Chapter Text
While everyone else shuffled out of the theater, Lydia stayed behind. It had been several days since the play was announced–she waited and waited, but it looked like the administration wasn’t going to go back on their decision. They were doing R+J. If she was going to be forced into doing a show as pedestrian as Romeo and Juliet, she was at least going to make damn sure that she got Juliet.
She opened her script and began blocking her audition, occasionally pulling the pencil out from behind her ear to make little reminders for herself. She’d been rehearsing the lines all week, but getting the movements in her body always made memorization easier for her. Unfortunately, every standard blocking track she tried just didn’t feel right.
With an exasperated sigh, she trudged over to the very edge of the stage and sat, letting her legs hang down off of the edge. Maybe she could start her audition sitting down? That would set her apart at least. Before she could begin rehearsing again, something in peripheral vision caught her eye.
Some idiot left their script on stage. Her eyes rolled as she leaned over to grab it. How did people expect to do well in auditions when they didn’t even bother to take their scripts home to practice? She tried to think about who had been standing around there during rehearsal, but they had all done so much movement that day, it honestly could have been anyone’s.
It was pretty beaten up, especially considering that they’d only been given the scripts a few days ago. The binding was cracked and it was curled under itself as though its owner had been compulsively rolling it up. Some of the pages were warped and stiff as though water had spilled on them at some point. She sighed and flipped it open, looking on the inside cover where they were all supposed to have written their names.
Predictably, considering the state of the thing, there was no name. After another quick flip through, she concluded that the owner of this script had not written their name anywhere, which she deemed highly irresponsible. They had, however, scribbled in nearly all of the margins.
That was something she had always done, too. She found that it helped her dig into the dialogue; find all of the words that weren’t being said. There were so many notes in this script that, if not for the cramped handwriting, she could have mistaken it for her own. Every page was not only full of notes, but also arrows and circles, things crossed out and things erased, and in one case a little doodle that seemed to depict Mercutio flipping the bird to, who she assumed, was Tybalt.
If this person’s notes were anything like hers, it would feel almost invasive to read them without permission, but everyone had gone home, and really, this person shouldn’t have forgotten it.
Abandoning her own rehearsal entirely, she began to flip through the pages, the thin pages fanning against her thumb. She landed on the conversation from Act 2, Scene 3 where Friar Lawrence tells Romeo that infatuation is different than love, and warns him that he’d better learn that lesson quickly. Next to lines 87 and 88, the owner of the script had just written:
cool down, idiot
Lydia snorted indelicately and felt her eyebrows raise. Yeah, that’s pretty much the long and short of it. That’s not exactly how she would have put it, but she definitely had a note in her own script with more or less the same sentiment.
She flipped forward, looking for more short comments like that one. She found one in Act 4, Scene 3. Where Juliet spirals with the poison and the dagger, the mystery person wrote:
so she’s more afraid of marrying this guy than she is of death? relatable
That one brought up an involuntary chuckle from her throat, and it echoed through the empty gym. There were other funny little quips littered throughout the script. Her favorite of which was on the very last page. Just underneath the last paragraph, scrawled in smudged pencil was:
there’s never been a sadder story? ever? come on man
That’s exactly how she always felt about that line. While the rest of the audience dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs and sniffled pathetically, she rolled her eyes at the stupidity of it all. It was sort of ironic that every audience fell in love with the story almost as quickly as the characters in the story fell in love with one another. Romeo and Juliet barely knew each other, and yet they fell into (the idea of) love with each other. Meanwhile, the audience also falls in love with the idea of love, so much so that it brings them to tears. Lydia had tried to explain that to people before, and they always brushed her off as a loveless cynic. This mystery person seemed to get it.
There were also some strong opinions mixed into the notes. No sense of nuance; clearly just this person stating their thoughts under the assumption that these were their personal notes, and they’d likely never have to defend their opinions to anyone. They were the sort of thoughts that people have, but rarely ever say out loud. In Act 3, Scene 2, they’d written:
she seems more excited about losing her virginity than having sex with him specifically. she doesn’t love him. he could be literally anyone
Lydia would agree with that, if it weren’t for the conversation Juliet has with the Nurse later in the show. She flipped to that scene, where the mystery person agreed with her:
nevermind, she really does love him specifically i guess (for whatever reason--freedom from her family?)
One of the harsh comments that really caught her off guard came from the scene where Romeo brings up suicide for the first time. The script owner had underlined several things in his monologue, and then connected all of the lines to a note at the bottom of the page that said:
this is all it takes for him to decide to kill himself? i don’t buy it. he’s been looking for a reason if you ask me
That was a big leap. In all of the times she’d read and seen this play, never once had she gotten the sense that Romeo was looking for a reason to kill himself all along. About a million questions flooded her mind, and for a split second, she considered writing some of them in the script, hoping that the owner would… she didn’t know. See them and answer them, she supposed? That was not only impractical, but also a line she shouldn't, and wouldn’t, cross. She shook off the impulse and kept reading.
In addition to the funny comments and the bold opinions, there were also notes of a more personal nature. She would be mortified if someone read the personal connections in her script, but something about the immorality of it drew her in even further. It was like she stumbled upon someone’s diary, and she couldn’t put it down if she tried. It was all so raw and honest in a way that no one ever speaks out loud; she was hooked.
In Act 1, Scene 4 when Mercutio talks about the fickleness of dreams, they had written:
he says dreams are as thin as air but i don’t think of air as being thin. even if you can’t see it, you can see its effects. it can cause real damage, create energy, move things around, give relief on a hot day. so can dreams. don’t think i agree with him on this
Lydia’s brows furrowed. It seemed almost contradictory that the person who jumped to the conclusion that Romeo was suicidal all along was the same person who refused to believe that dreams don’t matter.
They also seemed to take issue with the way some of the characters talk about love throughout the story. In the margins of Act 2, Scene 4, they wrote:
being in love is as good as being dead? no way. i don’t believe that. being infatuated maybe. i guess i’d like to think that being in love feels more like finally being alive. i hope so anyway
She felt her lips pull up at the corners–she hoped so, too. In another Act 2 scene, they’d written:
be moderate in your love? screw that. violent delights have violent ends? so what? i’d rather have a violent end than a lukewarm love i think
How was this the same person who wrote “cool down, idiot” just three scenes earlier? She’d heard that people contain multitudes, but she was quickly becoming desperate to talk to this person and uncover all of the minutiae of their brain.
Just like she couldn’t stop turning pages, she couldn’t stop the amateur psychoanalysis that began to take place as she learned more and more about this person through their writing. In the context of everything else, the colder, more distant comments seemed like a cover for something. Like a hard, wisecracking shell they presented to cover up their vulnerabilities. Her jaw dropped when she flipped to Mercutio’s death scene and found notes that corroborated that very theory.
man’s eyes were made to look, so let them… someone this cocky is hiding something for sure. no one’s actually that confident. what’s he got to hide???
look for me tomorrow and you’ll find me a grave man? he told a lame joke with his last breath. he’s clearly still covering something up. what’s so deeply buried that he’s still hiding even on his deathbed?
It sounded like this person was speaking from experience. All at once, the only thing she wanted was to see this person play Mercutio. If they could effectively bring all of their analysis to the stage, their reading of the character would be brilliant–she’d much rather have this person in the role than Cynthia, who oh so deftly described the character as “cool” a few days ago.
Putting aside impropriety and the silliness of it all, she grabbed her pencil, and began writing. All of the little comments and questions she had as she was reading flowed out of her and onto the pages next to the mystery person’s scrawl. She didn’t bother disguising her handwriting; she assumed that the person would ask around and try to figure out who did it, at which point she could confess (or not, depending on who it ended up being).
When she was finally done, she dug around in her bag for something to visually indicate that the script had been read by someone else, just in case whoever came to claim it didn’t notice immediately that it had been tampered with. Her hand closed around a small piece of paper, which turned out to be a little receipt from the record store she frequented. She stuffed it in between the pages of her first response, and put it back exactly where she found it, hoping that whoever it belonged to would reveal themselves soon.
___
Their identity took up an embarrassing number of her thoughts the next day; against her better judgment, she allowed herself to get sucked into the mystery.
The comments weren’t focused on any particular character, so she couldn’t narrow it down that way. The handwriting was sort of genderless; there weren’t little hearts dotting the i’s like she’d seen some girls do. Even though there were only a handful of people in thespians, Cynthia (much to Lydia’s dismay) had been running around the school all week trying to get more people to audition for the show, and any of them could have come in to rehearse on stage and accidentally left their script behind, so that didn’t help either.
The notes all indicated some level of intelligence. That was a clue, at least. She crossed several names off of her mental suspect list. The script owner was obviously emotionally intelligent, as well. She drew a mental line through a few more names. There was no way it was Arthur or Floyd (they both hated that Lydia wrote in the margins of her script and frequently begged her to stop and invest in a theatre notebook), so she crossed them off, too.
Unfortunately, that left her with no suspects.
When rehearsal finally came around, the first thing she did was look to where she’d left the script the night before. It was still right where she left it. This was perfect–all she had to do was watch everyone come into rehearsal and see who picked it up.
Only, no one did.
No one came in looking for a script they left behind, no one seemed to pay any attention to the beat up little book at all, actually. She spent the majority of rehearsal looking for indications of hidden depth in her fellow thespians, finding none. She listened as everyone talked about the play, but no one offered up any of the insights from the script. She also looked around for someone who was writing a lot in their book, but no one was making any more notes than usual. (Although, she may have missed something. Cynthia was incessantly cracking the spine of her script throughout rehearsal and it was incredibly distracting).
By the end of rehearsal, she was well and truly frustrated. Plus she felt stupid; did she really spend time writing questions and comments in someone else’s script just to have them not get read at all? She shouldn’t have done it in the first place.
Once everyone was gone, she walked over to the edge of the stage again, ready to erase all of her comments and pretend none of this ever happened. As she got closer though, she noticed that the pages of the script weren’t laying quite right. One of the pages had been dog-eared, making the book even less flat than it was before. Taking the hint, she flipped it open and found a scrawled response just under one of the comments she’d made the night before.
well man’s eyes were made to look, so let them… someone this cocky is hiding something for sure. no one’s actually that confident. what’s he got to hide???
His temper is another facet of this, don’t you think? His first reaction to a challenge is always anger, and his first reaction to something serious is always a joke. It has to be born of some level of insecurity. It’s interesting that you picked up on that–most people just assume Mercutio’s a bit of an ass. Do you relate to him at all?
maybe but don’t get all high and mighty. takes one to know one
She scoffed, eyebrows pulled together. The question wasn’t meant to come off as accusatory. Now freshly annoyed and suddenly in no mood to give up, she pulled her pencil from behind her ear and wrote:
What kind of maniac dog-ears pages of a script? Haven’t you ever heard of a bookmark?
To illustrate the point, she grabbed the receipt she’d left in Act 1 and moved it over to the current page, pointedly smoothing out its bent corner. This whole thing was stupid. She shouldn’t have read someone else’s notes, and she shouldn’t have responded at all. However, she did. Now she’d gotten the final word, and she was done with the whole, weird mess. Moving on.
That plan lasted for exactly 24 hours. After rehearsal the next day, she spotted the script at the corner of the stage, half of its pages propped up by something she couldn’t see. As she got closer, she saw that the person had finely crimped several of the pages like the folds of an accordion. It barely even looked like a script anymore–it was more like a strange paper animal, frozen with its mouth open and teeth bared. Her nostrils flared and she opened it up to the first destroyed page where they’d written:
how’s this for a maniac?
She should have let it be. For whatever reason, this was taking up more space in her brain than it had any right to, and she had better things to do. For that matter, she had better people to talk to. And yet…
Who are you?