I have to keep us from speaking for as long as I can. Even though I desperately need the Stars practice, I’m able to feign illness for two full days before Mrs. Cliffton says she’s calling for the doctor. On the third morning I rise earlier than normal, throw on my school uniform, and stuff my face with toast in the kitchen in front of Mrs. Cliffton and Genevieve. “I’m really feeling so much better,” I say, grabbing for one more slice. “Need to catch up on what I’ve missed. Do you think it would be all right if I borrowed Will’s bicycle?” Then I pedal away from the house as fast as I can.
After school I ask Miles to tell the Clifftons I’ll be staying late. “I want to use the school target,” I lie.
“What’s wrong with the one Will made?” he asks.
“His doesn’t move,” I say with impatience. “Besides, it will help me visualize being here for the tournament.” And then I dart to the back stacks of the library and emerge only when Mrs. Cliffton’s car pulls away with Will inside.
I weave more plans as I practice hurling Stars at the target.
“Miles is driving me crazy,” I tell Beas the next day, and then George the day after that. “Would it be all right if I came over for dinner?”
Each night I return home and head straight to my room, so that I manage to barely even glimpse sight of Will for five days.
I pull the covers straight up over my head and feel utterly exhausted. Knowing, stomach curling, that there is only so long I’m going to be able to keep this up.
Solving the Curse has reached a critical level now. More urgent even than the tournament, which is less than a week away. I throw Stars at the school target until my arms burn, then take Miles to town and ask Mr. Fitzpatrick to order a new Shakespeare biography for me: the most detailed one he can find. I know better than to hope that Dr. Cliffton will solve this voice Disappearance quickly. He hasn’t spent years preparing for it, the way he had when the music disappeared. So each night I rush through my homework and then find myself falling asleep in the early-morning hours with Mother’s Shakespeare book open in my lap.
I’m so tired by this routine that three days before the tournament, I doze off in the middle of Dr. Digby’s lab and Beas has to elbow me awake.
I open my eyes to glimpse the quote she has written across her knee.
Affection is a coal that must be cooled;
Else, suffered, it will set the heart on fire.
“Like that one?” Beas asks when she notices me looking at it. “I wrote it partly in your honor.”
I half choke, thinking that she’s somehow guessed about Will, until I recognize the words. They’re not about my Will. They’re by Shakespeare. I sit up and rest my chin in my hands. “Is it getting easier?” I ask hopefully, gesturing at her knee. “Getting over Thom?”
“No,” Beas says simply, and covers the words with her skirt. “It’s not.”
Then she kicks me under the table: “Find anything to tie Shakespeare to this one?” she asks.
I pull out a piece of notebook paper.
Speak low, if you speak love.
CLAUDIO: Silence is the perfectest herald of joy. . . .
BEATRICE: Speak, cousin; or, if you cannot, stop his mouth with a kiss and
let not him speak either.
—?Much Ado About Nothing
There are problems with my theory, gaping holes that can’t be explained, but I just know I’m on the right track. I feel it like a string vibrating. As if my mother were whispering in my ear. And if I fill my thoughts with Shakespeare, they won’t be filled with Will—?and maybe, if enough time passes, my feelings will dim.
But I feel a surge of euphoria, terrifying and addictive, every time I think of him. It’s almost like being hit with a Variant: a pure shot of joy, bottled and shimmering, multiplying even as I try to empty it from my hand. I doodle lumoava in the margins, wondering at how the Curse can dull every one of my senses.
Yet somehow love still makes them feel more alive than they’ve ever been.
I’ve completely forgotten about the interview I had with Daisy from the newspaper until the day before the tournament, when I finish my final practice with Mrs. Percy and swing by Fitzpatrick’s to pick up the biography I ordered. It’s one more excuse to stall before going home to help the Clifftons prepare for tonight’s party.
Mr. Fitzpatrick rings me up and nods toward the display case. “Don’t you want a paper?”
I turn, and my own face confronts me from above the fold. The headline screams NEW RESIDENT AILA QUINN SETS SIGHTS ON STARS.
I’m hurling one of my Stars directly at a picture of Eliza brandishing her epee, as if we’re getting ready to do battle.
