I sat back. “Well…yes. At school.”
He waved a hand. “It’s okay. There’s some weird shit floating around about me. My dad isn’t well. You probably heard that too.”
He deserved honesty, so I nodded.
“He didn’t take Mom’s death well either. Drove him to drink. Talking to him never got me much but a fist or a boot after that anyway.”
I swallowed hard and Isaac noticed.
“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you that shit. It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it does,” I said. “Of course, it does.”
He didn’t reply but I saw my words land on him and sink in.
“Then you found acting,” I said, and it wasn’t a question. “I heard it helped you find your voice again.” Shame burned my skin for sucking up rumors and gossip as if there weren’t real people on the other side.
“Fourth grade,” Isaac said. “When I went back to school, Miss Grant was the only teacher who didn’t demand I talk. She put someone else’s words in front of me one day and said, This character needs a voice. If you could lend him yours, that would be great. Like I was doing her a favor.” He glanced at me. “So I did. It wasn’t me talking. It wasn’t my words. And that made it okay.”
“You’ve been acting ever since?”
“Yeah.”
“And it helped you.”
He nodded. “That’s the funny thing about art. If it’s really good, you can see yourself in it. Sometimes a little bit. Sometimes a lot.”
“Do you see yourself in Hamlet?” I smiled faintly. “Seems like the exact kind of question Martin wants us to ask each other.”
He didn’t smile back. “Yeah, I do. Hamlet hates that his mother married Claudius so soon after his father died. In Hamlet’s eyes, Claudius is an imposter king, sitting in a chair that doesn’t belong to him. I lost my father when my mom died. An imposter sits in our shitty trailer now, drunk and u
nrecognizable, pouring the poison down his throat.”
Now I had to bite the inside of my cheek. Angie told me by doing this play with Isaac, I’d have a front row seat to his incredible talent. Sitting across from him at this little table, I realized he had an incredible mind, too. Poetry in his own words, though I doubt he knew it. His quiet observations about his life were a thousand times more potent and raw than anything I’d seen him do onstage.
He raised his eyes to mine and slowly they came back to the here and now. And my awestruck expression.
“Shit,” he said. “That was probably way more than you wanted to hear—”
“Don’t apologize,” I whispered.
His eyes widened slightly, drawing me deeper into their gray-green depths. A storm-tossed ocean, miles deep. Icy and choppy on the surface. Warm stillness beneath.
We stared. And in the short silence, something settled between us. An agreement or understanding. He’d shared himself, yet asked nothing in return. I was free to float in the intimate closeness between the storyteller and the listener. I wasn’t trapped or weighed down by him.
I could become the storyteller…
Except I couldn’t. My own story had to stay locked behind my teeth. Unfair, but how could I tell my acting partner what I hadn’t been able to tell my own parents or best friends? Risk a mental breakdown in this cute little coffee shop?
No, the time to tell the truth had long passed. What happened to me could only manifest through the words and acts of a character written more than four hundred years ago. The safest way to tell my story was to cut, distill and refract it through the prism of Ophelia’s madness.
“I’m still trying to find the connection to Ophelia,” I said, not looking at him. “I haven’t done this before. Dialed deep into a character, I mean.”
“Yes, you have,” Isaac said. “Your audition piece.”
“That was three minutes. A single moment. Hamlet is so much bigger.” I arched a brow at him. “I distinctly recall you telling me as much at the audition.” I tapped my chin. “How did you put it? Ah, yes. You politely requested I not fuck this up for you.”
A small smile ghosted over his lips. “It’s my standard request,” he said. He crossed his forearms on the table and leaned on them. “Start with the basics. What do you and your character have in common?”