Work Text:
The first time Gillian Anderson meets David Duchovny is at the auditions for the spring play, Romeo and Juliet. She’s fifteen years old, has just gotten her braces off and her hair is four different colors.
*
She knows of him, of course. He’s difficult not to notice, even in a high school as large as theirs is. He’s a junior to her freshman. David’s tall and broad-shouldered, with a shock of brown hair always falling in his eyes. Some days he walks down the hallways wearing his red and black letter jacket like the jock he is, surrounded by a small crowd of other jock boys who seem to delight in shoving him and calling him “Dukes.” Other days, he slouches in a black leather jacket, carrying around a well-worn copy of Waiting for Godot, like the disaffected intellectual he seems to want to be. Her friend Angie, a year older and light years cooler, tells her that David runs cross-country and plays tennis but he’s also a really good actor and is the lead in most of the plays, so it all makes sense.
David is in her French class but sits at the opposite side of the classroom. Sometimes when Madame Weinstein is yammering on about the conjunctive, Gillian slides her eyes across the room to him, watching him moodily chew on a pencil. His French is quite good but his accent is terrible. He’ll need to work on that if he’s serious about being an actor, she thinks.
*
The day of the audition, Gillian blasts the new Siouxsie and the Banshees record on her stereo and dresses carefully in her best vintage psychedelic print shift dress, fishnet stockings and her black Doc Martens. She somehow gets a brush through her tangled hair and pins it up in something resembling a French twist. She gives herself cat eyes with black liquid eyeliner and smears on dark red lipstick. She fiddles with the ring in her nose, which Angie pierced three weeks ago using an ice cube and a sewing needle, and wonders if she should take it out. Fuck it, she thinks. If Mr. Carter doesn’t like her the way she is, he can just go to hell.
After school is over, she finds the corridor outside Mr. Carter’s office reeking of Aqua Net and Giorgio perfume, full of girls, preening and applying baby-pink lipgloss, dressed in the latest from Esprit, their hair in full poof. Real girls, pretty girls, the kind she can never talk to because they know the secret to being a proper girl and she doesn’t. Her heart sinks.
And then she spots him, loping down the hall, this time clutching The Collected Works of William Shakespeare.
Several of the girls smile and toss their hair in his direction. “Hi David,” one coos. “Are you going to be my Romeo?” He waves them off like he’s Charlie Sheen or something and they’re merely groupies.
Gillian looks down at her copy of the play, suddenly afraid she’ll forget her monologue. “My husband lives, that Tybalt would have slain; And Tybalt’s dead, that would have slain my husband,” she mutters softly to herself.
“Hey, your name’s Gillian, right?” she hears a voice say and looks up from her perch on the floor. It’s him, David, and he’s smiling at her. At her.
She nods. Why is he talking to her, a lowly freshman girl without a Benneton sweater or boobs?
“Want to run some lines?”
“Uh no thanks, but, like, I need a moment to myself,” she says and immediately regrets it. What’s wrong with her?
“Cool,” he says, shrugging.
She wants to open the locker behind her, curl up inside and maybe die.
Soon enough, she’s called in to read for Mr. Carter, a youngish guy with an accent that’s almost a parody of a California surfer dude. He’s an English teacher and directs all the school plays.
Her Juliet monologue comes out probably too fast, but she gives it her all.
Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?
Ah, poor my lord, what tongue shall smooth thy name
When I, thy three-hours wife, have mangled it?
But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin?
That villain cousin would have killed my husband.
Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring!
Your tributary drops belong to woe,
Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.
“Mmm, yeah, that’s awesome,” Mr. Carter says afterwards. “I see that you’re just a freshman. Did you study Romeo and Juliet in middle school or something?”
“Something like that,” she says, not wanting to go into the whole rigmarole about how her mother loves Shakespeare and always read it to her and her brother before bed. Or that when they lived in London they went to see a Shakespeare play at the Globe at least once a year. It’s too complicated and she’d prefer to be thought of as a woman of mystery anyhow.
“Stick around. I’m going to have to read with one of the guys, okay?”
She nods, feeling a thrill go through her. She’s good at this, she realizes. Really good.
*
An hour later, she and David are the only ones left waiting. He’s clearly the one that she’s going to read with.
“You probably should’ve run lines with me,” he says with a smirk.
He has the prettiest eyes, she thinks. She can’t decide if they’re green or if they’re gray.
Mr. Carter calls them in and hands them mimeographed sheets of paper. “I want you two to do this scene for me.”
“But we haven’t practiced it,” David complains.
“That’s exactly what I’m looking for, Mr. Duchovny.”
Gillian fights the urge to laugh. Then again, she knows this scene better than her multiplication tables.
David says, “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun!”
She’s stunned. He’s good. David has a nice sense of the cadence of Shakespeare. True, he could stand to use a more refined accent, but he puts just the right amount of emotion into it.
She can feel the dialogue flowing between them like a rushing river. They seem instinctively to understand each other’s rhythms.
Romeo:
I take thee at thy word.
Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptis’d;
Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
Juliet:
What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,
So stumblest on my counsel?
Romeo:
By a name
I know not how to tell thee who I am:
My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself,
Because it is an enemy to thee.
Had I it written, I would tear the word.
Juliet:
My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words
Of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound.
Art thou not Romeo, and a Montague?
Montague is just barely out of her mouth when Mr. Carter yells, “Cut!”
“Did I do something wrong?” she asks, her heart thumping.
“It’s both of you,” Mr. Carter says. “Can you make it less romantic?”
Less romantic, she thinks indignantly, has he even read the play?
David raises his hand, somehow managing to look sheepish and arrogant at the same time. “Um…Mr. Carter? Like, isn’t that the whole point of Romeo and Juliet?”
Mr. Carter rolls his eyes. “Just don’t go over the top with it, you two. Keep the romance subtle.”
If there’s one thing the play is not, it’s subtle. But if that’s what Mr. Carter wants, she’ll give it to him.
*
They walk out of Mr. Carter’s classroom together. David slings his leather jacket over his shoulder and turns to her. “You’re really good, you know,” he says. “Have you been in a lot of plays before?”
She looks up at him, feeling like he must be at least a foot taller than her. “No, just a couple of little things in middle school.”
David brushes the hair out of his eyes. “Well, there’s a lot I can teach you. About acting in a play.”
“You think we’re going to get it?” Her face feels unnaturally warm.
He rolls his eyes. “Of course we are. No one else in this school can act their way out of a paper bag.”
*
The next morning, the cast list is posted on the bulletin board outside Mr. Carter’s classroom. David is Romeo and she’s Juliet.
She can’t stop smiling. She did it, she really did it. Gillian hears footsteps behind her and a masculine voice whispers in her ear, “You’re going to be a star.”
She turns and David is standing there, grinning. “You think?” she says.
“I know,” he answers. He bends down and kisses her cheek. “This is only the beginning for you, Gillian.”
She watches David walk down the hallway, wearing his letter jacket. This is only the beginning, she thinks, touching her cheek.
“Thus with a kiss I die,” she whispers to herself. It’s Romeo’s line but it fits.
David turns the corner at the end of the corridor and disappears. She touches their names printed on the cast list.
Romeo – David Duchovny
Juliet – Gillian Anderson
“I die,” she whispers again.