Read Online Illyria by Elizabeth Hand - Free Book Online Page B

Michael held out the box of Cap'n Crunch. "You look kinda weird."
    "I'm okay."
    Rogan arrived half an hour later. He looked happy and windblown, sweeping into the house in a flurry of dead leaves.
    "Hey, Mad-girl." He grinned when he saw me. I could smell smoke on him, cigarettes and marijuana. The uncanny blue-green eyes were bloodshot. "Whatcha doing?'
    I gave him a wan smile and held up the book. "I thought maybe we could rehearse?"
    "Oh, yeah. Right. I meant to tell you, the guys wanted to practice, we're doing some new stuff. But we can do it now if you want. That okay?"
    He tipped his head to make sure Michael wasn't paying attention, then rubbed my arm. "Come on, let's go to my room."
    Upstairs we read the entire play. Rogan took all the male parts. I took the female ones, and gave perfunctory readings to everyone save Viola. I was surprised at how easily Rogan handled all the lines, not just Sebastian's.
    "I thought you hated Shakespeare," I said.
    "Just Romeo and Juliet. This one's pretty funny."
    67
    We stopped often, to peruse the facile annotations and try to imagine what the stage directions would be.
    "This is, like, a dirty joke." Rogan tapped the page where Malvolio read aloud from a forged love letter, supposedly penned by his employer, Olivia. " 'These be her very c's, her u's, and her t's, and thus makes she her great P's.' He's talking about a cunt."
    I whacked him with the book.
    "Hey, I didn't say it! Shakespeare did."
    We reached the end. For a minute, neither of us spoke.
    "The girl has the bigger part," Rogan said at last. He didn't look at me. "Viola. The play's really about her. Not Sebastian. The boy twin's hardly onstage at all."
    "He's on at the end," I said quickly. "He has that great swordfight where Sebastian wins, where he duels Andrew Aguecheek. All his scenes are just toward the end of the play, that's all."
    "I guess," said Rogan.
    But we both knew he was right. It was Viola's show, at least the way the words read on the page.
    "Come on," I said. "It'd be so great, Rogan, we'd be up there together, it would be like--"
    I wanted to say, It would be like when we're alone. Like when Rogan murmured, You can't breathe, and I couldn't breathe, because desire and arousal choked me, because I breathed nothing but him; he was my air, my element; everything.
    But being onstage together wouldn't be like that. How could it? Nothing would ever be like that.
    The bleak horror I'd felt earlier returned; the sense that I had
    68
    somehow missed the real meaning of the world, which everyone but me had always known.
    "It would be okay, I guess." Rogan shrugged. He ran his hand along the back of my neck and gave me a sweet, stoned smile. "Hey, don't look like that! I'll do it--we'll do it. You're right, it'll be fun ..."

He leaned down to kiss me. I shut my eyes and imagined us in the close darkness of the attic, the toy theater tossing its phantom starlight on our bodies as we moved together, like some strange articulated toy.
    "What's going on?"
    We sat up so violently our jaws cracked. The copy of Twelfth Night spun across the floor, to where Rogan's mother stood in the doorway. She stared at us, mouth pursed between uncertainty and angry disapproval.
    "Why is this door closed?" she demanded.
    "We're rehearsing." I scrambled to pick up the book and showed it to her. "This play by Shakespeare, the auditions are Friday. We're going to try out for it."
    Aunt Pat barely glanced at the book.
    "Leave this door open," she said. "Rogan, you need to get ready for dinner."
    She stood and waited for me to leave.
    "I'll see you tomorrow," I said to Rogan, without meeting his eyes. "Yeah, see you."
    At the bottom of the steps, Aunt Pat stopped. She gave me an icy look.
    "You need to find other things to do with yourself, Madeline. You're too old for this. You're both too old for this."
    69
    She stared at me until I left.
    At dinner I showed the battered copy of Twelfth Night to my parents and my sister.
    "Do you