Runaway - A DEVIL'S NIGHT FANFICTION (PTBR + ENG)

Chapter 12 - Ivar

Four years ago...

"Professor, are you sure we should be doing this?" - I ask, scratching my head. – "I mean, we are twelve. Staging a play where two teenagers kill each other doesn't seem like a good idea..."

Artie Forester laughs openly at my questioning and circulates among the chairs in the school theater.

I don't like him. I don't like that he and Nini are friends and even less that he has casted her to be the Juliet in this ridiculous play that we wouldn't even perform, but that since we were reading the book, he wanted us to put ourselves in the characters' shoes as long as we made better choices. At least, that's what he said.

Besides, he can disguise it any way he wants, but he always smells like marijuana.

"I said I could cast someone else as Romeo, Mr. Torrance," he reminds me. - "You were the one who volunteered to do it."

I look from him to Nini who is on her back, sitting on the floor and painting a piece of scenery. She was also not enjoying being the center of attention and reading those huge dialogues out loud, but she refused to say no to this idiot, because she believed he was being nice by not saying anything about our friendship to her stepfather.

And if she wasn't enjoying it, Mads was even less, having been put in the role of Mercutio by the professor, who thought it was funny because we were cousins.

I let out a resigned sigh and pick up my copy, opening it and beginning to read standing up and in a mechanical form:

"If I profane with my unworthiest hand

This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:

My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss"

The professor taps his pen on the wood of the stage and Nini turns, startled.

"Juliet" - he calls her.

Nini looks around and seems to realize only now that the class had started and that other people were there. When she was focused on a function she liked, like painting, reading, or drawing, she would shut herself off from the world, but she quickly gets up and goes to her backpack, picking up her copy and opening it, returning to the same position and standing back while reading.

"Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too

much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss."

"Professor," I call him, "is there by any chance a more up-to-date version we could use? I mean, nobody talks like that anymore, unless they are really old... or crazy."

The class laughs and the teacher crosses his arms.

"Just read, Mr. Torrance."

I read to the end of that scene in my mind and an order at the bottom of the sheet catches my attention, so I start walking towards Nini quietly, trying not to scare her again, but I know she is now focused on the class.

"Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?" – I ask, kneeling down beside her.

"Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer." – she continues, for a moment confused by the outdated dialogue.

"O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do!

They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair."