Narrator.
That was all her script had said in place of a named role. It had taken Josh to point out to her that the narrator was Scout, all grown up and remembering. Dru had never read the book, or seen the film. She wasn't familiar with the culture, or even the world, from which the story had originated. But that didn't matter so much. The themes were universal. And for her, they hit home harder than she had ever thought would be possible.
Tirisano, her home, was as xenophobic as you could care to name. Anything from outside the borders, any person who hadn't been born and raised there, was viewed with suspicion and distrust. It was a part of their culture, and for a long time, she hadn't even questioned it. Not until she ran away from the home she had always known and found herself here, in a city that embraced all cultures and races. Things might not go smoothly all the time in Rhy'Din, but differences were tolerated with an easiness that might never come to pass in Tirisano.
She had worked hard with Maggie to get the accent just right, wanting people to recognize the link between the narrator and Scout without needing it to be pointed out to them as she had needed it. She'd watched as the Repertory company grew to inhabit their roles, to become the people from this classic piece of literature that taught a moral which should have been self-evident. Should have been.
She was moved by the narrative. By Scout's innocence, by Jem's struggle toward understanding, by Atticus' quiet strength in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. She was glad she had nothing to say at the end of the court case, for by the time Reverend Sykes spoke his line, she always found herself crying at the sheer injustice that had been done to an innocent man, simply because he was different.
But most of all, she was moved by Boo Radley, and every night, she struggled to keep her voice level as she spoke the last lines of the play. Because she, the heir to the Tirisano throne, saw herself in Boo Radley. Cut off from the world through no real fault of his own; treated differently, as an object of morbid fascination; made to be the face of the demons everyone held in their own hearts. It was not so very different from being what she was, held to a different standard and blamed when that standard failed.
Each night, as Maggie walked Josh across the stage and let him go through the door to the Radley house, Dru spoke over them, each word reverberating inside her with a twang that was almost painful.
"Boo was our neighbor. He gave us two soap dolls, a broken watch and chain, a pair of good-luck pennies, and our lives. But neighbors give in return. We never put back into the tree what we took out of it: we had given him nothing, and it made me sad.
"In my mind, the night faded. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk toward a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day's woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive. Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.
"Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him ..."
Boo's children needed him. Boo's children. Not his own flesh and blood, but the children he watched every day, the children he grew to love from a distance. Dru saw herself there, too. If Tirisano was Maycomb, and its princess was Boo Radley, then Boo's children were the people who lived within its borders. The people who were by turns afraid of, and hostile to, anything and anyone that was even a little bit different. They might pick her to pieces in the magazines, gossip about her on the streets, criticize and assign blame to her, but they needed her.
Dru's people needed her. They needed her to lead them out of their darker thoughts, away from the fear that painted the world outside their borders black. They needed her to be brave for them, and perhaps they would be brave because she was, too. Without her, there was no hope for Tirisano, no chance to step forward into the world that moved around them. She could give them that hope, she and Josh together; the next generation that would no longer allow their people to hide behind prejudice and fear. Boo's children needed him.
She would never have realized it had she not come to Rhy'Din. Though the Grangers were still a privileged sort of class in the mish-mash of cultures that made up Rhy'Din, they had given her a point of view she would never have found had she stayed at home. Without seeing the world from another point of view, she would never have proven to her people that she trusted them, by riding openly past the very same spot where her mother and uncle had been so horribly killed. Her people had needed her to be brave, and she had been, not just for them but for herself as well; a bravery she would never have discovered in herself without Josh's belief in her.
And that, too, was reflected in this astonishing work; in the last lines spoken before the lights went down, as the audience watched Atticus and Scout curled together to watch over Jem through the night to come.
"Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them.
"Just standing on the Radley porch was enough ..."