***
“Romeo and Juliette is the worst Shakespeare ever,” Melanie said, flipping the pages of a battered Upton High School copy of the play as she sat beside me in our English class.
“I wouldn’t know,” I murmured back at her. “I haven’t read all of Shakespeare yet.”
As usual, Melanie forgave the little criticism buried in my comment. “These people in it are just so stupid and frustrating,” she went on.
“Don’t let it upset you. Remember that some critics say Shakespeare actually meant it to be a funny play,” I remarked.
The head of black hair in front of us turned around, until we could see the entire face of Troy Gibson. “Funny?” he repeated. “Even when everyone dies at the end?”
I shrugged. “I guess. It’s not my personal theory.”
“Well, their lifespans were shorter back then. It would be a big tragedy if all this happened in Upton today. But maybe dying as a teenager wasn’t such a big deal in – wherever this story happened,” Troy suggested.
“Verona,” I supplied. “And that’s a good observation.”
He narrowed his dark eyes at me. “Seriously? Do you mean to compliment me or are you just making fun of me?”
I sat back. “Why the heck would I be making fun of you?”
“I thought that was just what you did,” Troy said, turning to face the front of the room again.
I looked at Melanie but she was still frowning into her book, mouthing the words to herself as she tried to make better sense of them. Our teacher had given up trying to talk to our class about a play hardly any of us had read so he left us alone in the classroom with instructions to read it while he was gone. Things were going as well as could be expected under those circumstances. The room was noisy enough to hide a serious conversation so I poked Troy in the back of his Nitzer Ebb t-shirt, hoping to start one. It seemed to be exactly what he wanted from me. There was something eager in his expression as he turned around again, flicking his long, curly bangs out of his face. He really was lovely. He looked like a member of the band INXS during its prime – and he knew it. Even I couldn’t help but appreciate it.
“What would you know about what I do?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” Troy admitted. “Just that you think you’re too cool for the rest of us.”
“I do not. It’s you guys who are aloof from me.” My protest was sincere but Troy seemed unmoved. In fact, he laughed at me.
“Wrong,” he said.
“I’m not aloof,” Melanie mumbled beside me.
We both ignored her. “If you’re truly not trying to be some kind of snob,” Troy began, “you’ll prove it by going with me to junior prom next weekend.”
“Junior prom?” I repeated. “That’s a real thing? I thought it only existed on old American TV shows.”
Troy waved his hand at me. “See? Snob.”
“You can’t ask her to junior prom,” Melanie said, finally torn away from Romeo and Juliette. “What about Kristy?”
A little of the self-assurance drained out of Troy’s rock star face. “We’re not together anymore,” he said.
Instead of responding with the sympathy I would have predicted, sweetie-pie Melanie just rolled her eyes. “Aw come on, you guys. Not again. How many times are you and Kristy going to break up and make up before your mission?”
“Oh, I understand now,” I broke in. “This isn’t about you rehabilitating my social life. This is about you finding some kind of counter-culture protest date while you’re temporarily split up from your true eternal companion.”
Troy shrugged. “What’s wrong with taking out someone new?” he asked.
Melanie looked at me, waiting. Troy was right. There was nothing wrong with it. There was actually an awful lot that was right with it.
I sighed. “So do people still dress up for junior prom just like they do on TV?” I asked.
“You can wear whatever you want,” Troy answered, even though Melanie clucked her tongue and shook her head in open disapproval of anything less than a formal dress.
“Oh right,” I said. “This is a protest date. The less conventional I look, the better, right?”
Troy grinned. “Whatever you want.”
“So when exactly is junior prom again?” I asked.
“Next Friday.”
That was where my and Troy Gibson’s junior prom experiment ended. “Aw man. I have to work that night,” I told him.
“Can’t anyone cover for you?” he asked.
I sat back in my chair and thought about it. Wayne was supposed to meet us on Friday night, after work. Ever since he quit TacoTown, I had hardly seen him at all. The thought of missing him again made me feel – really lonely. “Sorry,” I told Troy. “I have to go into work myself.”
He looked back at me, sceptically, and I could see he knew I probably could have freed up that evening – if it had been important enough to me to make it to the Upton High School junior prom.
Melanie closed her book and gaped at me. Clearly, she thought I was an idiot for not quitting my job completely in exchange for one night as Troy Gibson’s date. He was hardly ever available to go out with anyone but Kristy. And he’d sure look good beside me in the pictures of junior prom – even if it was just a protest date.
“Fine then,” was all Troy said.
“Hey, it’s a good thing,” I hurried, talking to the back of his head again. “The most counter-culture thing a guy like you can do at his junior prom would be to show up with no date at all, right?”
“Whatever you say,” Troy answered, almost good-naturedly. “Snob.”
The next hour of the school day was a spare period for me. I usually fled home whenever there was a break in my schedule but today, I found myself sitting in the library, resting my head in my open chemistry book, wondering if I’d made a single good decision since moving to Upton. The library was quiet and nearly empty – except for Ben Jones.
“Well, if it isn’t my hero.” I greeted him flatly when he finally stood up from his work and he walked by my table on his way to the computer printer.
“I’m more like a damsel in distress right now,” he joked with equal listlessness. “This stupid printer paper keeps jamming inside the machine.”
I glanced over at the brown box choking on a long, stiff ribbon of white paper. “It looks exactly like the printer we have at work,” I said. “Let me see what I can do with it.”
In a few seconds, I had the paper properly loaded. “Okay, watch how to do this,” I said.
Ben Jones leaned closer to where I was working over the machine.
“The paper,” I began, “has to go down under this thing here before you feed it through. Very important. Did you see how I did that?”
When I turned to Ben Jones he was still close, his head right next to mine as I explained the printer problem. His expression was attentive at first. But then he was shaking his head – as if he was trying to clear something away.
“Hey, did you see how I loaded the paper?” I asked again.
He sat back. “Sorry, no. I wasn’t looking at – at your hands.”
I sighed. “Well, it doesn’t matter. It should work for you now anyways.”
“Thanks.”
In a moment, the printer was screeching out its rows and rows of dot matrices on the paper.
“Jones,” I began, over the noise. “Am I wrong about everything?”
He chuckled. “We’re all wrong about a lot of things. Be more specific.”
“Do I have a completely false understanding of who I am in Upton society? I mean, I always thought I didn’t fit in here because people are too narrow-minded and suspicious of me. But maybe – maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Well, I can’t answer that for you,” Ben Jones began, “but I can tell you what it is people really think about. They think about themselves. So don’t worry what people might be thinking ab
out you – they aren’t.”
I sat on the edge of the table and nodded toward my knees.
“What’s got you worrying about all that, anyway?” Ben Jones asked.
I let out a long breath and told him what had just happened in my English class with Troy Gibson. I left out the part about refusing the date because I would rather see Wayne in the city that night. And I had a feeling Ben Jones was the last person I’d ever tell.
“Well, I must say I like the advice you gave him about going dateless to the prom as the ultimate form of protest,” he said when I’d finished.
“I thought you might,” I answered. “Or maybe I’ve just excluded myself so completely from Upton society that I haven’t heard who you’re taking as a date to your own prom.”
“You haven’t heard anything because I haven’t asked anybody,” he said, pulling his printed pages out of the machine. The silence that followed might have been more awkward if it wasn’t filled by the sound of him tearing the pages of his report apart at their perforated edges.
There I was, perched on the edge of the table, looking at him again. I wasn’t the only one who was wrong. Carrie had made a big mistake when she hazarded her guess about there being something more than friendship between me and Ben Jones. If he ever had any thoughts of asking me to go to his prom with him, he certainly would have taken the opportunity that had arisen between us at that very minute. But he didn’t ask me anything. As usual, he wouldn’t even look directly at me. The pitch of my disappointment took me by surprise. I could feel blood rising to my face.
“I gotta go,” I said, pushing myself off the side of the table before he noticed my red cheeks.
Ben Jones dropped his history report on the floor. “Right away – now?”
“Yeah. The printer’s okay now. Just don’t touch anything and it should work fine.” I was talking to the top of his head as he gathered his papers off the floor.
“Well, thanks for rescuing my history report. We’re even now – for the whole – fainting – thing,” he said as he sat up.
I turned and walked away. As I left the library, I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him, for just a second. His eyes were on the printed pages in front of him again. I thought of Troy Gibson. It was for the best that our junior prom protest date hadn’t worked out. I would have just bored and disappointed him in the end the way I kept boring and disappointing everybody.
From the library doorway, I saw all of Upton in the curve of Ben Jones’ shoulders as he sat with his back to me, proofreading his homework. He was neither narrow-minded nor suspicious. Maybe none the Upton people was. Maybe there weren’t really any dragons here. But maybe there was something else here – something that made me even less comfortable than dragons would have. Maybe everyone in Upton was like Ben Jones – the boy who was, quite simply, too good for me.