Romeo & Juliet • ASOUE Prequel

four • book it

It wasn't that simple.

First he had to go to the main reception, where a very grumpy receptionist handed him a form he needed to fill out to officially join the drama club.
Then he had to attend two drama lessons, which he found annoying and exhausting, but definitely worth it in the long run. The phrase "in the long run" here means in about six weeks, which is when the play will take place.

After those two lessons, the teacher – Mrs Hawk – gave him an alarmingly large stack of lines for him to revise in order for the judging teachers to review the way he delivered them, so that they could decide if they could deem him good enough to take on the role or not.

Pretending to be grateful and managing to pull up a fake smile, Olaf held the paper unsteadily in both hands and stumbled his way back to the Shack, dropping them down on the hay-scattered ground with a loud slapping noise that made Lemony practically fly off his hay bed.

"I need your help," Olaf announces.

Lemony, still shaking from the shock of the scripts falling right by his feet, looks up at him. "With what?"

"I've got my lines. I need you to help me practise."

"By doing what, exactly?"

"I need you to stand in for every single role other than mine."

Lemony raises an eyebrow. "Won't that be a bit complicated?"

"Yep. That's why I'm getting you to do it."

"... thanks?"

"You're welcome."

In truth, Olaf knew very little about what takes place in Romeo & Juliet. There's a teenage boy called Romeo who wants to marry a younger teenage girl called Juliet, but neither of their families are too happy about their decision. That's about the extent of his knowledge of the play. Of course, Lemony knew way more than that, and insisted that he explained the full plot of the play in extreme detail before practising with him.

"You might as well have just read the book out loud," Olaf mutters after his roomate finishes.

"Well, I can do that too if you want. I think there's a copy in th-"

"No, really, it's fine. I think I'll manage without," Olaf says, trying to persuade him, knowing that he would actually do it if he got his hands on a book.

The majority of his scripts, Olaf found out, were the lines for the other roles as well as stage directions, and that all of Romeo's lines in the first act had in fact been repeated at least four times, like the teacher was trying to make him positive that he knew every single word he needed to say in the exact order it was written, without a shadow of a doubt.

As him and Lemony rehearsed throughout the night, though, he often found that when his sample scripts would supposedly end, he would repeat his first line all over again.

Thinking it was just an odd occurrence of deja vu, he would carry on, and then when he reached the end he would get back to the first line again and think that his deja vu was deja vu, and then when he reached the end line a third time he thought that his deja vu about his deja vu was deja vu about having deja vu about having deja vu, and so on.

After asking "is the day so young?" to an imaginary Benvolio for the nineteenth time, Olaf pauses, double-checking the page he was reading.

"Wait a second."

"What?" Lemony asks in reply, curled up in his hay bed with his eyes barely open.

"Haven't I asked that before?"