What's Mine and Yours(71)
Gee seemed like a boy with his own secrets. He was smart and staid; he had the air of a man, except for when he drew the hood of his sweatshirt tight around his face, started chewing on the strings. All his quiet didn’t make her think there was nothing there, but the opposite. Inside, Gee was stirring.
Besides, he was cute. He had long dimples, sparse, unruly eyebrows, skin that was mostly clear for a teenage boy. He wore the beginnings of a mustache, neat and trim. He had long lashes, deep-set eyes. And while most of the boys at school reeked of too much cologne and deodorant, or musty towels that had never finished drying properly, Gee smelled like green soap: grass and limes.
He had been perfectly cast as Claudio, who was at the center of the drama, but silent for most of it. Without him, there’d be no plot to act out, no problem for the other characters to solve. When he was set free, the play found its resolution. He had one big speech and a few occasional lines that he had to deliver with heart. The rest of the time, he had to crouch behind bars, fall to his knees, and beg for his life. He hadn’t done any good acting yet, but neither had anyone. He had mumbled his lines at the read-throughs, and Mr. Riley had told him over and over to e-nun-ci-ate. But the key to Claudio was quietly transmitting endurance and fear, and Gee could do it.
They were sitting together, sharing a peanut butter sandwich. Noelle handed half to Gee, and he accepted it without saying anything, which seemed to her a sign that they were almost friends. Mr. Riley had called five, and the rest of the cast was onstage, miming actions with props from an old chest. Adira wore a plastic gilded crown and made nonsense pronouncements using hither and thither and prithee and thou. A knot of boys surrounded her, laughing, charmed. They were Shawn, who played Angelo; Beckett, who played the duke; Alex, who played Lucio, a friend to Claudio; and a few cast as townspeople. They watched her admiringly, and jousted at the air with rubber swords, striking each other underneath the arms.
Gee and Noelle saw their classmates horse around onstage, and they knew they were different, too old for childish games. They were better off watching, shoulder to shoulder, from the empty seats.
“It’s such a weird play,” Noelle said, licking peanut butter from her fingers. “I hope Mr. Riley doesn’t get in trouble for putting it on.”
“Nah,” said Gee. “I don’t think anybody’s going to understand it.”
They laughed.
The play was about a duke who pretended to leave Vienna so that he could observe how the citizens acted in his absence. Angelo, the deputy appointed to watch after things, was a pervert, corrupt and cruel. He put Claudio in jail for impregnating his own fiancée, Juliet, who was played by a sophomore named Rosa. Claudio and Juliet were the only ones worth rooting for, although they spent nearly every act apart. They were victims, they loved one another, and nearly everyone else was detestable, too stuck in their own ideologies to ever do what was right.
The star of the play was Isabella, Claudio’s sister, who eventually won his freedom by outsmarting Angelo. Mr. Riley had been wise to cast Adira as the lead. Noelle knew she’d be stunning even in her habit and veil, but it wasn’t only that she was pretty. She was easily one of the more popular new girls at Central. She got invited to senior parties on the weekends, flitted around between groups of friends, old and new, studious and cool, black and white. She would draw a big crowd, and so would Beckett as the duke. He was popular with the kids who went to Duke’s parents’ church. Together, they’d bring plenty of students, as well as parents, concerned and not, to the play. They’d all be in the same audience, subject to the same drama. They would witness Adira’s virtue, and Beckett’s self-righteousness, Gee’s despair, the consequences of legalism and wrongful judgments. The play might be important; it might say something. Noelle said as much to Gee, and praised Mr. Riley’s vision. Gee said nothing.
“The only thing I can’t stand is how much Shakespeare hates women,” Noelle said. “At least, he hates women who have sex. Everybody’s a whore, except Isabella, and she’s a nun.”
Gee didn’t know how to respond at the mention of sex. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing and offend Noelle, or reveal too much. When he’d first read the play, he’d wondered why Mr. Riley had cast him as the man who couldn’t control his impulses, who had impregnated a woman he’d promised to make his wife before it was time. It was as if Mr. Riley knew there was something wrong with him. Gee knew he couldn’t be alone in the things he did: futilely searching for free porn on the internet, masturbating to sleep, masturbating to wake, fantasizing about nearly every girl or woman who so much as looked at him, who brushed past him in line at the supermarket. But it was hard to know whether it was normal. Sometimes, he felt crazed and manic, like he might die if he didn’t find a release, a way to feel good. Other times, it had little to do with his body, and he wanted to watch those pixelated videos so he could be someone else: a man, wanted, powerful.
“Stop that,” Noelle said, and he wondered whether she could read his thoughts.
She reached for his face, cradled his chin in her cupped hands. “You’re clenching,” she said, and traced her thumb along his jaw up to his earlobe. He felt himself shiver and hoped Noelle couldn’t see.
“You know you’ve got the opposite problem I do—I say everything I’m thinking, and you look like you’re always thinking things you don’t say.”