‘Ivy, dear!’ exclaimed a voice in front of her. It was Olivia’s mom.
Mrs Abbott gave Ivy a hug, and Mr Abbott grinned at her.
‘We’re so excited about tonight,’ Mrs Abbott said. She was wearing an elegant emerald dress with a silver clutch. ‘Olivia has been practising so hard!’
‘And she tells us you’ve been keeping everything running smoothly,’ said Mr Abbott, in a dark grey suit with a black tie.
Ivy smiled. ‘Thanks.’ The Abbotts always cheered her up. ‘I’ve got to run; curtain’s up soon.’
‘The obstacle is the path,’ Mr Abbott said and bowed to her.
Ivy instinctively bowed back then hurried up the steps.
Olivia peeked through the wing, stage right, careful to make sure no one in the audience could see her.
Jackson was standing on a holodeck control board above Garrick and making the goggly eyes of his costume bounce wildly. ‘And in this state she gallops night by night, through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love …’
He was giving the famous Queen Mab speech. It started out teasing Romeo about being in love but then turned into a rage against the alien–robot feud and how everyone was obsessed with all the wrong things.
The audience, including Mr Vega and her parents, were watching, enthralled.
Who would have thought Mercutio as a cyborg could make so much sense? Olivia thought. Jackson was so good, exaggerating just the right phrases to make the meaning clear. No one could have done Merc-X88 better, Olivia knew, but that didn’t stop her wishing that he’d been cast as Romeo instead.
As he danced off stage, on his way to the robots’ feast, the audience burst into applause. Olivia felt her pulse start to race. He was coming straight towards her and he had such an exhilarated smile on his face.
‘I was hoping to run into you,’ he whispered and pulled her away from the other actors leaving the stage, into the darkness of the curtains.
Olivia knew there was a brief scene with butler robots before she had to go on. Was it enough time to kiss him? ‘You were?’ she said, looking into his silver-coloured face.
‘Yes, I just wanted …’ Jackson trailed off.
‘Julietron!’ hissed Ivy from somewhere nearby. ‘Cue Julietron with the Capulets!’
Just one second, Olivia thought. Please!
But Jackson was already backing off. ‘You’re doing so great,’ he whispered. ‘Get back out there and knock ’em dead.’
Olivia wasn’t sure her heart could take any more almost-kisses. She knew she was supposed to be on stage, but it was time to take matters into her own hands. She was just going to kiss him – now or never.
She took a step forwards.
‘Olivia!’ Ivy’s voice stopped her in her tracks. ‘Your cue!’
‘Arg!’ Olivia said, peeling away from Jackson to rush on stage into a melee of metallic masks and actors jerking about like mechanical puppets.
The fates were against Romeo and Juliet, Olivia thought as she moved around to the thumping synthetic music, and they are determined not to let me kiss my boyfriend!
In every break during the rest of the performance, Olivia tried to find Jackson again, but the closest she came was a glimpse across the backstage area while she was rushing for a costume change. Operation Cyborg Smooching had failed.
Now, Olivia was lying as still as she could while Garrick twitched around the cryogenic tomb she was on top of, performing his last monologue in the scene where Romezog arrives to find Julietron apparently dead, not knowing that she has been injected with an internal cryogenesis solution that gives the appearance of death.
‘Death, that hath suck’d the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty,’ he was saying. Olivia was impressed by Garrick – he had only missed a line or two throughout the whole show. The audience was silent, and Olivia hoped they were feeling the building climax of the tragedy.
With each line Garrick spoke, she knew it came closer and closer to the end where she would have to kiss him – and there was nothing to convince her that it would be anything but the grossest moment of her life.
She would have to make sure she didn’t vomit in front of everyone.
Garrick climbed on to the tomb with her and accidentally whacked her in the face with one of his costume’s arms. Olivia struggled not to react; she was supposed to be in system malfunction mode.
‘Eyes, look your last!’ Garrick was building up to the end. ‘Arms, take your last embrace!’ With that, he whacked her again with an octopus arm.
He lay down beside her and drank a purple vial of Astrolaudanum. Garrick gasped and choked and hammed up his death for at least a minute too long, then went silent.
That was Olivia’s cue to wake up.
‘What’s here?’ she said. She was pretending it was Jackson that she was looking at, imagining what it might feel like if that was him. ‘A cup clos’d in my true love’s hand? Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.’
She reached up to the back of her head to turn herself off and when she slumped on top of Garrick, Olivia heard several people sniffling in the audience – they were crying!
She had to bite the inside of her cheeks not to smile broadly.
Of course, they don’t know what’s coming next, Olivia thought. This was not the end of their show. Camilla had written an extra scene where Olivia would have no choice but to kiss the beastly boy.
The lights turned red, green, blue and purple and the theatre filled with an electronic humming sound. On cue, Olivia and Garrick stood bolt upright as the audience gasped in astonishment. They knew this wasn’t how the story of Romeo and Juliet went. Camilla’s big rewrite was to have them come back to life after dying, to give them the happy ending Shakespeare denied them.