Now You See Her (12 page)

But I couldn’t do it anymore. I was too far gone.

When Logan showed up where I told him to come (the piano rehearsal room because it was empty that morning; I checked the schedule and no one was using it), I ran to him and hugged him. It was such a relief after pretending for so long. He was probably almost a foot taller than I am. Well, not really. He’s only about five- ten. But it felt like that. I held onto him and I said, “Logan, Logan. I can’t stand it anymore. I can’t go on.”

He held me back by the shoulders and said, with this warm gleam in his eyes that made my mouth water like it does when you’re trying not to throw up, “You’re just nervous. Concentrate on being Juliet right now. Let’s be pros now, Hope. Tomorrow will be a big night for you.” I held up my hand, as if I were swearing in court. “‘The play’s the thing,’” I said. I tried so hard to act cool and professional, but just the way he smelled reminded me of so many things. A million scenes were flashing through my head like a dream movie. Logan and me on the floor of the cabin. Logan and me on a mountaintop, at sunrise. Logan and me on a beach. But we’d never been on a mountaintop, or a beach. It was all whipping around in my mind so that I couldn’t even remember

where I was.

Logan patted me on the shoulder, and said, “Hope. You’re a million miles away.” The he added, joking, “‘I

profane thee with my unworthiest hand. . . .’”

“‘O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do. . . .’” “Hope,” Logan said, “you’re a complete doll. And if

you were two years older—”

“What,” I said, “my age matters now. Since when? What are you talking about?” It was a good thing the room was soundproof because I was screaming. I was screaming and ready to start crying.

“It should matter to you,” he said. “If your parents knew how you act around me—”

“Forget about my parents,” I said, and I gave the ring to him, and I said, “This is for luck. ‘This ring to my true knight.’”

Logan said, “Toots, I can’t accept this.” He turned it over in his hands. “It has someone’s initials in it!”

I said, “I got it on eBay. It’s totally fine. It’s for luck. I paid ten bucks for it. It’s vintage. And it’s just a loan. For the show.” Guys never spot a lie like that. Plus, they have no idea what clothes cost. They think you can get a really nice pair of jeans for twenty bucks. Their mothers keep buying them clothes until they’re, like, old enough to get married. I could never have bought something that was real gold for ten dollars. It was probably worth a couple of thousand bucks or something. Or at least a hundred.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. The way his face got all dreamy kind of made me forget how much Carter loved

the ring, how he kept a special polishing cloth for it and everything. I thought then, maybe I would let Logan keep it, not give it back to Carter at all. Hey, I thought, we have three other grandparents. One of them was bound to die someday and leave him something just as nice. “Well, then, I thank you, my most fair lady,” Logan said, making a big bow to me. “Now. You promised we could get to work.” He slipped on the ring. It fit just per- fectly. “I have the run-through and sound check tonight, and about four thousands things to do, plus studying, before the first school show.”

I wanted to pout, but didn’t. It wouldn’t be smart or professional.

“I’m busy too,” I said. You always tell a guy you’re busy. All I wanted to do was feel his arms around me.

But all Logan did was stroke my hair and say, “I per- sonally think you look the part more than Alyssa Lyn. I always saw Juliet as dark.”

“Thank you,” I said. I hugged him again, and I know— I’ve told Em this—he hugged me back. He couldn’t help it. “Oh, thank you. Thank you for seeing me as your Juliet. That means so much coming from you.”

“Well, in a few years, you’ll be able to do this role blindfolded, Hope. You’re a good little actor. But now we need to get down to work—”

“Can we just talk for a minute first?” I asked him.

“Let’s run through whatever scene makes you the most nervous.”

“But we need to talk about The Idea,” I said. “I’m ready and everything.”

“If you’re ready, what do we have to talk about?” Logan asked. He looked around him like he was check- ing the doors to see if anyone was coming. I realized then how totally secretive we still had to be. There were secu- rity cameras everywhere on the campus. He was so much smarter. And I knew then that his saying I was “ready” meant that the time for The Idea had come. I had to brace myself. It was going to have to be after the school show at Black Sparrow Lake High the following night. He didn’t have to say the exact words. That was the way we were together. But I had to make sure.

“Should we do this tonight or tomorrow night?” I asked.

Logan looked at me oddly. I guess he thought I was an idiot because I didn’t understand. After all, we were practically one person. “Hope, it’s now or never. Come on, what do you want to run through?” He looked at his watch. The ring sparkled on his strong hand, with the ruby like a little heart deep inside it. He turned it around. “Are you sure you want to let me use this?”

I told him of course I was sure and that I wanted to run through the balcony scene. It’s the hardest

scene in the play to do, though anyone would think it’s the easiest.

People have it memorized—even in regular, retard high school, some teachers make kids memorize it. It’s familiar, so you have to do something to keep it new.

But now I was thinking about all the things we needed for The Idea, so I could hardly concentrate on doing what I loved doing most. I loved watching Logan pretend to walk away, and then act as if he heard a sound and say, almost like he was shocked and goofing off, “‘But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?’”

We rehearsed for an hour and a half.

Then I went to my room to sleep with tea bags on my eyes.

I used to be able to fall asleep instantly. I’d trained myself to do that so I could take an afternoon nap before a performance, because it totally clears out your mind. You’re an empty vase, with the character filling you up from your subconscious. And if you sleep right before, you look all fresh when you wake up, not all liney and puffy like my mother does. The tea bags make your eyes sparkle, too, and darken your lashes naturally. You always sleep on your back.

But I couldn’t sleep. I was too tense. I just lay there for a while and tried to do yoga breathing. Then I got up, and I packed my makeup bag because I wouldn’t use

their stuff (I have my own stage makeup for extra-sensitive skin) and checked that I had all my packets of concen- trated liquid and my two layers of pants stuffed under the bed with the tape and junk. I had to take a taxi down the road to the shopping center during study hour before dinner and get a few extra things.

It turned out that I really didn’t. I already had the stuff. I was so nervous that I’d forgotten that I got it when they took us to shop the Saturday before. Well! It had been a weird month. The weirdest month of my life. Falling in love. Getting a starring role. Planning to run away with the man you didn’t even know you were dreaming of meeting until you met him. Faking a kid- napping because you were a good enough actor to pull off something like that. Buying your freedom. It was a lot for a fifteen-year-old to take in.

That night Brook drove me and Logan to the high school in his car, while the other cast members went in the two green school vans. Just before we got out of the car, he handed me the Black Sparrow Lake paper with an interview they had done with me, like, a week before, about playing Juliet when I was the real age of Juliet.

“It’s an amazing experience,” I said. “I really know how it feels to be totally in love and have it be totally hopeless and have the world not understand. Nobody understood how Juliet could want to die if she couldn’t

be with Romeo. They would have said, ‘You’re rich and beautiful. Think of the future. This guy is getting ban- ished.’ But she didn’t want to live without him. Obviously I wouldn’t do that. But I get it.”

It was so weird that I had forgotten even talking to the reporter.

And he was the theater critic. He talked about how poised I was for my age and what a good sense of humor I had, how “natural” I was and yet so “innocent.” It was on page five of the section, though, with only my freshman- year head shot; but Brook was really impressed. He said, “Now you live up to that, Hope.” I promised I would, and Brook kissed me on the forehead.

You cannot imagine the reception we got.

Four
curtain calls. Four! Brook was practically hyster- ical. He said to me and Logan, “You made those kids
get
Shakespeare!”

Despite everything I had been through, and even though I knew what I was going to do later that night, I was a total pro. I put the emotions aside. My training took over and I
fell into
Juliet. My tears were real. I never stumbled over a single line. Even stupid high school kids in the bleachers were crying and sighing.

My parents were crying, and even Carter was clap- ping his head off. Logan picked me up like I was a little doll and spun me around during the second curtain call.

My mother handed him some white roses and he took one and gave it to me; and I gave him one of my peach roses—fifteen, one for every year of my life. The school gave me another bouquet, too. I was practically stagger- ing under flowers.

That was the picture they ran on the front page of the papers Saturday. The front page of papers as far away as Detroit and Madison and Chicago and Minneapolis.

The picture was like, five by seven inches.

But the story was not about the play. It was about my disappearance.

VIII
‌

T

HERE
’
S
L
OGAN
. And there’s me. And there are my parents, back again. Up there at the top of my page.

Logan shouldn’t actually be there.

The three of us, alone against the world.

That’s how I saw it. But now, basically, they’ve ditched me.

I suppose it should be just one little I. Me, alone against the world.

But that doesn’t go with my journal headings. I like things neat.

I went from being a star—okay, it was just in front of a high-school audience, but it would have been in front of big-time agents and scouts from Hollywood and everything—to being a suspected criminal literally overnight. It didn’t happen the way Logan said it would.

Maybe he chickened out. Maybe Alyssa Lyn talked him out of saving me. Maybe he wanted to make a fool of me because secretly he knew that I outclassed him as an actor. And it makes want to pull out my hair that I did it myself. I shot my own balloon out of the sky. But only because Logan told me to. I was afraid, but I had to believe him. It was like stories in that book I read about Princess Diana. I was a lamb to the slaughter. She said that. I know how she must have felt—like, beautiful, and everyone thinking you must be so happy, but totally sad and confused. I had so many notes with so many maps and so many directions for The Idea, they were all get- ting jumbled in my head. And I didn’t keep them! There were so many of them that they were like a book! When the police asked me later on to show them the notes Logan gave me, I started to laugh. I told them that they had to be kidding. Like I could keep those notes, any more than I could keep his love letters? I burned the love letters and I burned the notes, right after he gave them to me, in a rice bowl I had put in my purse once when we were at Sumo Sushi in New York. It was a bowl where I normally kept my earrings. They wanted to see

the bowl to check for ashes.

What did they think, that I didn’t wash it? There were no ashes in that bowl.

I couldn’t believe how stupid and suspicious they

were, right from the beginning. They always blame the victim. The police were no different from anyone else involved. I have a very good memory, I told the police— when they came to do the so-called investigation. I should have, after, like, eight years of memorizing lines. It was all in my head. And I wanted to tell them the truth. But . . . the police! It was so terrifying! And my head, which was normally so clear, was filled with argu- ing voices and arguing thoughts. Should I? Shouldn’t I? If I did, would Logan still love me? Or would he turn to Alyssa-the-Bitch? He would never let me go through this alone. Or would he? He wouldn’t abandon me!

On top of everything, I got an academic probation slip for the second quarter where I had gone from As to Cs because of all the stress I was under, good and bad. I’d given up everything for Logan, and after the perform- ance, he got weird, staying away from me.

The thing was, after the show, after the flowers, I went from being a girl to being an outlaw, a person com- pletely dedicated to one person and to our dream. Like Van Gogh. Or Gandhi. Outside society’s rules, which were dumb anyhow.

This is how it all happened. As best as I can remember.

It took me a while to get back to my room that night of the first performance. My parents insisted on taking me out to dinner. I wanted to go to the first cast party with all