The Juliet Spell (2 page)

Gillinger sighed again and closed his eyes. “The point is, if I am going to do this show at all, I am going to do it right. I will not, repeat, not, be satisfied with anything less than an outstanding production. And that, unfortunately, will require at least some outstanding actors. Now, I’ve seen a few of you who are—good. I’ve seen a few more who aren’t bad. And many of you will do for the servants. This play is, after all, servant central. But there are key roles that cannot be filled by anyone I’ve seen so far.

“Fortunately, since this production is being funded by a grant from the city, it is, as you all know, open to the com.munity at large. Thus, I do not have to cast just from the shallow talent pool at dear old Steinbeck High. So I’m doing something I’d rather not do, but which the lack of talent in this entire community is forcing on me. I am, in despera.tion, extending tryouts one more day. Go home, tell your friends if they have any acting ability at all to get down here and save this show. Otherwise—” He shrugged.

Maybe that meant “Otherwise I will not direct anything, and take the consequences.” Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Gillinger strode off into the wings with his jacket trailing from his shoulders like a cape.

That was it. We were done here. All over the theater there were thumping sounds as the seats went up and people started for the doors.

I slung my backpack and slid down the row to the aisle.

Bobby and Drew passed me.

“Break it,” Bobby said with a grin and a nod in my di.rection. This was Bobby’s version of “break a leg,” which is what theater types wish each other for luck before a show, which this wasn’t. But Bobby said “break it” any time. He thought it made him sound like a professional.

Drew gave me a thumbs-up, then flashed two fingers side by side.

What was that supposed to mean?

All the way home I wondered about that. If it didn’t mean some weird sex thing, which was virtu.

ally unthinkable given how straight-edge Drew seemed to be, it probably was supposed to mean, “I think you’re the best one. But it’s between you and one other.”

Food for thought. Or, actually, dessert for obsession. If I was one, who was the other? Vivian the Terminally Hot? Or was it somebody who’d read the day before, when I couldn’t come to tryouts? Who would that have been? Were they even in our school?

Blah, blah, blah. I wished, in a brief rational moment, that I had a different head with something else in it. But we are all stuck with the heads we have, and mine was trying to think of anything I could do that I hadn’t already done to get that part.

This was not entirely and completely because I was a total drama nerd who only cared about getting a lead. That was a lot of it—but I had a reason all my own that nobody else did.

My mother had never played Juliet.

Right now you’re thinking, “So what? My mother never played Juliet. Nobody’s mother I know ever played Juliet. And none of the mothers’ mothers ever played Juliet. Your mother is right on track.” Which would be true, except that, before she was a nurse, my mother was an actor.

You never heard of her. Which means she was just like ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of all the actors in America. But she went to Juilliard, and when she graduated she came out to the West Coast and joined what they call The I-5 Repertory Company.

The I-5 is the freeway that runs between Seattle and San Diego, and there are actors who make their living—or al.most make a living—moving up and down it. There’s a lot of theater in Seattle, some in Portland, and there’s the Shake.speare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, which is huge. There’s work in San Francisco and Sacramento and Los Angeles and San Diego if you can get it, and there are side trips to places like Austin.

That’s what my mother did for eight years. She was good, she was pretty and twice she was nearly cast as Juliet, once in Ashland and once in San Diego.

When she turned thirty and she was still just almost mak.ing a living, and she gave up acting and went into a nursing program, the one regret she had was that she’d never played that part.

She’d plowed though nursing school, which she loved, gotten out and found work right away at Bannerman Hospi.tal here in Guadalupe, California, met my dad and had me. And I’d caught the acting bug from her, and we’d all been happier than most people I knew, until my dad, who had a Ph.D. in psychology, decided he needed to “develop as an individual” and told Mom he was taking off.

I hadn’t seen him since ninth grade. That was almost two years. As far as we knew, he was wandering around Amer.ica, sometimes working, sometimes not. Once in a while, we got a postcard.

Mom and I kept hoping he’d come back.

If I could play Juliet, I would give my performance to my mom. I would put it in the program as a dedication and say something nice. In one way, it wouldn’t be much. But in an.other way, it would be gigantic. It would be a way of saying “I love you” in big, fat, Elizabethan letters.

When I got home, the house was quiet. No surprise there. Mom was working a double shift over at Bannerman and wasn’t supposed to be home until tomorrow morning. But the note on the bulletin board where we communicated with each other was surprising:

CHILD SUPPORT! Your dad paid up. That means this

is my last double shift at the hospital for a while. I’ll

be home tomorrow about seven-thirty. Who knows?

I might even see you before you go to school. It’d be

nice to touch base with you again before you graduate.

Love,

Mom

My parents weren’t divorced. If they’d been divorced, things might actually have been better for us. Then at least we’d have had the law on our side when Dad didn’t pay the money he’d promised to help keep me alive. But they were just “separated.” He paid when he paid. Which was some.where between not often and never. And when he did pay, it wasn’t much. But today there was a check on the fridge, and it was big. Almost a whole year’s back cash for the privilege of not seeing me.

I tried to ignore the pang that gave me, and thought about the good things that the money would mean. A dinner out with Mom to celebrate was one thing for sure. And some new school clothes. And some bills paid off. And Mom working eight hours a day instead of sixteen, at least for a while. Thank you, Daddy, wherever you are. For a few min.utes, I wasn’t thinking about playing/not playing Juliet.

But then I was again.

The child support was a sign. When you’re an actor, ev.erything is a sign of something else. Actors are the most su.perstitious people on the planet. And it was obviously a good sign. Anything I did now to move things in my direction would work. That’s what I told myself.

And it made me think of something else. A whole new obsession. Maybe, if I played Juliet, my dad would come

home. I mean, I’d tried out, and here was the child sup.port. Therefore, if I got the part, he’d come back. Perfectly logical.

This is what shrinks like Dad call fantasizing. They will tell you that it is immature and a sign of emotional distress. They will also tell you that it doesn’t work.

But I had nothing to lose by believing it. And fantasy is only fantasy if it doesn’t work. So I went into my room and got out my spell kit.

I’d read about spell kits the year before in a book called Spellcraft For the Average Teen. The writer, who called herself Aurora Skye, had written a sort-of cookbook for how to get things you wanted. And I’d put mine together and started using it daily.

What did I want? I wanted my father to come home. And I’d cast spells for it for over a month, every afternoon when Mom wasn’t home, which was pretty much all of them. They were called drawing spells, because they were supposed to draw the person to you.

You do not need me to tell you how well they worked. Daddy was still out there somewhere. But now was differ.ent. There was that check. That big check that meant he’d remembered us. Remembered me. So, fantasizing said, it was time. Aurora Skye said it, too. If a spell didn’t work, she wrote over and over again, don’t give up. Keep casting and the spell will work in its own time. Today, right now, I be.lieved it.

So I got out the cardboard box where I kept the odds and ends you needed to cast spells and flipped open the book to Spells For Success. The chapter had a lot of subheadings: Suc.cess in Love, Success in Sports, Success on Tests, but nothing that specifically said Success in Getting Cast as Juliet. The closest I could come was Success in Becoming Famous.

First, draw a perfect circle eighteen inches across. (Ev.eryone who’s taken geometry for a day knows there’s no such thing in real life as a perfect circle. This is prob.ably the second-best escape clause anybody ever had for when something magical doesn’t work. The best is, “It must not be time.” But what I had for a circle was a round eighteen-inch piece of glass, a little tabletop I’d gotten at the garden section of a hardware store. It was better than anything I could have drawn.)

Next, mix . cup Epsom salts and . cup rubbing al.cohol in a baking dish. Form into a volcano shape.

(This was pretty much the equivalent of bake at 350 de.grees, apparently. Most of the spells started this way.)

Place in the cone of the volcano one cube of sugar dyed red. (I had a few left over from last year. They were faded to a sort of brown now, but I wasn’t in a mood to be fussy. They’d been red once.)

Place the dish in the exact center of the circle. (Ah, yes. There’s that word again. Exact. I lined it up with a ruler on four sides. But how could anything ever be exactly exact?)

Say the following spell: “Powers that be, harken to me. Send me success in the thing I confess. To the universe proffering, I make this offering.” Then say what it is that you want.

Light the volcano with an ordinary wooden match that has been blessed by a Practitioner. (A Practitioner

is what the book calls people who sell stuff for spells. I

had a box of Practitioner Matches with three left in it.)

When the alcohol is consumed, a thick crust will be left in the bottom of the dish. The crust is the obstacles in your path burned away. When the dish has cooled, remove this reverently to the trash.

I set everything out on the kitchen table and said the spell. “Powers that be, harken to me. Send me success in the thing I confess. To the universe proffering, I make this offering. I want to be Juliet. Please, please, please, please, please. Make me Juliet.”

And I lit the match.

There was a quiet whoosh and orange flames licked up all over my little volcano. The red cube burned. It was pretty. Very theatrical.

But it was casting too much light. And for some reason, the light was coming from over my head, like a stage light.

I jerked my head up and saw a bright white glow hanging about three feet over the table, right over my flame.

“Aaah?” I said. Or maybe Uuuuuh? Anyway it was some.thing like that.

And with the bright light came a sound like a low bass note that turned into a sort of rumbling thrill, something like an earthquake.

Everyone in California knows what you’re supposed to do when a quake hits. You stand in a doorway. And that’s what I did, even though this was no quake and I knew it. I clutched the door frame with both hands while the white light suddenly filled the whole kitchen, so bright I couldn’t see anything. There was a bang, and the light was gone.

My baking dish was shattered. It lay in two exact halves on the floor. Smoke curled up from each one of them, but there was no crust. They were clean as a pair of very clean whistles.

But that was not the main thing I noticed. No, the main thing I noticed was the tall young man standing on the table in the middle of my glass round. He was about my age, and for some reason he was dressed in tights and boots and a big poofy shirt like he was supposed to be in a play like, say, Romeo and Juliet.

He even looked a little like Shakespeare.

Long hair, a bit of a beard…

I screamed.

He smiled, held up one hand, got down on one knee, bowed his head to me and said some words in a language I didn’t understand.

“Speak English,” I said.

The boy looked up, shocked. “Ye’re never Helen of Troy,” the boy said, and leapt to his feet.

“What?” I said.

“These are never the topless towers of Illium,” the boy said, looking around the kitchen wildly.

I screamed again, and he, for some reason, crossed him.self, yanked a crucifix out from under his shirt, held it out at me like he thought it was a shield, and shouted, “Doctor D., Doctor D., where are ye?”

Chapter Two

After those frantic moments, we just stared at each other for a bit.

Finally, the boy gulped. I could see his cross was trem.bling in his hand. He wasn’t the only one trembling.

“What ha’ ye done wi’ Doctor D.?”

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“Who in hell are ye?” he asked.

“What are you doing here? How did you do that? What do you want?” I shrieked.

I’d cast a spell and it had worked. But it hadn’t worked right. Something was very, very wrong, and I didn’t have a clue what it was, or how to fix it. I was scared, more scared than I’d known I could be.