William's Midsummer Dreams Read online

  And then yesterday he gave Aunt Fiona some chrisansomoms some crysanthamums (can’t spell them). Anyway, those big yellow flowers, and told her he bought them for her at the florist’s with some money he earned by pulling weeds in Mrs. Howard’s garden. But Mrs. Howard told me that Buddy picked the chris (whatevers) in her garden all right, without asking permission, and if he pulled some weeds she was glad, but nobody told him to, or paid him for doing it. So you see how it is, and why I’m still very worried about him.

  Jancy

  The letter made William feel guilty. Guilty because he found it so difficult to get his mind away from his great dress rehearsal and down to writing an answer. And also because when he read over what Buddy had done, he found it hard to take it as seriously as Jancy obviously thought he should. In fact, he couldn’t help grinning a little when he pictured Buddy trying to look innocent as he slipped string beans, one by one, under the table and into Tiger.

  But he didn’t say so. Actually, he didn’t say much. He just wrote a very short note, saying he thought it was swell that they were all going to be able to come for closing night, and that he could see why she was worried about Buddy. That was about all he had to say, except he added in a P.S. that he didn’t think he could spell those big yellow flowers either. Of course there was that big dictionary on his desk, but he just wasn’t in the mood to worry about how to spell an ordinary garden flower.

  The next day there were only special rehearsals of some scenes that Mr. Andre thought needed extra work, and none of them were William’s, so he more or less had the day off. But he went to the greenroom anyway, because there wasn’t anything else to do. And because it was fun talking to people who happened to come in. Like Miss Scott, for instance.

  William was sitting at one of the tables when she came in, and he didn’t see her until she came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. When he turned around she gave him a big smile and said, “I’m so pleased, William. You were marvelous. Even better than I expected.”

  William didn’t think he was the blushing type, but his face did get kind of hot, and for a minute he couldn’t think of anything to say. Then he grinned and said, “Good typecasting, I guess. Guess I’m just the not-exactly-human type. You know, Ariel first and now Puck.”

  She patted his shoulder again and said, “Don’t you believe it. Wait a few years and we’ll be casting you as Romeo, or maybe Henry the Fifth.” She started to go away and then turned back to say, “Besides, don’t put yourself down for being out of the ordinary. I think this world could use a few more original, outside-the-mold types.”

  She went away then, and William went back to saying thanks to people who came in and said things like, “Nice going, kid,” and “You’re going to kill ’em, Puckster.”

  When the greenroom door opened again and Bernard came in, William caught his breath. Before he could look away, Bernard gave him what almost looked like a smile, and said, “Congratulations, William. Good job.”

  He couldn’t believe it! Congratulations, and good job? From Bernard? William was so surprised his mouth must have hung open for a few seconds before anything came out. But he finally managed, “Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

  Bernard didn’t stay long, but he left William wondering. Wondering why a guy who had almost always been rude would suddenly change to being almost friendly to someone he knew had accused him of stealing and trying to cause a serious accident.

  Sitting there in the greenroom, in between chatting with people who wanted to tell him how well he’d done last night, William went on wondering exactly what Clarice had told Bernard. Did she make him think she and William were waiting to see what he might do next before they told on him? Or else did she threaten him with something that scared him so much he decided to reform? Because exactly what she’d said, and how she said it, might explain why Bernard suddenly seemed to be a normal person, or at least someone who could act like one.

  The more he thought about it the more anxious William became to talk to Clarice and find out exactly what she’d said to Bernard. But as it happened, Clarice’s Cobweb scene, the one with all of Titania’s fairies, was one that needed some extra rehearsals that morning. So the only way William was able to see her was from the wings as she flitted around the stage with the other fairies. He was still waiting for a chance to talk to her when one of the stagehands rushed up and said that Mr. Andre was looking for him.

  William couldn’t imagine why, since he’d been told that he didn’t need to report that day. But he soon found out. In the greenroom, the first thing he saw—and heard—was little old Jerry, the changeling, who was sitting on the floor in the middle of the room, screaming his head off. Around him in a circle were Mr. Andre, Miss Scott, Jerry’s mother, and two or three other frantic-looking people. Jerry, who had been given the role of Titania’s changeling because he looked so angelic, had spells of acting pretty devilish, and more than once before William had been the only one who could talk him out of whatever he was doing. Mr. Andre said it was another of William’s exceptional talents. So now they were counting on him to do it again.

  He’d been watching for more than a minute before anyone noticed that he was there, but when Mr. Andre did, he motioned for William to come over. The director’s lips were tight and thin, and his bushy eyebrows were practically standing on end as he pulled William aside and whispered, “That little monster is having another tantrum. I’d dump him for sure, but it seems his understudy has the mumps. Can you talk to him? Think you could get to him to listen to reason?”

  William said, “Gee, Mr. Andre. I don’t know if I can. But I’ll try.”

  The kid seemed pretty wound up. But then William remembered something he’d seen Jancy do when Buddy was having a fit about something. So he went over and sat down right in front of Jerry, leaned forward, crossed his eyes, pushed up the end of his nose, and let his tongue loll sideways out of his mouth. Jancy called it making a gargoyle face, and sometimes it worked for Buddy. Sure enough, after a couple of minutes Jerry stopped screaming, gulped, and demanded, “Why are you doing that?”

  And William grinned and said, “Doing what? I wasn’t doing anything.”

  When Jerry started to scream again, William made another horrible face, and before long Jerry stopped to watch. After this happened once or twice more, Jerry wiped the tears off his face, got to his feet, and making a wide circle around William, went over to Miss Scott. When she put out her hand, he took it and let her lead him out the door. And a few minutes later, when it was his turn to be onstage, he wiped his face again and did what he was supposed to.

  Watching from the wings, Mr. Andre turned to William and said, “Well, young man, you do have a lot of tricks up your sleeve. Where did you learn that one?”

  When William said he’d learned it from his sister, Mr. Andre smiled and nodded. “I see. You obviously come from an unusually talented family.”

  William only grinned and said, “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” and went back to looking for Clarice.

  She wasn’t in the greenroom or anywhere backstage. It wasn’t until he’d almost given up and was on his way to the cafeteria that he saw her up ahead of him. He managed to catch up just as she was going through the door.

  “Hey, Clarice,” he called, and she stopped, turned back, and waited. She had a different look. Like she had on some leftover stage makeup, maybe? But there was more to it than that. Something about the tight-lipped, narrow-eyed way she was looking at him?

  “What do you want?” Her tone of voice had changed too. He had expected—what? He wasn’t sure.

  “I have to talk to you.” He looked around to be sure no one was going to overhear. The other fairies she’d been walking with had gone on into the cafeteria. “I want to know what you told Bernard, and what he said. You know—the promptbook thing, and the bacon grease? Did he admit it?”

  Clarice’s strangely blank stare continued as she said, “Well, sort of, I guess. We haven’t finished discussin
g it. What do you want to know?”

  “Well, what he said, and how he acted when you told him. Because I can’t figure him out. He’s, I don’t know—not the same. He’s acting different.”

  Clarice nodded. “I know. He is different. We’re talking about it.” Then she whirled around and went on into the cafeteria. And left William just standing there thinking and wondering.

  Obviously he’d done something that hurt Clarice’s feelings a lot. He couldn’t imagine what it could have been, but then if Jancy was right about Clarice being in love with him, that might explain it. From what he’d heard and read about people who were in love, it seemed that they were often kind of touchy about how the person they loved ought to be treating them.

  That’s probably it, he told himself. I probably did something stupid without meaning to, and if she would just tell me what it was I would say I was sorry and try not to do it again. He was still trying to figure out what it might have been as he went on down the path to the cafeteria, went in, and sat down where he didn’t have to look toward Clarice and she didn’t have to look at him.

  CHAPTER

  17

  The next night William got out his secret journal and did some writing. It had been quite a while since his last entry. When he’d brought his journal with him to Mannsville, he thought he’d be writing in it every night, but it hadn’t turned out that way. He wasn’t exactly sure why. Of course, part of it was that he’d had too much else to do. But there was more to it than that.

  One of the reasons he used to need to write so often when he was still a Baggett was that there had been so much that he needed to put down on paper, in order to get it off his back. It sometimes helped quite a bit. After putting a bunch of the worst stuff down in pen and ink, it was kind of like he’d written it out of his system and he could quit stewing about it. But now, on this particular night, it was more like writing something down in order to understand it—to figure it out.

  Some of it, the part he was looking forward to thinking about, was opening night. The fact that very soon he would be going onstage in front of hundreds of people, some of whom would have come from many miles away to attend the famous Mannsville Shakespeare Festival. An audience that would include a lot of critics and reviewers who would write about what they liked and didn’t like about this year’s production. And the stuff they wrote would then be printed in newspapers all over the state. Maybe even all over the country. Dealing with the fact of opening night was a little nervous making, but at this point mostly just exciting.

  But then there was Bernard. The Bernard thing wasn’t nearly as pleasant to think about as opening night, but somehow it felt more urgent. Like something that had to be dealt with right away. He didn’t know why, except that it would certainly be a relief to be able to believe that Bernard really had changed and would no longer be one more thing to worry about, on opening night or on any of the other nights when William would be too busy being Puck to remember to be on his guard. So, as it turned out, William began his journal entry that night by writing about Bernard Olson. Climbing into bed, he propped himself up with two pillows and began:

  Well, here I am again writing about something I can’t seem to get a handle on, but this time it’s a person. This time it’s this kid—well, a pretty big kid, who has it in for me because he thought he was for sure going to get to be Puck in the Mannsville Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I got the role instead. So this guy started being very stiff and cold when we happened to meet, and wound up doing things like stealing my promptbook and tearing it up, and putting bacon grease on the rope I use to swing onstage. Which messed up my run-through performance and could have broken my neck.

  But then I made the mistake of telling Clarice about it. A really bad mistake, because she decided to tell Bernard that we knew what he’d done. I told her not to, but she did it anyhow. And now, big surprise—Bernard is suddenly acting kind of friendly. I suppose it might be that he’s trying to make us think he’s sorry for what he did, so we won’t tell on him. Like, we might tell Mr. Andre what he did? Except he’s probably smart enough to figure out that I haven’t any way to prove anything, and people probably would think I just accused him so I didn’t have to admit the whole thing just happened because I was showing off or something.

  At that point he stopped, remembering how Miss Scott used to say that people who were interested in acting should try to do a lot of their journal writing in the form of dialogue, and then read it over out loud, acting out the parts of the different characters. So when he picked up his pen again, what he started to write was a dialogue between himself and Clarice Ogden. The way it started was:

  One day a guy named William happened to meet a girl he knew—or at least thought he did.

  William stopped writing again, wondering if he ought to add something about the fact that this girl was, or at least had been, in love with him. He decided against it.

  That is, he knew who she was and everything, but he didn’t ever know what she was going to do next.

  William: Hi, Clarice. I want to talk to you.

  Clarice: (coldly) Why? What do you want to know?

  William: I want to know exactly what you said to Bernard. Because something about him has changed. That’s what I want to talk about.

  Clarice: (even colder) Okay. Bernard and I are still talking about it. And things have changed. And that’s all I have to say about that.

  That wasn’t word for word the way it had gone, but it was more or less what it meant. So he read it over, making his voice sound as distant and cold as Clarice’s had been, and then kind of eagerly interested when he was reading his own part.

  He did a good job of it, looking, even feeling, kind of unfriendly and mysteriously secretive when he was being Clarice. But it didn’t turn out to be very useful. That is, it didn’t prove anything, or even make it easier to understand. Finally he went back to thinking about how great the dress rehearsal had been, and wondering if opening night was going to be that easy—and fun. When he finally turned off the light, he slept all right at first, but then things started happening. Things that seemed too real and vivid to be a dream or even a nightmare.

  He was standing in his usual spot in the left wing in his Puck costume, waiting for his prompt, when he looked back and saw a huge, shapeless blob oozing out of the shadows and coming right toward him. He tried to back away, but the blurred image kept getting bigger. As it came closer, he could see huge, billowy arms that seemed to reach out and flow around him. And then, up at the top, an almost human face began to form, a face with mean little eyes and a cruel, sneering grin. Like Rudy’s maybe, or one of the twins.

  Waking up with a start, William sat straight up and turned on his bedside lamp. Nothing there. No shadows except the ones that came from yesterday’s pants and shirt hanging over the back of a chair, and the fainter moving ones that came from the wind-blown curtains. No dark, looming shadows, and no Baggetts! But it was quite a while before his heartbeat slowed down to normal. Turning off the light, he lay back down and pulled the covers over his head.

  By the next morning, the morning of opening night, William’s mood definitely was having its ups and downs. Or, more accurately, its downs and up, since it certainly started with a downer. It all began as soon as William S. Hardison’s eyes began to open, and his half-awake mind suggested that he’d better just go back to sleep, because it wasn’t ready to face up to what was about to happen. And what he did next didn’t help.

  What he did was to stagger out of bed, still half asleep, and cross the room to end up in front of the dresser. He was getting out some underpants when he happened to look at himself in the mirror. To stare at his thin, pointy-chinned face, and his no-particular-colored hair, which at the moment was kind of standing on end, as if he’d just been scared half to death.

  What he was looking at was the face of a kid who had been born, not only a “good-for-nothing” Baggett, but also a scrawny, unders
ized one. And who had the nerve to think that he was about to go on a big stage, in front of hundreds of important people, and make them believe that he was a magical not-quite-human creature known as Robin Goodfellow, or sometimes Puck, a famous character created by William Shakespeare, the greatest writer who ever lived.

  He leaned closer, hoping to see—he didn’t know what. Maybe hoping to see something he’d been missing. Miss Scott said his face was wonderfully expressive, whatever that meant, and once Clarice said he had great eyes. Actually, what she’d said was that he had gorgeous eyes. And it had been Mr. Turner, his dresser and makeup artist, who said he had great cheekbones and an electric smile. But at the moment all he saw when he looked at his face was a skinny, scared-to-death kid.

  The fear lasted until he arrived at the cafeteria and sat down with his pancakes and scrambled eggs, and some other members of the cast joined him. Tom/Bottom was one of them, and another was Virginia/Titania, both special friends of his, but there were several others, too. Everyone was talking about how big the audience would be and what important people might be there, but most of them talked to William, too, and said he shouldn’t be nervous because he was going to be a big success. They said things like what a natural he was, and how great he’d been in the dress rehearsal, and how everyone thought he was going to steal the show.

  By the time breakfast was over, he was feeling a little better. A lot better, really. At least for the time being.

  CHAPTER

  18

  The rest of that long day—the day that would end with opening night of the Mannsville Shakespeare Festival’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream—was an emotional yo-yo for William. Excited anticipation one minute, and absolute panic the next. Panic that came when he let himself imagine stepping out onto the stage and being too stiff with fright to reach for and find the roguish, cocksure creature that Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote about Puck in his midsummer dream play.