Ever since Benjie realized that Romeo in Shakespeare’s play was sixteen, which happened to be his exact age, he became fixated on playing the romantic hero.
He wasn’t being totally impractical about this ambition—he had been acting in school and community theater plays for a long time. When he was ten years old he played Oliver in the big musical. The director liked the idea of having a boy of ten playing a seven year old.
This worked out well for Benjie until he turned thirteen when his voice cracked and lowered to something that sounded somewhat mature but was just vaguely boring.
Benjie heard that the theater in a neighboring town was putting on Romeo and Juliet. He prepared, memorizing the best lines and went to the audition. He thought he had done a pretty good job until he heard the director comment, “This part calls for a sixteen-year-old, maybe older.”
“I’m sixteen,” Benjie replied.
“You look twelve.”
“I’m too tall to be twelve.”
“I’ve seen tall twelve year olds. They don’t look like Romeo. They look like basketball players.”
“But I don’t want to play basketball.”
“No wonder. As a sixteen year old you’re too short to play basketball.”
“I’ve already memorized most of the lines—“
“Next!”
After Benjie recovered from that rejection, he began an exercise regimen to make himself look like a romantic hero. And after his voice stabilized, he acted in several more productions, mostly as the leading man’s best friend. And anytime a nearby theater announced it was going to produce Romeo and Juliet, Benjie was there for the audition. He still looked too young though.
Finally, when he was twenty-six he looked like a sixteen-year-old boy who would have a hot affair with a thirteen-year-old girl. The girl playing Juliet actually was eighteen, but looked much younger. Even after his makeover Benjie didn’t exactly thrill the hearts of young women in real life, but he could pretend he was Romeo on stage.
During the audition, Benjie let go of all his inhibitions and self-doubt and he felt like he was actually Romeo. After he won the role, Benjie floated through the rehearsals. The only problem was the girl who played Juliet did not like him at all. Her brother who was cast as Tybalt treated Benjie as though he were a true menace to their family. The young actress expressed her wishes that Benjie wait to kiss her until opening night. Her brother played the dueling scenes with frightening enthusiasm.
None of this backstage drama dampened Benjie’s excitement because when on Halloween night the curtains would part, he was Romeo.
The first few scenes passed smoothly. Benjie thought the balcony scene was fantastic because Juliet grabbed his face with both hands and laid a hard, hot kiss on his lips. He was so shocked he could not remember his next line.
Benjie blinked several times and when he finally focused on his surroundings, he realized he was not in the theater. He held Juliet’s hand as they skipped along a moonlit cobblestone street in a Middle Ages Italian city. His first thought was that this place really stunk. And he didn’t smell none too good either. It was as though he bathed once a year, and he was a month away from his next one. He didn’t want body odor to ruin this fine romance.
Not one building looked familiar to him, but he felt drawn to the big cathedral in the town square. They went around the church to a door hidden by dark shadows. Benjie knocked, and an old man wearing monk’s robes opened the door. This man looked like the actor playing Friar Lawrence but strangely enough, he didn’t speak English but Italian. Strangest of all, Benjie understood everything the monk said. And when Benjie opened his mouth to speak, he asked, in perfect Italian, for Lawrence to marry Juliet and him.
The monk took them to the chapel and married them right on the spot. When he leaned in to kiss his bride, Benjie bumped into her cheek because she had turned her head away at the last moment.
“Boy, does she run hot and cold,” Benjie muttered.
Before he knew it, Benjie—or was he now really Romeo—was walking in Verona’s town square with his kooky cousin Mercutio in broad daylight. What happened on his wedding night he could not remember. Then Tybalt came upon them trying to pick a fight.
Now Benjie’s rational side told him this was the brother of the girl playing Juliet, but his other side realized—as fantastical as it seemed—he was actually Romeo in old Verona. This guy with a sword was indeed Tybalt and meant to kill him.
Benjie’s practice in dancing, fencing and gymnastics paid off because he kept Tybalt off balance. Nothing bad would have happened but Mercutio started fighting against Tybalt too. This two-against-one gambit didn’t seem fair to Benjie—I mean, Romeo—and he tried to break up the entire brouhaha which caused Tybalt to kill Mercutio.
Never in Benjie’s life had he ever gotten that out-of-control angry—but that’s all his alter ego Romeo did, get mad and fight. There was a small part of Benjie’s mind that was still Benjie which thought, “Uh no, I don’t want to do this. I know what this leads to.”
Too late. Romeo/Benjie stood over Tybalt’s dead body. Everyone in the square told him to get out of town and never come back.
What sense would that make—get married, kill somebody and run away? The dwindling consciousness of Benjie made one last decision. He knew gossip on the street about Tybalt’s death would spread like wildfire and would eventually burn him in the end. Benjie’s only logical course of action was to run immediately to Juliet’s house, grab her and escape, possibly as far south as Sicily.
When Juliet tried to ask what had happened and where they were going, Benjie shushed her as he stole a couple of horses at a nearby stable. They rode about half a day before he stopped to rest the horses. He lifted Juliet from her mount, told her he had killed Tybalt and assured her they were going to live happily ever after in Sicily.
Juliet grabbed his face in her hands and kissed him hot and hard upon his lips. This pleasurable sensation only lasted a moment before Benjie felt the sting of a harsh slap across his cheek.
When he recovered his senses, he was still on the balcony set in the community theatre. His eyes focused on the girl playing Juliet.
“Snap out of it, you idiot!” she hissed.
Benjie smiled. He was back in his own frustrating, boring, unrequited life. But it was a hell of a lot safer than being the real Romeo.