Circles Read Online Free

beautiful passage in the whole play because it described so well how she felt about Dave Mitchell.
    “A madness most discreet”—that’s exactly what it was, because it was almost more than she could bear and yet nobody knew how she felt about him. Not her mother, not Wanda, certainly not Dave Mitchell.
    “A choking gall.” Yes, that too, because so many times when she met him in the hall, or saw him in class, or even here at rehearsal, so many times, when she’d practiced some cute or funny or charming words— they could never rise out of her throat. They died there while she only managed to choke out something inane and colorless.
    “A preserving sweet.” Yes, her feeling for Dave was a preserving sweet. Her daydreams about him had gone on and on for nearly a year now. They were preserved, and they were very, very sweet.
    “Romeo’s shallow,” her mother said. “He’s a typical, macho teenager. At the beginning of the play, he’s madly in love with Rosaline. Then he goes to a dance, sees Juliet, and in a few seconds, is even more madly in love with her, just because she’s prettier. He’s got no character. But Benedick ...”
    Beebe didn’t want to hear about Benedick. It was bad enough that her mother had insisted on naming her Beatrice—her father had preferred Miranda from The Tempest, a much prettier name as far as Beebe was concerned—but the two lovers in Much Ado About Nothing just yacked and yacked like middle-aged adults. They lacked the passion and ferocity of the lovers in Romeo and Juliet.
    “People change,” Beebe always said, defending Romeo. “You said you liked somebody in your acting company until you met Dad.”
    “Yes, but I fell in love with Dad because of what he was, not for what he looked like. Ted Ritter, the guy in my company, was very good-looking, but he was kind of shallow too, just like Romeo.”
    “People change,” Beebe repeated stubbornly. And maybe Dave would change too. Right now, he and Jennifer Evans/Juliet were going around together. They’d been together since last year when both of them had gotten the leading roles in Twelfth Night.
    Now they were both up on stage, rehearsing scene 5, the big one where Romeo sees Juliet for the first time. Beebe clenched her fists, and whispered the words along with Dave:
     
    “What lady is that which doth enrich the hand
    Of yonder knight?”
     
    “Don’t mumble,” Mrs. Kronberger said, “and remember to keep your chin up. We’re losing half the words out here.”
    Dave nodded and smiled good-naturedly at her. Beebe’s heart beat faster. How good-looking he was with his short, curly brown hair, his large, dark eyes, his slim, graceful figure. And how nice he was—for such a boy, such a star. He wasn’t at all conceited or mean-spirited. Just the other day when she met him in the hall, and dropped her notebook and all the papers had gone flying, he’d helped her pick everything up, laughing and making her feel almost good about dropping it, almost as if she’d finally done something right, something to get his attention and approval.
    His voice wasn’t really projecting well, but there were a couple of kids horsing around over on the left side of the auditorium. She shot them a ferocious look as Romeo mumbled:
     
    “O! she doth teach the torches to burn bright.
    It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
    Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear;”
     
    “Louder and slower, louder and slower,” Mrs. Kronberger repeated. “And get a little more feeling into it. You’re not reading a shopping list.”
     
    “Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!”
     
    Jennifer Evans/Juliet walked over to the front of the stage and called out, “Mrs. Kronberger, I’m going to have to go in fifteen minutes.”
    “I know, I know,” said the teacher. “You have to go to the dentist. I know.”
    “Well, can we just move ahead to my part?”
    “We purposely moved on ahead to scene five and skipped the first scene