Encore Edie (13 page)

“Let’s talk about costumes,” Regan says. “I want to go
to the fabric store over the break and draw up a budget. I want to start sewing soon, too. I can’t do ten costumes overnight.” She pulls a folder from her satchel. “I’ve made some sketches.”

Sam scootches closer so she can see. “You drew these yourself?” she says. “They’re amazing.”

Colour comes into Regan’s cheeks, like Auntie Ellie when she talks about Daniel. “Thanks,” she says. She actually smiles shyly at Sam. “This is my thing. I love fashion and, like, fashion history. Sketching, making designs.”

“Do you design your own clothes too?”

Regan’s smile fades. Uh-oh—she thinks Sam is making fun of her. She stands up and grabs her jacket and bag. “You can keep those,” she says. “They’re copies. I have to go.”

“What happened?” Sam says, panicked, as Regan clomps out of the shop in her big boots, her dress swishing. “What’d I say?”

“She does that.” I pick up the drawing on the top of the pile. As it happens, it’s the Fool.

Merry looks over my shoulder. “Raj!” she says, clapping her hands again.

It
is
Raj, but it’s also not Raj, somehow. Regan knows how to do those long, lean, sketchy fashion drawings, all specific in the clothes and vague in the face. It’s Raj in jeans and a hoodie, hands jammed in his pockets, slouching, his face in deep shadow.

“That’s it?” I say. “That’s his costume? That’s the Fool?”

“You have to see the others,” Sam says, passing them to me. I look at Goneril and Regan, and Cordelia, and then Lear.

“Oh my god,” I say. “These
are
amazing.”

Sam hands me back the Fool. “Now do you get it?” she asks.

“The one has the wings,” Merry says. “Like a fairy, the one I love.”

“Cordelia,” I say automatically, sheafing through the pages again.

Merry takes the sketch of the Fool. “No wings. He different.”

I look up at her.

“He makes me feel sad,” Sam says to Merry. “Do you feel that way too?”

Merry’s looking at me.

“He
is
different,” I say.

I’ve just had either the best or the worst idea of my life. I’ll have to go to the library to find out which.

“I’m going to the library!” I yell. “Goodbye!”

“Hold on!” Mom yells back.

She’s downstairs doing laundry. Dad is at work. Dex is gone for the day with her ballet gear in her pink ballet bag. She’ll be gone for supper too, Mom says, at a friend’s. I assume this means Mean Megan. I’ve got my copy of
King Lear
, my notebook, Regan’s sketches, my bus pass, my
Google map, Mom’s cellphone, and ten dollars for lunch. Mom’s letting me go to the university library on my own for the first time ever.

Mom comes upstairs and studies me, frowning at my favourite green hoodie. “Is that going to be warm enough?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say firmly. I know Mom would be happier if I’d just go to our local branch, but I searched the catalogue online last night and found nothing I could use. The university library has everything.

“You couldn’t just use Wikipedia?” Mom says.

“Mom, I’m fine.”

“I know.” She gives me a hug. “Can I see that phone?”

“It’s turned on,” I say. “The volume is set to high. It has four bars of battery.”

“You know how to—”

“Yes, Mom. I know how to use a cellphone.”

“I know you know,” she says, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. “You remember where I told you to go for lunch?”

When I told her last night I wanted to take the bus out to UBC by myself, we printed up a map of the university and Mom circled everything I would need in red pen: bus loop, Main Library, and the Student Union building with the food places.

“Don’t talk to anybody,” Mom says. “Phone me at lunchtime and let me know how you’re doing.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”

“No!” I give her a hug. “No, thank you!”

“That’s better,” she says.

The bus ride takes a long time. I’m used to taking the bus to places close by: Sam’s house, the mall with Dex and Merry, the swimming pool. First I take the local bus to the SkyTrain station by the mall, and then I transfer to the big university bus. It’s an articulated bus, which means it’s extra long and bends in the middle. “Articulated bus,” I whisper to myself, finding a seat halfway down, just ahead of the bendy bit. I sit there for the next hour and the bus fills up and empties out and fills up again. I don’t want to pull out my map and look as if I don’t know where I am, so I spend a lot of time discreetly watching the list of stops posted over the exit doors. The last stop is the university loop.

Main Library has a grand reading room upstairs, with long wooden tables and high ceilings and stained glass. I’m easily the youngest person here. I go to the information desk, like Mom told me, and a friendly Chinese librarian with six facial piercings (nose, top lip, eyebrow, other eyebrow, bottom lip, tongue) gives me a sticker with visitor on it to wear on my hoodie. Straight down a narrow staircase are the stacks, where all the books and movies are. I already have my call numbers from the work I did online last night, and just have to find the books. A couple of people look sideways at me as I go by, but I’m not so nervous now. I like libraries.

I find a carrel at the end of the aisle where my books are and get down to work. I read; I take notes. I read about medieval European jesters, Chinese jesters, Indian jesters, Tongan jesters. I write down some of their names: Muckle John, Birbal, Archibald Armstrong, Jeffrey Hudson, J.D. Bogdonoff. I read about Punch and Judy,
commedia dell’arte
, Till Eulenspiegel, and the opera
Rigoletto
. I read about Renaissance fools, who were either “artificial” (clowns, jugglers, dancers, poets, comedians, mimes, singers) or “natural” (crippled, handicapped, insane). Henry VIII had one of each: an artificial named Will Somers and a natural named Patch.

I stop reading and taking notes and spend a long time staring at the graffiti penned on and scored into my carrel, thinking about Patch.

At noon, I pack up my bag, quickly study my map so I won’t have to pull it out while I’m walking, and head for the Student Union building. It’s busy in here, and I walk around the food places twice before I get brave enough to go buy anything. Eventually I find a place where I can get a chicken sandwich from a fridge and a coffee from a row of Thermoses and then line up at a counter to pay, like in a grocery store. Fortunately, it’s not raining, so I don’t have to worry about finding a seat. I take my lunch outside, sit under a tree, and pull out Mom’s cellphone. She answers on the first ring.

“Where are you?” she demands.

“Under a tree. Eating a chicken sandwich. Did you know Queen Elizabeth I once rebuked her own court jester for not being hard enough on her?”

Mom says she did not know that. She asks if I’m warm enough.

“I have coffee,” I say.

She laughs. “I knew you were going to love the university. You sound as happy as I was when I first went there. Books, coffee … How’s the library?”

I say, “Oh, my god.”

She laughs again and says not to be late.

I finish my sandwich and sit for a few minutes in the weak sunlight, enjoying the last of my coffee. I watch the students come and go and try to imagine their lives: dorm rooms, meal plans, budgets, class schedules, studying in the library, going to the movies with their friends. Going on dates, writing papers, slowly but surely zooming in on what they want to do with their lives, what they want to spend their time thinking about, what they want to know. I could like it here; I could love it. I could study literature, maybe, or theatre. Renaissance theatre. I think of Mei and understand her for the first time. I think about Shakespeare and spending all my time reading Shakespeare. I think of the names of his fools: Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Yorick, Puck, Grumio, Tom O’Bedlam, Fool. I think about artificials and naturals. I think about Raj. I think about Patch.

I think about Merry.

Merry will never go to university, never have a dorm room, never write a paper, never spend the day reading in the library, never feel the world get bigger and bigger when all she’s doing is sitting in a carrel reading some old books.

I toss my lunch stuff in the recycling and go back to work.

Upstairs in the big fancy library room are computers, and this time I’m braver. I find a free one and take a seat. There’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time, something Sam said to me months ago. I never felt right looking for it on the computer in Dad’s den, where someone might walk in and see. I’m not sure why—I just knew it was something I wanted to do alone.

I put on the headphones. It takes me about fifteen seconds to find the video clip I’m looking for, as if it’s just been sitting there waiting for me all this time. Mr. Harris, in the costume of a king—black cloak, crown, sceptre—kneels on a stage, holding a girl in his arms. She wears what I now recognize as the traditional Renaissance fool’s costume: patchwork jacket, pants with different-coloured legs, three-cornered hat with jingle bells. She too holds a sceptre, even though her arm is limp and it looks as if she’s either dying or dead. There’s no sound, only Mr. Harris, his face contorted, crying over the girl fool. Then the video disappears and a sign comes up saying:
From 1981, a rare performance of
King Lear
in which the characters of Cordelia and the Fool are conflated, or dual-roled, according to Renaissance tradition.

I look up “dual-roled” in an online encyclopedia: it’s when one actor plays more than one character in the same production. Sometimes, the encyclopedia says, theatre companies might be short of actors, so they have to double up. Sometimes, though, the playwright might
intend
for one actor to have several roles, to show how the characters are similar in ways no one might otherwise have expected, or understood.

When I get home, Mom gives me a hug.

“I thought of something for Merry to do in the play,” I tell her, but when she asks me to say more, I tell her it’s a surprise.

Embraceable You

On the last Wednesday in May is the dress rehearsal. After that are four performances: Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday matinee, and Saturday night. The Leadership students have run ads in the local papers, hung a banner that says
KING LEAR: THE MUSICAL
on the side of the gym, and sent flyers home with every student. The three evening shows are already sold out and the matinee is filling up fast. Mom and Dad and Dex and Grandma and Aunt Ellie and Daniel have tickets for Thursday night. Dex is skipping her ballet lesson to come.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say when I find out, even though if she didn’t come I would feel like a little brown slug.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she says, in that serene, grown-up voice that makes me want to flick her in the head. “I’m going to bring someone, okay?”

“Whatever,” I say.

She opens her mouth as if she’s going to say something else, but hesitates. I open my mouth to tell her I don’t care about her stupid date, but hesitate. She’s trying to be nice; maybe I should be too. We look at each other for a few seconds with our mouths open and then we both turn away.

By Wednesday morning, I feel like a carrot, with everything I have to keep track of shooting out of the top of my head in big fronds. I have to go to my three morning classes, then lunch, then the afternoon is free for the rehearsal. Everyone in the school not involved in the musical has two choices: come watch or do homework in the library. All the teachers will be there, and it’s a pretty good bet that most of the school will be too. I think longingly of the library, how cool and quiet and empty it will be this afternoon, what a pleasant couple of hours I could spend there if I didn’t have to spend the afternoon as Edie Snow, the Human Carrot. I would much rather hide in the library with a book: Edie Snow, the Book Potato.

My first class is math. I spend most of it thinking about Merry. She didn’t seem nervous when we walked to school this morning, but I’m not sure she knows how to be nervous. When I asked her if she was ready, she just said, “Yup.”