Prologue #3
“ I have long hair and blue eyes,” Jessica pointed out. “And all the crew is in black. It’s mandatory.”
They were about two feet from my hiding spot tucked behind an abandoned set piece, some hanging fabric, and an old speaker. If I’d been wearing anything other than black, there’s no way James wouldn’t have spotted me, but as it was, I was invisible.
James Neely was the opposite of invisible in his Romeo getup, puffy sleeves and all, hair swept to the side and perfectly in place despite the agitated way he kept running his hands through it.
“Nyx is sick, ” he told Jessica. “They’re throwing up in the bathroom as we speak, and we need someone to put on their costume, read Juliet’s lines, and make it passably okay so that I can finish this thing because there is a literal talent agent here and—”
He broke off and closed his eyes, seeming to count to ten as he inhaled.
My plan was to sink farther back into my hiding place, to wait out the not my monkeys, not my circus scene playing before me.
But because I was terribly, terribly unlucky or maybe because the magic felt jilted or maybe it was just a fluke…
my turned-on-silent-mode phone decided then was a great time to start playing the theme music from Angry Birds at full blast.
The fabric was jerked aside instantly.
Jessica was looking at me openmouthed. She asked something along the lines of, Where did you come from?
But I didn’t really hear her, because James was staring at me with the same intensity as when he’d come into the fitting room and found me crying, but this time it was the opposite of murderous.
It was relieved.
Like I was the sun in the east and he was standing below my balcony as Angry Birds continued its chipper ditty and…
“ You, ” he said, and it was half a word, half a breath. “Can you do Act Five?”
“Can I do…What?”
He pulled me from my perch onto the ground beside him, reaching for my phone and turning it back to silent in one smooth motion.
“Act Five,” he repeated. “You are mostly lying there fake-dead and then you are dead. The knife is retractable, you literally can’t mess it up. Do you know the lines?”
“Do I know the—”
James affected a girl’s voice. It wasn’t just that it was high-pitched the way most people did when they were trying to be feminine; it was like he was becoming Juliet in front of me with just one line.
His countenance softened and his voice came from a different part of his chest than his regular speaking voice.
“ What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand? ” he recited as Juliet.
I rolled my eyes and quoted after him, finishing the line I had heard Nyx say at least a million times since January. “ Poison I see has been his timeless end! ”
Jessica had yet to close her mouth, her eyes darting between us.
“You can’t be serious,” she said. “ She can’t be Juliet.”
James and I were still staring at each other. His lips tilted a little, the suggestion of a smile, but his eyes were still intense, nearly frantic.
“Go change,” he told me, ignoring Jessica completely. “The show, as they say, must go on.”
I blinked, the reality of the situation hitting me full-force as I turned to Jessica to get a brief reprieve from James’s intense gaze.
“Don’t we have understudies or something?” I asked her.
James was the one to answer, forcing me to look at him once more.
“It’s a one-semester class with one showing of the play. We were lucky to have enough people to put Romeo and Juliet on to begin with. Understudies weren’t an option.”
“Wait,” I said, like he could be reasoned with, like I could talk myself out of the inevitable. “Wait. I can’t…This is…I’m going to freeze up! It would be better to end it here. The agent has seen what you can do. There’s no reason to—”
“Come play with me,” he said, and the way he said it—like we were the only ones in the world, like we were eleven instead of twenty-one, like he was welcoming me into his universes—did something to my stomach.
“It’s all just make-believe,” he said. “It’s a play. It’s supposed to be fun.”
Now I was really panicking.
“I’ll mess it up for you,” I said. “I’ll make it not fun and it’ll ruin your life and—”
“You do not have to do this,” he interrupted, and somehow he was even closer than before. “But I think you’ll always regret if you don’t. Who knows what could happen?”
It was enough for twenty-one-year-old me to dumbly take the costume from a rather green-looking Nyx, shove it on over my bra and the jeans I didn’t bother to take off because we had to be onstage now and did I mind using Nyx’s stage mascara if someone brought me a cotton swab?
He was enough. James Freakin’ Neely with his convincing eyes and mouth and…
The curtain rose.
It did not go seamlessly, of course. How could it?
Even with hours of watching rehearsals and table reads and lines being run as I flipped the same switch over and over again, I couldn’t have remembered all the blocking, the nuances that had been worked out under the careful eye of the director and the even more critical eye of James.
But we made it work, he and I. We got my secretly-denim-wearing self to the wooden platform painted to look like marble and then—beneath the stage lights someone else clad in black was operating beyond the coughing, rustling audience—we played. Just like he promised.
James transformed before me. Through the smallest of slits in my eyes, I watched as he found me, how he wept.
Was he actually sweating in distress? When James clutched me to him, I stopped being Juniper Green and started being Juliet Montague and he stopped being anyone other than Romeo, like he was squeezing the character into me through my torso.
I’d been a reader all my life. When we were made to read Romeo and Juliet our freshman year of high school, I hadn’t scoffed at the language or been confused like so many of my classmates.
I hadn’t thought it was just a silly play about silly teenagers—a favorite litmus test for intelligence by English professors, I would learn later when I made it my major—but instead saw it for what it was, what I think Shakespeare intended it to be: an entertaining love story that could have gone on longer if not for the hubris of those who were supposedly older and wiser interfering.
But even then I couldn’t know what it felt like to be Juliet, couldn’t really envision how her arm would reach out to cradle Romeo’s poisoned body, how she woke expecting to find him there with her, yes, but alive.
For the second time that night, I felt the tears coming.
Something unlocked in me after the Romeo-James hybrid fell spectacularly to the stage.
Flashes of the police report, of the kind EMT who I spoke with at length when my therapist at the time recommended I do so to find closure in the wake of Mom’s death, and of the images I had painted in my head of Mom’s final moments brought sobs to my throat, to Juliet’s.
I can only imagine what the audience saw: a girl hysterically crying, maybe with jeans peeking out from the bottom of her gauzy dress, smushing her face against Romeo like she could bring him back by will alone or, if not, like she could suck just enough poison to go after him.
“ To make me die with a restorative, ” I managed to say through my tears, against his lips. I didn’t recognize my voice. I didn’t recognize me. That moment was so different from sitting in my room imagining myself into a book. “ Thy lips are warm. ”
I remember the clattering of the watchmen offstage, how I raised the stage knife to my breast and christened it happy dagger before slumping beside Romeo’s body. And then came the hardest part of my unforeseen performance: I had to stop sobbing.
We were dead, of course. No matter the directorial liberties taken, that was indisputable. Juliet could not be weeping.
But Juniper Green could. Juniper Green felt simultaneously healed and mortally wounded, like the thousand and one cuts—of realizing I couldn’t pick up the phone to call Mom, that she would never text me again and ask my opinion on awards seasons red-carpet outfits, or that we would never rewatch the 2005 Pride and Prejudice —all came for me at once.
I think I might have gone on crying forever if James Neely—definitely not Romeo, because he was clearly dead—hadn’t begun to whisper in my ear.
“Leave it here,” he said, his breath hot. “You can leave it all on the stage if you want. Nobody can come and pick it up if you want to leave it here, not even you if you wish it hard enough.”
We were lying next to each other, our characters no longer the focal points as the enthusiastic watchmen ran about the stage, calling for the prince and for the friar.
“How do you know?” I asked, my lungs forced to inflate properly to draw the words.
To this day, I’m not sure if I imagined his thumb caressing my hand, but I know I didn’t imagine what he said next.
“I do it all the time,” he whispered back.
And then, I swear —on all the books I’d ever read, on Mom’s grave, on my own life—his lips brushed my wet cheek. Just once. It was off script, out of character, out of common sense…but it felt like an enchanted sword coming out of the lake, like a future. Like a friend. A friend who understood.
It was one of those moments that felt bigger than me, bigger than the stage and everyone on it. A shiver went down my spine like an echo of the magic Mom took with her, and I wondered if this was not its dying breath but its return.
Maybe if a person could take magic with them when they died, another could bring it back.
The play ended. Romeo and Juliet were dead, but James Neely and Juniper Green were ever so alive as he dragged me by the hand for the final bow, my cheek burning red from the standing ovation or his lingering kiss, I couldn’t tell.