“You are going to be Demetrius, another tough role. Get ready to memorise muchly.”
“Cool,” Jake says.
“Puck? Where is my Puck? Christine Caniglia?”
Christine is now down in front, near Jake; all I see is her blonde hair.
“You’re kidding!” she squirts. “I’m Puck?”
“You, young lady, are Puck.”
“Yes!” Christine jumps out of her seat pumping her fist. Everyone eyes her with respect and swelled-up cutesy pride, or maybe that’s just me; when girls get happy and jump out of their seats, like on The Price Is Right, it’s sweet to watch.
“Don’t get too excited, Christine; it’s a disgusting number of lines. Maaaaaaah!” Mr Reyes moves on through Hermia, Helena, Titania, Bottom and about a dozen other people. Mark, behind me with his Game Boy, gets to be some kind of cross-dressing elf. That’s comforting.
“OK, those are the roles; now we must have the read-through. Ladies, fetch two metal chairs each and bring them on stage.”
“Wuh?” The girls down in front look confused. (It’s funny how they look confused from behind, with their shoulders bunched up.) Christine is the only one I hear: “How come we have to get the chairs?”
“Come come, it’s a trade-off each time,” Mr Reyes says. “The men will be on chair-fetching tomorrow. Speaking of which, men! Pick a representative to go to the Teachers’ Lounge and have them microwave my Hot Pocket!”
“For the whole play?” I ask. I don’t want to get stuck with that job.
“No, Jeremy, just for today. Next time the girls will pick someone to go.”
“I don’t understand,” Mark says behind me, actually pausing KAP Three. “Could you explain that again, please?”
“Hugggggh,” Mr Reyes says. “On day one the girls will set up the chairs and the guys will pick a representative to get my Hot Pocket; on day two the guys will set up the chairs and the girls will pick a representative to get my Hot Pocket; then it repeats…does anyone have a question about this?”
Yes, of course: someone up front has one, and another, and another. When we finally get it all sorted out, this kid Jonah with a lisp fetches the Hot Pocket as the girls lug furniture and then Mr Reyes brings us all on stage, where we sit in a circle of chairs (the girls made it a bit small) as if it were time for Duck-Duck-Goose, but really it’s a read-through of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and really I’m not a little kid; I’m in high school. I have to remember that.
I grab the seat next to Christine’s in the circle.
“So, uh, congratulations,” I say quietly, speaking to the air in front of me and hoping she’ll notice, “on Puck.”
“What is this crap?” she turns, fierce. Christine has brown eyes with her blonde hair. Up close she looks like all the cutest movie starlets, all those ones that haven’t really been in any movies but you see them in Stuff magazine or wherever, all combined in Photoshop, except someone checked the “constrain proportions” box so nothing got distorted. “I can’t believe he’s making us fetch him chairs—isn’t that illegal?”
“Uh, I don’t think so, actually, but it’s very bad—”
“Oh yeah, whatever. We don’t have any rights under the constitution about discrimination?”
“We don’t have any rights under the constitution at all, because we’re students—”
“That is such crap!”
“Yeah…” I drum the head of Shakespeare in my pocket. “I’m Jeremy, by the way.” I reach out to shake her hand, then pull back—I don’t want people seeing.
“I know who you are,” Christine says. “You’re in my math, right?”
“Oh yeah.” I pretend I wasn’t aware of that fact. “But you know, you can be in a class with someone for a long time and never really—”
“Lysander!” Mr Reyes snaps. “Speak!”
“Uh…” 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