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“Yeah, but there’s still poison,” Jesse’s tone turned slightly impatient. He bounced up and down a little. “I like poisons. I want to do them.”
“It’s fine with me. I don’t care what we do.”
“Okay.” Jesse grinned at her for the first time in weeks.
Raina smiled back tentatively. She wasn’t sure why Jesse was acting nice, considering his less-than-enthusiastic response to discovering they would be partners. Maybe he’d decided to be civil for the sake of the project? Either way, Raina wasn’t complaining. She’d take civil Jesse over ignoring-her Jesse any day.
“How do you want to do this?” she asked.
“Well, there are a number of different options. Shakespeare never explicitly names the poison Romeo and Juliet drink, so we can look up the commonly used poisons from their time. It also might be cool to make our own potion or something.”
“I have absolutely no desire to be put into a coma.”
“No, no.” Jesse shook his head. “But you know how we have to have an interactive component? What if we made an actual potion?”
“That could work. Where would we find a recipe?”
“I’m sure we can find one with Google.”
Her eyes lit up. “We can also research the use of potions throughout history! And of course the symbolization of poison inRomeo and Juliet; we’ll have to connect it back to the play somehow.”
Raina’s mind flew through the possibilities. She had gone through a phase in freshman year when she had binge-watched nearly every magical show on Netflix, many of which had tons of potions in them. She glanced over at the nearby bookshelves, wondering where she could find ones about witchcraft.
Jesse stood, glancing at his watch. “It’s late, and the library’s going to close in a half hour, so there’s no point in starting to research now. We can come back tomorrow or another time to find the books we need.”
“Tomorrow’s fine,” Raina said, a little bit too quickly. So maybe she was a little bit eager to hang out with Jesse, but in her defense, she’d liked him. And after ignoring her for weeks, he was finally talking to her again, even if it was only about a school project. “But, um, why can’t we just look stuff up online?”
“She said we need two paper sources.”
Raina shrugged. She hadn't been listening when Mrs. Dixon was talking about the project. “Okay, works for me.”
“Tomorrow after dinner then?” Jesse pulled out his phone, tapping it against his thigh.
“I can do that.”
“Great, see you then.”
“See you then,” Raina echoed as Jesse got up, leaving her and the library behind.
It was a strange feeling to watch him go, knowing that, not for the first time, he was walking away from her. Maybe this project would be the catalyst for fixing their friendship. Raina figured only time would tell, but if she only had one chance to regain her friendship with Jesse, she would seize it with both hands.
ChapterFour
“Atropa belladonna.”
The thud of a book landing on the table had Jesse looking up from the page he was poring over. Raina looked exhausted as she sunk into the seat across from him, but if Jesse knew anything from having Zara for a cousin, it was not to point out how tired a woman looked. And either way, Raina’s sleeping habits were none of his business. They weren’t friends anymore.
“I’m sorry?”
“Atropa belladonna,” Raina repeated. “That’s most likely the poison Juliet took.”
“That’s a deadly one. A berry could kill a child.”
“She’d have to have taken averysmall dose. There would also be a number of other factors, like how she took it, her age, size, etcetera.”
Jesse reached for his phone, searching Google for more information about the poison. He’d read about it before but couldn’t remember any details.
“It says here that people would use it for cosmetics.” He read the words over three times before they made sense, even with the extra-large font size he had on his phone. “They would make an extract from the berries and use it to dilate their eyes.”
