Free The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown Page B

the transformation of As You Like It comes through the love between Rosalind and Orlando. How can you live up to that? How can you possibly find a man in twenty-first-century America who would paper an entire forest with love poems to you?
    Well, Rose will tell you, you can’t.
    And if he did, he would probably also be rather creepy.
    But she can tell you this only after sixteen years—sixteen years !—of searching through the forest, of weeding out unsuitable suitors in some sort of romantic scavenger hunt: Emotionally unavailable? Check! Oedipus complex? Check! Stalker? Check! Inability to commit? Check! Inability NOT to commit? Check! It wasn’t until long into her dating career, when a particularly callous date had taken her to a production of the offending play that Rose had realized the trap of her name. Because of course, being Rosalind meant she would always be searching for her true love, but would require such extraordinary lengths to prove it that she would never find him, at least not outside of fiction.
    So she dumped the playdate and vowed to give up entirely, because it’s not as though her life was unsatisfying, she promised herself, and this is of course precisely when she met Jonathan, who was not the type of man to write poems and post them all over campus, but who was the type of man to agree to do that if that’s what she wanted, and she figured that wasn’t too shabby.

FOUR

    E ven if it hadn’t been summer, had been fall or spring or winter, if the campus had been alive with students and more than the skeleton crew of staff that kept the town on life support during the long, slow pull between graduation and orientation, there still wouldn’t have been anything to do at night. Maybe a concert by a visiting performer, or a misguided experimental piece in the black box theater would take you through to the anemic hour of nine or so, but then what? Bean had always been a night owl, had more than once been caught by Rose reading under her sheets with a flashlight when we were children and had fully embraced the ethos of the city that never slept.
    And now here she was back in Barnwell. Our parents had drifted toward sleep in stages, like a series in tableau, here doing the dishes, then sitting on the sofa reading, then their voices talking softly upstairs, and now silence. Rose had taken a long walk, and when she’d gotten back Bean had been nearly desperate enough to suggest a game of Spite & Malice, a card game we had played as children that was terrible with only two players but would have at least whiled away some time, worked her into sleep. But Rose had been grouchy and silent, so Bean had thought better of it and curled up on the sofa with a book until Rose, too, had stomped up the stairs, taking her ill will with her like Pooh’s little black rain cloud.
    “This would never happen in New York,” Bean told her book, a weepy novel she had discovered half-read in the pantry.
    The book remained, unsurprisingly, quiet.
    The whole drive home she had pictured her stay in Barnwell, imagining an ascetic, nun-like existence that would serve as spiritual penance for what she had done. She would wear drab colors and eat dry bread and her skin would take on the cinematic pallor of a glamorous invalid as she modestly turned down creature comforts. But the reality of that hair shirt was beginning to chafe already. It was Saturday night, for crying out loud. At this hour in the city, she would only just be getting ready to go out, and here she was seriously considering going to bed.
    “Ridiculous,” she told the book, and shut it firmly. There was gas in the car, and she had a few tens folded in her wallet, not that she was going to be buying her own drinks. Some lonely yokel would be more than happy to take care of that for her. She slipped up the stairs and into her room, opening the closet and flipping through her clothes until she found something acceptable—not good enough for New York by half,