The Juliet Spell. Douglas Rees

      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.

      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 something 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.

       The Juliet Spell

      Douglas Rees

      To Carol Wolf

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Chapter Seventeen

      Chapter Eighteen

      Chapter Nineteen

      Chapter Twenty

      Chapter Twenty-One

      Chapter Twenty-Two

      Chapter Twenty-Three

      Chapter Twenty-Four

      Chapter Twenty-Five

      Chapter Twenty-Six

      Chapter Twenty-Seven

      Chapter Twenty-Eight

      Chapter Twenty-Nine

      Chapter Thirty

      Chapter Thirty-One

      Chapter Thirty-Two

      Chapter Thirty-Three

      Chapter Thirty-Four

      Chapter Thirty-Five

      HISTORICAL NOTE

      QUOTES NOTE

      Acknowledgments

      Chapter One

      “Miranda Hoberman.”

      That was me. My turn. My chance. My audition. Now. With all the cool I could muster, which felt like exactly none, I left my seat and climbed up onto the stage.

      Down in the front row, Mr. Gillinger glared at me, looked at my audition sheet and glared at me again.

      “You’re reading for Juliet?” he drawled in his deep voice.

      “Yes,” I gulped.

      “Very well, go ahead.”

      Bobby Ruspoli grinned, sizing me up. He was already Romeo, and everyone knew it. It just hadn’t been announced, yet. Mr. Gillinger would post his name along with the rest of the cast on the theater office door tomorrow or the next day. But we all knew he was Romeo before the play was ever announced, the way people in drama know who’s going to get what, when the fix is in. So with that weight off his mind, handsome Bobby was checking out every girl who might be his Juliet.

      As if I wasn’t nervous enough. As if I hadn’t been studying this part every day since it had been announced that we were doing Romeo and Juliet. As if I hadn’t spent the last week lying awake nights worrying and thinking about how to do this moment better, I had to have Bobby checking out my boobs and butt. As if—

      “Begin,” Mr. Gillinger commanded.

      Bobby shrugged, inhaled, the way he’d seen real actors do in some of the acting DVDs we’d watched in class, and announced:

      “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”

      Then he looked up, like I was hanging from one of the Fresnel lamps that were glaring down on us, instead of standing right in front of him, shaking.

      “But soft! What light is this that through yonder window breaks?

      It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

      Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,

      Who is already sick and pale with grief

      That thou her maid art far more fair than she….”

      He rattled off the next nineteen lines of the speech exactly the way he had done them all afternoon, racing down to:

      “O that I were a glove upon thy hand, that I might touch that cheek.”

      My turn. My line: “Ay me!”

      I know, it sounds lame. But I said it like I wanted to die. Because that’s how Juliet feels right then. But had it been too much?

      Bobby went on, “She speaks.”

      Out in the auditorium, someone giggled.

      Bobby continued.

      “Oh, speak again, bright angel, for thou art

      As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,

      As is a winged messenger of heaven

      Unto the white upturned wond’ring eyes

      Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,

      When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds

      And sails upon the bosom of the air.”

      Me again. My first real line in the scene. The one everybody knows—usually wrong: “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”

      You probably thought Juliet was asking where Romeo is, right? Wrong. She has no idea he’s anywhere around.