briefly, near dawn. Theo was dressing in the dark.
“Theo?”
“I’ll be back in half an hour. I just need to take care of one thing.” He straightened; Auggie could feel the weight of his gaze through the shadows. “Will you be ok?”
“Yeah.”
“Half an hour.”
When Auggie woke again, Theo was next to him in bed. Sun came in through the windows. On top of the quilt, Theo’s hands were visible, his knuckles freshly split and scabbing in the morning light. He ran his hand down Theo’s arm and laced their fingers together.
22
Theo was sitting on the couch, papers spread around him, when Auggie came downstairs. He was wrapped in the sheet. Late morning sun climbed the far wall. Through the cracked windows came the smell of dew-soaked earth and grass.
“Morning,” Theo said. He was aware again of his hands aching pleasantly; on one split knuckle, he’d resorted to a butterfly bandage, which was already coming loose.
Auggie groaned.
“I put a new toothbrush on the kitchen table.”
Another groan, this one with an underlying note of gratitude, as Auggie staggered toward the bathroom. The sound of running water came, and Auggie spat several times. Then the shower came on. Theo flipped pages and continued to work. Eventually the shower turned off. Clothing rustled. The sound of bare footsteps moved over the floorboards.
Auggie dropped onto the couch face first, knocking over one of the piles of papers. He was wearing the Van Halen t-shirt and mesh shorts that Theo had left in the bathroom for him. He smelled like soap.
“How’s your stomach? I think you need to eat, but I don’t want to make you feel worse.”
The cushion muffled Auggie’s groan but didn’t hide it completely.
“Ok. We’ll wait a while.”
For the next twenty minutes or so, Theo actually managed to get some words on the page—a feat that had become less and less common during this school year. This chapter of his thesis was about Romeo and Juliet. It should have been easy. He’d had plenty of time in Wagner’s class to think about the text, to re-read the criticism, to assemble his own argument and contextualize it. Theo even had necessity on his side: if he wanted to finish the PhD in a reasonable timeframe, he needed to submit his thesis over the summer and transition to working on his PhD-level coursework and his dissertation. But he came home to an empty house. Or he came home to Cart. And either way, whatever he typed was shit. He took advantage of this rare burst of clarity and typed like mad.
In those twenty minutes, he got more done than he had in the last three months. He checked his notes, made sure he’d included the references he wanted, and added the header for the next section.
“You type very aggressively,” Auggie croaked.
“I’m excited. I’m finally making some progress.”
“That’s great.”
“How are you feeling?”
“I’ve got the perfect description. And I was going to share it with you. But lying here, I’ve realized the only good option left for me is to sneak out the back door and run away and join a circus traveling through South America. So I think I’m going to do that. ’K, bye.”
Theo caught his leg as Auggie tried to worm his way off the couch.
“What do you think about this part?” Theo asked. “When Capulet tells Paris, ‘My child is yet a stranger in the world,’ his point to Paris seems simple: Juliet is too young to decide about marriage, and so Paris must wait two years before she can consider his offer. But estrangement is at the heart of the play, along with the misunderstandings that accompany it. So many deaths in the play result from misunderstanding—or an incomplete understanding. Tybalt and Mercutio, Romeo and Tybalt, Romeo and Paris, and Romeo’s suicide. Perhaps the only character to see clearly is, ironically, Juliet, who wakes and immediately and correctly understands the sequence of events that have preceded her death. While an argument may be made for dramatic exigency, it is nevertheless significant that Juliet, the character marked most clearly as a child-stranger, is the one who sees and understands. Such an accounting of Juliet opens up larger questions about the play’s thematic interest in estrangement. To what extent, the play demands, are we all strangers to the world? To each other? Perhaps, even to ourselves? Friar John’s missed message provides an opportunity to examine the praxis of estrangement within the world of the play, as I shall show in the next section.”
Auggie flopped onto