Swallowtail: Mariposa Radiante

Shakespeare Sucks

Swallowtail:

Chapter 3:

Shakespeare Sucks

Being a fan of the arts was something that Kaikane really liked about him. He had always been fascinated by theater performances and music. One of his hobbies was arranging music, a talent that he developed and nearly perfected the previous year in his former Theater Club. Of course, due to his poor grades, he had to quit extracurricular activities. Not only was he forced to leave due to his suffering academics, but most of the members had graduated and left, leaving only one or two members. With a lack of interest, the club had ceased operations so now no one had dominion over a club that had been around for years. He felt really bad, especially because he felt his own decisions had killed his favorite club.

Regardless of that, he had kept a lot of old material, including copies of various plays they had performed or read for fun, one of them being Romeo and Juliet. He had taken a bit of time after he had arrived home the night before to memorize the lines for the scene he had been given in class. Of course, modernizing a play was a lot easier said than done, and before he could even do something like that, he had to dissect the dialogue, break it down, and understand it enough for him to even make an attempt.

Thankfully, that was something he was easily able to do. He had seen many renditions of Romeo and Juliet, had seen movies and even theater performances. He was confident in his abilities to make a good scene. The problem, of course, wasn't his ability, it was his partner.

Nino Nakano.

He didn't really understand her. How was it that someone like her, a social butterfly, could act so friendly too so many people, and then turn around and treat him like trash. Was it a woman thing? Was it her personality or was he the issue? He spent twenty minutes looking at his reflection asking himself if he was the problem, but he didn't necessarily arrive at an answer.

Did she just find him uninteresting? Unattractive? He wouldn't go as far as calling himself handsome, but he wasn't ugly either. He was smack in the middle. An average Joe. His Hawaiian traits were more noticeable than his Japanese ones, it wasn't every day a tanned sandy blonde man walked down the streets of a highly populated Japanese city after all.

Kaikane waited until the lunch bell rang for him to finally make his move, once the other students in the classroom had left, he approached Nino. She had been busy speaking with her friends, but they had decided to head on without her, as she was packing her untouched worksheets inside her folder. She looked up at him, sweeping her hair over her ear, her eyes narrowing in anger.

"What?"

"I wanted to share my notes with you. I spent a couple of hours last night reviewing our scene and I found several ways to edit it while keeping the general meaning the same. I'm not sure if you've read the play so I brought a copy of it with me so you can at least skim it." he said, reaching into his backpack for it.

"Yeah about that... you see I'm a little busy today so not only will I not be showing up for the tutoring session, but I'm not going to be free to work on this. So uh... if you don't mind doing my share, I'd really appreciate it."

"And here we go, I knew she'd try to do this." he thought. He caught her arm as she tried brushing past him, pulling her back a bit.

"Ribbons, this is serious. I am not here to play around with you, we need to buckle down and do this shit," he said sternly.

"I'm not here to play around with you either, I am telling it to you straight. I made plans so you can do my project for me."

"And I am telling you, cancel those plans, we are working on this shit."