Stratford-on-Avon calling! Can a scrawny, irreverent guy save the play by . . . being Beatrice?

I carefully stepped out of my second period class and checked if the William express was around. It was not, so I walked down the hall in my search for Anna. I had thought about asking her to go to the last game of the regular season. Since our school was out of the running for state I had to wonder if it would only be the two of us, the pep band and the cheerleaders. It would be cold, as it it usually became that time of year…except when I was next to Anna.

A theatrical performance goes off the rails. Can it be saved?

Two students’ love of literature creates an escape – but also, a common language to discuss more personal concerns.

Shadowsblade a Whateley Tale: Written by Shadowsblade

Created for war and forged in pain, dealing with demons within and without.

The Den was a huge and recessed room with a large couch with a television on the wall. The pool table was a full-sized unit. I wondered how they got it into the house and into this room. The air hockey table was just as new looking and probably twice as heavy.
I admit I am terrible at pool. Anna went over the rules a little bit and we played one game before shifting over to air hockey.

“OK, Ella, what the heck are you thinking, agreeing to have Reginald the Idiot with us? Do you want us to get caught?” Naomi demanded, as soon as we were inside our beach house.

The days before she died was all the time that I really knew the real Anna Renee Joel. She was very sweet; always helpful and polite to me and that kindness made me feel threatened because whenever she talked to me my guard would come down and I was pretty much hypnotized. She could read the directions for soup from the back of a can and it would have sounded like poetry in motion.

Sitting down to eat, I couldn't keep my eyes off of Reginald. I wondered what he thought about being surrounded by students from Doom Valley Prep School. He was pointedly ignoring everyone, eating his lightly grilled baby charybdis steak. He hadn't actually looked at me once since he offered to act as my guide, assistant and bodyguard. I still didn't know why Ella had accepted his offer. He would only mess things up.

When you come across a bear in the wild, there is a very handy rhyme that tells you what to do. “If it’s brown, lay down. If it’s black fight back. If it’s white goodnight”. And even though I was staring straight into a set dark brown eyes framed by a big bush of curly brown hair, laying down definitely was not the right course of action. For these eyes did not belong to a ferocious mammal with razor sharp claws, but instead a 16 year old girl who was very excited to meet her online friend for the first time. The latter feeling a lot more dangerous than the former to me right now.