Now You See Her (8 page)

He was so beautiful.

He didn’t have one single zit.

I still love him, if you can believe that.

V
‌

T

HERE HE IS
, at the top of my journal entry, the arrow that cut through my soul.

Look, I knew it wasn’t a little crush.

A woman can tell. I was more mature for my age. He knew I was mature for my age too. And our love was like a storm, so big it knocked us both over. I had never even been kissed before, much less done the sickening stuff some of the girls in Bellamy did, like get drunk and let the neighbor kid climb in the window and feel you up. I had never wanted some acne-face slob’s hands all over me after he was done picking his pimples. Logan was so pure. He smelled pure, like pine. And how do you know it’s love when you were never in love before? Well, I had seen love in the movies and on the stage. And you know how the follow spotlight just narrows down until it’s only shining on one person? That’s what love is like. The

whole world fades until you can only hear that person’s voice and see that person’s face. No matter who he’s pre- tending to talk to, you know he’s talking to you, that he wants you to hear. And when he crosses the room, even if he’s teasing and pretending he doesn’t see you, there’s this connection. You both feel it. You know he’s been thinking about you since the last time he saw you and you’ve been thinking about him, totally nonstop. I could get physically sick and not be able to eat just thinking about him. At night, in bed, every song on the radio would be him, singing to me. I would think of him out there, in his room, looking out the window and wanting me, and I could hardly stand it. Logan was my breath. I needed him from the first moment. Needed him. We used to try not to look at each other—after all, I was just a kid and he was almost nineteen. People would have said stuff and totally been jealous. He
was
Logan Rose. And we were probably too far apart in age, maybe. Maybe a little. But we couldn’t stop. Wherever I would go, there he would be. I would be sitting on the floor outside the choral room reading and he’d be coming out of class and he’d practically trip over me, and I knew he wanted to grab me up right there—but he would just kind of laugh and mess up my hair and go jogging off with a bunch of guys. Once, when one of them said, “There’s your shadow,” he punched the guy on the

shoulder. He didn’t want to hear that about me.

I knew it was the kind of love that would last if the world would not mess it up.

It wasn’t like he started going after me the first minute. There was that little thing in the cafeteria his first day. But then he was totally cool about it, and so was

I. But he would do this thing. He would sort of stop like he had been hit on the back of the head when he passed me (freshman and sophomores had to march in lines across the road from our dorms to class; it was part of the big security thing) and act like he’d never seen me before that very moment. He would act like it made his day.

Tryouts for
Romeo and Juliet
were coming up.

I had read the play in eighth grade and ninth grade, but I read it again twice.

Everyone knew Romeo was Logan. It was a done deal. And the tradition was that Starwood always had a guest director for the winter play. This time it was Brook Emerson.

The students were going totally nuts. Usually it was some over-the-hill person, but Brook Emerson had won a Tony just two years before for playing Antonio in
The Feast of Fools
, which I personally thought was one of those talky-talky musicals that doesn’t have one single song in it anyone will ever remember, but people really loved it, I guess.

All the girls were practicing monologues. The first thing you had to do was just a one-minute thing, not from Shakespeare. We knew all the major roles would go to the seniors, because directors and scouts from colleges came to the winter play too. But that didn’t stop anyone from trying out. There were going to be plenty of street guys and waiting maids or whatever, and any of us would have been glad to be one of them. I just wanted to stand on the same stage as Logan.

But then, there was this one girl I started to notice in French class. Alyssa. Alyssa Lyn Davore. She was like the red-haired girl who should’ve been Annie instead of me. She
was
Juliet, with long sandy hair that hung below her waist. Alyssa reminded me of a candle, she was so pale and almost transparent. And though she was a dancer, she could really act in a semi-phony kind of way, which works with Shakespeare. Her father was an English pro- fessor, so she didn’t have to have anyone explain stuff to her. She knew how to place her hands like they were lit- tle statues. Do you ever notice actors’ hands? How they don’t just let them hang by their sides or stick them in their pockets? They pose their hands. Their hands are like little speaking voices, saying something to the audi- ence. Plus, Alyssa Lyn was a junior. And I thought if any underclass person got to be Juliet, it would be her.

I tried to take some hope from the fact that Juliet

was Italian, like me.

But northern Italians are blond.

We had tryouts on a Wednesday, starting right after lunch, in the big theater. Classes were canceled for the afternoon. Even the little eighth graders came to watch. Brook explained the play to us, like anyone who hadn’t been in prison all their life wouldn’t know what
Romeo and Juliet
was. He talked about its relevance to life now, about class and racial hatred, and how kids would be the ones who would start the healing. I felt like I was going

to yawn, so I pretended to fix something on my shoe.

Then we all did our one-minute monologues.

I did the scene from
Our Town
that got me into Starwood. Other girls did monologues from mono- logue books, like about not wanting to clean your room or whatever. Like that would so impress Brook Emerson.

Then they started little readings, from the actual script. Brook started out with the scene where every- one’s teasing Romeo for falling around like an idiot because he’s so in love—like the way Logan tripped over me. And then there’s the big fight between Romeo’s cousins and some guys who are Capulet guys and such.

Those were the parts most of the guys read for.

A few guys read for Romeo, and one really good sen- ior read for Mercutio and Romeo.

But then, the director basically lined up girls to read Juliet with Logan. Like, twenty girls. I was almost the last one. I decided to do the most familiar scene, but in a new way. The part where she asks, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” But I acted really pissed off, like a real fourteen- year-old girl would, a rich girl having a tantrum because her boyfriend’s retard family was so into being Montagues. I drew on changing my own name, and how it felt weird but free, when I told him to leave his family and forsake his name. I did it like she wasn’t pleading, but she was ripping him a new one.

They let us break for dinner; and then he put the call- back list outside the big hall.

They had called five girls back.

Alyssa Lyn was one, and there were three seniors.

And me.

When I came back into the hall, Brook Emerson sat me down. He said, “I don’t think I ever saw that scene played that way. Who told you to do it that way?”

I said no one. I just thought about her really being my age—I had just turned fifteen—and how fifteen-year-old girls really act, which is like they have the world by the . . . I almost said “balls” but said “tail” in time—especially if they’re cute and have a boy they love.

He said, “You remind me of the young Gwyneth Paltrow, except for the hair. Or Natalie Portman. With a

little Drew Barrymore and maybe Anne Hathaway.” Those weren’t the actors you saw on
People
magazine covers. They were actors in real movies. They were kind of old, but they were still beautiful.

I was about to jump out of my skin. I couldn’t believe he saw that! It was true, but nobody else ever saw that before but me.

The four other girls read. He thanked them and he said he would post his final choices on the board outside in the morning. He said that callbacks for Lady Capulet and the Nurse and such would be the next night.

He asked everyone else to leave. I didn’t know what was going on, because this was so unlike any other audi- tion I ever did.

I could see Alyssa Lyn looking at me like she wished I would catch on fire. But when she read with Logan, it just didn’t go snap, crackle, pop. She sounded limp, like she was already dead. And she sort of looked dead too, when the lights were on her. Pale is great for makeup, but not so much when you don’t have it on. I could see Brook scribbling in his notebook. He kept asking her to go over the same scene again and again. I started praying to Catholic saints. Finally he told her she could sit down. And then he had me and Logan read the scene where Romeo and Juliet are secretly married and they slept together, but he has to run away the next morning for

killing the guy in the street fight, and Juliet says, “Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightin- gale, and not the lark. . . .” I let myself go, and my teeth started chattering and chattering. I was stuttering like you would if you were in a panic. “‘Yon light is not d-d- day-light, I know it; I. It is some meteor... .’” And then I screamed when I said, “‘Thou need’st not to be gone!’”

And Logan sort of grabbed me and said, in this way that was almost angry and totally sexy, “‘Let me be ta’en, let me be put to death, I am content, so thou wilt have it so.’”

We basically forgot Brook was there. We got so into it we were standing there, and Logan was putting his hands all over my neck and my bare arms, and kissing my throat when I put my head back.

Finally Brook said, “Jesus Christ. Tone it down. I’ll get arrested.”

I looked out at him, and it was like waking up from a dream.

“You’ve got it,” he said like someone had hit him. “I couldn’t let anyone else be Juliet, or I would be untrue to myself. I’m going to catch hell for it, though, because you’re just a kid, so you’d better not let me down, or I’ll kick your ass.” I promised I wouldn’t let him down. “Alyssa Lyn can do one of the school shows. Jesus! I never saw chemistry like this on a first read.”

Logan said, “It’s been there all along, since the first time I saw her.”

I felt like I was flying.

Brook got up and said, “I think we have our star- crossed lovers.” He took off his glasses and said to Logan, “I know you can handle it. But she’s a sophomore, Logan.”

Logan said, “She’s been doing this longer than most of the girls here.”

Brook got up and shut off the lights on the stage then, and said to us, “Go out the back way. If you run into any faculty, I’m going to have to explain this, and I just don’t feel like it right now. I have to make about fifty phone calls tonight. To my agent and whoever.” Logan told him that he could walk me home because he was an SA. Brook said that was okay. An SA was a Senior Achiever, one of the older students who could go anywhere they wanted, even at night, and who were the escorts for younger students who couldn’t. So I guess Brook felt fine about leaving us alone, because of that. And the back door would be closer to the dorms.

Brook said, “No funny stuff.” Logan laughed like they were both adults. “Turn out the lights. The main switch is right by the stage door.”

Then he put on his coat and picked up his clipboard and left. I heard the door lock, and then I heard the

outside glass door swish.

I put on my coat. Logan didn’t put on his coat, though. I put on my leather gloves. Logan just watched me, with those huge green eyes, like lakes or moons. He was sitting on a metal stool in the middle of the stage. I flipped my hair out of the collar of my coat. Logan said, “Did you ever cut your hair?”

I said, “Just the ends.”

He said, “You have the most beautiful hair I have ever seen.”

I sort of blushed. I said, “Thank you.”

Logan asked me, “Do you really want to go back to the dorms?”

I said, kind of desperately, “Of course I don’t! But everyone knows tryouts are over, and my dorm advisor will kill me.”

He said, “Just let me take care of your dorm advisor.” Then he said, “You know how I feel about you, Hope.”

I said, “I feel the same way. But what are we going to do about it? We’re here, and everyone knows who you are. And I’m just this kid from Bellamy, Illinois. . . .”

“Not really,” he said. “You’re the real thing, Hope. Most of these girls will never make it after they leave here. But let’s forget about acting right now, and concen- trate on us.”

My heart was so loud, I was sure if you pulled up my

shirt you could see the outline of it under my skin, pounding. I started to walk toward the wings, like I really was going to leave. If he didn’t
do something
fast, I was going to completely lose it. The emotions between us were like the fake fog they use in the theater for scary stuff. It’s really just dry ice. But it was like it was rising and rising and it was going to cover us both up. I said, “Logan, don’t do anything you can’t take back. I’m really like Juliet. I’ve never loved anyone but you.”