Girls Rule!

  After dinner the boys sat out on the front steps in the early June evening and watched the fireflies flitting about in the tall weeds between the road and the river.

  “It may not be as bad as we think,” Josh said, trying to find some good in the situation. “You know we’d miss the Malloys a little if they moved. Do you remember the time we howled outside their windows and scared them half to death?”

  Jake grinned. “And tapped on the water pipes in their basement to make them think the house was haunted?”

  “And the time we trapped Caroline in the cellar at Oldakers’ Bookstore?” Josh chuckled.

  “The fact is, they won’t be in the Bensons’ house, so why should we care if they stay or not? We’ll probably be busy with the Bensons and won’t see the girls at all. We’ll only read about them in the paper when they get married or something,” said Jake.

  “Yeah, and Caroline will move away before any of them, because she wants to live in New York City!” said Wally. “She wants to be on Broadway.” He was beginning to feel better, and so were his brothers. They stretched out on the steps and put their hands behind their heads, looking up at the night sky.

  “So how are we going to collect twenty dollars each before they do, that’s what I want to figure out,” said Jake.

  “Are we sure we want to do all that work?” asked Josh.

  “I’d like to ride on a float with a brass band following along behind,” said Wally.

  “Ha! Nobody promised we could ride on a float,” said Josh. “They just said that if we collected twenty dollars or more, we could be in the parade. They didn’t say we’d ride on anything. We could be assigned to walk behind a horse and sweep up manure, for all we know.”

  Wally’s eyes opened wide. “They wouldn’t !"

  “Well, somebody’s got to do it. They always have a few policemen on horseback at every parade, and there’s always someone following along behind with a broom and a bag. You know that,” Jake told him. “ ‘Earn twenty dollars and shovel up horse manure!’ How’s that for a reward?”

  “I don’t want to shovel horse manure! I want to eat strawberries!” said Peter.

  “Yeah, and how are you going to earn the money?” asked Josh.

  “I’m just going to stand downtown on a corner, hold out my collection can, and say, ‘Save a child! Save a child!’ “ Peter said. “No one can walk on by a boy who’s saying ‘Save a child.’ “

  Jake looked at his brothers and grinned. “He just might be right.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll sit outside the library and try to sell some of my sketches,” said Josh. “I don’t know if anyone will buy them or not.”

  “Maybe I’ll offer to mow lawns,” said Jake. “What are you going to do, Wally?”

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” Wally said.

  Five

  Onstage

  When Caroline got home from the library, she went straight out to the kitchen, where Beth and Eddie were setting the table for dinner.

  “The sky is falling,” she said.

  Mrs. Malloy turned from the stove, one hand on her hip. “Translation, Caroline?”

  “The Bensons are definitely coming back. I heard it from Wally.”

  “So what else is new? We were pretty sure they would,” said Eddie.

  “No, we weren’t. They kept saying that maybe Coach Benson would take a job down there in Georgia,” said Caroline.

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” said her mother. “This just means I’ve really got to start looking around at houses for rent in case we stay. Meanwhile, if we’re here for the summer, what do you girls have in mind? I don’t want you moping around with nothing to do.”

  “I signed up for the mystery book club at the library,” said Beth. “And Eddie’s playing summer baseball.” She turned to Caroline. “What about you?”

  “I just might have a job,” said Caroline. “I might go on performing at birthday parties all summer long. If I do, I can always say that I had my first acting job when I was nine years old.”

  “Oh, puh-leeze!” said Eddie, and clunked a handful of forks on the table.

  The following day when Caroline got home from school, her mother said, “Someone called about a birthday party, Caroline. They want you to act out a fairy tale on Friday after school. The number’s there by the phone.”

  Caroline clapped her hands excitedly, but then her face fell. “Only one call?” she asked. She had thought she’d get a dozen at least! Beth and Eddie rolled their eyes.

  “Once word gets around, Caroline, the phone will ring off the hook,” said Eddie.

  “Yeah. There’ll be a line halfway around the block, wanting to sign you up,” said Beth, opening the cupboard and reaching for the pretzels.

  Caroline cleared her throat and picked up the phone. She dialed the number. When a woman answered, she said, “This is the actress Caroline Lenore Malloy calling about my performance at your party.”

  Her sisters groaned.

  “Oh, yes,” said the woman on the line, sounding a little surprised. “We live right across the street from the college. We’d like you to act out a fairy tale for some six-year-old girls. Could you do ‘Hansel and Gretel’? It’s my daughter’s favorite.”

  “Of course,” said Caroline.

  “Friday at four-thirty,” the woman said, and gave her the address. “Will five dollars be about right?”

  “Yes, thank you. The money goes to the Hospital Building Fund, you know.”

  “Yes, that’s lovely,” said the woman.

  As soon as she hung up, Caroline raced upstairs. She went through her closet looking for everything she might use as a costume for her fairy tales—a long black skirt, a red jacket, a fur-trimmed parka, a velvet dress with a lace collar.

  She would have to be three different characters for this performance, she decided: Hansel, Gretel, and the witch. For Hansel’s part, she borrowed Eddie’s baseball cap; for Gretel, she chose a blue shawl to wear over her head. For the witch, she got down the pointed black hat she sometimes wore on Halloween.

  Then she wrote out the script as she would say it and made little check marks beside each point where she was supposed to put something different on her head. Oh, she was going to be wonderful! She hoped the woman would call the newspaper and ask a photographer to come over on the day of the party and take a picture of the performance for the front page.

  “Well,” Caroline told the boys the next day when they met the Hatfords at the end of the bridge. “I have my first job! I’m going to collect five dollars on Friday for performing at a birthday party.”

  “What are you going to perform?” asked Josh.

  ” ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ “ she said.

  “You’ll make a great witch,” said Wally.

  “That’s because I’m a great actress,” she said, and heard Wally sigh. “So how much money have you guys earned so far?”

  The boys didn’t answer.

  “Nothing!” Peter spoke up finally. “We haven’t earned anything yet.”

  After school on Friday, Caroline carefully packed a small bag with all the props she would need for her performance. Mrs. Malloy said she could put just a bit of blush on her cheeks and a thin smear of gloss on her lips to keep them moist. Caroline decided to wear black pants and shirt so she could more easily go from one character to another in her story. Finally, with the address in one hand and her bag in another, she set off for the birthday party. She had no trouble finding the house with the birthday balloons tied to the gate.

  It was a large old house with a wide front porch, where eight little girls were playing tag. Wearing ruffled dresses and socks, they raced around the wicker rocking chairs, leaped over small tables, jumped on the couch cushions, and ran in and out of the house, banging the screen door each time. One of the girls almost knocked Caroline over as she went up the front steps and rang the bell.

  An exhausted-looking woman answered. “Thank goodness you’re here,” she said. “The
girls are absolutely wild, they’re so excited. I’m getting the cake and ice cream ready, so I thought it would be helpful if you’d do your performance outside.”

  “Outside?” gasped Caroline.

  “Yes. The girls can sit on the grass, and you can use the porch as a stage, if you like. Unless you’d rather perform on the grass and let the girls sit on the steps.”

  What Caroline would have liked just then was to turn around and go home, but she reminded herself that actresses have to put up with all kinds of conditions. Why, actresses often performed before soldiers in the desert, or in theaters without heat or air-conditioning.

  “I…I guess I can do that,” she said. “But I’d rather do my performance on the porch and let the audience sit on the grass.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll just throw out a couple of picnic blankets and the girls can use those,” the woman said. She called to a little girl in a pink dress. “Marci, this is Caroline. Marci is the birthday girl.”

  “Happy birthday,” said Caroline.

  While the little girls gathered around Caroline and tried to see in her bag, the mother rounded up some blankets and told the girls the performance was about to begin.

  “Hey! Make a tent!” one of the girls cried as she grabbed a blanket, and immediately they draped the blankets over bushes and got down on their knees to crawl beneath them. Then they stood up again, and half the girls got under one blanket while half got under the other, and they ran blindly around the lawn, bumping into each other and collapsing in laughter.

  Caroline knew she would have to work fast to get their attention, so she put the baseball cap on her head and called, “Gretel! Gretel! Let’s go for a walk.”

  The girls didn’t even hear, they were making so much noise.

  “Gretel!” Caroline called more loudly. “Let’s go for a walk!"

  One of the girls yanked off the blanket and pulled the other girls down beside her. “Hey!” she said. “Look at that girl wearing a baseball cap.”

  The rest of the girls looked toward the porch.

  “This is the story of Hansel and Gretel,” Caroline announced.

  “I already know that story,” someone yelled.

  “Yeah! Why don’t you do Star Wars or something?” said someone else.

  “Shhhhh,” said Marci. “It’s my birthday and I can choose anything I want.”

  “Right!” said Caroline. And then she said to the girls, “What’s unusual about this story is that I will take the part of three different characters. Please make yourselves comfortable and the story will begin.”

  One of the girls lay back and pretended to snore, and the others laughed. But finally they sat at attention, their hair hanging down in their faces, their dresses wrinkled.

  “Once upon a time,” Caroline began, “there were a little boy and a little girl who lived near the woods with their mother.”

  “Why are you wearing a baseball cap?” one of the girls shouted.

  How rude! Caroline thought. The audience was never supposed to interrupt! She had to be nice, however. “I’m Hansel,” she said.

  “You don’t look like a boy!” the girl answered, and the others giggled again.

  Caroline put one finger to her lips to suggest they be quiet. “Gretel! Gretel!” she called again. “Let’s go for a walk!” Quickly she took off the baseball cap and placed the shawl over her head. “All right,” she said, “but we’re not supposed to go in the deep, deep woods.”

  Then Caroline was Hansel once again. “We won’t. We’ll just pick some flowers and come right back,” she said, the baseball cap on her head once more. When she became Gretel again, Caroline hummed to herself and did a little flower-picking dance as she twirled down a path in the forest.

  Back and forth, back and forth, from the cap to the shawl, Caroline went, as Hansel and Gretel talked to each other, and the little girls out on the blankets laughed when she dropped the cap once in her hurry to get it on her head.

  They quieted down when Hansel and Gretel decided to go a little way into the deep woods after all, and were fascinated when Caroline took a cracker from her pocket and dropped crumbs along the edge of the porch to show how Hansel planned to find his way home again.

  Then came the arrival at the witch’s house, and as soon as Caroline put on the witch’s hat and made her voice all quavery, the girls watched intently. Caroline played it for all she was worth—the stooped posture, the trembly voice, the evil smile.

  “Don’t go in! Don’t go in!” one little girl called nervously as Hansel and Gretel started to enter the imaginary gingerbread house. Caroline’s chest swelled with pride to think she had captured the hearts of her audience.

  What other girl her age could perform outside, using a porch for a stage? What other girl could entertain eight noisy girls at a birthday party? What other…?

  Suddenly the witch’s words were drowned out by the roar of a lawn mower. No! thought Caroline. This can’t be happening!

  “We can’t hear you!” the birthday girl called.

  Caroline talked more loudly and the noise of the lawn mower seemed to be getting fainter and fainter.Then suddenly it must have turned around and headed back, for the noise grew louder, then louder still.

  Caroline carried on, but no sooner had the witch put Hansel in a cage than the lawn mower was almost right beside them, in a neighbor’s yard. And there was Jake Hatford, mowing the grass of the house next door.

  What was an actress to do? How could she make him stop until she was through with her performance? How could she do it without getting out of character?

  Well, here she was, playing the part of a little boy in a cage, with a witch wanting to fatten him up.

  “Help!” she screamed. The little girls stared as Caroline clutched the imaginary bars of the cage. “Help!” she yelled again.

  She saw Jake look around. She saw him stop. He stared at Caroline up on the porch and she yelled “Help!” a third time. Jake shut off the mower.

  “What’s the matter?” he called back.

  Caroline took Hansel’s cap off her head and put on the shawl in its place. Then, in a high, childlike voice she cried, “What’s the matter is that my brother, Hansel, is locked in a witch’s cage and she’s going to eat him up!"

  “Yeah!” yelled the birthday girl. “And we can’t hear with all that noise.”

  “Well, I’ve got a job mowing this yard,” said Jake.

  “Just wait till the story’s over,” a bigger girl called back.

  Jake rested his arms on the handle of the mower as Josh and Wally came around from the back, carrying a rake and a bag for the grass. They stopped and stared too. Now Caroline had a real audience.

  Bravely she continued the story while the Hatford boys grinned and whispered from the neighbor’s driveway. Two of the girls got restless and began wrestling out in the grass, pulling each other’s hair and pretending they were Hansel and Gretel.

  People just didn’t understand what actresses had to endure, Caroline thought bitterly. Not only did she have to perform outside with a lawn mower waiting for her to finish, but she had to perform all the parts herself.

  When it came time for Gretel to push the witch into the oven, and Caroline—in the witch’s hat—bent over to look inside it, one of the girls from the audience crept up on the porch and did it for her, giving Caroline such a push that she went sprawling on the floor. The Hatford boys bellowed with laughter.

  “Ding, dong, the witch is dead! The wicked witch is dead!” sang the girl, taking over the stage herself.

  Caroline picked herself up and faced the audience. “The end,” she said, all too happy to have the ordeal over.

  “Girls!” called the mother from indoors. “Do you want to come in for ice cream and cake?”

  Caroline could not get her props back in her bag fast enough, for she had been shamefully and cruelly treated. As the girls pushed by her to get inside, the woman came out on the porch and gave her a five-dollar bill.

>   “Would you like to come in for some refreshments?” the woman asked. “Perhaps you could tell the girls another story while they eat.”

  “No, thank you,” said Caroline. “I think we’ve all had quite enough for one day.”

  Six

  Two for a Dollar

  Jake was the first of the boys to earn money for the new wing of the hospital. He got ten dollars for mowing the lawn, and he gave Wally and Josh two dollars each for helping out. But although he went down the list of all the neighbors, and even the friends of neighbors, Jake couldn’t find anyone else who needed a lawn mowed. All the other students of Buckman Elementary were trying to earn money too. For every lawn in Buckman, there were two kids wanting to mow it.

  As for Wally, he couldn’t think of anything he liked to do that would earn him any money. He could think of a lot of things he didn’t like to do, but he didn’t want to do them unless he had to.

  “You could always be a shoeshine boy,” his dad told him on Saturday before he went to work. “There’s a shoeshine kit in my closet. Maybe if you took that downtown, someone would want his shoes shined.”

  It was an idea. It was better than washing windows or weeding gardens. Wally could only remember one time in his whole life when he had shined his shoes, and that was when his aunt Margaret had gotten married. He decided to go downtown with Josh and try his luck.

  Josh filled a box with paintings and drawings he hoped people would buy. He was probably the best artist in the whole school. Whenever a teacher wanted a mural for the hallway or a new picture for the bulletin board or a decoration for a party, it was Josh who was called on to help out.

  Peter said he would go downtown with his brothers. Each boy had gotten his clear plastic collection can from the bank. Each can had a slit in the top for money and could only be opened by the bank itself. BUCKMAN HOSPITAL FUND, it read on each can.

  It was a beautiful June morning in Buckman, made all the sweeter by the fact that there was only one more week of school. Wally always liked the last week of school. Most of the end-of-the-year tests were over, papers had been graded and handed back, and teachers often saved something special for those last few days.