But she couldn’t say anything more. She had grown up with a mother who’d had one glorious season in summer-stock theater, playing every lead role in every play. Even though her mother was a lawyer now, Maisie remembered when she still tried to be an actress back in New York. She remembered her mother practicing lines for auditions, acting in showcases where agents went to try to find talent, taking roles in plays in tiny theaters off-off-off Broadway. Maisie used to be awed by her mother’s ability to memorize monologues and turn into a different person onstage, a murderer or a very old woman or once even an apple tree. But the thought of doing those things herself? In front of everyone at the Anne Hutchinson Elementary School? No way.
“—or you could be Betty or Ruth,” Hadley was saying. “They get to go into strange stupors, which is really cool.”
Hadley hung her tongue out one side of her mouth, crossed her eyes, and held her arms out zombie style to demonstrate.
“I don’t want to be in the stupid play!” Maisie said much more harshly than she intended.
Embarrassed, she walked away from Felix and Hadley as fast as she could and went into Mrs. Witherspoon’s classroom.
“What brings you here three minutes early, Miss Robbins?” Mrs. Witherspoon said, surprised.
“I’m sick of everybody talking about The Crucible,” Maisie said, slumping into her seat.
Mrs. Witherspoon leveled her stone gaze on Maisie.
“You would be wonderful as Abigail Williams,” Mrs. Witherspoon said in her dry voice. “Abigail Williams is smart, wily, and a very good liar.”
“Thanks a lot,” Maisie muttered under her breath.
“And,” Mrs. Witherspoon continued, “she is vindictive when crossed.”
“Vindictive?” Maisie asked, mildly curious.
“She likes to get even,” Mrs. Witherspoon explained. “For example, if Bitsy Beal were making her life miserable, Abigail would get even.”
Mrs. Witherspoon held Maisie’s stare until Maisie blinked first.
The second bell rang and everyone spilled into the classroom. But Mrs. Witherspoon did not look away from Maisie’s surprised face.
Earlier in the year, they’d had an assembly about peer pressure. The school nurse, Miss Patty, a round redhead with a slight southern twang, had stood on the stage in the auditorium and showed the school a movie on bullying with bad actors pretending to be middle school kids. Then she showed an animated movie in which cartoon hedgehogs got peer-pressured into doing things appropriate for other animals but not for hedgehogs, like swimming and flying.
Most of the kids had laughed or passed notes back and forth or even napped. Miss Patty’s pink face got pinker and pinker as she realized no one was really paying attention. Even though she wasn’t a real nurse, Miss Patty always wore a nurse’s uniform with white stockings and weird white shoes. Her body was round. Her face was round. Even her hair, pale and thin and red, was cut in a way that made it look round, too.
“Come on!” Miss Patty had whined. “Pay attention.”
But no one did. Why would middle schoolers pay attention to cartoon hedgehogs trying to swim?
That assembly made Maisie angry. Even though the actors in the first movie were terrible, when a gang of them laughed at the weird girl, Maisie’s stomach lurched. Bitsy Beal and her friends had been laughing at Maisie since she’d come to this school, hadn’t they? Which meant that Maisie had been bullied, an idea that made her so mad she wanted to stand up and scream.
At least she didn’t give in to peer pressure, she thought as she watched one of the hedgehogs jump off the branch of a tree, flap his little hedgehog arms, and fall straight to the ground. Everyone laughed, but Maisie even felt mad at that cartoon hedgehog. Stand up for yourself! she’d told him silently.
Now Maisie found herself in the auditorium after school, clutching that pale blue script, with everyone else. She absolutely did not want to be in The Crucible. Or any play, for that matter. But here she was, listening to Miss Percy talk about the Salem witch trials and Arthur Miller and the Puritans as if it mattered.
When Miss Percy said: “Many people believe that The Crucible is an allegory for Communism,” Bitsy Beal smiled and nodded and made sure everyone noticed her.
Miss Percy continued, “Arthur Miller says he wrote the play in response to the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. You’ll learn much more about McCarthyism in middle school. For now, let’s just focus on auditions.” Maisie leaned back in the creaky chair and sighed. Wasn’t she giving in to peer pressure by being here? Had she become nothing more than a dumb animated hedgehog?
“So here’s how this works,” Miss Percy said, her eyes shining. “I call you up in groups of two or three and have you read some of the lines together. You might be called up here many times or just once. What I’m looking for is how you inhabit the different roles, how you look with the other people up here on the stage.”
“You’re deciding who will play which part,” Bitsy said, overstating the obvious.
“Yes, Bitsy,” Miss Percy said. “I’m casting the play. That’s why we’re all here.”
Bitsy looked smug, but Maisie sat up a little bit taller. Miss Percy had just kind of put Bitsy Beal in her place, hadn’t she? And Bitsy didn’t even realize it.
Miss Percy began to call kids to the stage. She placed Felix to the right and had Rayne Ziff read with him. Then she made Felix stay there and had Bitsy read with him. Then she had Felix sit down and Jim Duncan read with Bitsy. And on and on for maybe the most boring half hour Maisie could remember.