Prologue #2
“Give me an even weirder answer,” James Freakin’ Neely said. “Tell me about it without giving the title or author.”
A literal snot bubble came from my nose as I exhaled, and there’s no way that James didn’t see it form and pop, but he pretended not to.
“Why?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Because you’ll have to think about why you really hate it and not just its easy identifiers.”
I stared at him.
He made a waving motion at me, like he was shooing me away, and I idly wondered how long he could sit crouched like that with his knees completely bent and his heels hovering just above the floor without falling flat on his butt.
“Go on, then,” he said, waving again. “Let’s hear it.”
Looking back, I know it was a tactic to distract me, to take my brain somewhere else. But at the time, I didn’t see it for what it was. I was just befuddled as to why the boy who was supposed to play Romeo in less than an hour was bothering with me at all.
“Um…I guess I haven’t really thought of it before. I guess it’s—”
“No title, remember,” he interrupted, his eyes not letting go of mine. “Just describe it to me.”
I opened my mouth, stuttered, and then tried again. I found that once I started, I couldn’t stop. For the first time in weeks, months, I was caught up in something other than my own choking thoughts.
“It was stupid,” I said. “ So stupid, because they made us read it twice in high school. It was this narrative that I think was supposed to be about colonialism and it was a story-within-a-story kind of thing.” I had to pause and take a deep breath to steady my voice.
“But it was just confusing and a parade of the darkest, grossest parts of humanity. Anything we were supposed to take away from it was lost because the language was so bloated and…” I paused, started again. “You want to know the worst part?”
“Tell me.”
His voice wasn’t irritated or put-out or resigned. It was interested, like he might actually want to know what I thought.
Even then, with the black feeling of grief simmering in the bottom of my stomach, I hated how much it made me like him, his interest. I didn’t want to like him. Much safer to imagine myself into fiction than to deal with the messiness of reality.
“There were so many other things we could’ve been reading,” I told him as I mentally stepped onto my soapbox.
“So many new books that came out that year that would have gotten us hyped to read instead of dreading it: the new Hunger Games, John Green, Rick Riordan. But because they weren’t going to be on the standardized tests and they weren’t ‘part of the canon’?”—I curled my fingers to make air quotes—“they couldn’t be taught.
Isn’t that ridiculous? No wonder so many people leave school and never pick up another book again.
They had the joy bludgeoned out of them, canoned out of them. ”
James was watching me like those National Geographic extreme photographers watch wild animals: a little bit wary, a lot in awe.
I was in awe, too. I had said more all at once to James Neely than I think I’d said to any other person since Mom died, even my ever-persistent roommate.
It was lost on him, of course, but not on me.
He could have said any number of things in response to my tirade. He could have guessed at the book ( Heart of Darkness, ugh); he could have nodded and slowly backed away.
But he didn’t.
“You have a great natural speaking voice,” he said instead. “Like a siren. It just lulls me.”
I wouldn’t have believed him except he sounded begrudgingly admiring, like he would rather have hated my voice than done anything else.
It was also not lost on me that I’d stopped crying altogether and that my heart was pumping fast in my chest for a reason other than just grief.
“Thanks,” I said, wiping my nose on my sleeve. “I made it myself.”
He pity-snorted. “Better?”
“Surprisingly yes.”
And it was true, I found. It still startled me, all those months later, how quickly grief could go from high tide to low tide with no warning.
“Good,” James said.
It looked like he was about to say something else, and because I could sense the conversation ending and for some reason couldn’t bear for it to be over just yet, I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“You were mad,” I said. “When you came in, I mean. You looked pissed.”
His eyes narrowed, and it was like I could see him throwing up a wall between us. Whatever closeness we had gained in those last ten minutes he was going to either crush beneath his godlike rage or block me from accessing entirely.
It did not take a great deal of intuition to see that James Neely was more than willing to parade emotions on the stage, but offstage was a different matter.
“Everyone has problems,” he said, like that was an answer.
It wasn’t, but it would have to be enough.
Clearly, James Neely was ready to be done with me now that I wasn’t crying my eyes out, so I decided to put us both out of our misery and end…
whatever that moment was. That blip in the timeline.
That last gasp of magic bringing us both to the same place at the same time.
I got to my feet, brushed off my knees, and proffered my hand down to where James still crouched. I tried to look confident and cool even though I knew my eyes and nose were going to be red for hours. My insides felt better, though, like they always did after a jagged cry.
“Come on,” I said, trying to infuse my words with the overt thank you I knew he wouldn’t accept. “I’ll get out of your way so you can go break limbs in the name of success.”
James Neely looked at my hand for a full minute, for an hour, for a year, but he didn’t take it. Instead, he looked up at me with devastatingly brown eyes, the kind that make poets forget blue ever existed.
“Why were you crying?” he asked. “You didn’t say.”
“Everyone has problems,” I intoned.
His mouth quirked at that.
“Tell me,” he said.
I wonder if he realized that was the second time he had commanded words from me that evening.
I was already feeling better than when he’d found me, but I was still too tired to argue, too wrung out from the latest grief attack.
And since we were still in the glitch in reality, in that pocket of time that shouldn’t exist, I answered honestly, my arm dropping to my side as I made myself meet his eyes again.
“My mom,” I said. “She died over Thanksgiving break.”
James absolutely froze, and it made me think of a scene from my favorite book, The Meadow, where William is so worried about losing control and hurting Arabella, he goes still as a statue while he collects himself.
When I thought about it, James was more than a little like William: tall with brown hair that might look reddish if the light hit it just right, brown eyes, definitely fair-skinned if not vampire-pale.
And he was…cute? Hot? I had never felt comfortable with those adjectives— any adjectives—to describe guys, but James was attractive.
Objectively. Clinically. Like he was designed in a lab.
There was something else, too, beneath the glossy surface.
Something about the intensity, the way he looked like he contained worlds and universes inside of him.
Nothing like the few guys who had expressed interest in me over the last four years.
If they contained anything other than the latest football stats or the places that gave the best Thursday-night beer discounts with a student ID, they had me fooled.
James was scrambling to school his features, which had flashed from alarm to sorrow and then to something like regret, all while still crouched stone-still beside my legs.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. “About your mom.”
I’d heard that phrase from dozens of lips since November and I knew I would hear it dozens more, but it wouldn’t sound as sincere as it did coming from James. Maybe somewhere in his stillness was empathy instead of sympathy…or maybe he was as good an actor as Jessica claimed after all.
Whatever the reason, I was still trying to be cool, so I shrugged like losing Mom wasn’t the biggest deal in the universe and quoted Lady Capulet: “ Some grief shows much of love, but much of grief shows still some want of wit. ”
James stood up, then, his eyes never leaving mine. He was tall, but not the kind of tall that made you feel like a different species to stand next to him. Just enough to feel the way my neck brushed against my sweatshirt when I tilted it back to meet his gaze.
“You know the play,” he said, surprised.
And then I did laugh outright.
“It turns out you can memorize just about anything after watching it at least a hundred times from start to finish,” I said. “And, you know, being a lit major helps, too.”
That could have been the end of it—James and I— should have been.
Even with what came later, I don’t remember how we parted after that. Awkwardly, I’m sure. It was a stolen moment that should have been returned to its rightful place of nothingness.
I left his dressing room, the play started, I performed my crew duties, intermission brought twitters backstage of a big-shot acting agent in the audience who just happened to be there to see his great-niece’s debut in the supporting role of Girl Who Helps Nurse.
And then, out of nowhere, the nothing moment we shared in the dressing room was plucked from obscurity.
“The girl,” James Neely was shouting, his voice echoing backstage. “Someone find that girl!”
Act 4 had just ended with Juliet taking the vial of sleeping draught, but I was only half paying attention.
My role as Girl Who Flips Two Switches had been fulfilled, and I was playing a mind-numbing game on my phone in a corner far backstage waiting for the play to be over and to receive permission to leave.
I could hear Jessica’s baffled voice drawing closer, like she was following James and he was coming here.
“ What girl?”
“The girl! The crying girl! Long hair, blue eyes, black outfit.”