Read Online Now You See Her by Jacquelyn Mitchard - Free Book Online

ninth grade, but I read it again twice.
    Everyone knew Romeo was Logan. It was a done deal. And the tradition was that Starwood always had a guest director for the winter play. This time it was Brook Emerson.
    The students were going totally nuts. Usually it was some over-the-hill person, but Brook Emerson had won a Tony just two years before for playing Antonio in The Feast of Fools , which I personally thought was one of those talky-talky musicals that doesn’t have one single song in it anyone will ever remember, but people really loved it, I guess.
    All the girls were practicing monologues. The first thing you had to do was just a one-minute thing, not from Shakespeare. We knew all the major roles would go to the seniors, because directors and scouts from colleges came to the winter play too. But that didn’t stop anyone from trying out. There were going to be plenty of street guys and waiting maids or whatever, and any of us would have been glad to be one of them. I just wanted to stand on the same stage as Logan.
    But then, there was this one girl I started to notice in French class. Alyssa. Alyssa Lyn Davore. She was like the red-haired girl who should’ve been Annie instead of me. She was Juliet, with long sandy hair that hung below her waist. Alyssa reminded me of a candle, she was so pale and almost transparent. And though she was a dancer, she could really act in a semi-phony kind of way, which works with Shakespeare. Her father was an English pro- fessor, so she didn’t have to have anyone explain stuff to her. She knew how to place her hands like they were lit- tle statues. Do you ever notice actors’ hands? How they don’t just let them hang by their sides or stick them in their pockets? They pose their hands. Their hands are like little speaking voices, saying something to the audi- ence. Plus, Alyssa Lyn was a junior. And I thought if any underclass person got to be Juliet, it would be her.
    I tried to take some hope from the fact that Juliet
    was Italian, like me.
    But northern Italians are blond.
    We had tryouts on a Wednesday, starting right after lunch, in the big theater. Classes were canceled for the afternoon. Even the little eighth graders came to watch. Brook explained the play to us, like anyone who hadn’t been in prison all their life wouldn’t know what Romeo and Juliet was. He talked about its relevance to life now, about class and racial hatred, and how kids would be the ones who would start the healing. I felt like I was going
    to yawn, so I pretended to fix something on my shoe.
    Then we all did our one-minute monologues.
    I did the scene from Our Town that got me into Starwood. Other girls did monologues from mono- logue books, like about not wanting to clean your room or whatever. Like that would so impress Brook Emerson.
    Then they started little readings, from the actual script. Brook started out with the scene where every- one’s teasing Romeo for falling around like an idiot because he’s so in love—like the way Logan tripped over me. And then there’s the big fight between Romeo’s cousins and some guys who are Capulet guys and such.
    Those were the parts most of the guys read for.
    A few guys read for Romeo, and one really good sen- ior read for Mercutio and Romeo.
    But then, the director basically lined up girls to read Juliet with Logan. Like, twenty girls. I was almost the last one. I decided to do the most familiar scene, but in a new way. The part where she asks, “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” But I acted really pissed off, like a real fourteen- year-old girl would, a rich girl having a tantrum because her boyfriend’s retard family was so into being Montagues. I drew on changing my own name, and how it felt weird but free, when I told him to leave his family and forsake his name. I did it like she wasn’t pleading, but she was ripping him a new one.
    They let us break for dinner; and then he put the call- back list outside the big hall.
    They had called five girls