“No,” Ricardo said in disbelief. “Oh, no.”
President Bay appeared above him, looking down his long, straight nose. “Sorry, buddy, you’re Banquo. Sorry for both of us, I mean. I’d just as soon not see you on that stage.”
Ricardo felt his face scrunch up with anger. “Banquo,” he said. “Banquo gets killed halfway through, then he’s just a- a-a ghost. I wanted—”
“Don’t be a wussy,” Neal said.
“A wussy?” Ricardo said. His anger passed and he felt weak. “Neal, see if I was second choice.”
“You dummy, you’re not even my understudy. Be glad you got anything.”
“But you can’t do it, Neal, you don’t have the time. You’re already president, isn’t that enough?”
“President no thanks to you, when all you did was tell me lies about Cory Fordyce, which is pretty screwed considering how you’ve got the hots for her.”
Around them, kids were staring and starting to laugh. Some even looked frightened in a tentative, eager way. “The hots,” someone repeated.
Ricardo tripped on an ankle out of nowhere, and falling backward grabbed the nearest object: Neal’s chest. He heard a rip as he continued to fall, and when he landed he had a handful of torn, threadbare cotton with Primo Beer written across it.
He looked slowly up at a bare-chested, raging Neal, and something happened to freeze them in time. Something kept his words in his mouth and Neal’s fists in the air. Everything stopped and Ricardo sat suspended outside of the world.
Until Cory Fordyce looked in.
Long blond hair, Miss Clairol curls, rosy cheeks and lips, pale blue eyes. All he could see of her was her face; the crowd hid the rest. She was peering around Neal, while Neal turned slowly to look at her.
“Hello, Cory,” Neal said, smiling as his fingers uncurled.
She scowled past him and looked down at Ricardo. “What did you tell him about me, Ricardo?”
“I didn’t say a thing!” Ricardo shouted. “Lisa said! Ask Lisa!”
Neal stepped forward with a shout, swinging his arm as if he were bowling. Ricardo’s face went numb with pain; he wasn’t sure why. He lay back on the asphalt, smelling a cloud of tarry, rusty, bloody smoke rising around him. Neal’s fist floated above in slow motion, a white planet spattered in blood. Ricardo’s awareness roamed into the dark.
“Ricardo?” A woman’s voice. “This is Mrs. Ensign, the nurse. We’ve called your mother. I’m afraid she’ll have to take you to the hospital. Your nose is quite broken. Breathe through your mouth and you won’t have so much trouble.”
His face felt like a pane of safety glass, shattered but clinging together. She wiped his eyes with a wet cloth as the sounds of typewriters and telephones filled his ears.
Jars rattled and a fluorescent light appeared. Mrs. Ensign stood above, shaking a thermometer. Then she shook her head.
“If I did that you wouldn’t be able to breathe,” she said. “Poor boy.”
“Bisses Edsid, could I see a cast list for Bacbeth’s Bartiad Revue?”
“A catalyst for who?”
“Cast list, cast list. I cad’t talk right.”
“Can you read right? Stay put, I’ll get you the list.”
When she returned, she had a ditto so fresh it fumed. She held it before his face so that he could read:
Macbeth…… Neal Bay
Banquo…… Ricardo Rivera
Lady Macbeth…… Cory Fordyce
“That’s all,” he said.
She left him alone with his pain.
Why me? he thought. Why me?
That was an old thought, worn thin over the years of his childhood. It hardly captured his present frustration, which felt like the undertow at high tide.
Why Neal? he thought. Better.
Why Neal, the sun-tanned surfer, instead of me, the brainy twerp? I’m not such a bad bodysurfer.
And why Neal, with the perfect dumb joke that makes all the girls laugh (except Cory usually, but probably now she’ll laugh), instead of me, s-s-stuttering R-R-Ricardo?
Yeah? Why does Neal get to be President Bloody Macbeth of the Blackstone Intermediate Bloody Spaceways and the Planet of Bloody Blood; when I get to be Good Ol’ Banquo the Friendly Ghost?
Why does Neal get Cory while I get… I get…
Cory. Thinking of her was like swallowing a Superball. He had never gotten over the bruises she’d given him the previous year, when he had let himself have a crush on her even while knowing that she hated him, even while knowing for certain that his affection would make her crueler.
In moments of pain, her image always brightened to torment him. He had never known as much pain as he felt now, and her face had never been so bright.
That night he cried out in his sleep. His mother found him sitting half-awake in his bed, describing in a senseless rush the events of some nightmare on another world: a planet of blood where starships of rusted metal crashed into the ruins of red cities; where a bloody sun and moon chased each other round and round while the stars howled in a hungry chorus, and seas of blood drenched everything in red. He fell back asleep without truly waking, leaving her clinging to his seemingly empty body, leaving her afraid.
On the table by his bedside, she saw his English assignment: Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.
“I’ll call the office in the morning,” she promised her son. “That place is giving you nightmares.”
Mrs. Sherman sighed when she saw Ricardo in homeroom 408 the next morning. His bandaged nose was the subject of several disputes between first and second bells. As the students punched their new day’s schedules into computer cards and copied each other’s math homework, she watched him gazing into space. Near the end of the period, she checked his schedule and saw that he had no class after home room.
“Would you please come see me at fourth bell?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Sherman,” said Ricardo, and he shuffled away without having met her eyes.
He wandered into the department office at third bell and was waiting for her when she got free of Mr. Ezra and Miss Bachary, who each claimed to have the room for the next period. The scheduling computer was down again.
“Everyone defended Neal,” he said, when she was sitting at her desk. He looked about eighty years old when he said it. She wanted to tell him to look up, to smile.
“They said you started it?” she asked.
He nodded. “I let them give my part away. Newt got it. David Deacon, I mean. He’s even shorter than me. I don’t know why Mr. Dean thinks Banquo’s a shrimp.”
“Have you taken your story to Mr. Magnusson?” she asked.
“He and Mr. Bay go golfing together,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the stupid play anyway.”
“Maybe it’s for the better, Ricardo,” she said. “I thought of you when we chose Macbeth. Mr. Dean will need a student playwright, someone who can write, to polish what the actors come up with and read it back to them better than before.”
Ricardo looked up, astonished. “You mean me?”
She smiled. “That could be, but it depends on you.”
“I’d do it! I have an idea about-about Macbeth’s mother!”
“Fine, Ricardo. I’ve talked to David Deacon since he was chosen, by the way. He’s in my science fiction class and he loves Mars. He said he’d be glad to help you learn what you need to know to write a story on Mars.”
“Write a story on Mars,” Ricardo said to himself. “Wow.”
“—gladly share his fine ideas about the angry red planet, that grisly world of war and blood.”