Free Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt

she’d started she found herself really interested. James had written about
all
the reasons why the Mayflower people wanted to come to America. He had found out who they all were and where they’d come from, and what had happened to them once they got to Plymouth. Dicey was surprised at what he was saying. Only some of the people came over for religious reasons, and even those (as James pointed out) hadn’t come because of a belief in religious freedom. They came over to practice their own religion, which was a very different thing from what Dicey had always heard. Some of the people came because they weren’t welcome in the society of England, because they were sort of rotten apples there. Some came because they had to, like wives, children, and indentured servants. Some came because they wanted to live and work in a land that civilization hadn’t already polished and divided, because they loved wildness, because they wanted to match themselves up against the wilderness and see how they did. Dicey could understand that feeling. Some of the settlers were looking for easy money, gold or furs, to get rich quick.
    â€œIt’s really good,” she said to James when she finished reading. He was standing anxiously behind her.
    â€œYou think so?”
    â€œIt’s interesting,” Dicey said. “I bet it’s the best report anybody does — I bet it’s miles better than any other report in your class. I’ll tell you,” she said, overwhelmed into honesty by the impression it made on her, “I don’t think I could write one this good.”
    James tried not to look as pleased as he felt. “You think Gram would like to read it?” he asked.
    At about that time, Mr. Chappelle assigned Dicey’s class a paper. He wanted them to write a character sketch, he said, about a real character they had met, someone they knew. He wanted them to show the conflict in a real person’s life. As soon as he said that, the complaints and questions began. Dicey stopped paying attention. She knew who she’d like to write about, she knew a whole lot of people. Momma, for one; but she couldn’t, because that wasn’t any of his business. Will Hawkins was another. She’d like writing about him. Not about the way he’d been a good friend to the children, taken them along with his circus and driven them down to Crisfield; and not even about what it was like to live with a circus, although that would be interesting. Dicey would write about the way Will was so honest with his friends, yet tricked the people who came to see his shows. Because the circus was like that, full of tricks that you didn’t know about until, like the four children, you had lived in it. Probably the people who came to see the shows didn’t care, but it wasn’t what the people wanted that interested Dicey. She wanted to write about those two opposite sides of Will. Maybe, if she wrote about him, she could figure out how he fit those two sides together in his life; maybe he did it by keeping them entirely separate, his friends and his work. She thought about him, traveling now around the country with his circus. He’d promised to come see them when the circus came back to the area, and she believed he would.
    And there was Cousin Eunice, back in Bridgeport. In Dicey’s opinion, Cousin Eunice was a boring person, but she had conflicts too. She too had taken the children in. But she had only done it because she wanted people to think she’d done the right thing. What she really wanted to do was live the life she’d planned for herself before the Tillermans turned up. She didn’t want the children, they were nothing but trouble to her, trouble and expense; but she’d made herself change all her plans.
    Dicey might just write something as good as James, she thought, the ideas tumbling around in her head. Then she corrected herself: almost as good as James. James was