Sullivan would’ve appreciated my off-the-cuff analysis of the material—hey, at least I’d done the reading, right?—but Linnet frowned at me. “I’d prefer if you didn’t use that sort of language in my classroom.”
I turned my attention to her and tried to sound like I cared. “I’ll try and keep it PG-13 from now on.”
“Do that. I’m sure Mr. Sullivan doesn’t allow that in his class.” The way she said it had a distinct question mark on the end, as if she wasn’t sure.
I smiled at her.
Linnet’s frown deepened and she jellyfish-drifted her tentacles toward another discussion group.
Georgia glared at me, tapped her pencil on her notebook, and said, “I think I identify most with Horatio, because—”
“Maybe Hamlet knew Ophelia wouldn’t get it,” Dee interrupted, and Georgia rolled her eyes in disgust. “Ophelia would’ve told Hamlet right off that what he was doing was stupid, without knowing the context.”
“You’re assuming that Ophelia didn’t know anything about what Hamlet was going through,” I said. “But Ophelia was there the first time, remember? She knows what back-stabbing freaks Gertrude and Claudius are. It’s not her first time around Denmark, Dee.”
“Hello, what are we talking about here?” Georgia asked. “Ophelia doesn’t know anything about Gertrude and Claudius. Hamlet only knows about Claudius murdering his father because of his father’s ghost, and Hamlet’s the only one the ghost spoke to. So Ophelia doesn’t know anything.”
I waved off Georgia and said to Dee, “Ophelia’s only clueless because Hamlet doesn’t trust Ophelia enough to confide in her. Apparently, he thinks he can do everything himself, which wasn’t true the first time and is definitely not true this time either. He should’ve let Ophelia help.”
Dee’s eyes were a little too bright; she blinked and they cleared. “Ophelia wasn’t exactly a great judge of character. She should’ve just stayed away from Hamlet like Polonius told her to. People only got hurt by being close to Hamlet. Everybody died because of him. He was right to drive Ophelia away.”
Georgia started to talk, but I leaned over my desk toward Dee and said, teeth gritted, “But Ophelia was in love with Hamlet.”
Dee stared at me and I stared back at her, sort of shocked that I’d said it, and then Paul broke the mood by saying, “I just figured it out. The whole gender-opposite metaphor was throwing me off. Sullivan must be Polonius. He’s got that whole father-figure to Ophelia thing going on.”
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I told him, thumping back in my seat.
Georgia gestured at the board. “Does anyone want to talk about the second question?”
No one wanted to talk about the second question.
I crossed my arms over my chest. I felt a sort of beautiful detachment from the scene, a sort of objectivity that I never seemed to have when Dee was around. I was getting over her. I could actually be getting over her. “I just don’t think Hamlet should be taking Ophelia’s calls if he’s only going to lie to her,” I said. “Ophelia’s slowly coming to grips with Hamlet tearing out her heart and being just friends, but even just friends don’t lie to each other.”
Georgia made a face and started to speak, but Paul put a finger to his lips and watched Dee.
Dee’s voice was very quiet, and it wasn’t her school voice anymore. You know how everyone has two voices—the voice they use in public and the voice that’s just for you, the voice they use when you’re alone with them and nobody else can hear. She used that one, the one from last summer, back when I really believed we’d have summer upon summer without change. “Hamlet can’t stand to see Ophelia get hurt again.”
She looked at me. Not at my eyes, but at my scar above my ear.
“Oh,” I said.
For some reason, I never realized until that moment—when Dee looked at my scar and used that old voice—that she really did love me too. All along, she’d loved me, just not the way I’d wanted her to.
Well, crap.
The autumn wind that came in the tall windows along the wall seemed colder, scented with incongruous odors: thyme and clover and the damp smell that appears when you turn over a rock. I sort of sat there and didn’t say anything for way too long.
“Could James and Paul come up here and see me for a moment, please?” Linnet was at the front desk, face ominous. She looked much more teacherly than Sullivan did, sitting behind the desk instead of on it. I made a note to never sit behind a desk. “Deirdre and Georgia, you two can keep discussing.”
I stood up, but before I went up to the front with Paul, I touched the back of Dee’s hand. I don’t know if she knew what I meant, but I wanted her to understand that I—I don’t know what I wanted her to understand. I guess I somehow wanted her to know that I finally got it. I didn’t get to see her face after I touched her hand, but I saw Georgia frowning after me and Paul.
Up at the front of the classroom, Paul and I stood before Linnet’s desk like soldiers waiting to be knighted. Well, I did, anyway. Paul fidgeted. I didn’t think he’d ever been in trouble before.
“Are you two friends?” Linnet asked. She was a tiny bird behind the desk, her hair ruffling like blonde feathers. She blinked up at us, eyes dark and wary.
I was about to expound upon the near blood-bond between us when Paul said, “Roommates too.”
“Well.” Linnet spread our outlines out in front of her. “Then I don’t understand. Is this some sort of cheating or plagiarism? Or some sort of very unfunny practical joke? It’s not my job to grade Mr. Sullivan’s papers, but I couldn’t help but notice that your outlines for the composition project are identical.”
Paul looked at me. I looked at Linnet. “It’s neither. Didn’t you read them?”
Linnet made a vague hand gesture. “They were both gibberish to me.” She pulled the title page of mine close and read it aloud:
“Ballad:
A Play in Three Acts,
to rely heavily upon Metaphor,
meaningful only to those
who see the World as it really is.”
She looked at us, an eyebrow arched. “I don’t see how this fits into the assignment—isn’t it a ten-page essay on metaphor? And it doesn’t explain why your outline is the same as Paul’s.”
“Sul—Mr. Sullivan will understand.” I was tempted to take the outlines from her before she wrote something on them with the red pen lying inches away from her fingers. “It’s a group project, and the play itself is our essay. We’re writing and performing it together.”
“Just the two of you? Like a skit?”
I didn’t really see why I needed to explain this to her, when she wasn’t going to be the one giving us our grade. She was bending the corner of one of the outlines back and forth, her eyes on us. I wanted to smack her fingers. “Me and Paul and some others. Like I said, Mr. Sullivan will be okay with it.”
“Are others doing projects like this?” Linnet frowned at us and then at the creased corner on the outline, as if she couldn’t figure out how the crease had gotten there. “It seems unfair to grade such a drastically different project on the same scale as other, more traditional compositions that followed the rules.”
Oh, God, she was going to start talking about rules, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep myself from saying something incredibly sarcastic and I would get Angel Paul into trouble by association. I bit the inside of my lip and tried not to glare.
“Mr. Sullivan is new to Thornking-Ash. Quite new to teaching as well. I don’t think he understands the ramifications of allowing students to stray too far from the boundaries.” Linnet stacked our outlines and reached for the red pen. I winced as she marked formatting/structure on the top of each of them. “I think I’ll have a talk with him when he gets back. You will probably have to redo these outlines. I’m sorry if he let you think you could interpret his assignment so loosely.”
I wanted to snap something really cutting back, like sorry you decided to interpret “looking female” so loosely or who died and made you God, sweetheart, but I just gave her a tight smile. “Right. Anything else?”
She frowned at me, as if I really had said my choice phrases out loud. “I know about kids like you, Mr. Morgan. You think you’re something special, but just wait until you’re in the real world. You’re no more special than anyone else, and all your wit and disdain of authority will get you absolutely nowhere. Mr. Sullivan might think you’re a shooting star, but I assure you, I do not. I watch stars like you burn out in the atmosphere every day.”
“Thanks for the tip,” I said.
I was playing like crap. I was standing on top of my gorgeous hill in the middle of the gorgeous day and everything was super-saturated with fall colors and my pipes sounded great and the air felt perfect on my skin and I couldn’t focus on a single thing.
Dee’s big red F.
Paul’s list of the dead.
Nuala’s fingers on my wrist.
I closed my eyes and stopped playing. I exhaled slowly and tried to focus on that narrow part of myself that I retreated into during competitions, but it felt like an inaccessible crack that I was too unwieldy and strung out to fit into.
I opened my eyes again. The hill was still empty because everyone else was in ensemble classes or private lessons. Good thing, too. Because it meant there was no one around to hear me suck. Maybe I was just a big shooting star like Linnet said, and I’d be a big nobody in a desk job when I got out of this place.
I gazed down at my shadow, blue-green and long across the trampled grass, and as I did, another long shadow appeared beside it.
“You suck today,” Nuala observed from behind me.
“Thanks for making me feel better,” I said.
“I’m not supposed to make you feel better.” Nuala moved around to face me, and I swallowed when I saw her hip-huggers and clingy T-shirt that was every color of the ocean, like her eyes. “I’m supposed to make you play better. I brought you something.”