Last Talking I gave you Alex and Robyn so I could do some dialogue. Today I'll show you a monologue with Ryan's second (he's the only character who gets monologues). This is from my play, Away, by the way. (that's fun to say aloud)
ACT TWO
SCENE ONE
The clearing. A crude, unfinished treehouse. RYAN approaches from the other side.
RYAN - There used to be woods behind our neighbourhood so that all the backyards on one side touched it. But about fifteen years ago they cut down a big section of it and built an elementary school and added a road. So it was still pretty new when we started going there. I didn't get to know Robyn, Jono and Alex until the summer before grade six. That was the summer the school burned down. The police said it was arson but they never caught whoever did it. Most people in town refused to believe someone had purposely burned it down. They said it was probably an accident. No one talks about it anymore. I guess it wasn't interesting like a pilot and his plane disappearing. It's funny what people remember and what they don't.
The property was never sold or if it was, the owner didn't do anything with it. Most of the wreckage was cleared out, anything that could be dangerous, and that was that. The road is still in use but there's a lot of trees that separate it from the main area and without the school, there's never much traffic on it. It's usually a pretty quiet place. The next summer all four of us were friends and we built the treehouse here. Alex had some wild ideas for it that never were realized. In the end, it was barely a treehouse, really. But we still used it a lot. It was like our clubhouse, a good place to hang out without being disturbed. When Alex got his telescope he started bringing it on clear nights and we would take turns gazing at the sky. Alex tried to teach us stuff about space and we tried to learn but we were never going to care about it the way he did. As we got older, we started coming less and less but still came to use the telescope on nights Alex said were ideal. We watched an eclipse of the moon once and would look at planets when they were visible. Alex knew all the constellations and would point them out.
I said I didn't know the others until the summer of the fire. Well, I did sort of know them but we didn't hang out together. That changed the night the school burned. I was walking home from another neighbourhood where I'd been playing street hockey. It was sunset and I was cutting through the woods on the far side of the school when I saw the flames. So of course I went to get a closer look. But before I even reached the edge of the trees Robyn came crashing through, running and tripping, her knees skinned and with twigs in her hair. She smelled like smoke. I tried to calm her down but she was really scared. Even though I told her the fire wouldn't spread to where we were. I wanted to go on and watch until the firetrucks came but she wouldn't come. So I walked her home. That's how we met. I started hanging out with her, Jono and Alex shortly after that. We never spoke about that night. Sometimes I wanted to bring it up to her but always stopped myself. I decided not to tell Jono or Alex and it's pretty clear she never did either. Even though Alex liked to sometimes point out that I was the latecomer to the group, neither he nor Jono ever really questioned how it was that I became friends with the rest of them. No one ever mentioned that it was just after the fire. It's funny what we choose to forget.
Exit RYAN
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