Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls: Stage Fright Read Free Page A

presentation. Because I did not want to have to put on some old-timey clothes and stand up and give a speech about walking nine miles to get to the mercantile. No thanks.
    Then Mrs. Hunter said, “I thought since all of you have shown so much creativity this year in your essays and drawings on the issue of the environment and what we can do at home to think green, we might do something a little different than the other classes.”
    I leaned across my desk to look over at Rosemary, who sits down the row from me, separated only by Stuart Maxwell. Rosemary hunched over her desk to grin at me. I could tell she’d been thinking the same thing about the one-room schoolhouse. Rosemary had had even more reason than me to be afraid of the settler thing. She hates wearing dresses more than any girl in our class. And if we’d had to dress up in old-timey clothes, for sure Rosemary would have had to wear a skirt…a long one. That would have just about killed her.
    “For our presentation,” Mrs. Hunter continued from the stool where she always sits when she reads to us from a Madeleine L’Engle book (although now she’d moved on to The Hobbit , by someone else, which wasn’t nearly as good because so far there are no girl characters in it, although sometimes I pretend Bilbo Baggins is a girl, and his real name is Jill, as in Jildo), “I was thinking it would be nice for us to put on a play.”
    Everyone in class gasped. Then started chattering excitedly. You could tell right away that the whole class thought the idea of putting on a play was a really, really good one. A much better idea than Mrs. Danielson’s idea about giving a presentation on settlers.
    I was excited, too. I had never been in a play before. Well, except for a little baby play in the first grade in which I played the letter A , because my name started with the letter A. But that didn’t count. This would be a proper play, I was sure, in which I would have more lines than A is for apple…and for Allie !
    And hopefully I wouldn’t trip over my own feet as I came onto the stage, like I did in first grade, either.
    “Oooh, Mrs. Hunter,” Cheyenne cried, throwing her hand into the air, eagerly begging to be called on, as always. Rosemary called Cheyenne a suck-up, a word she’d learned from her older brothers. “Mrs. Hunter!”
    Mrs. Hunter looked over at Cheyenne. “Yes, Cheyenne?” she asked.
    Cheyenne put her arm down. “May I suggest Romeo and Juliet as the play we put on as a class?” she said. “It is a very moving drama written by a man named William Shakespeare about two teenagers who, even though they are very deeply in love, are kept cruelly apart by their families.”
    As Cheyenne said this, she turned her head a little and looked at Patrick Day, who was sitting next to Rosemary in the last row, drawing a picture of James Bond’s car with a periscope coming out of the roof, racing stripes down its sides, and fire coming out of the exhaust pipe.
    Rosemary and I exchanged horrified glances, and I saw Stuart Maxwell, who was sitting next to me, make a face, while on my other side, Joey Fields squirmed excitedly. I think he was the only person in the whole class, besides Cheyenne and M and D, who liked Cheyenne’s idea. Everyone else was totally disgusted.
    Shakespeare? Romeo and Juliet ? I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure there’s kissing in that.
    The thing is, a few months ago, Mrs. Hunter had made a rule that there was no kissing in fourth grade. Also, no “going with” people, or any kind of boyfriend-girlfriend stuff.
    The only person who’d been upset about that had been Cheyenne (and Joey Fields, who I think sort of secretly dreams about someday having a girlfriend).
    Now, I could tell Cheyenne was trying to find a way to get around Mrs. Hunter’s rule, by having us all put on a play with kissing in it. No doubt she wanted to play Juliet…
    …and she probably wanted Patrick Day, the boy with whom she wanted to run off to