William's Midsummer Dreams Read online

  But what William told Jancy was, “Well, what I said to Sergeant Blanding was that I didn’t see the point, because they were probably halfway back to Crownfield by then. And since I’d be leaving Mannsville tomorrow, they wouldn’t have any reason to come back. Not ever. That is …” He grinned at Jancy. “That is, unless seeing one performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream turned them both into Shakespeare lovers.”

  She grinned back at him. “Not likely,” she said.

  “That’s what I told the sergeant,” William said. “When I said it wasn’t likely they’d ever show up here again, he kind of agreed with me. So he said that as soon as he took Buddy back to Aunt Fiona, he’d make sure they weren’t still around, and that would be the end of it. So I just went to the cast party, and after a little while Sergeant Blanding came back to get me and took me right to the door of the dormitory.”

  “But when he came to get you, didn’t he tell the rest of the people at the party about the Baggetts and what they did to you?” Jancy asked.

  “No, he surely didn’t. I didn’t tell him not to, but he seemed to know I didn’t want him to. When he came back, he just told them he thought there’d been enough party time for someone my age. They kidded him about how he was acting like a daddy instead of a cop, but Miss Scott agreed with him. She said that either Mr. Turner had lightened the color of my greasepaint, or I was a little off-color. She said she thought it was because I needed a rest.”

  Jancy nodded. “That sounds like what Miss Scott would say. But it seems to me—”

  William interrupted her. “But what I want to know is what Buddy told you and Aunt Fiona about what happened. It must have scared her half to death when he told her about the Baggetts showing up in my dressing room, and what they did to me.”

  Jancy’s eyes widened. “You know what? He didn’t say a word about it. He just said we took so long in the ladies’ room he got tired of waiting, and there were so many people around he got himself lost. That’s all he said. I wonder why.”

  William shook his head. “Gee, I don’t know. Sergeant Blanding must have told him not to tell about the Baggetts because it would scare you and Aunt Fiona too much. But what I don’t get is why Buddy did what he was told—for once in his life.”

  “I know.” Jancy nodded. “It sure isn’t like him. Except that …”

  “Except what?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly,” Jancy said. “Except that Sergeant Blanding really made a big impression on him. All he talked about while we were putting him to bed last night was how big and strong the sergeant is. He kept saying the sergeant must be the goodest strong guy in the whole world. Not the strongest good guy. The goodest strong guy.”

  William laughed. “Maybe it just dawned on him that you can be a good guy even if you’re strong as a horse.”

  Jancy sighed. “Well, it’s about time he learned that.”

  They grinned at each other, but then she sighed again. “But what I’m still worrying about is, what will happen if the Baggetts decide to come after you again in Gold Beach? They might, you know. I guess they still think you’re a millionaire.” She scratched her head, making her hair into a curly halo. “Maybe we can have the Ogdens write them a letter explaining how come you’re not rich and how they’re going to get nothing but a whole lot of trouble if they show up in Gold Beach again.”

  William didn’t think that was a great idea. “Look,” he told Jancy. “Clarice has probably told her parents about whatever it was I did that made her so mad at me. So probably they’re mad at me too.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jancy said. “After all, they’re lawyers, and lawyers don’t like it when people do unlawful stuff like Rudy and Gary were trying to do. So they’ll probably want to help, even if Clarice doesn’t.” Jancy’s eyes suddenly widened. Her voice got even lower. “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I talked to Clarice last night. In the ladies’ room. And I think I know what you did that made her mad at you.”

  “You do? Well, I’d sure like to know. Tell me.”

  Jancy cocked her head. “Well, it wasn’t so much what you did to her. She said you did something to someone else, though. Someone she liked a lot, I guess. His name is—”

  A lightbulb went off in William’s head. “Let me guess,” he interrupted. “His name is Bernard?”

  “Oh, you know? You already knew about him then? What did you do to him?”

  William grinned. “Nothing, really. Except he wanted to be Puck and I got the part. But what I don’t get is what changed. Before Clarice stopped speaking to me, she was saying that what we ought to do was tell on Bernard and get him in trouble because of what he’d done to me.”

  “To you? What did he do to you?”

  “Oh, nothing much. Just tore up my promptbook and greased that vine I used to swing onstage, so I slid down and almost broke my ankle. And you know something else? The very last thing Clarice said, before she stopped talking to me, was that she’d told Bernard that we knew what he’d done. And right after that, she stopped speaking to me. What I can’t figure out is what happened in between.”

  “Hmm,” Jancy said. “Maybe I can. I’m going to work on it.”

  William laughed. “Swell. You do that. Because I’m not.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  It was right after breakfast, only a day or two after the Hardisons got back to Gold Beach, that William made his next journal entry.

  Well, here I am back in my room at 971 Eleanor Street, and in just a few days I’ll be starting my freshman year at Gold Beach High. I’ve been up to the school to register, and it doesn’t look too bad. I mean, it has some pretty nice buildings. I got to meet Mr. Cutler, who’s the principal, and a couple of other people. And Aunt Fiona says there are some really good teachers, for things like English and geometry. So it sounds kind of okay. No drama department, though, but you can’t have everything. Right?

  Anyway, in a year or two I might try to get a scholarship for a private boarding school that is especially for people who want to act. Miss Scott told me she’d be glad to write me a recommendation, and having been in a Mannsville production would help a lot.

  He stopped for a moment to think about that. And then he wrote: Other news? Oh yes. The Clarice thing.

  He put down his pen. There had been a lot of recent twists and turns in what you might call the Clarice story. So many that writing it all down would be like a murder mystery story, where there were so many mixed-up clues that the author kept forgetting which one of the characters he was going to murder. And what made it even more confusing was that in this particular mystery, a lot of the recent clues were secondhand—by way of Jancy. Because ever since the Hardisons got back to Gold Beach, Jancy and Clarice had been writing to each other.

  Jancy kept telling William she couldn’t let him see her letters from Clarice because she’d promised Clarice she absolutely, positively wouldn’t. So she didn’t. But that didn’t stop her from telling him what was in every one of them, down to the last word. For instance, how Clarice had written that as soon as she really got to know Bernard, she realized how unfair she and William had been to him.

  “Gee!” William said when Jancy told him that. “She said I was unfair to Bernard?”

  “Well,” Jancy said, “what Clarice says is that Bernard only put the bacon grease on your entry rope so it wouldn’t be so scratchy on your hands, and he didn’t know it would make you fall. And he also told her he wasn’t the one who tore up your little notebook. He said somebody did it who was mad at you for being an upstager. And the only reason those scraps were lying there under his jacket was because he had been collecting them to take home and see if he could paste them all back together.”

  When Jancy told him that, William slapped his forehead in amazement. “Sure he did,” he said. “Jancy. You’re telling me that Clarice fell for a bunch of lies like that?”

  “I know. It doesn’t seem possible,” Jancy said. “But she said she really did believe h
im. Well, what she actually wrote was that she really did believe him for a while, but maybe not anymore. Not lately.”

  “The thing is,” Jancy went on, “in her last letter she said that she guessed that what made her believe Bernard’s story in the first place was …” Jancy rolled her eyes, grinned, and clasped her hands over her heart. “It was because she was in love.”

  At first William didn’t get it at all. If Clarice was in love with him, like Jancy was always telling him, why would that make her believe Bernard’s lies? But all of a sudden he began to get it. “So,” he said, “you mean Clarice is in love with Bernard now?”

  Jancy began to nod, then stopped nodding and shook her head. “Not exactly. Not anymore, anyway. What she said in this last letter was that she was in love with Bernard for a while. But she’s not anymore.”

  William slapped his forehead even harder. “Wow!” he said. And then, grinning, he added, “So who’s she in love with now?” He thought he was making a joke, but Jancy’s answer was absolutely serious. “Well, his name is Alfred. His family just moved to Gardenia Street, and he has big muscles and curly hair.”

  William thought about that for a minute or two before he got up to go. “Oh. Well, okay. I guess I get it, at least sort of,” he said. But Jancy grabbed his arm and stopped him.

  She had a worried look on her face as she asked, “Are you sorry that Clarice doesn’t love you anymore?”

  William’s answer was, “No. Of course not. I never believed it anyway.” That’s what he told Jancy, but after he gave it some more thought, he decided that what he’d said wasn’t entirely true. Thinking a girl was in love with you was kind of interesting, but if it ever happened again, he hoped the person who loved him didn’t change her mind quite as often.

  So that was about where the Clarice story stood at present, and thinking it over, William decided not to even try to put the whole thing—or even any part of it—down in pen and ink. Learning to understand females, he decided, was another project, along with keeping Buddy from turning into a real Baggett, that he was going to have to work on right away. Like before school started, when he would probably be too busy.

  Putting his journal away, he went downstairs to see if he could find something less complicated than the female thing to begin with—like, for instance, finding Buddy and making sure he wasn’t picking the neighbors’ flowers, or beating up on their kids.

  Yes, he told himself, he really needed to think about Buddy. The thing was, after having a tendency to not take the Buddy problem too seriously when Jancy was writing to him about it, something had happened on the long drive home from Mannsville that made him reconsider. But of course he couldn’t discuss it with Jancy at the time. Not with all five Hardisons and a lot of luggage crammed into Aunt Fiona’s Dodge.

  Up until then he’d been shrugging it off by telling himself that Jancy was just a natural-born worrier, but that afternoon in the car, he happened to be thinking about the problem when he noticed Buddy drawing an imaginary line with his finger between his part of the backseat and Trixie’s. He had a Baggetty expression on his face as he drew the line and then, still scowling, he leaned over and said something in Trixie’s ear.

  When William asked Buddy what he’d just said to Trixie, he clamped his mouth shut and shook his head. But then Trixie said, “Ask me. Ask me, William.” And when he did, she said, “He said that if I put one single finger on his side of that line, he’d bite it off and throw it out the window. Didn’t you, Buddy? Didn’t you say that?” Buddy’s frown got even fiercer, but he didn’t deny it.

  That was what made William start to wonder if Jancy had been right all along. He decided right then he was going to have a serious discussion on the subject with Jancy, and maybe later with Aunt Fiona, too, as soon as possible.

  However, when they finally reached Gold Beach, there was so much to do, settling into his room again and getting unpacked, and getting used to being a part of the Hardison family of Gold Beach again, instead of the big-shot actor of the Mannsville Shakespeare Festival, that it was a few days before he remembered the talk he’d meant to have with Jancy about the Buddy problem.

  He wasn’t looking forward to it, but that particular afternoon Aunt Fiona had gone to the grocery store and had taken Buddy and Trixie with her, so it seemed like a good time.

  He went looking for Jancy and found her in the backyard, sitting under the oak tree, reading a book. When she looked up, he asked her what she was reading, and she said it was Huckleberry Finn.

  “Well,” he said, “I’d hate to interrupt Mark Twain, and I’m not in that big of a hurry to discuss it, but I guess we’d better talk about Buddy the Baggett. You know, like you kept writing about, when I was in Mannsville?”

  Jancy put her finger in her book to save her place and looked up at him. “Well, okay,” she said, nodding thoughtfully. “But you know what? I haven’t been worrying about that as much. Not lately. Not since we got home from Mannsville, anyway.”

  William was kind of surprised. Actually, it didn’t seem to him that Buddy had improved all that much. He still wasn’t eating his vegetables, and yesterday he’d punched out two different neighbor kids, one right after the other. So William reminded Jancy about the punched noses, not to mention how, just last night, he’d sassed Aunt Fiona when she told him to eat his peas.

  “Yes, I know,” Jancy said. “He’s still pretty awful. But something that happened in Mannsville made me realize that, bad as he is, we won’t ever need to worry about Buddy growing up to be an honest-to-goodness Baggett.”

  “Really.” William was once again thinking how hard it was to understand women, when he suddenly began to guess what had changed Jancy’s mind. “Oh, you mean because of how he saved my neck when Rudy and Gary were giving me a bad time?”

  “Yes, that’s part of it. That was a good thing. But I’m not just talking about being good. The important thing was how he did it.”

  “How he did it?” William asked. “What do you mean? All he did was go out and get Sergeant Blanding.”

  “Exactly,” Jancy said.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Yes.” Jancy was grinning. “That’s the important part. How Buddy did it! What did he do when Rudy and Gary showed up? Instead of just trying to fight them, which would have been good of him all right—but pretty dumb—he ran right out and got a policeman. Just think about that for a minute, William,” she went on. “Would any honest-to-goodness Baggett ever go looking for the police?”

  After he’d thought about it, William wasn’t too sure that solved the Buddy problem, but he was glad Jancy thought so.

  So he grinned at her and said, “Okay. You might be right.”

  A little later William went back to his room, thinking that his life had suddenly calmed down quite a bit. For one thing, Clarice didn’t seem to be his problem anymore, and for another, Jancy had stopped trying to get him all worked up about Buddy. Two big problems more or less solved, at least for the present. And there were still a few more days before school began. So right at the moment, he wasn’t as busy as usual, and there wasn’t even that much to worry about. Which meant, it suddenly occurred to him, that it just might be a good time for William S. Hardison, experienced Shakespearean actor, to start deciding what new role he might start rehearsing.

  But then came dinner, so it wasn’t until quite a bit later that he found time to go through his Doubleday’s Complete Works looking for a future role. It was a hot night, and he opened the window and stripped down to his undershorts before he began his search. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, with the big volume on a pillow on his lap, he started by checking out Twelfth Night.

  A lot of time had passed, and a lot had happened since he started reading about the Duke and Viola and Sir Toby Belch, but he remembered liking what he’d read. But when he went over the list of characters, or the Dramatis Personae, as Doubleday called it, he couldn’t find any character that a smallish—okay, slightly scrawny—not-quite-fou
rteen-year-old would be good typecasting for.

  After some thought he got off the bed and went to the mirror. Leaning close, he checked out his “gorgeous eyes,” “great cheekbones,” and “electric smile.” Of course, it had only been Clarice who’d said that about his eyes, right before she stopped talking to him and fell in love with Bernard. But that stuff about his cheekbones and smile had come from Mr. Turner, his dresser and makeup artist, who didn’t seem to be the type to say things and then change his mind.

  So far so good. But when he went on to raise his fists and flex his muscles in an Atlas pose, what he saw wasn’t as promising. After a minute he grinned ruefully and told himself that was another problem he’d have to work on.

  Back on the bed he began to check out a few of the other plays that were on Miss Scott’s reading list. He read through several Dramatis Personae, but he couldn’t find any other sprites or hobgoblins or even a half-grown gentleman.

  There was a clown in As You Like It. A clown could be made up and padded so you couldn’t tell much about what shape the person under the costume was in. So that was a possibility, but not a very good one, since gorgeous eyes and great cheekbones wouldn’t count for much. He went on flipping pages.

  It was on page 313 that he came across Romeo and Juliet. That stopped him for a while. He’d read parts of it before, and Miss Scott had discussed it in class. She’d said it was one of her favorites, and of course it was probably Shakespeare’s most famous play. Not that your less-than-average-size almost-fourteen-year-old would be good typecasting for a handsome, sword-fighting ladies’ man, but someday, who knows?