My Life After Now - By Jessica Verdi Page 0,3

my locker to find it covered in pictures. Printouts from the Internet of random actors: Laurence Olivier, Keanu Reeves, Ben Affleck, John Barrymore, the guy who played Michael on Lost. All artfully arranged so that not an inch of the slate gray locker surface showed.

I stared at the collage, dumbfounded. Who put it there? What did it mean?

“What do you think?” Ty’s voice said, close to my ear.

I whirled around. “Did you do this?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned back on his heels, a proud look on his face. “Yup. Got here early and everything.”

“But…why?” It didn’t come out right. I meant it as a genuine question—I was totally confused—but it sounded like I was accusing him of something.

Ty’s grin melted. “You hate it. I knew it was a stupid idea.” He moved to tear the pictures down, but I blocked his path.

“I don’t hate it. I just don’t understand it.”

“They’re all pictures of famous people who have played Mercutio,” he explained. “Max seemed to think you were pretty upset about not getting Juliet. I told him you seemed fine to me, but he insisted. So I thought it might make you feel better to see that you’re in good company.”

I turned back to the locker and looked at it again. Of course. John Barrymore played Mercutio in the 1930s movie version of Romeo and Juliet. The guy from Lost was in the Claire and Leo movie. Laurence Olivier probably played the role on stage—he was in pretty much every Shakespeare play at some time or another.

I reached for Ty’s hand and squeezed it tightly. “Thank you,” I whispered.

• • •

Two weeks went by. And slowly, I actually started to enjoy playing Mercutio. The role was pretty awesome—in the span of only four scenes, I was going to get to be funny, sexy, crude, and violent. And I was going to be killed in a swordfight.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. My dads actually may have unwittingly been onto something with that line, and I kept going back to it in my thoughts. It doesn’t matter what something is called, I reminded myself, it matters what something is. I might not be Juliet, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still be great.

Another unexpected upshot of my being cast as Mercutio was that I became friendly with the new guy Evan, who was playing Tybalt. Just by looking at him, you would never guess that he was interested in theater. He wore a baseball cap over his shaggy product-free hair, sported the same faded jeans almost every day, and played video games on his PSP during breaks. But he’d apparently been some sort of stage combat guru at his old drama club, so I guess I lucked out that he was the one who’d be killing me.

Together, we ventured to the massive basement prop room in search of swords. It took a while—we had to squeeze past large backdrops that seemed to have just been thrown into the first available spaces their set-strikers had found and toss aside sheets that were draped over the larger furniture pieces. But when we finally found the swords, we both went motionless, astounded by the sight before us.

“We’ve hit the mother lode,” Evan whispered.

Andre had warned us that there was a ton of swords down here because of a considerable prop donation after the local Renaissance Faire had gone belly-up a couple of years ago, but nothing could have prepared us for this. The prop room was stockpiled with swords in every size and variety imaginable, and they were everywhere. Propped up in rows five layers deep against the walls, sticking up out of large, cylindrical bins, even dangling from racks attached to the ceiling like silver chandeliers.

“Where do we even start?” I marveled.

A slow smile spread across Evan’s face. “Anywhere.”

I seized a sword at random from the nearest bin and stabbed the air. It felt too light, flimsy. I tried another. This one was painted black and didn’t catch the light the way I wanted. I kept choosing swords and they kept letting me down. “How will I even know when I find the right one?” I mumbled.

Evan looked at me in total seriousness. “The right one will find you,” he said.

“What is this, Ollivander’s Wand Shop?”

Evan stared at me, an unreadable expression on his face.

“What, you’ve never read Harry Potter?” I said.

He laughed. “Of course I have.”

“So what’s