15
ALTHOUGH work on the play seemed to go along pretty well, I couldn’t shake the conviction that King Lear was going to get me into some kind of trouble. I had the kind of indistinct foreboding that, on a sunny day, warns a clamdigger on Bolotomy Bay that a storm is approaching.
It was a gloriously sunny day, an unseasonably warm day for December, almost a balmy day, when Spike walked home from school with me.
“Hey, Peter! Peter!” she called. “Wait up!” When she reached me, she was a little out of breath. “It’s such a nice day,” she declared, flinging her arms toward the sky. “What do you say I walk you home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Spike had never had much to say to me before, and I had had hopes that it might be possible for me to get through the entire fourth grade without coming within arm’s reach of her.
“Come on,” she said. “You and I can have a nice talk.” It sounded like a command to me, so I followed her. She walked off, singing “The rain it raineth every day.” When I caught up to her, she raised her arm and I thought she was going to knock me on the ear, but instead she flung her arm across my shoulder and gave me a friendly squeeze.
While we walked along, scraping our shoes on the sidewalk and chatting about this and that, I thought to myself, “Gee, this Spike is pretty nice. It just goes to show that you shouldn’t judge people by reputation or appearance.” I almost thought of sharing this observation with Spike, but when I tried putting it into words, it came out as, “You know, Spike, you’re not the rat that everybody thinks you are,” and so I decided to keep it to myself.
“Hey, Pete,” said Spike, knocking me on the shoulder, “a penny for your thoughts.”
“Huh?” I said.
“What’re you thinking about so hard? I bet you haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Oh, uh, nothing,” I said. “Just, uh, nothing.”
“‘Speak,’” she said, chewing her gum enthusiastically and giving me that big grin again.
“Nothing,” I said.
“‘Nothing?’” she said, widening the grin so that I could see the gum again and giving me a knock on the shoulder.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Hey! That’s great!” she said. “That was perfect. Maybe you ought to play Cordelia!”
“Huh?” I said. Then I realized what she was getting at. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “Act I, Scene I. Yeah. Very good.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ve been practicing. I think I’d be a pretty good Cordelia myself. What do you say?”
“Cordelia?” was what I said.
“Yeah,” said Spike. She poked me in the stomach with her forefinger. “I’m going to try out for the part—and I sure hope I get it.”
“I don’t know—” I began, without knowing how I was going to finish.
“Hey, listen,” she said suddenly. “I bet you haven’t seen the real King Lear, have you?”
“Uh, no,” I confessed. “Is it different?”
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