The Sham

Shakespeare's grave or How running from a missing girl can uncover a missing boy

            But by mid February, the mood was changing. Particularly towards us. The sympathetic related-to-dead-girl-through-half-aunt looks had given way to strange suspicions around hanging-with-the-new-boy. We needed to escape and reading the inscription on Shakespeare’s grave seemed like a good idea at the time,

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare,

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones.

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

            Jack slid his arm across my shoulder as if it always lived there. I raised my eyebrows but I was trying to keep the blood from splashing too fast round my body from a Close Proximity Alert to cute boy. He was grinning. “What?” he asked.

            I shook my head and nestled it into his hand.

            Jack pointed to the grave. “He had a thing about it,” he said. “Didn’t want his body to be dug up.”

            “Who could blame him?” I said.

            “Apparently it was really common back then, by gravediggers or just to make more room for more dead bodies. It’s in loads of his plays apparently.”

            “Which ones?” I asked.

            “Richard the Third, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet –”

            “– You know, I’ve never read Hamlet. Is it any good?”

Jack cleared his throat, looking into my eyes. “How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself.” I giggled my appreciation for WonderBoy. There were times over the past seven weeks, where I’d felt so happy that I’d had to reassure myself that Jack wasn’t just in my imagination. The irony wasn’t lost on me either; I seemed to be getting happier in inverse proportion to the town’s sadness. My classmates were dead after all. “As I perchance hereafter shall think meet,” he continued. “To put an antic disposition on –”

            I hit him lightly on the arm. “ – Okay, enough, enough,” I said. “It’s about madness, isn’t it? The ‘antic disposition’?”

            He nodded. “He says he’s going to pretend to be mad but he plays the part so well, that everyone thinks he’s gone mad for real.” Jack had a weird look as the memory of something momentarily flashed across his face. “Anyway,” he said, shaking it off. “You need to read it and then decide.”

            I added it to the growing list of books in my head that I know I should read but I’m sure I’ll never start. If it doesn’t have equations or molecules on the first page, it’s kind of a no-go. Except maybe Pride and Prejudice. It’s the only book I could get through without suffering a haemorrhage from acute boredom. Or by using the Pass Notes.

            “Kind of sad though, if you think about it,” he said.

            “What?”

            He pointed at Shakespeare’s grave. “He’s been dead 400 years and people still want to dig him up. Think someone put in another bid last week. They want to see how he died.”

            “How do you know all this stuff?” I asked. Jack could actually ingest information, assimilate it, spit bits of it back at you; offbeat articles you might have missed, in parts and pages you never reached. He was quick too; he completed my last essay for me on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in like, a tenth of the time I could do it myself. I told myself it wasn’t cheating because I could have done it anyway. He never talked about school; I wasn’t sure he’d ever been. “I mean, you seem to know –” I tried not to sound too impressed, “everything.”