The Glorious Adventures of the Sunshine Queen by Geraldine McCaughrean

appalled. Cissy was still on her feet, eyes tight shut.
    Loucien, thwarted, angry, and still hankering to play Pirate Nancy herself, saw Cissy’s face . . . and laid her own feelings aside in an instant. She held up a finger to silence the others. “Well, that would be real swell, honey,” she said, with infinite gentleness, “but you’re working the plank with Max. There’s only so much one trouper can do, trust me. But we thank you for offering, we surely do.”
    Cissy sat back down in her chair, tears pressing against the backs of her eyes like cows in a cattle crib. Her future as an actress had just collapsed rather like a general store crushed by a grain silo. She was a clown, and she knew she ought to be grateful. But her lime-green dungarees made her behind look like a net of apples, and she never got to speak a word.
    â€œTibs would make a real pretty heroeen!” suggested Kookie. “Or—tell you what!—I could be Kookie the Corsair!”
    â€œWhat did I just say, Habakkuk Warboys?” asked Miss March menacingly.
    Kookie won the day, though. Despite Miss March trying to act like his mother, despite Tibbie changing her mind when she saw the dress Curly sewed for Nancy, despite the playwright’s refusal to change the title to The Perils of Kookie the Corsair , Kookie Warboys did land the starring role.
    When he found out he had to wear a wig, dress, and dance shoes, he almost backed out again. But he comforted himself that he was two U.S. states away from home and among strangers: if any of his classmates had turned up in the audience, he might have died of embarrassment.
    The Perils of Pirate Nancy was a huge success. Somewhere between Elder Slater preaching hellfire and Max’s plank act, little Nancy got sold into slavery by her own father, carried aboard ship, attacked by pirates, captured by a mustachioed pirate chief, saved from death by the beseechings of the pirate chief’s beautiful (but pregnant) lover, then offered marriage by the said mustachioed pirate chief. When she refused to marry him, she was forced to walk the plank (not Max’s, which was far too bendy and needed for later). At the last moment, Nancy’s dashing cousin (Chad) swung to the rescue on the end of a rope, engaged in a sword fight (which he lost), but did not die, because the pirate chief’s jilted jealous pregnant girlfriend shot dead the pirate chief, who fell through a hatch in the Texas roof. (There was a mattress underneath the hatch to break Everett’s fall.)
    After the first performance, there was another mattress, nailed to the wall of the upper deckhouse, too. Chad Powers had worked out his stunt with infinite care, using a pair of compasses and a ruler: where to tether the rope, the length of rope to use, the arc of the swing, the ideal way to spotlight this feat of derring-do. . . .
    He was intended to derring-do the stunt himself, but at the first performance he forgot to put down his feet at the crucial moment, crashed into the deckhouse, and dislocated a shoulder.
    So at the second performance, Nancy’s cousin Chad became Cousin Benet, and one of the Dixie Quartet moved into the acting business. Nobody seemed to notice that Nancy’s cousin was as black as prime molasses and wore two-tone shoes: Benet, despite his age, was as handsome and springy elegant as a mountain lion, and there was an audible sigh from the women in the audience every time he swung a sword or plunged through the light toward his rendezvous with the mattress nailed to the deckhouse wall.
    At the end, Tibbie, in a red-white-and-blue, star-spangled dress, said a poem called “ America the Bounteous.”
    The gasps, the ripples of applause, the shouts of encouragement— ”You tell him, gal!” —the tangible hatred for the villain, the aaah s that greeted Tibbie in her patriotic frock, all these were more intoxicating than strong drink. Kookie quickly lost