Free Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King Page B

his dad would buy him that.
    “Nice lighter,” I said as he used it to light his cigarette.
    “Come on,” he said, starting his descent.
    “I can’t. I have a stupid essay to write.”
    He continued down the tree, and I followed him. When we got to the blue trail, he went toward the pagoda by himself and I went home. The essay was about Romeo and Juliet , our first journey into the mind of William Shakespeare. The assignment was: Many writers and filmmakers have used the classic story of Romeo and Juliet as the theme for their works. If you were to write a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, what would make yours stand apart from these others?
    Pretty hot question for eighth graders, if you ask me, but I was excited by it, too, because I liked when teachers asked hard questions. It’s safe to say that when all other students in the class said “Ugghhh!” it was an assignment I was going to enjoy. But this time, there was a problem. I couldn’t picture Romeo and Juliet without picturing Charlie and me.
    Part of me was repulsed by the thought. Dad had just told me, the year before, about Mom’s old job at Joe’s and had made it clear that Charlie Kahn was off-limits to me as a boyfriend. (Though to give him credit, he did it in a nice way and was nothing like Lord Capulet. I think his closing words were: “I hope you understand I’m saying this because I love you.”) The other part of me was excited. Charlie was such a strange sort of attractive, it was hard to explain—I felt a mix of wanting to kill him and wanting to kiss him at the same time. When I thought of what true love must be like, I figured it must be a mix like this, and not the stupid eighth-grade infatuation most girls my age felt. True love includes equal parts good and bad, but true love sticks around and doesn’t run off to Vegas with a podiatrist. Anyway, somehow, in my weird, mixed-up brain, Charlie was Romeo and I was Juliet. I wrote my essay about how in my version, Romeo was a total slob and Juliet was a tomboy, and they decided that the fake suicide was excessively dramatic, and instead, ran off to live in the forests beyond Verona. When Charlie asked me what my essay was about at the bus stop the next morning while he picked some old blue-trail dog crap out of the tread of his shoe, I told him it was about Shakespeare, and he made a yuck face before I had to go any further.
    That winter, we fidgeted a lot because we were too old to do the stuff we used to do, like play card games in the tree house, and too young to do anything interesting. Charlie went hunting with his dad on the weekends, which was the only thing they ever did together, and I felt happy for him. The only tradition Dad and I had at that point was Friday-night pizza from Santo’s.
    When the forest sprouted in between our houses, and the brambles grew new bright green leaves, we took to spring-cleaning the tree house and Charlie started to talk about building The Amazing Deck. Charlie had found a book in the library about tree houses—real ones, like real houses all over the world built around trees. He said that he wanted to rip down the house he’d already built but his dad wouldn’t let him, so he planned to add The Amazing Deck. He worked with the shop teacher to figure out how to support the thing, and they drew a plan together.
    The first Saturday it was warm enough, he walked in circles around the base of the tree with a calculator and a cheat sheet of geometry equations. He’d stop and scribble some numbers down on a small spiral notepad and then measure again, and say something like “Better safe than sorry.”
    After that, he furiously wrote cut lists. All mitered cuts because, he announced, The Amazing Deck would be octagonal. Because with Charlie, nothing was ever easy. Everything was windswept and octagonal and finger-combed. Everything was difficult and odd, and the theme songs all had minor chords.
    I helped him build the deck every day after school, but my