Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus Page A

to have every boy pledging his
nonexistent sword to her defense. But it was the authentic accent that sealed the deal. Next to that, everyone else sounded like the absolute worst: a regular high school kid.
    Claire took her place next to me, knocked the mud from her boots, and gave me a kind, if brief, smile. The wind was doing wonderful, wild things to the hair outside of her beret.
    “Act two, scene two, page two,” Mrs. Leach said. “Let’s do this.”
    Tub gawped at me, the donut scandal forgotten. I cleared my throat, looked at the spinning letters upon the page, and dove in.
    “Oh, are you going to leave me so unsatisfied?”
    One line in and I was blushing.
    “What satisfaction could you possibly have tonight?” Claire asked.
    “I would be satisfied,” I said, “if we made each other true promises of love.”
    No doubt these lines were masterpieces of meter and meaning, but for all the feeling coming out of my mouth, they might as well have been ingredients from a cereal box. Claire, of course, turned
Juliet’s lines into things as natural as breath, one word as full as rainwater gathering on the tip of a petal, the next dry and windswept as the desert outside of town.
    I looked at her in wonder and saw that she was reciting by heart and that her eyes were focused on the football field. There at the nearest corner was a helmetless Steve Jorgensen-Warner running
drills. Just drills, and yet he executed them with supernatural grace, vaulting over lesser humans and grinning like he’d just as soon keep going until he conquered the world. Claire was rapt
and I couldn’t blame her. That sort of movement was a kind of poetry, too.
    “Oh, blessed, blessed night,” I whispered from a script I hadn’t realized that I’d memorized, too. “Because it’s dark out, I’m afraid all this is just a
dream.”
    Was it, in fact, a dream? I lowered my eyes and regarded the chewed, dirty fingernails holding my script, the scuffed shoes on my feet, and realized that these were the symbols of my pitiful
little life: worn-out, insignificant, ready to be thrown beneath Dad’s industrial mower. With one hand I touched the medallion beneath my shirt, a different symbol entirely, and thought of
that dark world beneath the surface. Which dream was preferable, the wild danger down there or the slow suffocation happening up here?
    Mrs. Leach took her glasses by the frame, lips parted to demand an end to this pitiful farce. But my voice continued, louder now, my despair as real as anything Romeo could come up with.
    “A thousand times the worse for me, to want your light! / A lover goes toward love as schoolboys from their books. / But love goes from love, like boys toward school with heavy
looks.”
    Mrs. Leach released her glasses.
    Claire turned away from the football field and gave me a curious look.
    “It is my soul that calls upon my name,” I continued. Until then, anguish was something I’d felt in my heart and head. Now it had a voice and I let it flow. “How
silver-sweet sound lovers’ tongues by night, like softest music to attending ears.”
    Claire smiled with not just a corner of her lips but her whole mouth.
    “I shall forget,” she said softly, “to have thee still stand there, remembering how I love thy company. Romeo!”
    “Romeo, indeed,” Mrs. Leach said.
    The drama coach was standing and clutching her hands to her bosom. Like any good teacher, she knew that keeping decorum was priority one. But her flashing eyes revealed that she was rapturous. I
expanded my gaze. The other auditioners sat there with stunned looks upon their faces. Even Tub’s face was void of sarcasm. Two water boys on their way to the football field had paused with
their bag of thermoses and were staring at us, enraptured. Mrs. Leach turned to a wardrobe parent, who was clapping her hands with tears in her eyes.
    “Mrs. Dunton, take some measurements. I think our Romeo might just wake up this town of football