PART 2 of 2
“Ok, who wants to be next?” Mr. Callahan asked the class. No one raised a hand. “Come, on, if you won’t pick for yourselves, I may have to be the one to do it for you. How about….” He scanned the room, “How about Casey’s group?” he said, spotting Casey shrinking down in the front.
“Yeah, have Casey go,” Ariel said from the stage as the rest of her group made their way down off the platform. Casey looked up, and in the lights on the stage, her eyes shone in such a way that it was impossible for Casey to say no. He climbed up onto the platform as if in a trance.
Now because of the number of students in the class, Casey had been the odd one out, and that was how he liked it. He had requested to do a monologue instead of a one act with a group, and at first Mr. Callahan had objected. But Casey had fought for the right to do a monologue so hard and vehemently, that finally Mr. Callahan conceded.
Casey now found himself in the middle of the platform, standing perfectly still, looking around at the rest of the class, completely petrified. He tried to remember what his monologue was about, but then he looked at all the faces staring back at him, and he completely forgot. Then he looked over at Ariel, realized she would be watching, and got even MORE petrified. Wait, he thought, as he looked over at Ariel again, and saw that Matt’s arm was around her shoulder. All of a sudden he remembered. His monologue was about betrayal.
He began his monologue, and all of a sudden, he was speaking with such force the class sat back on their heels, leaning away from the stage as the force of Casey’s biting words hit them square in the face. To Casey, all of a sudden the words just came pouring out of his mouth, and he wasn’t speaking to anyone other than Ariel and Matt. Even though he knew that Matt was allowed to do whatever he wanted, and Ariel didn’t really like Casey anyway, he still felt as if she had somehow stabbed him in the back, even without knowing how he felt about her. He spat his words at the class, radiating anger and hurt with every word.
When he was finally done with his monologue, he just stood there for a moment, and for a second they all just sat/stood there, stunned. Casey himself couldn’t believe what he had just accomplished. Suddenly the whole class rose, with thunderous applause filling the whole room. Out of all of the people there, however, Ariel seemed to be clapping the hardest. She beamed up at the platform at Casey, and he felt that, even though he had been thinking of Ariel the whole time he had been doing that, she suddenly knew how he felt, and she understood what he was trying to really say while he was performing.
After that, one other group went, but no one really paid much attention to the one act, and after the bell rang, everyone crowded around Casey and offered reassuring slaps on the back or enthusiastic compliments. Casey suddenly found himself more popular than he had ever been in his 11 years of school. He smiled and took the attention in stride, all of a sudden finding the words to hold up conversations and make jokes with the people that at one point had so intimidated him. As he was making his way up the hall to his second class of the day, however, he felt something slam into his back and almost knock him off his feet. He realized that it was Ariel, and she now held him strangled in a bear hug.
“Casey, that was AMAZING!!” she raved as she clung to his back. Casey couldn’t help but grin as he walked down the hall with Ariel’s arms around his shoulders and neck.
“Well, I hope you got the meaning of what I was saying,” he said, surprisingly flirty and outgoing with his new boost of confidence from the class before. Ariel let go of his neck and walked beside him through the halls.
“What do you mean?” she inquired, “I mean, I knew you must have been thinking of someone while you were saying all that stuff. How could you not have been, it was so powerful…anyway, is that what this is about? Who you were thinking of?”
“Yes, exactly!” Casey said, a brand new burst of encouragement surging through his body, “Can you figure out who it was I was talking about?”
Ariel wrinkled her nose in confusion, “What’s going on, Casey?”
“Well, don’t you see? When I looked over at you and Matt, it inspired me to be that good on stage. It inspired me because it was all about betrayal, and for some reason I felt just that when I saw you with Matt: betrayed. The thing is,” Casey continued, almost not believing what he was saying at long last, “I was jealous of him in that moment, and I wanted to tell you that I love you,” he finished passionately.
Ariel stood there in the hall, the wrinkle in her nose even more prominent now. “What?” she said after a while.
Casey, now fully realizing what had just happened, but still confident enough to not go running from the hallway, pressed on. “I love you, and I have since freshman year.”
“How can you think you love me?” Ariel said, her brow furrowed now, “You barely even know me.”
“Of course I know you,” Casey said warily, his confidence draining out of him like sand in a sieve.
“No, you don’t,” Ariel argued, “You can’t possibly think you really know me. I myself only know your name and that you like to draw. I have never really talked to you, so how can you know me enough to be able to think you love me?”
Casey felt like he had been slapped. He had never thought about these things; he had always just assumed that after years of seeing her dance down the halls and smile at everyone she met that he knew how he felt, but now that Ariel herself was telling him all these things, he was starting to have doubts. How could he make such a claim if he never really got a chance to talk to her? It wasn’t like he wouldn’t if he ever had the chance; it was just that he never did have that chance.
He wanted more than anything to be able to tell Ariel at that moment that she was wrong about him, that he really did love her, but he knew now that he had been ridiculous for even thinking that.
Finally, he managed to mutter, ‘I can’t believe you’re doing this…”
Then Ariel said something he never in a hundred years thought she would say: “Casey, you’re a nice guy, but how could you think I could ever think of you like that? I am me, and you are you, and…well…that’s just the way things go around here, isn’t it? I have my friends, and you have….yours.” She turned on her heel and hurried to class, for by this time they were more than late.
Casey just stood there for a moment, not letting the words sink in for a moment. What did she mean, his friends and hers? He started walking down the hall, for subconciously he knew he should be going SOMEwhere, but when he got to the door of his classroom, he just kept walking past it. He just kept walking and walking until he came to the big, wooden double doors. He pushed them open, letting the morning light pour in on him. He didn’t break his stride, however, and just walked on down the sidewalk, across the street, and on down the road. He had no idea where he was going, or what he was doing, but after all, Ariel had basically just told him that she was too good to think of him that way, and he wasn’t even worth anything as a friend to her. He needed time to process all this.
He walked until finally he woke out of his trance, looked around for the first time, and realized he was in the middle of a park. He found a bench and sat down, just looking ahead. He wasn’t sure why he was taking this so hard, either. Needless to say, Casey had been rejected by many girls before. Well, he would say that if he had indeed done what he had just done with anyone else before. The truth was, Casey had never told another girl he had liked that he had liked her. He had liked) or, as he had thought, loved) Ariel from afar for so long, and now it was all over. He had nothing. He didn’t love her, h ad never loved her, would never love her again. As she had said, he knew nothing about her, so how could he say that he loved her?
Casey sat there, thinking, on that bench in the park for hours until he remembered that he was supposed to be in school. He was not the type to skip school like this, and walking out those doors should have been harder for him to do. Casey realized, however, that he didn’t care anymore. He didn’t really want to think about school, or Ariel, or anything for awhile. He just wanted to let his mind go, forget for a bit. He slowly rose, and then made his way over to the swings at the opposite end of the park.
He sat down at the swings, still in a sort of daze, then pushed off the ground and began to move back and forth, back and forth. He let himself be carried away in the motion of the swing, and the warm breeze that flitted around his face, and the sound of younger children laughing and playing below him. As he closed his eyes, a small smile played across his face, and in that moment, he came to a conclusion. Casey realized that Ariel was right; he had never known anything real about her. Yes, he had thought this before now, but as he sat on the swings, it hit him full force. If he had known, really known Ariel, he would not have been surprised by her response to his confession. He would not have been shocked when she said she was too good for him. He would have known this before and never thought anything about her, for when he really saw Ariel for who she was, he realized that she was indeed a rather vain, ugly person. This was of course not at all like anything he had ever thought of her before, but now that the blindfold was ripped from his eyes and he saw a glimpse of how she thought about the world, he couldn’t help but wonder if anyone really knew her. He thought to himself, “I have really seen Ariel. I really know her now. And I can’t help but feel sorry for her.”
