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1.
When she first wakes up, it’s too bright to tell where she is.
She knows where she’s supposed to be—poisoned, comatose, in the dark, dark vault. Far too bright for that.
Dead, then. Heaven, maybe.
Juliet? a voice asks. Are you there? Can you hear me? Why hasn’t she woken yet? Then—Shush! / Peace! / I’ll call the doctor. She pieces it together. Juliet, check. Awake, check. Hospital, half-conscious, alive. Not where she’s supposed to be.
There’s the Prince and the nurse who don’t ask so many questions, and her father and mother who ask none at all, just sit there tight-lipped mourning their empire.
Then Friar Laurence, who asks her so many questions she forgets her answers as she’s saying them. Some of them she won’t answer, can’t answer. She doesn’t remember much. Taking the potion, then… waking up in the hospital. It all happened so fast. The Friar taps his shoe against her bed in a way that makes her head buzz, but she can’t find time between his questions to ask him to stop.
A nurse comes in and looks at her like she’s just an everyday patient instead of a Capulet. “What do you remember?”
She struggles in silence. “I died. Then I woke up here.” It’s the truth. That’s all she knows.
“Before that?”
She shakes her head numbly and looks to Friar Laurence for help.
“Romeo was exiled,” he starts. “He was your husband, but it wasn’t known. You were engaged to Count Paris, and you came to me for help. I gave you a potion—it was supposed to simulate death for forty-two hours, but instead it lasted much longer—we still don’t know what went wrong. Romeo found you in the vault, and—”
“It’s alright,” the nurse cuts off sharply. Then she looks at her. “Your memories will come back in a few weeks, but until then your mind will be completely scrambled. Be prepared for that.”
“How?”
The nurse shrugs. “Doctor didn’t say.”
She blinks. So. Romeo. Whom she loved. Romeo is dead, and somehow that means something devastating to her, even though she can’t remember him at all. She tries to make sense of the last week. Bites her lip—nothing. Friar Laurence looks at her sadly and then suddenly:
The party surrounds her like a tornado, or maybe a hurricane. Everybody, dancing, twirling, round and round and round. Trumpets and glitter and a woman singing: love, love in the stars, love everywhere. It has a distinct smell, too—gunpowder and alcohol and fireworks and the sea, a haze blanketing the night and fogging up her mind. When it clears, there’s only a fish tank and a blue eye. He’s beautiful.
Then: Pool lights. A hand wrapping around her neck, around her waist, against her palm, on her back. He’s a Montague and it feels like everything wrong and everything good. A choir.
Then: Tybalt, who is dead, who was killed by Romeo. A gun in her hand.
Then:
She closes her eyes, swallowing.
She dreams about waking in the vault and watching him drink the potion. Everything is softly blue and vaguely golden. She can’t move. She can’t feel anything. She can’t speak, and that’s what scares her the most. She fears ghosts even though she doesn’t remember why. Thus with a kiss I die, he whispers, his eyes frantic against his otherwise frozen face. She lies paralyzed on the sheets.
I love you, she tries to say, never says. His eyelashes quiver. She wakes up with her hair sticking to her cheeks and clinging to her lips. Romeo is still there lying next to her on the bed, translucent and ghostly.
This, she thinks, must’ve been what happened—
(But it was only a dream, because Friar Laurence was never good at making potions, and forty-two hours turned to forty-three to fifty, and no one ever saw what happened in the vault, anyway.)
Romeo turns to her. She sees him fully realized now, the same way she saw Tybalt, true and absolute as a person can be: eyes crazy in their sockets, trying to look at all of her all at once. He brushes the hair from her face, fingers graceful. She slipped those fingers a necklace once. The summer night is humid and unbearably sticky. Droplets drip from the ceiling fan onto her shoulder and slide down her collarbone. His touch is cold.
I have to go, he says, serious.
I love you, she doesn’t say.
She wants to touch his face, make it real. She wants something tangible and beyond doubt: she wants to see if ghosts can blush the same pink with the same red blood as everyone else. But she can’t move.
(His lips are slick with poison.)
Romeo is dead, she thinks. And besides, this is not a ghost story. This never was a ghost story.
She shuts her eyes. In her head, there is no story. In her head, they ignore their parents, run away together to Mantua the day they get married. Tybalt never kills Mercutio; Romeo never kills Tybalt. Verona never cries. There is a beginning and a car and no ending. In her head they do everything right.
By the time she opens her eyes, Romeo is gone.
She understands now. I went to sleep on the worst day of my life and woke up on the second worst day of my life. A nurse brushes back her hair and dries her face silently.
Romeo’s friend comes the next morning. His name is Benvolio, and he dresses properly—without Hawaiian shirts—which is a nice disguise. The nurses let him through without fuss and he sneaks in candy and soda and Romeo's gun.
“Thought you might want to have it,” he says, holding it out expectantly like she really might want to have it.
She runs her fingers over the cool chrome, feels the carefully bevelled engravings. “Pretty, huh? Expensive, too,” he adds as an afterthought.
Juliet looks at him. There’s a thick air in the hospital she doesn’t know how to talk through. “Are you allowed to give me this?”
“I don’t believe that you’ll do it,” he says, and hands her the gun.
She says, “Tuesday feels like a long time ago.”
“Dying will do that to you.” He's halfway between smug and cheerful. She doesn't know why—nothing he said could be interpreted as any of those tones. Maybe he can't help it. Maybe everything he does just comes off as asshole, whether or not he wants it to.
“The thing about suicide,” she says, “is that you think you’re doing the right thing. I didn’t think: I’m going to do something really stupid today. It was the only thing I could do.”
“I couldn’t have done that,” he goes on, ignoring her. (Asshole.)
“So what should I have done instead?”
He shrugs. “Ignored your parents. Run away to Mantua.” (Helpful asshole.)
“And the wedding?”
“Who cares? You could’ve left, that’s all I’m saying.”
She sits up. “I don’t understand,” she says, not like she doesn’t understand, but like she doesn’t want to. She gets it, fine. They messed up. She doesn’t need to hear all the ways that Romeo would've lived if he had been with Benvolio instead.
“You could still do it,” he says, suddenly, like he just remembered something. “You could still leave everything and run.”
“For what? What’s the point?”
“Romeo was my friend too, that’s the point! Before it was Romeo-and-Juliet it was Romeo-and-Benvolio. And now everyone’s dead,” he says, and he’s right, and she hates him for it. “I think about it all the time—getting a car and running away to somewhere else. But I’m the Montague heir now, and you can do whatever you want.”
“I don’t want somewhere else. You’re the one who wants somewhere else,” she says.
“Romeo would want you to live,” he says, and he’s right again, and she still hates him.
“I know. People tell me that.”
And that’s when she realizes that she really is dead, in spite of her rosy cheeks and steady pulse. Because of it, in fact. For people are the sum of their senses—what can be seen and heard and felt, and only that.
She really is dead—she died in the tombs when Romeo did, before Friar Laurence came to retrieve her. Without Romeo, there is no one to see her face, no one to hear her heartbeat through the sheets, and then who’s to say that she exists?
In that way, Romeo is more alive than she is, because she sees him every night. She sees him turning the key in the ignition and driving past Verona and past Mantua and past rolling slopes of sand and out into the wide, wide world, where Capulet and Montague and Romeo and Juliet are just words, and she sees him foot on the gas pedal looking out the open window speedometer going fifty sixty a hundred, and she watches the car spin out on the hot asphalt tires screeching Romeo not releasing the gas for his damn life Romeo says Thus with a kiss I die—sits completely paralyzed trying to respond but can’t quite manage it head smashed under the glass—
And she begs the nurses for sedation after that, but it never works, because she always dreams the same thing every night, even if she forgets it in the morning.
2.
She lives, although she doesn’t mean to. It just sort of happens, while she’s reading magazines on the bed (they’ve contained the scandal quite well) and answering Friar Laurence’s questions (no, she still can’t remember anything) and sitting silently while the doctor takes notes (perfectly fine? Suicidal? Schizophrenic?). A week, and nothing happens. She’s in the same place as she was before, always was. Then, somehow, she’s being led out the hospital doors, feeling like a ghost. She’s disorientated and confused and wearing the dress she was in when she died.
It’s Benvolio she sees first. Before her parents or anything. She smiles in a sort of confused way. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere else.”
“I thought you said you were the Montague heir.”
“Changed my mind. C’mon, let’s go.” Benvolio stares, she stares back blankly.
“This your ride?” the nurse asks. She’s looking at her watch and tapping her heel very deliberately. Juliet continues to stare.
It takes her a while to realize that it’s an invitation. With Benvolio, everything seems like a funny coincidence, and a mean one at that—like he was going someplace on his own and just happened to stop by the hospital.
“What are you waiting for?” he says, and the uneasiness snaps in relief.
“Yes, I’m going with him,” she says, a smile riding up her lips. After that, it’s easy to get in the car. Not even a choice. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go. He only has one suitcase, and she only has a purse with the gun and some cash. They’re out of Verona by noon.
It would make for a good story: a fish tank and a blue eye. It’s what she’d say if anyone ever asked, “So how did you meet?”, in some other life.
He’s standing there, on the other side, and she doesn’t know his name or his age or anything at all, and it’s the woman singing in the background, maybe—she’ll say it was the piano, or the coral, or the two inches of glass and five inches of water separating them—but really, the truth is that the idea of it so romantic she falls in love with him on principle. He bumps his nose against the wall, and it smushes just the slightest bit—and then something happens, someone pulls her away—she’s dancing with a man she doesn’t know and she’s smiling but it’s not because of the man she doesn’t know: it’s because of the boy she knows even less but understands infinitely more.
See, here’s the thing: Romeo talks to her about the gentle sin and he’s definitely crazy, yeah, he’s the craziest guy she’s ever met. But she keeps it going, talks some more about holy palmers, and Romeo gives her a look that says, You wanna find out?
So she finds out, alright, when she pulls him into the elevator and kisses the boy she doesn’t know anything about at all, and when he kisses back, she’s thinking that she’s finally found it—she’s found a way out of everything, she’s found her true love, she’s found where she’s supposed to be—then the nurse points at him and hisses that he’s a Montague, and suddenly she’s got nowhere to go at all. And she’s thinking: What? What am I supposed to do, now? What the hell am I supposed to do?
So she finds out, alright, in the end.
Benvolio pauses only once for gas before they stop at a hotel. He doesn’t use his real name, and he pays in cash. This she understands. She’s good at running and even better at hiding.
She’s not on the run; not really. She knows that she’s useless now, and it’s a relief. Romeo is dead and she can never marry anyone else, it’s Benvolio they’re looking for. She could go back to her old life and never worry about a thing.
Still, she’d like to get away from Verona. Just for a little while.
Mantua looks different in real life. (She supposes she’s never really been out of Verona.) There are no sand dunes, only packed dirt stretching hours. Outside, it’s even stranger. It’s hard to imagine a world where the words “Montague” and “Capulet” aren’t plastered on giant buildings everywhere. By Cremona, Benvolio thinks it’s safe to stop using aliases, and nobody bats an eye when she says that her name is Juliet Capulet. Then they stop by Milan for a few days, the longest they’ve ever stayed in one place.
Juliet mostly sits in the hotel room while Benvolio is out doing whatever Benvolio needs to do. She knows on some level that it must be something illegal, but she can’t bring herself to call him out on it when she’s living on his money and his car. She doesn’t question the stacks of cash beneath his bed, and he doesn’t question her about Romeo. She looks at her ring and he looks at the purse with the gun. They don’t talk about it. He gets her new clothes, which she’s grateful for. (His wardrobe is mostly Hawaiian shirts, she finds. She wonders if he picked that up from Romeo, or if it’s something all the Montague boys do. She can’t seem to ever recall Tybalt dressed in flowers.) It is, all things considered, a non-interactive relationship.
She doesn’t mind being alone, sitting on the bed with nothing but her thoughts. She has all her memories of Romeo she needs to rearrange and carefully sort in order. In the elevator. By the pool. In her room. Three days, she reminds herself. You knew him for three days. So why does it feel longer? She laughs. He’s subtly weaved his way into all of her memories, from the day of her birth to right now. She can see herself wandering in the Capulet garden and reading in her room and braiding her hair in front of the mirror, and somehow he’s there with her. Always had been.
She would’ve almost preferred that Benvolio didn’t give her the gun. It feels like faith. It feels like trust that she won’t blow her brains out on the bed and leave the bloody membranes for the maids to clean up. How presumptuous of him. How fucking presumptuous, to assume that the words Romeo would want you to live keep her from pulling the trigger. But he’s right, and as long as she has the gun she feels a moral obligation to not kill herself. Then it would be Benvolio’s fault, and she doesn’t want that. Benvolio is asking, How can you love him when you don’t even remember him?
She doesn’t know. She never has. She doesn’t know how she loved him long before he had a face and a name and a voice. She doesn’t know why Benvolio can’t see his ghost like she can. The only thing she knows is that marriage is holy and Capulet is ancient, but Romeo is Romeo and he is older and more timeless than any of those things. The only answer she has is that people are the sum of their senses, and Romeo was the only person who ever saw and heard and felt her, and Romeo was the only thing that was ever right.
Her father is angry again. He’s always angry, but today especially—a business deal gone wrong or another lawsuit, she doesn’t know. Funny that she’s thinking about something so dark when the sunlight is streaming through the window so brightly. Cheer up, it says. Buttercup. Outside, roses in the garden. A hummingbird feeder that no one’s ever filled. She’s good at running and even better at hiding, but morning is never the right time to be in the Capulet house, because everything is too clear and quiet. The sunlight shines brightly on every surface and there are no shadows to slip into, so she can only sit by the window and wait for it to be noon and wait for it to get loud and wait for the door to open, and when it does open her father opens it softly, but she can tell that he’s angry because he closes it again, and he says: don’t you dare
“Juliet.”
It’s Romeo. He’s looking at her like he recognizes her, even though he’s never seen her before, won’t meet her for another year. And she can’t quite recognize him either, but she knows who he is, because there’s nobody else he could be.
“You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“I know. This isn’t how it usually goes, is it?”
“No.”
He’s sitting so still. All she wants to do is touch his face and kiss his hair, but everything that happens in her memories has already been predetermined. The only thing she can do is squeeze a little closer, a little tighter, and breathe a little deeper. Take it all in before it’s gone.
The sun hums discordantly, as if it knows. The leaves have stopped rustling in the wind. Everything is absolutely, heart-stoppingly still. Romeo touches her hand. She looks back at him.
The light, hungry, drowning his face.
“You know, I don’t think this is a memory.”
(It’s odd, she’s thinking. Romeo would never dare to visit her in broad daylight. She doesn’t have roses in her garden. And her father is gone, and the door is locked again.)
“I think it’s a dream.”
He leans his head back against the window. She can really feel the warmth now, and her skin is flush all over. I want this to be real. I want to love you. I want to be with you. She gets the feeling he understands. He angles his body towards her, as if to say:
You never know until you try.
She lifts her hand, trembling.
3.
On their last night in Milan, Benvolio comes back late and enters the room carrying a box wrapped with a pink ribbon. Really. He sets in on the bedside table and grins and she opens it and—
Oh. She’d almost forgotten.
“Happy birthday, Juliet,” he says. It’s a cake. It’s a fondant cake and she hates fondant, but she smiles for Benvolio’s sake. It’s hard to imagine him doing anything so ordinary, not shooting up gas stations and sneaking into parties hosted by his great enemy Capulet like he has nothing better to do.
He pulls out a lighter from his pocket. She cuts the cake open. Hopeless. Jam and frosting and generally cake-ish ingredients spill out into the box everywhere. Like guts. Gooey, disgusting, waxy cake-guts. “Oh,” he says, at a loss for words. “Oh,” she starts to agree, then gives up. Cake is cake is cake, no matter how many times it’s been thrown around carelessly in a grocery store bag.
“So, I’m—fourteen and a widow, now,” she starts. She picks out a stray piece of candle and throws it in the trash.
“Better than sixteen and dead.”
“I keep forgetting how young he was,” she says, spooning all sorts of jelly into her mouth. She’s wondering if the whole affair would’ve been less tragic if everyone had been adults. Because that’s what it was, really—sad and lovely and tragic. It wouldn’t, she decides: love isn’t something you magically “get” when you turn eighteen. —And they knew what they wanted and they got it. There’s a fine line between catalyst and reactant, between love and obsession, between becoming a nun and jumping off a building; and she’ll never know which side of the line she’s on. She’s not exactly a victim, but she’s not exactly a perpetrator either. She made some stupid decisions because she was caught in the middle of a stupid feud, but it’s all over now, and any deaths she may or may not have caused will forever hang silently between her and Verona like an executed prisoner. She’ll never know if it was her bullet. Considering the state of the rest of the city, she’s done pretty well for herself. She knew what she wanted and she got it.
“I keep forgetting how young you are.” He says it in such a classic asshole way that she almost laughs, but she knows that he’s pitying her. She doesn’t mind. She’d rather have pity than anything else. More fondant and more raspberry jelly.
“You mean that I’m too young to die?”
“If you think Romeo was. Then you are too, yes.”
But it’s different, she wants to say, though she knows that he’s right (he always is). Romeo was sixteen and had his whole life ahead of him. She’s fourteen and already dead.
Benvolio nudges her and she realizes that she’s gone still. “There is love in this world other than the romantic kind,” he says gently, and she thinks how strange it is that she’s never heard him be gentle before. Shootouts and parties. Maybe, once upon another universe, he had been like this all the time. Nice. A peacemaker, even.
“Like what?”
“Friendship.”
She’s really smiling now, shaking her head. “Friendship.”
By the time they’re done, they’ve gone through a whole box of Kleenex. She steps back to survey their work. “Looks like a crime scene,” Benvolio says. She giggles. So many red tissues. She never knew there could be that much jelly in a cake. She never knew there could be that much blood in a person.
“I’ll get some towels from the—”
“No, no. That would make it worse.”
“You’re right. We might as well try washing it with soap and water.”
She sighs. “It’s fine. I can clean that up tomorrow before we leave. It’s late, and I’m tired.”
Benvolio turns out the lights. She starts to crawl into the covers, but his voice stops her. “Hey. Hey, Juliet.”
She looks over. Total darkness.
“Fourteen and you’ve still got your whole life ahead of you, yeah?”
As if. Her life is over.
A tap on the shoulder. It’s Romeo, standing waist-deep in the water. “I’m sorry,” he says, but she knows he really isn’t. “I’m sorry. But I had to ask for one last thing.”
She looks back. “Really? And what’s that?”
He shakes the water from his hair slightly, light bouncing off like sparks. “The exchange of your love’s faithful vow for mine.” And she thinks: there he is again, Romeo, that crazy boy, going on and on about vows and kisses and pilgrims.
“Oh,” she laughs in realization. “Oh, I gave mine before you asked for it!”
She sits down and rests her head on his shoulder. Closes her eyes and just sits in silence for a few minutes. Below her fingertips, gritty stone. A ladder. She’s by the pool, and this is only a memory, and she can’t change what she does next any more than she can change what happens. She’s only sitting and waiting for whatever they do after.
She takes his face in her hands and impulsively pushes them both in the water, rougher that she’d wanted to. Romeo gasps—a little, only a sharp intake of breath.
His kisses are softer, a bit more hesitant, but she crashes their bodies together with more force than the water can handle, and he’s looking at her like she’s an angel, and she’s looking at him like he’s the sun and she’s a comet and she can only see him once every eighty years, and even past her line of sight, going by touch alone, she knows that his hand is absentmindedly trailing down her waist, and she wonders how long he’s been doing that for. He kisses her like he’s afraid of pushing her away, and she kisses him like she’s never needed anything else. And she really can’t think of a time when she ever needed anything else. She’s been waiting for this her whole life—before Romeo, before Juliet, before words, back when there was only love and warmth. Suddenly his hand reaches where her hip meets her thigh and they both absolutely stop.
And she’s thinking of how the security guard is still watching everything that’s happening on his monitor. And how the nurse is still waiting for her to come inside. And how the lights are making a hazy ring above his head. And somewhere, waves against the shore, a sunset.
And how humans can only hold their breath for a minute or so at a time.
She doesn’t know how long they stay there, unmoving. She thinks it’s God who gives them a little more oxygen. She’s begging, praying to somebody, anybody: please, please, please give us more time. Please let us stay down here for one more second, just one more second.
She emerges first, and he follows, breaking the surface that’s been smooth for so long. Romeo helps her onto the edge again, she rakes her hair back with her nails, and then the moment is gone. She looks down. He’s still clinging tightly to her dress.
“You have to go,” she says. “If they see you, they’ll kill you.”
He rises and kisses the top of her head. Gently. She inhales deeply, taking in the night air, letting it fill her lungs and sink down forever. Something to remember this night by. He sits down beside her, so close that she can close her eyes and understand everything. His breathing is steady, but his heart beats fast.
“I don’t care about them,” he says, looking up at the stars as if he’s seeing an asteroid and the world is about to end. “Let’s wait for the sunrise.”
“Don’t say it out loud.”
“You know what I’m going to wish for anyway.”
“I’ll try not to.”
She leans over, tucks her hair behind her ears, and blows out the candles.
4.
More driving. Cities and countryside and cities, again. Sometimes they go for hours with only sky and road and grass. She gets bored enough to forget to die. Benvolio’s fairly sure that they’ve shaken off any pursuers by now, and he asks if she’s got any destination in mind.
Somewhere with a beach and a sunset. “Los Angeles,” she says, finally. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”
Benvolio laughs. “No, we’d need a plane. Wouldn’t want to make it easy for them, if they were looking.”
“Paris, then,” she decides on a whim.
It’s 900 kilometers and eight hours from Milan to Paris. On the second, Juliet gets very brave very suddenly. “What did you mean?” she asks. “What you said about romance and friendship.”
He grunts.
“Last night,” she clarifies.
“What do you mean, ‘What did I mean’?”
“I was just wondering. If you ever—” She starts feeling very stupid. “Never mind.”
Third hour. She excitedly stops the car to watch the cows outside. “I’ve never seen one before,” she says. (You’ve never… / What can I say? I’ve never been outside Verona.)
Fourth hour. She no longer stops the car for every single new exotic farm animal she sees. “You get used to miracles,” Benvolio explains.
Fifth hour. They stop for lunch, so it doesn’t really count. She briefly wonders about Benvolio’s metabolism.
Fifth hour, again. He starts singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and gets bored very soon.
Sixth hour. Complete silence.
Juliet cracks on the seventh, unable to ignore the elephant in the room.
“Benvolio.”
“Yeah?”
“Did you and Romeo ever…” She loses her words again suddenly and they won't come out right. "You know."
“Fuck?”
“Yeah. That.”
“Well, I won’t lie to you,” he says. “How much do you want to know?”
“No, it’s alright. But you loved him?”
“I loved him, yes.”
“And—and after?”
“Sometimes,” he says, looking straight at her and not at all at the road, “you can be such good friends with someone that you can date and break up and go right back to being friends.” (There is love in this world other than the romantic kind. / Like what? / Friendship.)
“He wasn’t just pretty,” she says. Last chance, she’s thinking. This is the only time she’ll ever get to talk about Romeo with somebody else. “Romeo was…”
Romeo was crazy. Romeo was nonsense about holy shrines and angels and pilgrims. Romeo got it, really got it. Romeo was the only option in her life that made sense. Romeo was a way out.
“It’s okay, I understand.”
“Romeo was special,” she says, but that doesn’t quite encapsulate it.
“He was the best friend anyone could ever ask for. Now—hush, I’m driving.”
She’s on the roof looking at the sky. If there ever was a night, this is the one. They say that Paris is a man of wax. She hopes not. Men of wax get strange ideas about themselves. Funny. She’s in a mansion with a hundred servants and not one of them has ever looked at her.
“Juliet!” someone screams.
She swings both her legs around. “What, Nurse?”
“What are you doing?”
“Oh,” she shrugs. “Just looking at the fireworks.”
“Come to the balcony with me,” she says. “The fireworks are better from there.”
Paris is the city of love, they say. And maybe she’d childishly harbored the hope that Romeo would be waiting for her here, miraculously, but miracles aren’t real. Neither are birthday wishes.
She’s so tired when they arrive that Romeo appears again. She’s inexplicably dizzy as she lies in the bed on her side, beside him. He’s sitting and he leans over to kiss her neck and trace a pattern down her back, elliptical (the way comets orbit the sun) and swooping between her vertebrae. Her body calms and her mind follows. The air around them is drowsy too; heavy sweetness hitting the back of her throat, intoxicatingly. This is what she imagines alcohol to taste like: scarlet burgundy maroon wine colored sunsets. He covers both her eyes with one hand and presses her lips shut with the other, whispers into her ear something she doesn’t hear, doesn’t need to hear. She lies still, eyes closed and breathless, and lets him steal every one of her senses.
She falls asleep because he does, and wakes when he is gone.
She’s dreaming of sunshine again—
The morning sun is in just the right position in the sky to fill the whole window with light. All the walls, too, are awash with white, almost glowing. Outside, the wind blows stray leaves towards the house. She’s sitting on the window sill, waiting for something she can’t remember.
“Hey.”
He’s there with her and everything is okay for now. Even if it all falls apart later, even if someone sees them from the window, even if her father enters and kills them both. —And yet. Roses in the garden. The door is locked. The footsteps stop. Everything is paused at right before.
“Thank you,” she says.
He follows her gaze to the door. “So what happens next?”
Not this. Nothing about this is real. She doesn't know whether that's a good or a bad thing.
“I hadn’t realized,” she says.
“Realized what?”
“That you’re from the future.”
There’s a moment.
“I haven’t thought about these memories in a while,” she admits.
“No?”
“It’s strange. I know what happens next, but I can’t remember.”
“That’s how dying feels like. I understand everything, even if I don’t remember any of it.”
“Do you regret taking the poison?”
“Yes. Every single day.”
“But what if I really had been dead? Then—would you still—?”
“I would still regret it.”
Another pause.
“So why did you do it?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Everyone keeps saying that you would want me to live,” she says. “But I can’t. I don’t understand. Everybody does it. You did it for me, and I'll do it for you.”
“No, I think this is different.”
“It would fix everything. I was up there with you, it would fix everything. But now I don’t know.” She’s almost crying out of sheer reflex. She knows this room. She knows this door. She knows what happens next. She knows that her father is angry when he closes the door when he enters, and he says, Don’t you dare make a sound, but she’ll scream and cry anyway, and the house is still quiet. She knows that a loud metal clang followed by two sharp thuds is the sound of someone getting slammed against the stairs, and she knows why the servants here have a turnover rate higher than the military. And she knows that when her mother comes into her room at night, she’s not hollow eyed because she’s tired. Because money is power, and Capulet is ancient, and the house always wins.
She hates mornings like nothing else because her bedroom faces the east. And in the morning, when the sun shines in like a giant spotlight, and her door unlocks—
It’s easier to pretend that it isn’t happening when you can’t see it, and so she squeezes her eyes shut.
“Juliet,” he says, and she looks up again. He’s starting to fade away. “I don’t think you’re about to kill yourself because of me. —And I don’t mind, because I’m not worth dying over. Whatever you’re doing this for, I don’t think it’s because of me. Make of that what you will.”
The light is blurry through her tears and now he really starts to glow. “So why am I here?” Her voice splinters. He takes as much of her as he can and holds her in his voice.
“You are an angel,” he says. “I don’t think you realize that, for all your gold and white dresses. I don’t know what you’re going to do in the morning. I don’t know what any of these dreams mean. But I know that when I look at you, I see angel wings, and I see light.”
She closes her eyes because she doesn’t know what to say. As Romeo fades away, the wind starts to blow again and the footsteps resume.
“Wait,” she says.
He stops. Everything stops.
“Will I remember any of this in the morning?”
He smiles and tips his head. “Does it matter?”
Benvolio won’t let her stay in the hotel. “It’s Paris,” he insists. “And you were the one who wanted to come in the first place.”
She relents only for the sycamores outside. Paris wears August well, if slightly carelessly: leaves drift from the sky in large, scooping arcs and land on their waiting shoulders. He makes her a crown out of fallen leaves and tells her that she looks beautiful. And everything is only an afterthought, after that.
(Then: the Seine, and looking down and seeing mawkish pink love boats in the water, and looking up and seeing between her and Romeo, all that sky.
Then: going for ice cream first and lunch after, and drinking her first coffee (“You’ve never had a coffee!?”), and slowing down just enough to let the noon sunshine slip down her neckline and into her dress, and feeling impossibly warm.
Then: the Louvre. The prettiest clouds in the world hanging casually on the walls close enough to touch. Getting lost in the crowd for fifteen minutes to see the Mona Lisa. Victory on the staircase. —And she almost misses it at first, it’s so big. Groups of visitors walk past the statue without a second thought. Juliet steps through the rush of people coming down to get a closer look. Her wings seem almost light from below; she is irreversibly, inevitably broken and beautiful. Somehow, she sees the statue how she imagines Romeo saw her. Just for a second, and then it’s gone. She has no face. She has no body. She is, familiarly, only two divine wings on a marble ledge.
“Benvolio,” she whispers.
“That’s Nike,” he says quietly. “Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
“No,” Juliet says, smiling. “I think she’s an angel.”)
From the Eiffel Tower, Paris looks infinitely blue, golden ribbons stretching on from forever to forever. She knows she could stay here forever and never run out of places to go. Down, fifty stories of plain air between her and the closest building. She leans over the ledge; Benvolio reaches for her hand. She looks up. Feels the wind against her lips. All that sky.
Tomorrow, I’m going to watch the sunrise with someone I love.
Paris—the city of love. The city of death, too, and scarlet burgundy maroon wine and darkness and light. The Eiffel Tower is a conductor of light, and she’s never felt it so much before now. The golden steel stretches into a point in the night sky like a star among the millions of stars (and the millions of comets orbiting them) and below her feet, spreading into a wedding veil lace of gold. Paris is not light in the way that Victory of Samothrace is light. She is light in the way that angels are light. It ripples and flows from the stars to the land. There is so much of it to come.
She dreams the same dream. They drive the same road, same car, same four wheels spinning out beneath. The road is always so, so hot, and Romeo’s touch is always cold. They’re under a wreck of metal and glass, but it’s alright. It’s where she’s supposed to be.
Thus with a kiss I die, he says, serious.
Thus with a kiss I die, he says, smiling.
I love you, she says, too late but finally. I want to be with you.
His lashes lift one last time. Delicately—then nothing.
He is smiling.
5.
She rises before the sun does and makes her way to the roof. She sits on the edge, legs dangling. Twenty stories.
Romeo would understand. Romeo thought she was dead, Romeo killed himself. She is no different.
“Juliet?”
She turns around. Benvolio looks a bit sad, but mostly disappointed, hollow. “You were wrong,” she says. “Romeo wouldn’t want me to live. You were right about many things, but you were wrong about that. But thank you for taking me here. Seriously.”
“You're welcome.” The sadness is already gone, and his voice is only hollow.
She pats the roof next to her. “Sit with me. I won’t jump now, I promise.”
Benvolio walks closer. Carefully, tentatively. Swings one leg over and then the other. When she doesn’t move, he asks, “Is this what taking the poison was like?”
“Yes.”
“Which time is this?”
“I don’t know,” she says, squinting through the darkness. “The third? I don’t remember a lot of my life, honestly.”
“What do you remember?”
She looks down.
“I—I think I’ve been waiting for something, only I’ve forgotten what. Maybe it was this.” She gestures broadly to the scene in front of them. “And I always knew it would end like this, even before Romeo. So it’s not your fault, or his.”
“Sure feels like it.”
“It’s not,” she insists. “Please. You didn’t have anything to do with this.” Nothing that matters anymore had anything to do with this.
“So why—?”
Why this? Why now? Why here?
Why anything? She’s been anticipating something that hasn't happened in weeks for so long and she still can’t let it go.
They sit in silence for a few minutes. He’s holding her hand. She swallows. “I’ve been planning this for a long time. I’ve seen it in dreams, even. I’m always sitting on top of a very tall building, and you’re always next to me. We see the sun. Then I jump. But it feels different this time, somehow. I don’t know why.”
Benvolio startles.
“Because it’s real.”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s not that. I woke up this morning and at first I didn’t even want to do it. It felt like someone was telling me in a dream, something—I couldn’t remember. But I understand now.”
From the horizon, a hint of gold. Benvolio is lit from beneath. “I think you were right about Romeo,” she says. “Thank you again. For saving me.”
“No, I didn’t save you. In the end, you’re the only one who can decide whether you live or die. ”
Benvolio puts his arm around her shoulder. She takes a deep breath. All that sky.
Together, they wait for the sunrise.
“For a long time, I hated the sun and anything bright. I thought that light was the worst thing that God had ever created. I know that doesn’t make sense, and I can’t explain it. When I first met Romeo, I couldn’t understand how I had fallen in love with someone so hopeful, so light. All I could think of was how terrified I was by the morning, and he was the morning personified. Funny, but I’ve just remembered—he showed me the sunrise once, and he waited the whole night with me, and I was sobbing, and he kissed me, and everything turned out fine in the end. It was beautiful.”
Benvolio is looking at her. His face is bathed in sunshine. The light gravitates towards him so easily—the whole world does. It’s getting brighter now, and harder to make out his features. He’s still looking at her. She doesn’t know how she knows this without being able to see him. She wants to believe that maybe—just maybe—it’s Romeo telling her.
The only indication of any time passing is the sun rising. Light glistens off of rooftops and illuminates a long glowing line reaching from east to west. The world is strangely quiet, like it's waiting for her. Until she's ready to leave. Until she learns that mornings mean that was then and this is now. Until the day she learns to let go of everything. It might be another hour, it might be fifty years. She knows that Benvolio will wait for her forever if he has to. And when that day comes, she’ll finally stop trying to remember and just let herself understand.
Coda:
As soon as she gets off the plane, she’s hit by a hot blast of air. Los Angeles. Then she’s walking through the airport hallways, air conditioned and comfortable again.
Here’s the thing: she wants to be hopeful. She wants to watch sunsets without thinking about hurricanes and listen to waves crashing into the shore without hearing gunshots and walk onto balconies without looking below for someone she loves. And maybe, someday, a million years from now, they’ll return to Verona and visit all the old places and laugh at how stupid they were.
But for today, Benvolio is leading her through the gates and through the shops and sure, Paris is the city of love, but Los Angeles is the city of angels, and—
“Wait! Hold on!”
“What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s alright. Go get a car. I’ll find you later.”
And then she’s rushing outside, holding her dress up like she’s running through Verona Beach instead of the airport, and Benvolio is waiting in his car—he always is, he always is—and she opens the door and gets in and he raises his eyebrows and says—
“Angel wings? Really?”
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Scheherazade, Richard Siken