William's Midsummer Dreams Read online

  Putting a pompous, self-important look on his funny face, Tom Grant/Bottom held out an imaginary newspaper and pretended to read, “As always this year’s Mannsville’s Shakespeare was more or less entertaining, but what made this summer’s effort call for a real standing ovation was the kid who played Puck, who is obviously going to be the next Johnny Weissmuller.”

  William got the point. Way back when he used to go to the movies in Crownfield, he’d seen a lot of Tarzan movies, with an actor named Johnny Weissmuller swinging on the jungle vines, along with Cheetah, his pet chimpanzee.

  So now William grinned back and asked, “Or maybe the next Cheetah?” They all cracked up laughing, saying things like, “Good one, Hardison,” and “You tell him, Puckster.”

  By the time William went back to the dorm that night, he was feeling pretty good about himself. But later, in bed and trying to sleep, he began thinking again about Bernard and what he maybe, or probably, or pretty much for sure, had done. Thinking about what kind of a person would set a trap that might hurt somebody, even hurt them really bad, just because they’d been given a part he wanted and thought was his.

  It was all pretty frustrating. Insomnia had never bothered William. Lying in bed for hours without being able to go to sleep wasn’t something he’d done much of, not even when he was still a Baggett, freezing or roasting in a crummy attic. But now, thinking about Bernard’s dirty trick, and how there was no way he, William, was going to be able to do anything about it, was enough to make his eyes refuse to stay closed for more than a minute or two at a time.

  Because he was tired of staring at the ceiling, he got out of bed pretty early the next morning and made his way to the cafeteria, feeling groggy and bleary-eyed. And since there was no one there to talk to at that hour, it didn’t him take long to eat. Which meant he got to the theater quite a bit earlier than usual, and when he walked into the greenroom he discovered that there were only a few people there. And one of them was Clarice.

  Rats. In love with him or not, Clarice Ogden was not someone he was in any mood to cope with right at that moment. Curled up in one of the big easy chairs, she looked up when he came in, quickly got to her feet, and hurried toward him. William glanced around, hoping to locate someone else he just had to talk to immediately. No such luck.

  Clarice kept coming, and when she was practically standing on his toes she began to whisper. “Guess what. I found out something very important. Something you need to know.”

  “Oh yeah?” William said. “Like what?”

  She rolled her eyes, looking around the room suspiciously, as if she were afraid someone might be listening. “It’s about your notebook.”

  What immediately came to mind was that Clarice was referring to the leather-bound binder she’d sent him last fall. “Oh, that,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me. I guessed. There wasn’t any return address on the package, but I guessed you must have sent it.”

  For a moment she stared at him blank-eyed, before she started to shake her head. “No, no. I didn’t mean that notebook. I meant the little one you carried around in your pocket. The one you were looking for yesterday.”

  “Oh, you mean my promptbook? Okay, I got it now. You mean you know what happened to it?”

  “Yes, I do.” She nodded firmly. “It was Bernard. I think he tore it up.”

  “He tore it up?” William gasped. “What makes you think so?”

  Clarice was still nodding. “I’m pretty sure. You know that blue and gold Mannsville College sports jacket he wears sometimes? The one that he usually hangs down at the end of the coatroom? Well, when I was leaving last night I went in there to get my sweater, and I noticed two little scraps of paper down at the end of the room—right below Bernard’s jacket. And here they are.”

  Reaching in her pocket, Clarice fished around and brought out two small pieces of paper. “See. Look at this.”

  William looked. The scraps weren’t very big, but there was enough for him to be able to see that the handwriting was his. And the little sketch of a stick figure making a bow was a reminder of what he had to do in act 5 at the end of the play.

  “Yeah,” he said between clenched teeth. “That’s my promptbook. Part of it, anyway.”

  He wasn’t used to feeling angry. At least not the kind of anger that boiled up inside you and made you want to yell and punch something, or maybe even somebody. Somebody like that mean, sneaky, pickpocket Bernard Olson. But he felt that way now, and that must have been what caused him to say something that, only a second later, he knew was a huge mistake.

  What he said was, “So that’s what he did right before he tried to kill me.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  Tried to kill you?” Clarice was staring at him goggle-eyed. “What … ? When … ? What are you talking about?”

  “Shh.” William looked around to see if anyone else had heard. No one seemed to be listening. “I shouldn’t have said that,” he went on. “I don’t know for sure if he did it. I mean, not really.”

  “Did it? Did what?”

  “Well, it’s just that I think that yesterday someone put bacon grease on my rope. Someone climbed up and greased it right where I grab it when I swing off. And that’s why I slid down like that and made a mess of my entrance. And almost broke my ankle.”

  Clarice was wide-eyed, her hands over her mouth. After she’d gasped a few more times, she said, “You told them, didn’t you? I mean, Mr. Andre and all of them. You did, didn’t you?”

  “Well, no. I haven’t yet. I was going to, but then I thought, I don’t have any proof. By the time I went up to investigate, someone had already been there and wiped it pretty clean. But I could still smell it. The bacon, I mean. But by now the smell is probably pretty much gone too. I decided that if I started telling people, they’d just think I was trying to blame someone else for my own goof-up.”

  Clarice was still staring at him over her clasped hands. “But you have to,” she said. “You have to tell them, or he’ll just keep on trying to kill you.”

  “No!” William shook his head firmly. “I told you, I decided it wouldn’t do any good. I don’t have any proof, and he’d just deny everything. And it would only be my word against his.”

  “Then I’ll tell them.”

  “No. No. No.” Leaning closer, he whispered, “They wouldn’t believe you, either.” He was thinking about how everyone would react if Clarice started blaming Bernard for William’s accident. Bottom, Tom Grant that is, was still calling Clarice “Helena” because he thought she was crazy about William—like Helena was about Demetrius in the play. So everyone would just think she was trying to prove the accident wasn’t his fault because she was in love with him. They wouldn’t believe her any more than they’d believe William himself. But he wasn’t going to bring that up at the moment. So all he could do was shake his head and keep repeating, “They wouldn’t believe you. So don’t do it. Please don’t. Please!”

  Clarice’s eyes had narrowed to angry slits as she said, “Okay. I won’t tell Mr. Andre, or Miss Scott, but I am going to tell someone.” She put her hands on her hips. “You know who? Well, I’m going to tell Mr. Bernard Olson himself. I’ll tell him that we know what he’s been doing, and he’d better stop it. Or else!” And before William could stop her, she had whirled around and stomped out the door.

  William looked around the greenroom. There still wasn’t a large crowd, and no one seemed to be watching him. No one, that is, except Tom Grant, who was grinning at William and raising his bushy eyebrows in a kind of teasing way, probably getting ready to say some Shakespeare quote about a lovers’ quarrel.

  William turned his back on Tom and strolled over to the call-board, in what was supposed to be a relaxed, unconcerned way. But if Tom, or anybody else who might be watching at that moment, thought William looked the least bit relaxed, it was just one more proof that he, William S. Hardison, was a natural-born actor. Standing in front of the call-board and pretending to calmly read
the notices, what he was really thinking was, That does it. Now everything is going to fall apart. Clarice is going to find Bernard and tell him that she—that she and I—think that he stole my promptbook and tore it up, and tried to kill me by putting grease on my entry rope. And then he, Bernard, will … he will … do what?

  For a minute or two that was as far as his thinking went. What would Bernard do after Clarice told him? Would he go to Mr. Andre and tell him that Clarice and William were trying to blame William’s accident on him just because they didn’t like him?

  It took only a minute for William to decide that no, probably Bernard wouldn’t do that. Because when Mr. Andre wanted to know exactly what they were saying about him, Bernard would have to tell him, wouldn’t he? And then Mr. Andre would probably feel it was something he had to look into a little more carefully. Like maybe hiring a professional detective who had ways to tell if bacon grease had been on a rope, even after it had been carefully wiped away. No, William decided, if he had any sense at all, Bernard probably wouldn’t tell anyone just what he was being accused of. So what else could he do?

  While he was still standing there, pretending to read things on the call-board and thinking about what Bernard might do, William finally came to the conclusion that Bernard just might not do anything at all. He might feel that it would be too risky for him to tell anybody about what Clarice had accused him of. So maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t such a dangerous situation after all, because another possibility was that when Bernard found out that William and Clarice were onto him, he might not have the nerve to try anything else.

  It wasn’t until he’d gotten that far in his thinking that William actually did start to read the notices on the bulletin board, and found out that there was to be a cast meeting in about twenty minutes. A very important meeting in which there would be a discussion about the first dress rehearsal, which was scheduled for the day after tomorrow, as well as a reminder that opening night was only a few days after that. A reminder important and exciting enough to make William forget all about Bernard, at least for the next few minutes.

  So William went to the cast meeting and learned that all the costumes were finished and that appointments had been made for final fittings, and that the stage crew were about to put together the last of the sets. And then, just as he was leaving, Mr. Andre called to William. “Hey, Hardison,” he said. “I want you to come with me right now and let me watch you do your flying entry one more time. And if there doesn’t seem to be any problem, some prop people will be put to work immediately turning your rope into a vine, and we’ll go ahead with it as planned.”

  William said, “Okay,” as if he really meant it, and this time he definitely wasn’t acting.

  Out on the stage Mr. Andre had some crew guys bring out a big thick pad and spread it out where William had crash-landed the day before. “Just in case,” he said. And then he stood there watching with his fierce eyebrows bunched together and his hands on his hips, while William climbed up to his takeoff spot and quickly tested for the smell or feel of bacon grease. Not a bit of either one.

  Then, feeling not at all nervous, he grabbed the rope, called, “Okay. Here I come,” and swung out and away. Swung out, twisting to one side and then the other to build up momentum, and then back again to land lightly center stage, and start strutting and cartwheeling and doing flips as he always did while he waited for the First Fairy to appear.

  Mr. Andre’s little white beard bobbed up and down as he nodded, clapped, and shouted, “Bravo! Well done.” Then he motioned to some stage crew guys who had been watching from the wings, and called, “Get that rope over to the prop people and tell them we’ll be expecting a convincingly leafy vine by tomorrow afternoon.”

  And also by tomorrow afternoon William had been assigned not only his own dressing room but also a dresser. A man named Mr. Leroy Turner, who taught things like costumes and makeup in the drama department at Mannsville College and who was, according to greenroom gossip, the best dresser you could hope for.

  “Shows how important the powers that be think you are in this production,” Tom Grant told William. “So appreciate him.”

  William said he would, but until that evening he didn’t know how much. After Mr. Turner finished with him, and William finally got to check himself out in a full-length mirror, he was astonished by what he saw. Dressed in a tight-fitting tunic that seemed to be made out of big green leaves, with his eyes lengthened and darkened, his eyebrows painted into sweeping arches, and with his elf ears reaching so far up past the top of his head they looked like antennas, he hardly recognized himself. He looked, not like Willy Baggett for sure, and not even like a sometimes shaky and uncertain William Hardison, but quite a bit like an unreal fairy-tale creature known, for some reason, as Robin Goodfellow, or sometimes just as Puck.

  “How do you like it?” Mr. Turner asked.

  “It’s great. I mean, I hardly recognize myself. You did a great job,” William said.

  Leroy Turner grinned. “You’re right. I did. But I had some good raw material to work with. You have great cheekbones, kid, and a smile that’s pure electricity.”

  William was still wondering about the electric smile thing as he was leaving the dressing room and heading for stage left. He was, that is, until someone poked him in the back, and he turned around to see an unfamiliar creature with a painted face, wearing a kind of tutu and a pair of gauzy wings that floated out behind her back. It took him a couple of seconds to realize he was looking at Clarice Ogden.

  “William?” she asked as if she weren’t quite sure.

  “Hi, Cobweb,” he said, grinning.

  She nodded, but she didn’t smile back. Instead her eyes narrowed into mascara-fringed slits as she said, “I told him. I really talked to Bernard. And I told him that we know all about what he did.”

  For the first few seconds after Clarice told him what she had done, William felt as if he’d been thumped in the chest. Thumped so hard the breath was pretty much knocked out of him, so the dress parade and the important dress rehearsal didn’t get off to a very relaxed start. At least not as far as William was concerned.

  So Bernard knew. Knew that William and Clarice had found out that he was the one who, not only stole and tore up an important little notebook, but also did something that might have caused a broken arm or leg, or even a neck. But what nobody knew was what he would decide to do next.

  On the one hand, you might think that knowing he’d been found out might make Bernard afraid to try any other tricks. But on the other hand, a person who’d had as much experience with natural-born bullies as William knew one when he saw one, even if his father was Dean of Performing Arts at Mannsville College. And he also knew that such a person, given the chance to do serious damage, usually just went ahead and did it—no matter what the consequences might be.

  Right at that moment, however, before there was time for William to do or say anything, the backstage lights flashed three times—the signal that the dress parade was about to begin.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Shoving not only Bernard the rope greaser, but also Clarice the blabbermouth, out of his mind, William hurried to get in place for the dress parade. All the actors circled around the stage, checking one another out and having fun reacting to everybody’s transformation into Shakespearean characters. Especially to Bottom, who had chosen to wear his donkey head as he paraded, and almost as much to Puck, with his arched eyebrows and antenna ears. But then there were three more flashes, and the stage cleared for the beginning of the dress rehearsal.

  So the curtain went up and dress rehearsal began—and went well for everybody. Especially William S. Hardison. William knew it before anyone told him so, and a lot of people did tell him. He knew it by the way that he had not only looked like, but also felt like, Puck whenever he was onstage. Felt like a mischievous, limber-legged show-off, as he pranced around reciting all the lines Shakespeare had given Puck to say, as well as adding all the extra sta
ge business that Mr. Andre had thought up for him to do. Not to mention making his fancy flying entrance in act 2, when he flipped and twirled like a trapeze artist, with not a bit of slippage. And afterward everyone, not only Miss Scott and all the cast but also a lot of backstage people—dressers, and set crews, and even one of the campus police officers, a huge man named Sergeant Blanding—came to his dressing room to tell him how well he’d done. It was all pretty exciting.

  When he finally got back to his room that night, there was another letter from Jancy. William sighed, shook his head, and tried to get his mind out of its excited whirlwind and down to what his sister had to say. This time the letter started out with some good news, but just like before it ended with a bunch of stuff about Buddy and the problems he’d been causing.

  Dear William, it began:

  I guess you must be really busy now that the play is about to start. Opening night is real soon, isn’t it? I think it must be a very exciting time for you. Please write and tell me all about it. I have some swell news. Aunt Fiona says that if she can afford to get the car’s brakes fixed, we, all four of us, will drive down to Mannsville to see you being Puck. She says it would be swell if we could stay for closing night so you could ride back home with us. Would you like that?

  Aunt Fiona is going to write to Miss Scott and ask her if she could find us a not-too-expensive place to stay for a couple of nights. Do you think she could?

  Now the not-so-good news. Buddy still is being a big problem. All the time!!! Last Thursday he let Tiger, you know, the Johnsons’ cocker spaniel, into the kitchen and put him under the table. And when Aunt Fiona put some string beans on Buddy’s plate, he sneaked them down to Tiger, one at a time when she wasn’t looking. I saw what he was doing, but I didn’t tell on him, but Trixie did. Aunt Fiona scolded him a little, but when she said she was going to punish him by not letting him have dessert he howled, and she went ahead and let him have some.