The Juliet Club

The Juliet Club

Suzanne Harper

Dedication

For Mitchell Waters

Contents

Prologue

“Which one of Johnny Burwell's eyebrows do you think is cuter?” Sarah asked. Her light brown bangs fell into her eyes as she tilted her head meaningfully at a boy sitting two tables away in the school cafeteria. “Don't look!”

“Don't be ridiculous,” her friend Annie snapped, right before she swiveled around to take a long, hard, deliberate look. She narrowed her eyes, then said, “Hmm. That's actually a
very
difficult question.”

“At least you have a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right,” Kate murmured, refusing to even glance over. She gave a deep, rather pointed sigh, which was completely ignored.

“The right,” Annie finally decided. “I like the way it goes up when he says something sarcastic.”

“Oh, I hadn't thought about that,” Sarah said, interested. “Now,
I
would have said the left, because it has that funny little tilt to it, but you do have a point—”

“Oh,
please
.” Kate took an annoyed bite of her sandwich. Sarah, Annie, and Kate had become fast friends on the first day of second grade and then spent the next nine years talking about everything from the meaning of life to the meaning of mascara. But today Kate was most definitely not in the mood to discuss eyebrows, or the relative cuteness factor thereof.

“Can we talk about something else, please?” she said. “
Anything
else?”

“Like what?” Annie asked innocently. She was of the opinion—often stated and never successfully refuted—that Kate was only slightly less serious than a Supreme Court judge. “Emily Dickinson's poetry? Quantum mechanics? The Constitutional Convention of 1787?”

“Come on,” Kate protested. “Just because I don't want to write sonnets in praise of Johnny Burwell's left eyebrow—”

“I don't want to write a sonnet about it.” Sarah sighed dreamily. “I just want to sit in silent contemplation of it.”

“I know. I saw you contemplating it all through algebra class.”

“You have to admit, Kate, that it
is
a very nice eyebrow.”

“And you have to admit, Sarah, that you
are
failing algebra.”

“I've never met anyone as practical as you, Kate,” Annie said. “It's really rather terrifying.”

Sarah nodded in agreement. “And
that
is all your mother's fault.” After a moment, she added, in the spirit of fairness, “And your father's, too, of course, but in a completely different way.”

“Absolutely,” Annie agreed. She had recently developed a unifying theory of the universe that boiled down to one indisputable fact: Everything that was wrong in her life could be traced back to her parents. This theory had proved so satisfactory that she was now attempting to apply it to everyone else's lives as well. “And, of course, when you factor in what
Jerome
did to you—”

Kate shot her a look that stopped her in midsentence. She wasn't ready to talk about Jerome, think about Jerome, or even accept the fact that Jerome was still alive and breathing on the same planet as she was.

“Well. Anyway.” Annie quickly went back to her first point. “With parents like yours, it's no wonder that you're so . . .
unromantic
.”

And when Kate thought about this, she found she couldn't disagree.

When Kate was eleven years old, her parents had divorced. She was sad, of course, but hardly surprised. The only puzzle was what had taken them so long.

After all, her mother and father disagreed about everything: whether to squeeze the toothpaste in the middle of the tube or from the end, whether to let dishes soak overnight or wash them immediately, whether to pay bills as soon as they arrived or designate one day of the month to write out checks.

And they were polar opposites in the one area that really counts: love.

Her father was a heart-on-his-sleeve Romantic (with a capital R), while her mother was a cool and controlled Rationalist (also with a capital R; neither of them did anything by halves).

Her father was a Shakespeare scholar with a tendency to launch into sudden long orations on the genius of The Bard; her mother was a law professor whose precisely reasoned arguments could reduce law students, opposing counsel, and tardy plumbers to tears.

Her father cried at Hallmark commercials and any movie in which True Love Triumphs. Her mother preferred documentaries on the History Channel, which never made her cry, not even when the barbarians conquered all of known civilization.

Her father thought Valentine's Day was the most important holiday of the year. Her mother thought Valentine's Day was a capitalistic ploy to get people to amass major credit card debt on chocolates, champagne, and flowers.

Kate often wondered how they ever got together in the first place. When asked, her father would hum a few bars of “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” and then change the subject. Her mother would offer a more scientific, but no more helpful, answer. “There is a natural law that states that, given enough time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible probable, and the probable virtually certain,” she would say. Then she would peer over the top of her glasses and add, “Thus the dodo bird. And my marriage to your father.”

For six years after the divorce, Kate spent weekdays with her mother and weekends with her father. She split summer vacations neatly in two between the second and third weeks of July. She opened presents on Christmas Eve with her mother (who liked sleeping in) and on Christmas morning with her father (who thought that only the dim light of dawn offered the appropriate sense of mystery).

For six years, Kate listened as her mother pointed out the foolishness of people made giddy with romance. If they happened to see a teenaged couple entwined in the park, her mother would shake her head and say something like, “That girl should be studying for her finals.” She would usually say it in a voice calculated to be heard by the girl in question. Kate would blush, grab her mom's arm, and drag her away as quickly as possible.

If her father saw that same couple, he would start declaiming, in an embarrassingly loud and enthusiastic voice, “I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows; Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.” People would stare. Some of them would snicker. And Kate would blush, grab her dad's arm, and drag him away as quickly as possible.

For six years, Kate moved back and forth between these two households, alike in dignity but divided by major philosophical differences about whether the heart should rule the head or vice versa.

Her friends hadn't been much help. Sarah always got crushes on boys who didn't know she existed, and consequently had become quite skilled at Yearning From Afar. Annie, on the other hand, was like Attila the Hun when it came to romance. Pale, stuttering boys were always falling for her and then wilting as she broke their hearts with ruthless abandon.

Neither option seemed appealing to Kate, who held herself apart from the romantic fray in a way that her friends found most irritating.

“Just wait,” Sarah had told her. “Just wait until
you
fall in love! It will happen,
boom
, just like that! Like an earthquake or an explosion or a lightning bolt!
Then
you'll see!”

“It sounds dangerous,” Kate had said. “And painful.”

“The danger is what makes it fun,” Annie had said, her blue eyes sparkling.

“Don't listen to her,” Sarah had said reassuringly. “True love makes you feel like—well, like every day is spring!”

Annie had pretended to gag.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” said Kate, who had been adding a few items to her to-do list during this conversation. She capped her pen with an air of finality.

Sarah and Annie had exchanged a meaningful look.

“Well,” Annie had murmured, in a knowing tone that Kate found quite irritating. “We shall see.”

“No,” Kate had said with great finality. “You won't.”

Which was why her friends had been understandably delighted when Kate, most unexpectedly, fell in love.

Of course, Kate being Kate, she managed to fall in love in a clear-sighted, practical, down-to-earth way that Annie and Sarah found less than satisfactory.

It happened in science lab on the very first day of their junior year. The chemistry teacher had handed her a beaker of some mysterious liquid and told her to carry it to her lab table. She had almost reached her seat when Jerome Hollis caught her eye and smiled. She blushed and tripped over her own feet. He plucked the beaker from her hands as she fell, then helped her stand up.

“Thanks,” she said breathlessly.

“For what?” He handed the flask back and her heart gave a little flip. He had straight black hair, hazel eyes, and black-framed glasses. He looked cute, in a nerdy-but-hip kind of way.

She tried to collect herself. “For saving me from a horrible, disfiguring scar, of course,” she said. “After all, if I had been splashed with this, um—” She gingerly held the flask aloft.

“Saline solution,” he said. “Otherwise known as salt water. You would have been fine.”

“Oh.” She put the flask down and looked away.

“Although,” he added thoughtfully, “if you
had
dropped the beaker, the gravitational force and speed of descent would have meant that it would have, in all probability, shattered.”

Kate glanced back at him. “The force could have sent a shard of glass into my eye, blinding me,” she suggested.

“Or cut a vein, causing a massive loss of blood. When you take all the disastrous possibilities into account—”

“You should be given a medal for heroism,” Kate finished.

“I can't believe they're not pinning it on my shirt right now.” He smiled, and she was lost.

If Kate had believed in fate (although she didn't; in fact, she believed most emphatically in controlling her own destiny), it would have seemed that higher forces were at work when she discovered that they had been assigned to the same lab table, and that they were both taking Spanish, and that they had the same lunch period. A few weeks later, he asked her to go to the Halloween dance. After that, Kate and Jerome were officially a Couple.

They studied together for hours (neither of them had ever missed making the honor roll; they shared a mutual horror at the very thought). They had long discussions on a number of political and social issues (they were both pro-environment and anti-fur, and had agreed to disagree on whether globalization would turn out to be a good thing or not). Together, they joined the debate team (and found that spirited arguments were quite enjoyable when the subject had no personal meaning whatsoever). And they both agreed that the only way to truly be in a relationship was to commit to being straightforward and honest with each other (at all times, no matter the cost).

When Kate rather complacently reported all this to Sarah and Annie, she was disappointed by their reaction.

“He sounds great,” Sarah had said, with little conviction.

“He sounds
worthy,
” Annie corrected her. “And sensible,” she added, in the most damning tone possible.

“Exactly! That's why we're perfect for each other.” Kate had said that more emphatically than she had meant to, because she had been wondering, just a tiny bit, if this was what romance was supposed to feel like. Especially after Jerome, in a self-congratulatory mood, told her that their relationship was what any chemistry textbook would define as “steady state.” (When she looked this up on the Internet, she had not found the definition reassuring.) “Anyway, what's wrong with worthy?” Kate went on. “Or sensible, for that matter?”

“Nothing,” Annie had shrugged. “It just doesn't sound like much . . .
fun
.”

Kate knew enough not to take this bait. Instead, she changed the subject and reflected complacently that some people just couldn't understand a truly
evolved
relationship.

For Christmas, he gave her a gold ring with a little ruby—actually, more like a ruby chip, but it was the thought that counted. Kate invited him to the Valentine's Day dance; he invited her to the prom. And Kate enjoyed the smug sensation that, unlike her parents, her friends, and apparently everyone else in the known universe,
she
had this love thing all figured out.

But then, on a beautiful spring morning in early May, Jerome called Kate on the phone to tell her three things in rapid succession: He wanted to break up with her, he would like her to return the ring with the little ruby (
definitely
just a chip), and he was going to the prom with Ashley Lawson (also known among Kate, Sarah and Annie as the Practically Perfect Ashley Lawson, thanks to her shining black hair, sparkling blue eyes, and intimidating fashion sense). The fact that the Practically Perfect Ashley Lawson was everything that Jerome had said he didn't want—frivolous, flighty, and shallow—only made matters worse.

“I don't understand,” Kate said. “It doesn't make any sense! What could they possibly have to talk about?”

Annie had sighed, a world-weary sigh that said that Kate had so, so much to learn about the ways of men. “Maybe,” she pointed out, “he's not interested in
talking
to her.”

“Don't worry,” Sarah said. “There are plenty of other fish in the sea, so you just have to get right back on the horse and kiss a lot of frogs in order to find your prince!”

But after being betrayed in such a cold, uncaring, thoughtless, treacherous, traitorous, downright cruel manner, Kate had decided that, when it came to love, it was far better to retire from the field of battle altogether.

Kate took a despondent bite of her chicken sandwich. It tasted like sand.