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She looked past him, through the filing cabinets, up at the clock.

“And Macbeth,” she intoned, “all black and red, dark night and dark blood. A haunted planet, a cursed play. Did you know there was a curse put on the play? It’s bad luck for an actor to hear the Scotsman’s name, unless they’re in the play. If you listen long enough, you’ll hear stories about the strange things that happen when people perform Macbeth.”

Ricardo’s gaze followed the path her eyes traced upward, ever upward.

“Use your gift, Ricardo.”

“Okay, Mrs. Sherman, I’ll give it a try.”

“A-plus, Ricardo,” she said. “You’re A-plus material.”

* * *

The new Banquo, David “Newt” Deacon, was a nerd. He even had a bowl-head haircut. When Ricardo found him in the audiovisual room, he had toilet plungers strapped to both legs and was filming himself with an upside-down video camera while extolling the virtues of “Human Housefly Sucker-Cups.” He looked a bit like a housefly himself, wearing bug-eyed glasses with quarter-inch-thick lenses.

Newt shed his plungers and turned off the video recorder.

“Ricky River?” he asked.

“Ricardo Rivera.”

Newt shook his head, as if clearing it. “Thought that couldn’t be right.”

“Mrs. Sherman sent me.”

“Oh, I know. Excuse me a second.” He went poking through shelves cluttered with tape reels and charred copper wire, speaking over his shoulder. “She’s neat, huh? She said I’d tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Mars, right?”

“I guess I know as much as anybody. I read The Martian Chronicles.”

“Oh,” Newt said. “That’s just the beginning.”

When he came out of the cupboard, holding a burned-out electromagnet, his cheeks were sucked in between his molars. He stared at Ricardo’s bandages.

“Neal was my best friend once,” he said. “Back in fifth grade, we did everything together. He got ideas for all these neat things—squirt-gun burglar traps and stuff—and I built ’em. But he kept taking and breaking them. Now it figures he’s president. And going with Cary Fordyce, too.”

“Cory,” said Ricardo.

Newt unwound some of the scorched copper wire from the motor and began winding it around the fingers of his left hand as he talked.

“Here’s what I thought would work for Mars on the stage: all red lights; we’d make big castles out of red foam rubber—sandstone-looking stuff. I wanted to do a sandstorm—they’re really bad on Mars—but Mr. Dean said no, too messy. We get an avalanche at least. The space suits are gonna be kind of a cross between space suits and kilts.”

“How about canals?” Ricardo asked.

“There aren’t any canals,” Newt said emphatically. “Didn’t you ever see Robinson Crusoe on Mars?”

“No, but-but I think I know how Mars looks.” He looked up and saw a clock with its hands skipping backward. The office reset speeding clocks several times a day. “It has two moons, a red sky, towers, and Martians who nobody ever sees… I bet I could write it so everyone acted like they would if they were really up there.”

“Make it good and bloody,” said Newt, fidgeting with the prongs of an electric plug. The other end of the wire was hooked to the motor, now strapped to his left hand.

“Yeah,” Ricardo sighed, “except they won’t let us have any blood in it.”

“Aw, there’s this great word from horror stories that no one would ever mind.”

Ricardo leaned closer. “Tell me.”

Newt’s hand exploded. He yanked the plug out of the wall socket while Ricardo, in shock, peered at the smoldering hand.

“You did that to yourself?”

Grinning, Newt unwrapped his hand and held it out. The fingers and palm were powdered with carbon but unharmed.

“Mr. Dean’s letting me do the special effects,” he said. “Now, you were asking about a good word for blood?”

* * *

A small flame licked up and seared Ricardo’s heart each time Cory and Neal shared the stage. Two weeks after the primaries, their political sessions were notorious; according to Lisa Freuhoff, they would as soon ogle each other as filibuster. Sunk deep into a folding chair, Ricardo daily watched them declare their sappy Martian version of love while a piano student rapped out accompaniment. When the ruddy stage lighting lingered in their eyes even off the stage, he saw it as the glow of lust and hated it. Cory tried none of the tricks she had played on Ricardo last year. She and Neal were at each other’s mercy.

One afternoon, between scenes, Neal jumped from the stage and sauntered over to Ricardo.

“What a quay-zar,” Neal said.

Ricardo drew up his knees and sank down into the safety of his own lap. “What are you trying to prove, Bay?”

“Nothing you haven’t proved already. That you’re a lying little wimp. If your mouth and fingers are both really connected to your brain, then everything you’re writing is probably a lie, too.”

Ricardo sat up and set the script book down. He was getting hot now.

“Neal, would you just fuck off?”

Of course, of course his voice had to break when he said the worst word he knew.

“Ooooh! What nasty words! They’re just what I’d expect from a nasty little boy like you. Nasty little fag.”

Neal spun away and leapt back onto the stage without using his hands. Ricardo lapsed into a fever of pent rage; he almost smote his breast in public.

“Just because I don’t have a bitch for a girlfriend!”

Sheri DuBose, who was passing behind him, gasped.

He blushed, felt his ears burning. When she was gone, he looked at Cory Fordyce, alone at the center of the stage. He covered her with a hand, imagining the bitch-queen of them all in her place. Lady Macbeth, with long black hair and vampire teeth and bloody lips and hungry eyes. In his mind, the Lady consumed Cory, another bitch, and he began to smile.

“I don’t care if I’m not Macbeth or Banquo or any of you,” he whispered, giggling.

He held his pen up before his eyes, concentrating on it until he went slightly cross-eyed. His thinking also did something like doubling; he suddenly thought of himself as every one of them. He could be Duncan, murdered in his sand castle, and any or all of the three witches who danced across the viewscreen of the starship Silex; he could be the comical porter of the air-lock. The whole time the players thought they were creating the play, he had actually been writing new lines and getting the actors to learn them.

Over Christmas break, he was left to polish the script and prepare a final version. He lost interest in the mundane holiday and often had to be coerced to take part in family affairs such as ornamenting the tree and visiting relatives.

For two solid weeks he breathed the sands of Mars and haunted the winding stairs of a crumbling Martian castle. Instead of carols, he heard phantom birds cawing from the high thin air as murder sneaked through the two-mooned night. His dreams were premonitions of laser-fire, in which no blood was allowed. The holes in Duncan’s chest smoldered, cauterized. And always, just before he woke, the sand dunes of the Birnham Waste came humping forward, crawling, alive….

He wrote and rewrote. Sometimes he stared at the wall and the soccer trophies and the Certificates of Merit and the pencils in the papier-mâché holder he’d made in third grade. He stared at these objects but all the while saw blood, only blood, blood swirling into sand, spraying in the wind, blood that the school would never allow, everywhere the substance that the Committee had forbidden.

The days passed in a red dream.