The Juliet Spell

I hadn’t seen him since ninth grade. That was almost two years. As far as we knew, he was wandering around America, sometimes working, sometimes not. Once in a while, we got a postcard.

Mom and I kept hoping he’d come back.

If I could play Juliet, I would give my performance to my mom. I would put it in the program as a dedication and say something nice. In one way, it wouldn’t be much. But in another way, it would be gigantic. It would be a way of saying “I love you” in big, fat, Elizabethan letters.

When I got home, the house was quiet. No surprise there. Mom was working a double shift over at Bannerman and wasn’t supposed to be home until tomorrow morning. But the note on the bulletin board where we communicated with each other was surprising:

CHILD SUPPORT! Your dad paid up. That means this is my last double shift at the hospital for a while. I’ll be home tomorrow about seven-thirty. Who knows? I might even see you before you go to school. It’d be nice to touch base with you again before you graduate.

Love,

Mom

My parents weren’t divorced. If they’d been divorced, things might actually have been better for us. Then at least we’d have had the law on our side when Dad didn’t pay the money he’d promised to help keep me alive. But they were just “separated.” He paid when he paid. Which was somewhere between not often and never. And when he did pay, it wasn’t much. But today there was a check on the fridge, and it was big. Almost a whole year’s back cash for the privilege of not seeing me.

I tried to ignore the pang that gave me, and thought about the good things that the money would mean. A dinner out with Mom to celebrate was one thing for sure. And some new school clothes. And some bills paid off. And Mom working eight hours a day instead of sixteen, at least for a while. Thank you, Daddy, wherever you are. For a few minutes, I wasn’t thinking about playing/not playing Juliet.

But then I was again.

The child support was a sign. When you’re an actor, everything is a sign of something else. Actors are the most superstitious people on the planet. And it was obviously a good sign. Anything I did now to move things in my direction would work. That’s what I told myself.

And it made me think of something else. A whole new obsession. Maybe, if I played Juliet, my dad would come home. I mean, I’d tried out, and here was the child support. Therefore, if I got the part, he’d come back. Perfectly logical.

This is what shrinks like Dad call fantasizing. They will tell you that it is immature and a sign of emotional distress. They will also tell you that it doesn’t work.

But I had nothing to lose by believing it. And fantasy is only fantasy if it doesn’t work. So I went into my room and got out my spell kit.

I’d read about spell kits the year before in a book called Spellcraft For the Average Teen. The writer, who called herself Aurora Skye, had written a sort-of cookbook for how to get things you wanted. And I’d put mine together and started using it daily.

What did I want? I wanted my father to come home. And I’d cast spells for it for over a month, every afternoon when Mom wasn’t home, which was pretty much all of them. They were called drawing spells, because they were supposed to draw the person to you.

You do not need me to tell you how well they worked. Daddy was still out there somewhere. But now was different. There was that check. That big check that meant he’d remembered us. Remembered me. So, fantasizing said, it was time. Aurora Skye said it, too. If a spell didn’t work, she wrote over and over again, don’t give up. Keep casting and the spell will work in its own time. Today, right now, I believed it.

So I got out the cardboard box where I kept the odds and ends you needed to cast spells and flipped open the book to Spells For Success. The chapter had a lot of subheadings: Success in Love, Success in Sports, Success on Tests, but nothing that specifically said Success in Getting Cast as Juliet. The closest I could come was Success in Becoming Famous.

First, draw a perfect circle eighteen inches across. (Everyone who’s taken geometry for a day knows there’s no such thing in real life as a perfect circle. This is probably the second-best escape clause anybody ever had for when something magical doesn’t work. The best is, “It must not be time.” But what I had for a circle was a round eighteen-inch piece of glass, a little tabletop I’d gotten at the garden section of a hardware store. It was better than anything I could have drawn.)

Next, mix ½ cup Epsom salts and ¼ cup rubbing alcohol in a baking dish. Form into a volcano shape. (This was pretty much the equivalent of bake at 350 degrees, apparently. Most of the spells started this way.)

Place in the cone of the volcano one cube of sugar dyed red. (I had a few left over from last year. They were faded to a sort of brown now, but I wasn’t in a mood to be fussy. They’d been red once.)

Place the dish in the exact center of the circle. (Ah, yes. There’s that word again. Exact. I lined it up with a ruler on four sides. But how could anything ever be exactly exact?)

Say the following spell: “Powers that be, harken to me. Send me success in the thing I confess. To the universe proffering, I make this offering.” Then say what it is that you want.

Light the volcano with an ordinary wooden match that has been blessed by a Practitioner. (A Practitioner is what the book calls people who sell stuff for spells. I had a box of Practitioner Matches with three left in it.)

When the alcohol is consumed, a thick crust will be left in the bottom of the dish. The crust is the obstacles in your path burned away. When the dish has cooled, remove this reverently to the trash.

I set everything out on the kitchen table and said the spell. “Powers that be, harken to me. Send me success in the thing I confess. To the universe proffering, I make this offering. I want to be Juliet. Please, please, please, please, please. Make me Juliet.”

And I lit the match.

There was a quiet whoosh and orange flames licked up all over my little volcano. The red cube burned. It was pretty. Very theatrical.

But it was casting too much light. And for some reason, the light was coming from over my head, like a stage light.

I jerked my head up and saw a bright white glow hanging about three feet over the table, right over my flame.

“Aaah?” I said. Or maybe Uuuuuh? Anyway it was something like that.

And with the bright light came a sound like a low bass note that turned into a sort of rumbling thrill, something like an earthquake.

Everyone in California knows what you’re supposed to do when a quake hits. You stand in a doorway. And that’s what I did, even though this was no quake and I knew it. I clutched the door frame with both hands while the white light suddenly filled the whole kitchen, so bright I couldn’t see anything. There was a bang, and the light was gone.

My baking dish was shattered. It lay in two exact halves on the floor. Smoke curled up from each one of them, but there was no crust. They were clean as a pair of very clean whistles.

But that was not the main thing I noticed. No, the main thing I noticed was the tall young man standing on the table in the middle of my glass round. He was about my age, and for some reason he was dressed in tights and boots and a big poofy shirt like he was supposed to be in a play like, say, Romeo and Juliet.

He even looked a little like Shakespeare.

Long hair, a bit of a beard… I screamed.

He smiled, held up one hand, got down on one knee, bowed his head to me and said some words in a language I didn’t understand.

“Speak English,” I said.

The boy looked up, shocked. “Ye’re never Helen of Troy,” the boy said, and leapt to his feet.

“What?” I said.

“These are never the topless towers of Illium,” the boy said, looking around the kitchen wildly.

I screamed again, and he, for some reason, crossed himself, yanked a crucifix out from under his shirt, held it out at me like he thought it was a shield, and shouted, “Doctor D., Doctor D., where are ye?”

Chapter Two

After those frantic moments, we just stared at each other for a bit.

Finally, the boy gulped. I could see his cross was trembling in his hand. He wasn’t the only one trembling.

“What ha’ ye done wi’ Doctor D.?”

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“Who in hell are ye?” he asked.

“What are you doing here? How did you do that? What do you want?” I shrieked.