Then he zipped up his sweatshirt and walked out.
Francisco: So Hamlet considered suicide.
Ophelia: I don’t know.
Barnardo: You were his girlfriend. How can you not know?
Francisco: Ophelia? He asked a question. (pause) He never spoke about it?
Ophelia: Well… yeah, he talked about it, but not in a real way.
Barnardo: Not in a real way? What does that mean?
Ophelia: Hamlet talked about a lot of things. He said he was going to climb Mount Everest one day. Maybe you should haul in some Sherpas and find out if they knew about that plan.
Francisco: Don’t be smart.
Barnardo: No risk of that with her.
11
“So if Hamlet wasn’t crazy, was it an act?”
Ophelia purses her lips. “No one is that good an actor.”
Zara raises her eyebrows. “Are you admitting to all of us that he was crazy?”
Ophelia looks up at the stage lights and sighs. “I don’t know what to tell you. Truly. He was troubled.”
Zara leans forward and touches Ophelia’s knee. “Both your personal life and school life were unraveling because of the attention you paid to Hamlet. Was it worth the sacrifice?”
Ophelia pulls at her sweater. “I did what I thought was right at the time.”
The next week, Horatio came home for Christmas. He canceled his trip to meet Kim’s parents, saying that I sounded tired, and after the weird messages he was getting from Hamlet, he thought he ought to return. Horatio and Hamlet spent most of their time together and, though I never told either of them, it was a relief to be alone. Knowing Horatio was taking care of Hamlet, I let go a little and was able to sleep and paint, and painting helped me to stop thinking. I didn’t check e-mail or call anyone. I ignored my texts. I painted until my hands were as colorful as a garden and I’d filled paper after paper with images that had nothing to do with Hamlet or the king or the castle.
Finally I showered and changed, and when I went into the sitting room, I found a message from my dad that the boys wanted to go out for a movie and it was fine with him if I went. I headed up to Hamlet’s room, where I found him completely engrossed in something he was reading on the Internet and Horatio looking annoyed.
We waited for over an hour for Hamlet to log off, and I knew if we didn’t leave the castle soon, we would never make the movie. Of course we could have mentioned any film to the social secretary and it would have been played for us in-house, but there was something so much better about being in an actual theater with regular people, especially for a comedy. As long as the guards were in plainclothes and Hamlet kept his sunglasses on or his hood up and his head down, no one bothered us, at least most of the time. We got the occasional tween girls screaming or hugging him without permission, but more often than not he went undetected, or people just whispered as he passed. It made their months that they could go around telling everyone they’d been in the same place as the prince, and it made us feel better for having done something together that was normal. And if Hamlet couldn’t stop fixating on his computer, we were going to lose out on our last chance for normal that night, and we all needed a laugh.
Horatio and I had been trying to entertain ourselves as best we could, but Horatio was getting impatient and my worries were starting to creep back. He signaled to me that it was my turn to try, so I walked up behind Hamlet, put my arms around him, and kissed him on the head. He didn’t look up, just patted my hands. I started massaging his shoulders and said, “You shouldn’t be reading those message boards. They’ll drive you nuts.”
Horatio jumped in with, “Some of the things people say are so ignorant.”
“You don’t believe this junk?” I asked, hoping that leaning in front of the screen might work.
Hamlet just leaned the other way and kept reading.
I continued, “Conspiracy theorists, crackpots. Come on, Hamlet, let’s just go.”
Ignoring us, he frowned and read. “Listen to this: Someone claiming to be a servant here says he saw Claudius putting poison in my father’s ear.”
“His ear?” Horatio laughed. “How the hell would Claudius get poison in an ear?”
“My dad was probably asleep. He loved to nap in the conservatory. Said the flowers