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  Just One Day

  ( Just One Day - 1 )

  Gayle Forman

  A breathtaking journey toward self-discovery and true love, from the author of If I StayWhen sheltered American good girl Allyson "LuLu" Healey first meets laid-back Dutch actor Willem De Ruiter at an underground performance of Twelfth Night in England, there’s an undeniable spark. After just one day together, that spark bursts into a flame, or so it seems to Allyson, until the following morning, when she wakes up after a whirlwind day in Paris to discover that Willem has left. Over the next year, Allyson embarks on a journey to come to terms with the narrow confines of her life, and through Shakespeare, travel, and a quest for her almost-true-love, to break free of those confines.

  Just One Day is the first in a sweepingly romantic duet of novels. Willem’s story—Just One Year—is coming soon!

  Just one day

  By

  GAYLE FORMAN

  For Tamar: sister, travel companion, friend—who, incidentally, went and married her Dutchman

  All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts . . . .

  From William Shakespeare’s As You Like It

  PART ONE

  One Day

  One

  AUGUST

  Stratford-upon-Avon, England

  What if Shakespeare had it wrong?

  To be, or not to be: that is the question. That’s from Hamlet’s—maybe Shakespeare’s—most famous soliloquy. I had to memorize the whole speech for sophomore English, and I can still remember every word. I didn’t give it much thought back then. I just wanted to get all the words right and collect my A. But what if Shakespeare—and Hamlet—were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

  The thing is, I don’t know if I would have asked myself that question—how to be—if it wasn’t for Hamlet. Maybe I would have gone along being the Allyson Healey I had been. Doing just what I was supposed to do, which, in this case, was going to see Hamlet.

  _ _ _

  “God, it’s so hot. I thought it wasn’t supposed to get this hot in England.” My friend Melanie loops her blond hair into a bun and fans her sweaty neck. “What time are they opening the doors, anyhow?”

  I look over at Ms. Foley, who Melanie and pretty much the rest of our group has christened Our Fearless Leader behind her back. But she is talking to Todd, one of the history grad students co-leading the trip, probably telling him off for something or other. In the Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza brochure that my parents presented to me upon my high school graduation two months ago, the Todd-like graduate students were called “historical consultants” and were meant to bolster the “educational value” of the Teen Tours! But so far, Todd has been more valuable in bolstering the hangovers, taking everyone out drinking almost every night. I’m sure tonight everyone else will go extra wild. It is, after all, our last stop, Stratford-upon-Avon, a city full of Culture! Which seems to translate into a disproportionate number of pubs named after Shakespeare and frequented by people in blaring white sneakers.

  Ms. Foley is wearing her own snow-white sneakers—along with a pair of neatly pressed blue jeans and a Teen Tours! polo shirt—as she reprimands Todd. Sometimes, at night, when everyone else is out on the town, she will tell me she ought to call the head office on him. But she never seems to follow through. I think partly because when she scolds, he flirts. Even with Ms. Foley. Especially with Ms. Foley.

  “I think it starts at seven,” I say to Melanie. I look at my watch, another graduation present, thick gold, the back engraved Going Places. It weighs heavy against my sweaty wrist. “It’s six thirty now.”

  “Geez, the Brits do love to line up. Or queue. Or whatever. They should take a lesson from the Italians, who just mob. Or maybe the Italians should take a lesson from the Brits.” Melanie tugs on her miniskirt—her bandage skirt, she calls it—and adjusts her cami-top. “God, Rome. It feels like a year ago.”

  Rome? Was it six days ago? Or sixteen? All of Europe has become a blur of airports, buses, old buildings, and prix-fixe menus serving chicken in various kinds of sauce. When my parents gave me this trip as a big high-school graduation present, I was a little reluctant to go. But Mom had reassured me that she’d done her research. Teen Tours! was very well regarded, noted for its high-quality educational component, as well as the care that was taken of its students. I would be well looked after. “You’ll never be alone,” my parents had promised me. And, of course, Melanie was coming too.

  And they were right. I know everyone else gives Ms. Foley crap for the eagle eye she keeps on us, but I appreciate how she is always doing a head count, even appreciate how she disapproves of the nightly jaunts to local bars, though most of us are of legal drinking age in Europe—not that anyone over here seems to care about such things anyway.

  I don’t go to the bars. I usually just go back to the hotel rooms Melanie and I share and watch TV. You can almost always find American movies, the same kinds of movies which, back at home, Melanie and I often watched together on weekends, in one of our rooms, with lots of popcorn.

  “I’m roasting out here,” Melanie moans. “It’s like middle of the afternoon still.”

  I look up. The sun is hot, and the clouds race across the sky. I like how fast they go, nothing in their way. You can tell from the sky that England’s an island. “At least it’s not pouring like it was when we got here.”

  “Do you have a pony holder?” Melanie asks. “No, of course you don’t. I bet you’re loving your hair now.”

  My hand drifts to the back of my neck, which still feels strange, oddly exposed. The Teen Tour! had begun in London, and on the second afternoon, we’d had a few free hours for shopping, which I guess qualifies as culture. During that time, Melanie had convinced me to get my hair bobbed. It was all part of her precollege reinvention scheme, which she’d explained to me on the flight over: “No one at college will know that we were AP automatons. I mean, we’re too pretty to just be brainiacs, and at college, everyone will be smart. So we can be cool and smart. Those two things will no longer be mutually exclusive.”

  For Melanie, this reinvention apparently meant the new heavy-on-skimp wardrobe she’d blown half her spending money on at Topshop, and the truncating of her name from Melanie to Mel—something I can’t quite remember to do, no matter how many times she kicks me under the table. For me, I guess it meant the haircut she talked me into.

  I’d freaked out when I’d seen myself. I’ve had long black hair and no bangs for as long as I can remember, and the girl staring back at me in the salon mirror didn’t look like anything like me. At that point, we’d only been gone two days, but my stomach went hollow with homesickness. I wanted to be back in my bedroom at home, with my familiar peach walls, my collection of vintage alarm clocks. I’d wondered how I was ever going to handle college if I couldn’t handle this.

  But I’ve gotten used to the hair, and the homesickness has mostly gone away, and even if it hasn’t, the tour is ending. Tomorrow, almost everyone else is taking the coach straight to the airport to fly home. Melanie and I are catching a train down to London to stay with her cousin for three days. Melanie is talking about going back to the salon where I got my bob to get a pink streak in her hair, and we’re going to see Let It Be in the West End. On Sunday, we fly home, and soon after that, we start college—me near Boston, Melanie in New York.

  “Set Shakespeare free!”

  I look up. A group of about a dozen people are coming up and down the line, handing out multicolored neon flyers. I can tell straightaway that they’re not American—no brig
ht white tennis shoes or cargo shorts in sight. They are all impossibly tall, and thin, and different looking, somehow. It’s like even their bone structure is foreign.

  “Oh, I’ll take one of those.” Melanie reaches out for a flyer and uses it to fan her neck.

  “What’s it say?” I ask her, looking at the group. Here in touristy Stratford-upon-Avon, they stand out like fire-orange poppies in a field of green.

  Melanie looks at the flyer and wrinkles her nose. “Guerrilla Will?”

  A girl with the kind of magenta streaks Melanie has been coveting comes up to us. “It’s Shakespeare for the masses.”

  I peer at the card. It reads Guerrilla Will. Shakespeare Without Borders. Shakespeare Unleashed. Shakespeare For Free. Shakespeare For All.

  “Shakespeare for free?” Melanie reads.

  “Yeah,” the magenta-haired girl says in accented English. “Not for capitalist gain. How Shakespeare would’ve wanted it.”

  “You don’t think he’d want to actually sell tickets and make money from his plays?” I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but I remember that movie Shakespeare in Love and how he was always owing money to somebody or other.

  The girl rolls her eyes, and I start to feel foolish. I look down. A shadow falls over me, momentarily blocking out the glare of the sun. And then I hear laughter. I look up. I can’t see the person in front of me because he’s backlit by the still-bright evening sun. But I can hear him.

  “I think she’s right,” he says. “Being a starving artist is not so romantic, maybe, when you’re actually starving.”

  I blink a few times. My eyes adjust, and I see that the guy is tall, maybe a full foot taller than I am, and thin. His hair is a hundred shades of blond, and his eyes so brown as to almost be black. I have to tilt my head up to look at him, and he’s tilting his head down to look at me.

  “But Shakespeare is dead; he’s not collecting royalties from the grave. And we, we are alive.” He opens his arms, as if to embrace the universe. “What are you seeing?”

  “Hamlet,” I say.

  “Ah, Hamlet.” His accent is so slight as to be almost imperceptible. “I think a night like this, you don’t waste on tragedy.” He looks at me, like it’s a question. Then he smiles. “Or indoors. We are doing Twelfth Night. Outside.” He hands me a flyer.

  “We’ll think about it,” Melanie says in her coy voice.

  The guy raises one shoulder and cocks his head toward it so his ear is almost touching his very angular shoulder blade. “What you will,” he says, though he’s looking at me. Then he saunters off to join the rest of his troupe.

  Melanie watches them go. “Wow, why are they not on the Teen Tours! Cultural Extravaganza? That’s some culture I could get into!”

  I watch them leave, feeling a strange tug. “I’ve seen Hamlet before, you know.”

  Melanie looks at me, her eyebrows, which she has overly plucked into a thin line, raised. “Me too. It was on TV, but still . . .”

  “We could go . . . to this. I mean, it would be different. A cultural experience, which is why our parents sent us on this tour.”

  Melanie laughs. “Look at you, getting all bad! But what about Our Fearless Leader? It looks like she’s gearing up for one of her head counts.”

  “Well, the heat was really bothering you . . . ” I begin.

  Melanie looks at me for a second, then something clicks. She licks her lips, grins, and then crosses her eyes. “Oh, yeah. I totally have heatstroke.” She turns to Paula, who’s from Maine and is studiously reading a Fodor’s guide. “Paula, I’m feeling so dizzy.”

  “It’s way hot,” Paula says, nodding sympathetically. “You should hydrate.”

  “I think I might faint or something. I’m seeing black spots.”

  “Don’t pile it on,” I whisper.

  “It’s good to build a case,” Melanie whispers, enjoying this now. “Oh, I think I’m going to pass out.”

  “Ms. Foley,” I call.

  Ms. Foley looks up from ticking names off her roll-call sheet. She comes over, her face so full of concern, I feel bad for lying. “I think Melanie, I mean Mel, is getting heatstroke.”

  “Are you poorly? It shouldn’t be much longer now. And it’s lovely and cool inside the theater.” Ms. Foley speaks in a strange hybrid of Britishisms with a Midwestern accent that everyone makes fun of because they think it’s pretentious. But I think it’s just that she’s from Michigan and spends a lot of time in Europe.

  “I feel like I’m going to puke.” Melanie pushes on. “I would hate to do that inside the Swan Theatre.”

  Ms. Foley’s face wrinkles in displeasure, though I can’t tell if it is from the idea of Melanie barfing inside the Swan or using the word puke in such close proximity to the Royal Shakespeare Company. “Oh, dear. I’d better escort you back to the hotel.”

  “I can take her,” I say.

  “Really? Oh, no. I couldn’t. You should see Hamlet.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll take her.”

  “No! It’s my responsibility to take her. I simply couldn’t burden you like that.” I can see the argument she’s having with herself play out over her pinched features.

  “It’s fine, Ms. Foley. I’ve seen Hamlet before, and the hotel is just over the square from here.”

  “Really? Oh, that would be lovely. Would you believe in all the years I’ve been doing this, I have never seen the Bard’s Hamlet done by the RSC?”

  Melanie gives a little moan for dramatic effect. I gently elbow her. I smile at Ms. Foley. “Well, then, you definitely shouldn’t miss it.”

  She nods solemnly, as though we are discussing important business here, order of succession to the throne or something. Then she reaches for my hand. “It has been such a pleasure traveling with you, Allyson. I shall miss you. If only more young people today were like you. You are such a . . .” She pauses for a moment, searching for the right word. “Such a good girl.”

  “Thank you,” I say automatically. But her compliment leaves me empty. I don’t know if it’s because that’s the nicest thing she could think to say about me, or if it’s because I’m not being such a good girl right now.

  “Good girl, my ass.” Melanie laughs once we are clear of the queue and she can give up her swooning act.

  “Be quiet. I don’t like pretending.”

  “Well, you’re awfully good at it. You could have a promising acting career of your own, if you ask me.”

  “I don’t ask you. Now, where is this place?” I look at the flyer. “Canal Basin? What is that?”

  Melanie pulls out her phone, which, unlike my cell phone, works in Europe. She opens the map app. “It appears to be a basin by the canal.”

  A few minutes later, we arrive at a waterfront. It feels like a carnival, full of people hanging about. There are barges moored to the side of the water, different boats selling everything from ice cream to paintings. What there isn’t is any kind of theater. Or stage. Or chairs. Or actors. I look at the flyer again.

  “Maybe it’s on the bridge?” Melanie asks.

  We walk back over to the medieval arched bridge, but it’s just more of the same: tourists like us, milling around in the hot night.

  “They did say it was tonight?” Melanie asks.

  I think of that one guy, his eyes so impossibly dark, specifically saying that tonight was too nice for tragedy. But when I look around, there’s no play here, obviously. It was probably some kind of joke—fool the stupid tourist.

  “Let’s get an ice cream so the night’s not a total write-off,” I say.

  We are queuing up for ice cream when we hear it, a hum of acoustic guitars and the echoey beat of bongo drums. My ears perk up, my sonar rises. I stand on a nearby bench to look around. It’s not like a stage has magically appeared, but what has just materialized is a crowd, a pretty big one, under a stand of trees.

  “I think it’s starting,” I say, grabbing Melanie’s hand.

  “But the ice cream,” she complains.
r />   “After,” I say, yanking her toward the crowd.

  “If music be the food of love, play on.”

  The guy playing Duke Orsino looks nothing like any Shakespearian actor I’ve ever seen, except maybe the movie version of Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio. He is tall, black, dreadlocked, and dressed like a glam rock-star in tight vinyl pants, pointy-toed shoes, and a sort of mesh tank top that shows off his ripped chest.

  “Oh, we so made the right choice,” Melanie whispers in my ear.

  As Orsino gives his opening soliloquy to the sounds of the guitars and bongo drums, I feel a shiver go up my spine.

  We watch the entire first act, chasing the actors around the waterfront. When they move, we move, which makes it feel like we are a part of the play. And maybe that’s what makes it so different. Because I’ve seen Shakespeare before. School productions and a few plays at the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre. But it’s always felt like listening to something in a foreign language I didn’t know that well. I had to force myself to pay attention, and half the time, I wound up rereading the program over and over again, as if it would impart some deeper understanding.

  This time, it clicks. It’s like my ear attunes to the weird language and I’m sucked fully into the story, the same way I am when I watch a movie, so that I feel it. When Orsino pines for the cool Olivia, I feel that pang in my gut from all the times I’ve crushed on guys I was invisible to. And when Viola mourns her brother, I feel her loneliness. And when she falls for Orsino, who thinks she’s a man, it’s actually funny and also moving.

  He doesn’t show up until act two. He’s playing Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, thought dead. Which makes a certain sense, because by the time he does arrive, I am beginning to think he never really existed, that I’ve merely conjured him.

  As he races through the green, chased after by the ever-loyal Antonio, we chase after him. After a while, I work up my nerve. “Let’s get closer,” I say to Melanie. She grabs my hand, and we go to the front of the crowd right at the part where Olivia’s clown comes for Sebastian and they argue before Sebastian sends him away. Right before he does, he seems to catch my eye for half a second.