the Romeo + Juliet Experiment

Chapter One: Jess

The bus bounced along the road as the movie credits started rolling. I stretched in my seat as best I could and caught sight of Tibby's face. She saw my smirk and sniffed.

"What?" she laughed as she wiped her eyes. "It was sad."

"You are such a romantic sap," I said fondly.

She was utterly unashamed by the tears tracking down her face. "Well someone has to be."

I nodded, giving her that one.

It was kinda sad the poison hadn't killed him fast enough and they'd both had to realise the mistake. But that was what you got when you played dead for a boy at thirteen. I was never going to play dead for a boy. I wasn't going to play anything for a boy. Romance was dumb and so not worth it.

"All right, girls," Mr Lawrence, our English teacher, called as he stood up from his seat. "Can I have your attention, please?"

Once the busload of us was relatively quiet, he nodded.

"Thanks. Now that we've seen the mastery that is Baz Luhrmann, we can get down to business. We don't usually do camps this early in the year – it's only week three and all that, I know. But a colleague and I had this great idea to bring our classic studies into the twenty-first century and put them in terms you guys can understand–"

"You calling us idiots, sir?" Norah called, raising her hand and Tibby and I smiled with her.

"I'm not calling you idiots, Norah," Mr Lawrence said with a wry smile. "We just thought it would be easier if we put it in context for you, and you might be less resistant to learning if we made it a little more fun."

"So, what exactly are we doing?" one of the girls up the front asked. "Are we staging a play?"

"Yeah," Tibby scoffed to me quietly. "Because that would be fun."

I snorted, putting my fist over my mouth when Mr Lawrence shot me a quick glance.

"We're not," he answered to audible disappointed groans from the front. "We're going to conduct an experiment."

"An experiment in English?" Norah hissed to Tibby and me. We both shrugged in response.

"We've started looking at Shakespeare's infamous 'Romeo and Juliet' this year. We've started looking at themes and tropes, and there has been some debate about the legitimacy of this text as the world's greatest love story. So, we're going to put it to the test."

There were cries of "What?" and "How?" and some quieter mutterings as the class tried to guess what he meant by that.

"We're going to meet up with a class from Prince Edwards at the camp ground. Tonight, we're going to stage our own 'ball' where you – our Juliets – will meet your Romeos. You then have three days in which to test if it's possible to 'fall in love'," complete with air quotes thankfully, "with each other."

There were pockets of excited chatter, some of it coming from my friends on either side of me. There was one person who was even less enthusiastic than me, but Mr Lawrence was always happy to hear our concerns.

"Yes, Reese?" He pointed to her behind us.

"I just have to question how inclusive this is, sir."

Mr Lawrence nodded. "Good. Yes. Miss Johnson and I talked about the potential problems with this at length. We debated it and wondered if we should just scrap the idea. But, given we need to pair you with someone you hopefully don't know and it's none of our business what your sexual orientations are, pairing one Our Lady's with one Prince Edward's student seemed the most fair."