Star-Crossed (10 page)

It was then I learned that blue was Mr. Tennant's favorite color.

He showed me an album from his youth, with pictures that were so obviously nineties it made me grin. There were photos of Will on a boat, sailing with family. Will in school, in his uniform, where he told me that all the girls and boys wore uniforms, too. It was a mandated thing.

Things I discovered about Mr. William Tennant:

-Only child. Very similar upbringing. Rich parents, lonely childhood. Spent most of the time with his books, films, acting.

-He was an Oxford Man.
Oxford
. I couldn't believe it, and at the same time it wasn't a surprise at all. He showed me his diplomas, which he hung proudly in his bedroom.

I tried not to think about the fact that, even if was barely for a minute, I had stood in his bedroom.

-Once-upon a time, I discovered, he had played Romeo. At the Globe Theater, no less.

There were photos of him on stage, performing; dressed in Renaissance costumes and wearing crowns.

With each page turned, the aged photographs granted me a small glimpse into the far away world that Mr. Tennant had once resided in. A time where his hair was just a little bit longer; his body a bit lankier; his eyes a bit brighter.

They had darkened some since his youth.

Turning to the last page, there were several photos of the same girl that lived in the framed photographs. Burnished hair, freckled-nose.

I looked at Mr. Tennant, his mouth a straight line. We were floating in that same blue light; suspended in a place between silence and spoken words that neither of us would dare to say.

“Have you ever had your heart broken?”

The question drifted quietly into the air, evaporating immediately.

“Yes,” he said. No pause.

“When?”

“Twice,” he said. “Once when I was younger.”

He touched the photo. A part of me hurt; not because of him, but for him.

“And the second time?” I asked.

Mr. Tennant slammed the album shut, eyes heavy; touching his black tie and gazing into the projector's blue light with a look that said both
help me
and
I can't be helped.

He never responded.

It was raining that Wednesday, and the sound of rainfall rang through chapel that morning. Both of us, Tyler and I, watched as the droplets pelted against a stained-glass depiction of The Virgin Mary, running down in tiny rivers.

Neither of us really heard the sermon. Mr. Tennant, being a faculty member, was forced to sit in the back rows – Tyler and I sat up front. This admittedly made it easier to absorb the monotone murmurs as I kept my head low, hands clasped in faux-prayer.

A sopping courtyard left Tyler and I to fend for ourselves in the cafeteria. Which, to be frank, was more of a buffet-style restaurant than the typical plastic-tray and spork setup. Trinity had coined it
Tuscana Ristorante
. The food was made by hand with legitimate chefs, and you could get anything from a plate of fries to pasta in a fresh, homemade pesto sauce.

But I was plain. I bought a plate of mozzarella sticks and a bottle of Coke. We split both; hunkering down in a shadowy booth with our legs curled up to our chests.

“What's it like to be rich?” Tyler asked, stretching out the two halves of his mozzarella stick. I measured about three inches before the cheese finally snapped, like bubblegum between fingers. “Like, not having to worry about the same shit that regular people worry about. Like how much a gallon of milk costs.”

“How much does a gallon of milk cost?”

He blinked, embarrassed.

“I don't even know. Like five bucks.”

“About $3.50,” I told him. “And I'm not rich. My father's rich.”

We ate our appetizer in silence for awhile. The sounds of chewing, swallowing, dishes clattering, people laughing. Everything was cast in red and pink Valentine-colored lights.

“You look sullen,” he eventually said.

“Twitterpatted,” I echoed. “But no, I'm not sullen. The word you're thinking of is delusional. I'm swimming in a sea of all-consuming delusion.”

“You're rambling,” he said, alarmed. “Jesus, what's wrong?”

“I'm just insanely out of it at the moment.”

“Why?” he wasn't going to stop pressing. “What have you been up to?”

A fleeting image of Mr. Tennant, blindfolded, danced around in my head
.

“Nothing really,” I lied. “Just figuring some things out.”

He leaned forward, his green eyes curious. Tyler Dawson was such a boy. It made me really sad, and really soft, and really happy at the same time. I wanted to be like him. Less selfish and more moon-eyed about everything.

“About what?” he asked.

I shrugged, sipping my Coke, stirring the ice around with my straw.

At the
Ristorante's
door, I saw Mr. Tennant laughing along with another faculty member. Some teacher who was in the Science Department; I didn't know his name, but I knew that he taught the Advanced Biology courses.

“About me,” I told him.

Bell rang. Tyler cleared our dishes, and we separated as I caught one lingering glance from both Mr. Tennant and the Science teacher.

Tyler shoved me playfully, bidding me a temporary farewell; we split like the two halves of a sliced Planarian.

I went barreling into the theater that afternoon, where Tyler was waiting on stage. Hands hanging loosely at his sides, he smiled at me, already dressed in his street clothes. Mr. Tennant didn't want us in uniform; he insisted that we dress comfortably, eschewing the distractions that ties and skirts would bring.

I was wearing a simple black T-shirt and jeans that were loose enough. Black flats.

I wanted to look like him, in some way.

“Rain's still pouring down,” he told me, as if I couldn't hear it. I could.

Everyone eventually entered, but I didn't notice any of them. Even Marius, who rapped his knuckle against my shoulder; he was dressed in khakis and a T-shirt that read
Schrodinger's Cat Is Not Dead
.

When Mr. Tennant took stage, stoic-as-usual, I tried my best to breathe normally. I felt choked, distracted; watching as he moved so normally without the weight of potential consequence. He moved like a grown-up; unaffected by the banter and quiet giggles of teenage inexperience.

He was an adult. I had to remind myself of this. A growing child when I was born; ten accumulated trips already made around the sun. When I was first learning to form sentences, he was learning what it meant to fall in love. To have his heart broken. To take his first steps on a journey that in my still-growing mind, as a toddler, I was unable to even comprehend.

The time, no doubt, and the world and sights and people he had seen, had more than likely chilled him out - but I was still a live wire.

Mr. Tennant clapped his hands, and we quickly fell into the groove of things. Insisting on starting things off with an ice-breaker, Tyler and I were instructed to perform the infamous scene where Romeo and Juliet ditch the masked ball and he proclaims that hooking up with her would be like a religious experience.

I loved that, in a truly sincere way. Not just in the dynamics of the play, but how lyrical and poignant the entirety of the line was. How mind-blowing it was to be so young and so wound up by one person so quickly.

Tyler touched my face, and my heart skipped-a-beat. We were beneath the burning light, as close as Leonard and Olivia were when they performed our roles nearly fifty years prior.

While my prayers affect I take.

Our lips met to the soundtrack of gasps and clapping hands. His fingers touched my cheeks; my hands were around his neck. Tyler was at least a head shorter than Will, and much closer to my height.

His gaze was hooded and smile sleepy. When it was finished, we turned to the audience and smiled like two awkward kids who had obviously just kissed for the very first time.

“Fantastic,” Mr. Tennant said. “Absolutely fantastic. Alright. Now one more time, at the beginning.”

Again,
I thought. So we did it again; this time with more passion, more raw verbosity as we wove the lines like string set fire. There was the inevitable explosion; the giving of sin; the realization of what it meant to fall head over heels into something so wholly unexpected.

As our lips met for the second time, I imagined that it was Will whose arms held me against him with a desperate intensity. I imagined the students gasping; bags dropping, bodies dropping. Doors slamming in frantic escape to tell someone –
anyone
- what they were witnessing.

Tyler was still holding me when it was over; nose pressed against mine; bits of his hair tickling my forehead.

I love you
. I pictured him saying. Even if he didn't. It would have fit.

More clapping. More of Will telling Tyler how brilliant he was. Tyler beamed, hand still in mine, the skin of his palms warm and soft.

We took our seats, and I watched as Marius took the stage alongside the actor playing Mercutio. They yelled, pretending to sword-fight, and during the entire span of time all I could do was watch Will from my spot at the back of the theater; watching as he gave suggestions and ran lines with an emphasis on passion.

I wondered to myself; head against the back of the hard seat; half-listening to Tyler talk about how he was all nerve-endings and jitters, about what I would be like when I was Mr. Tennant's age. I wondered how much would change, and how much would stay the same; if I would find happiness in my adult life. If there would still be silver-bell laughter and surprises. That explosive awe, like when the person you've been long-pining for finally says your name. Those feelings that in your hot-blooded youth you believe will stay sewn into your heart forever and ever, always.

I wondered, looking at Mr. Tennant in that millisecond of our eyes meeting, if we were doomed to perpetually search for the things we lost somewhere along the way.

NINE

Something had happened with Mr. Tennant, approximately half-way between exchanging phone numbers and my walking out his classroom door.

He had seen, written on a piece of notebook paper, his name scrawled out in purple ink – surrounded by a five-pointed star. I had drawn a series of lines behind it, symbolizing a shooting star; a small wish.

The worst of it all was that it had meant nothing; I was simply trying to keep myself from nodding off during a horribly boring lecture in Psychology involving Classical Conditioning. And what he couldn't see was that under the name, I had also doodled a series of buildings and birds. A skinny girl with long hair, and a bunch of little, tiny flowers.

It was embarrassing, and I felt completely childish. Totally stupid.

His eyes were locked for a solid minute before he released my hand, smiling tightly while still maintaining a look that seemed both perplexed and mildly disarmed.

“Enjoy the rest of your day,” he said, each syllable sharpened. Cordial. “I'll see you on stage this afternoon.”

“Bye, Mr. Tennant.”

As my fingers brushed against the dark-lacquered door, he cleared his throat. I waited to see if he was going to say something, but he simply grabbed the stack of papers that had been lazily dropped on his desk – neglecting his request for a neat pile – and sighed wistfully.

“Goodbye, Kaitlyn.”

I had scared him.

Practice went the same. Tyler and I ran through the balcony scene, and Tyler also went up against Marius in the sword fight where Romeo kills Tybalt while avenging Mercutio's death. Marius, of course, knocked him backward with an aggravated blow.

“Enough!” Mr. Tennant yelled. The sound vibrated off the walls; a delicious thrill trembling up my spine. “Marius, that was absolutely not necessary. There's a difference between acting and ego. I don't need your bravado on stage.”

Tyler, rubbing an aching arm, sulked up the steps and into his seat. We talked about Friday; about running lines and maybe ordering takeout. Tyler liked pizza; I liked the idea of anything thoroughly soaked in either grease or MSG.

We shared headphones for a little while, as we typically did when walking through the halls together. Tyler was a proper punk, and enjoyed music that was both bold and thrashy. The 1975, or old-school Alkaline Trio. He went on about an At the Drive-In show that he'd caught in Brooklyn the year before. It was a beautiful moment in Tyler Dawson's sweet-seventeen-year-old life.

That night, after all of my obligatory school-related assignments were complete, I hunkered down outside on the balcony and sent Mr. Tennant a text.

What's your favorite band?

I waited for a reply, for anything; and it was an easy enough question, I figured. Who doesn't enjoy rambling on about their music? Maybe that would segue into other topics, like a weekend meet-up. Or maybe just my apologizing for my teenage antics; for his name written inside a star.

But there was never any response.

Tyler's car smelled of gasoline and that fake-pine scent that is always way too overpowering. The air-freshener, shaped like a pine tree, hung from the rear-view mirror and twirled whenever Tyler hit the break, which was often. He was a terrible driver; the red patches of spray paint that covered the rusted portions of the steadily-decaying vehicle only served as an almost-invitation to the police:
please, find a reason to pull me over.

“I almost didn't pass the driving test,” he offered, smiling through closed lips. “But, I mean, the guy was really nice. There was a lot of traffic, to be fair, and some jerk-off ended up cutting us off at an intersection, so I was all kinds of anxious.”

There was a mess of crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor; the windows were smeared with hand-prints, and the seat belts were frayed.

“This was my aunt's,” he said, nearly apologetic towards his cramped Mustang hatchback. “She's dead now, though.”

“That's terrible,” I raised an eyebrow, a free hand toying with the volume of Alkaline Trio's
I Wanna Be a Warhol
. Tyler had been begging for me to listen to it. “I'm sorry.”

“I didn't really know her,” he explained, swallowing. He was still wearing his uniform; occasionally tugging at the tie like it was choking him. “Anyway, you look pretty.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I look okay.”

I should have just thanked him, but my brain was sort of short-circuiting over my last interaction with Mr. Tennant, who had nearly flat-out refused to acknowledge my existence when we ran into each other after final bell. I had emerged from the bathroom in my street clothes – a pair of flared, frayed jeans that looked deceivingly inexpensive, along with my Yale sweatshirt – and had spotted him kneeling down and searching through his briefcase.

“Hey,” I'd said. “Did you get my message last night?”

Mr. Tennant glanced at me; the both of us bathed in a cool, white-washed light that sang through the ceiling-to-wall windows.

“Kaitlyn,” he said, his voice lower than a whisper. “I can't. I'm sorry. Please understand that I am terribly, terribly sorry.”

And then he left; his suit jacket slung over his shoulder and his polished shoes scuffing against the marbled tile. I stood with my arms hanging like limp string; my expression likely gobsmacked. The windows gave everything around me a harsh, sterile glow.

“Alright then,” I said to no one but myself. My eyes cast towards the window; to the distant larger-than-life wooden cross that was at the very far end of our courtyard. Sometimes people ate lunch around it; other times people just stared.

“I like the jeans,” Tyler interjected, severing through the nearly-solidified formation of my boggled thoughts. “They sort of make you look like an average person.”

“Is that supposed to be some kind of compliment?”

Tyler took a sharp turn into the parking lot of a building that was beyond any kind of salvaging. The bricks were dust and the staircase was missing chunks of cement; it was as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the steps. It was a horrible thing to think, but a part of me was worried that I was going to get stabbed or kidnapped or suffer some other type of untimely demise if I hung around this place alone.

“Yeah,” he said, and the engine went silent. The music disappeared, quick as the drop of a dime. “It was supposed to be a compliment. I'm sorry if I suck.”

“It's fine,” I reassured him. We grabbed our things and slammed the doors shut. “I suck at interpreting the meaning of things.”

“Me too. So we both suck, then.”

“That works.”

He smiled; I grabbed my backpack, and the two of us navigated through the packed lot and into the building that was heavily air-conditioned for early spring. There were window units leaking water from the outside; the drippings falling onto pavement like rain.

The walls were an aged yellow, the doors a mossy green. On each door hung a golden three-digit number. Tyler's was 307; third floor, seventh door to the left.

Inside, a woman was sitting at a small, cylindrical-shaped table; particle board that was painted black to understate the obvious lack of quality. She wore a black polo and black dress pants, black sneakers. Her mid-length auburn hair was tied back in a low ponytail.

When she looked up, discarding the magazine she'd been reading, I saw that her eyes were a bright gray - like the first bit of platinum sky revealed after a rainstorm. Aside from the color, they were identical to Tyler's. Long lashes; wide and brimmed with the simple elation that her son had walked through the front door. His arrival at the precise hour of three o'clock sharp was a fantastic, wonderful thing.

“Hello, my love.”

Tyler groaned as his mother kissed him on the forehead; taking his face in her hands and looking at him in the same way that every child would want their mother to look at them.

“Mom, this is Kait,” he said quickly. “Kait, this is my mom.”

I was promptly engulfed in the biggest hug that anybody's parents had ever given me. The scent of restaurants and second-hand cigarette smoke was imprinted on the cloth she wore like a stamp; signifying so much about her. There's a lot you can discover about others by the way they and their clothes smell.

Tyler's mother carried the scent of toil and long hours; strained limbs and a well-worn smile. Still, despite this, she gazed down at me – a surprisingly tall woman – as if she were running off the last vapors of breath. She was completely illuminated.

“Thank you so much for having me over, Mrs. Dawson,” I smiled.

“Please, please. Call me Laura. I truly do appreciate the sentiment when it comes to respectful titles, certainly; but we're a first-name kind of family.”

Tyler told her that we were going to run lines in his room, and she replied that he would have to keep his bedroom door open. This was a little bit funny, because the apartment was so tiny that there was nothing we could have really gotten away with regardless. From our spot in the kitchen, I could already see straight into the poster-paper walled room.

We went inside, his mother left to continue reading her magazine, and I lowered my eyes as Tyler quickly changed out of his uniform scraps and into a plain white undershirt.

“I tried to clean the place up beforehand,” he gave a sweeping gesture over the small room. There was a double-bed, just a mattress and box-spring, covered in blue sheets with a blue coverlet. A single pillow, white and blue stripes; it was a very empty space.

On the small corner-desk (more particle board) rested an ancient laptop with the security tag still glued to the back.

“Did you have a secret thing for swiping electronics?” I asked, brushing a finger over the top of his dresser; this was the only other piece of furniture in the room.

“Floor models are a whole lot cheaper,” he confessed this with a hint of embarrassment. “But you can't take the tag off. It's, like, permanently glued with some super-human type crap. I know, it's gaudy.”

“I like it,” I told him, smiling and looking out the tiny window that was just above the spot where a headboard should have been. Tyler smiled back, seated on the mattress. “I like your home. I really do. And I like your mother.”

Tyler smiled. People always like it when you compliment the things that are dear to them; family, lovers – even pets.

We tried practicing for awhile before giving up. Since neither of us felt comfortable doing any of the kissing scenes (which, arguably, could have been all of them) with his mother practically steps away in the kitchen, we tried running the final scene where Juliet ends it by stabbing herself with a dagger. Tyler kept laughing, though, which only resulted in me buckling over in laughter.

“I can't take killing myself seriously with you laughing on the floor,” I said. “You're supposed to be dead.”

“I know, I know. I'll be seriously corpse-like this time. Seriously.”

He shut up, pressing his lips together tightly, and we tried again. We failed miserably, and eventually just decided to hang out and order dinner. Pizza and fries soaked into paper plates as we watched Baz Lurhman's
Romeo + Juliet
.

Five minutes into the film:

“This kind of sucks,” Tyler said.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “It's Baz Lurhmann. It's brilliant.”

A flower of fireworks cascaded across the evening sky; Romeo and Juliet fell in love through the blue glass wall; they kissed in the elevator, dressed as a knight and angel.

“I will say, though, Paul Rudd makes the best awkwardly nerdy Paris ever,” Tyler said. “Even though the technical Paris is like, ancient in comparison to Juliet. Did you ever see Zeffirelli’s version?”

For a split-second, I had almost succeeded in convincing myself that I was back at Mr. Tennant's apartment, sitting on the midnight-colored settee and drowning in the haunting blue light.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Not long ago, actually.”

We watched the rest of the film, and when it was finished we listened to that song from the 1968 adaption; the voice of the singer soundtracking the very moment when Leonard Whiting first sets eyes on a young, wide-eyed Olivia.
What is a youth
?

“Do you believe they were really in love?” I asked Tyler, the two of us sprawled out on his comforter. He shrugged.

“I think you're missing the point if you think, you know, that it's supposed to be a forever kind of love story,” he said. “I mean, sure, I think they loved each other. I think they loved each other with the unique, intense passion that comes about during a time of of sexual discovery, you know? But I don't know. It's not about whether or not they would last, really. It's about being young; and all of the nonsensical, irrational nonsense that comes with it. Meeting that one person and being driven to act out.”

“Hormones make you crazy,” I said. Tyler laughed.

“Yeah, well, that's a shorter way to sum it up.”

He turned to me, on his side; his long figure etched in light from the outside street-lamps that seeped through the small window. We watched each other for a few seconds before I cleared my throat and suggested that we run a few more lines before calling it a night.

I closed my eyes and listened to Tyler give his final last words before drinking the invisible vial of poison. Despite the chill his voice gave me, there was a sincerely devastating sound in the way his voice cracked; the heat from his skin and simmering blood was enough to seep through the fabric of my sweatshirt.