Page 68 of In Harmony

“Why not?” he spat back. “You don’t go to school.”

“I stayed in school until they kicked me out and now I’m taking a test to finish. You are in the eighth grade. You’re fucking up your future if you don’t go.”

“Okay, okay,” he said, no commitment in his tone. I hadn’t gotten through to him. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I didn’t have the words. I wasn’t his dad. I was just the neighbor with the drunk father.

And suddenly I was so fucking tired. Weary to my bones.

“You want to help me run lines?”

“You’re not going to take me to school?”

“I can drive you there every day of my life, Benny, and it won’t matter if you don’t know it’s important. This play I’m doing right now? It’s important to me. So yeah, I could use the help.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I handed him my script and he sat down on the semi-truck tire. “Where are you at?”

“I have it marked.”

>

He found the dog-eared page and flipped it open. “To be or not to be?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” I said, taking a final drag off my cigarette. I dropped it, ground it out with my boot. “I’m not acting it, just running it for the lines.”

“I’m ready,” Benny said.

I stood in the middle of the scrapyard clearing and closed my eyes.

“To be or not to be, that is the question.

Whether t’is nobler in the mind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

or to take arms against a sea of troubles

and, by opposing, end them?”

My shoulders sagged. “To sleep. To die,” I said my voice low. “To die, to sleep perchance to dream.”

“You skipped a bunch of stuff.”

“I know.”

“What does it mean?” Benny asked, his voice hushed now.

“He’s asking if it’s worth it. To keep going or not.”

“Is it?”

I don’t know, I thought. Sometimes I just don’t know

“What’s the next line?” I asked.

“Ay, there’s the rub,” Benny said and wrinkled his nose with a small laugh.

I went through the rest of the monologue, Benny stopping me now and then to correct my mistakes. I got to the end, where Ophelia entered, and fell silent. My thoughts filled with Willow, imagining her stepping onto this stage with me—this crappy junkyard—looking beautiful and fragile, but strong and resilient too.