No doubt these lines were masterpieces of meter and meaning, but for all the feeling coming out of my mouth, they might as well have been ingredients from a cereal box. Claire, of course, turned Juliet’s lines into things as natural as breath, one word as full as rainwater gathering on the tip of a petal, the next dry and windswept as the desert outside of town.

I looked at her in wonder and saw that she was reciting by heart and that her eyes were focused on the football field. There at the nearest corner was a helmetless Steve Jorgensen-Warner running drills. Just drills, and yet he executed them with supernatural grace, vaulting over lesser humans and grinning like he’d just as soon keep going until he conquered the world. Claire was rapt and I couldn’t blame her. That sort of movement was a kind of poetry, too.

“Oh, blessed, blessed night,” I whispered from a script I hadn’t realized that I’d memorized, too. “Because it’s dark out, I’m afraid all this is just a dream.”

Was it, in fact, a dream? I lowered my eyes and regarded the chewed, dirty fingernails holding my script, the scuffed shoes on my feet, and realized that these were the symbols of my pitiful little life: worn-out, insignificant, ready to be thrown beneath Dad’s industrial mower. With one hand I touched the medallion beneath my shirt, a different symbol entirely, and thought of that dark world beneath the surface. Which dream was preferable, the wild danger down there or the slow suffocation happening up here?

Mrs. Leach took her glasses by the frame, lips parted to demand an end to this pitiful farce. But my voice continued, louder now, my despair as real as anything Romeo could come up with.

“A thousand times the worse for me, to want your light! / A lover goes toward love as schoolboys from their books. / But love goes from love, like boys toward school with heavy looks.”

Mrs. Leach released her glasses.

Claire turned away from the football field and gave me a curious look.

“It is my soul that calls upon my name,” I continued. Until then, anguish was something I’d felt in my heart and head. Now it had a voice and I let it flow. “How silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.”

Claire smiled with not just a corner of her lips but her whole mouth.

“I shall forget,” she said softly, “to have thee still stand there, remembering how I love thy company. Romeo!”

“Romeo, indeed,” Mrs. Leach said.