapse, and everybody thinks that I die from shame. Do you know how weak you have to be to
die
from
shame
? You, on the other hand, get to go around raving about how if you were a man, you'd tear Claudio's heart out of his chest and eat it, and I just sink to the floor. Oh, dear,” she exclaimed softly, flailing her arms. “Whatever shall I do?”

“But you get to kiss Ryan Daughtry,” I said. “That's a perk, right?”

Alicia rolled her eyes. “Just between you and me, Jo,” she confessed. “Ryan's not a very good kisser.”

Inconceivable. I stared at her.

“But you and Ryan were dating last year, weren't you?” I asked.

She grimaced like she found the idea totally embarrassing. “Oh that,” she explained. “That was the verisimilitude.”

“The what?”

“It's this thing in theater, where you kind of get lost in the part you're playing. So, if your character falls in love with someone, you kind of do too.”

“Sort of like how Hollywood actors always hook up with their costars,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“So you and Ryan . . .”

“We had a little thing during
Oklahoma!
It wore off pretty quickly. Ryan's okay. He's pretty,” she said, a bit wistfully. “But he's also a little . . . vapid.”

Vapid. I was going to look that one up.

“Anyway,” Alicia continued. “I'm glad you're in the play. I think you'll be great once you loosen up a bit. Shakespeare's challenging, but you'll get it. And you and me, we should hang out. We're supposed to be cousins, you know? Best friends.”

“So there could be verisimilitude between us too?” I said. “Beatrice and Hero are friends, so we should be?”

She smiled that perfect smile again. “Yes,” she said. “Something like that.”

. . . . .

Okay, here's what they don't show you on
Glee
: blocking.

That's the part in the beginning of the rehearsal process where the actors stand on the stage and go where the director tells them. I had to learn the geography of the stage: upstage and downstage, left, right, and center, and all the combinations: Enter down left. Walk to center right. Exit up left. It was initially confusing, but by the end of the first week of rehearsals, I had it down. I was a bundle of nerves, though, because the entire time I was thinking, how are we going to block the kissing? But when we got to the part in the script where Claudio is supposed to kiss Hero (So—Ryan kissing Alicia, as you'll recall—heavy sigh), they just kind of looked at each other and smiled knowingly and moved on to the next line.

I relaxed a little. Apparently we weren't going to be expected to kiss anybody yet.

Whew.

I wasn't supposed to be onstage for a bit, so I sat down in the wings backstage and started going over the lines for my next scene. After a while
I became aware that someone was standing in front of me. Someone wearing black Converse sneakers with ratty laces. I looked up.

Eric Bradshaw.

“My lady,” he said, and gave a slight bow.

I stared at him, uncertain of how to respond. His shirt featured a guy with glasses and a mustache and the word
PIZZA
in large block letters, which I didn't understand. He smiled.

“Hi?” I said.

He stuck out his hand. “I'm Eric,” he said, like I didn't know. “We were never formally introduced before, so . . .”

I took his hand. It was warm and slightly rough. “Jo.”

“Jo, right,” he repeated, squeezing my hand. “Are you a freshman?”

“Uh, no,” I said with an embarrassed laugh. “Junior.”

“Oh. Sorry. I'm a junior too, but I moved here last year, so I don't know everybody, and I've never seen you before. I mean, maybe I've seen you, but never in here.” He finally let go of my hand and gestured to the auditorium around us.

“I've never really been in here before,” I admitted. “Except for auditions.”

“I loved your audition. You, quite simply, rocked.”

I glanced away, hoping I wasn't blushing. “Right. When I wasn't speaking in a British accent, you mean.”

His eyes, which were a deep blue, widened (dare I say) theatrically. “No, I thought the British accent was hot. I think we should all do this entire play in British accents. Shakespeare was British, after all. That's authenticity.” He pressed his fist to his chest, his voice deepening into something that reminded me a bit of Charlton Heston. “That's truth, in theater.”

I couldn't help but smile. “Thanks.”

“Eric, you're up, dude,” somebody said from onstage. Eric turned with an apologetic smile and tipped an invisible hat at me, then bounded out onto the stage.

I watched as he did the scene. I really let myself look at him, which I'd been too mortified by the situation to do before, and what struck me most about him was that he was an oversized little boy—tall, broad in the shoulders, a tad stocky, not overweight or anything, but solid. He smiled a lot. He had a large chin and deep blue eyes that twinkled under the lights. His hair was blond and all over the place, and his face was a bit scruffy, like he couldn't be bothered with shaving. Because he was too busy playing.