Disclaimer: I do not own Newsies or A Midsummer Night's Dream. The story title and all chapter titles are quotations from Shakespeare's play.

Author's Note: I was reading A Midsummer Night's Dream the other week and decided that it would make a great Newsies story. This is quite a loose adaptation of the original play and I really enjoyed writing this first chapter, so I hope everyone enjoys reading it!


In a Fine Frenzy

I.

The course of true love never did run smooth

"She isn't Jewish," Mrs. Jacobs said for the third time that morning.

Mr. Jacobs looked up from his copy of the World and shook his head. "Esther, dear, does it matter if the girl is Jewish or not? If our David wants to walk her home on occasion, then he may walk her home."

"I do wish you would find yourself a nice Jewish girl," said Mrs. Jacobs, turning her gaze upon David as he ate his breakfast. "I can't imagine what you are going to do about that girl you've been seeing these days. What if the two of you decide to get married? What faith are your children going to be?"

"Mama, I'm too young to get married," said David, flushing over his plate while Sarah put her face in her napkin to hide her laughter. "Besides, I've done nothing but walk Henrietta home from school for the past week or so. It's perfectly harmless."

"I'm merely concerned about your future, David. Why, the Rosenthals live on the floor below us and they have a daughter just your age."

"Hannah Rosenthal is sweet on David," Les piped up. "Everyone says so."

"Les," David hissed, kicking his brother under the table.

"But it's true," said Les.

"You see, David?" said Mrs. Jacobs. "Hannah is a very nice girl and she likes you. Why not walk her home from school every now and then?"

David remained silent and gazed moodily down at his breakfast. It was true that Hannah was perfectly nice, but she made a nuisance of herself in her attempts to win David's attention, especially when she knew that David had his eye on Henrietta Fairbanks. Of course, Henrietta had yet to express a return of David's feelings, but David was confident that in time she would throw off her shyness and declare a preference for his company.

As for David's mother, well… she would just have to learn to respect his choices, regardless of faith. Ever since Sarah began keeping company with Jack Kelly, David's former selling partner, Mrs. Jacobs became determined that at least one of her children would make a proper Jewish match.

David suddenly wished that Les was old enough for girls.

While Mrs. Jacobs despaired over the future of her oldest son, a similar conversation took place in an apartment just a few streets away. Henrietta Fairbanks sat at the kitchen table, poking despondently at her bowl of porridge while her father gave her his usual morning lecture. Instead of telling her to work harder at her lessons or spend less time outdoors the way he normally did, her father decided to lecture from a different angle that Saturday morning.

"You ought to be a little friendlier to David Jacobs," he was saying. "Perhaps invite him in for tea some afternoon."

"David is dull," Henrietta informed him as she continued to push porridge around with her spoon. "We would have nothing to talk about."

"He comes from a good family. His father and I work together at the same factory, and I've heard that the boy is real intelligent for his age. He's got a future ahead of him, that boy does, unlike that good-for-nothing, one-eyed urchin who lurks beneath your window."

Henrietta dropped her spoon. "Papa…"

"Don't try and pretend innocence. I've seen him on our fire escape with my own eyes. I didn't raise my daughter to spend her time with street rats."

"He isn't just a street rat," Henrietta argued. "He sells newspapers. David used to do it too!"

Her father ignored her and adjusted the spectacles that sat on his nose. "Young David may be writing newspapers someday. I tell you, Henrietta, he's a good boy, and I would like you to invite him over for supper sometime this week."

"What if I don't?"

"Then I will make sure you never see that urchin boy again, and I don't mean that as an idle threat."

"Papa, that isn't fair!"

"It's perfectly fair," said her father, as if he were merely commenting on the weather. "You are my daughter and as long as you live under this roof, you obey my rules. I won't have you ruin your future."

Henrietta pressed her lips together, her brown eyes flashing with a defiance she didn't dare express in words—at least not yet. She had no desire to spend her time with well-behaved David Jacobs, teacher's favorite and all-around bookworm. She wanted to be with Blink, who knew how to have a good time even if he didn't have a proper home or a family.

Edgar Fairbanks, Henrietta's father, had been orchestrating her life for as long as she could remember. Books, studying, piano lessons, etiquette—all intended for her to better herself and find a man who would take her off his hands and provide for her nicely. He had even picked out Henrietta's name, naming her after her uncle Henry who had died before she was born, and he had been her sole guiding hand since her mother passed from fever ten years ago.

And now her father had gone too far. If he would take the time to actually meet Blink and see him as a person instead of just a "street rat," perhaps he would be a little more relenting. Just because he thought David had a future, he assumed he could plan out Henrietta's life for her, but Henrietta had different ideas and wasn't afraid to do what she could to reach them.

Breakfast remained a silent, uncomfortable affair and Henrietta forced herself to eat so she could slip off to her room, the one place where she exercised a bit of her own control. She had sewed her own bedding and curtains herself without her father's interference, and it was where she sought refuge when life became too oppressive. She paced about the room a few times, silently fuming over David Jacobs, his bothersome pursuit of her, and her father's encouragement, when an idea struck her.

She would do what she should have done ages ago.

Henrietta ran to her chest of drawers and fished out a hair ribbon, then stepped out of her bedroom window so she could tie her ribbon to the railing of the fire escape.


"Go ahead without me," Blink told Mush.

"You sure?" said Mush. "We always earn more sellin' together."

"Yeah, well, I got things to do." Blink put out the cigarette he was smoking and ground it under his boot heel. "Go on. I'll manage by myself, all right?"

Mush didn't move; in fact, he deliberately remained where he was and allowed a grin to form on his face. "This ain't about sellin.' This is about your dame, ain't it?"

"What dame?"

"You know what dame, Blink. The one with the H-soundin' name."

"Henrietta," Blink supplied.

"Yeah, that's it! Henrietta. If you ever wanna share her sometime, lemme know, okay?"

Blink rolled up his stack of papers and whacked Mush on the arm with them. "Course I ain't gonna share her, 'specially not with you. Henrietta is a one-newsie kinda girl."

"I was only kiddin," Mush said good-naturedly. "Go on and see your dame, maybe try to sell her a pape or two."

"Yeah, yeah," said Blink, but he grinned at Mush as the two of them parted ways. He couldn't explain his inexplicable need to see Henrietta when he still had a whole stack of papers to sell, but he just had to see her. It had been a few days since he last met her in the daytime and he missed the way the sun hit her curly brown hair, making her look all warm and secure, as if all he needed to do was be with her and the problems of the world—the hunger, the cold, and the exhaustion—would melt away.

Henrietta was a real fine girl, as pretty as a poster outside of Irving Hall, and she was exciting to boot. She spoke her mind—not in the brash, coarse way that the street girls did—but in a smart way that Blink liked, and most evenings he waited to hear the tell-tale clop clop clop of her boots as they trotted down the street cobbles to meet him. It was right there in this very neighborhood, on a night when Blink was selling the evening edition alone for a change, that he met Henrietta for the first time while she was out for a walk, getting some night air and attempting to escape her "dreary apartment," as she put it.

That apartment of hers was the only snag in the relationship. Well, more like her father who happened to live in the apartment, really. Blink had never met Mr. Fairbanks face-to-face, but he had heard plenty about the man and could have sworn he caught a glimpse of him once or twice while he was on Henrietta's fire escape, singing her quiet snatches of song about being the king of New York. She liked hearing him sing, and she liked the patch that covered one of his eyes, and she even liked the way he said "ain't" instead of "isn't," and Blink was convinced that she had to be the finest girl in all of Manhattan, completely under-appreciated by that no-good, strict father of hers.

If Blink was a little older and had a little more money, well... he'd take her away with him, someplace far away. They'd do as they pleased and would never go hungry, and he'd get to see the sun shine on her hair every waking day.

Blink shook his head and tightened his hold on his papers. The newsies might have won their strike, but they were still newsies plain and simple, and Blink would have to sell a hell of a lot of papers if he wanted to get even a step closer to that dream. He didn't have any other options like David, who had gone back to school the moment his father got a new job, and sometimes he would lie awake wondering what he would do with himself once he got too old to be a newsie. He couldn't be a newsie forever, and one of these days he would probably land himself in some lousy factory job, sleep in some rundown rooming house, and drink himself stupid every night, and then what would he do? There was no way in hell a girl like Henrietta would want him then.

Blink supposed that was the reason why his mother left his father. It was the way the world worked in New York, it was the way the common people lived, and if Blink wanted to keep Henrietta he would have to avoid all those traps his old pop fell into years ago.

The problem with New York was that it liked to drag a fellow down, and sometimes you started sinking before you even knew it.

Blink managed to sell a couple of papers on his way to Henrietta's street and the pennies clinked in his pocket as he approached her apartment building. The moment he craned his neck and looked up, up towards the fourth floor where her window was located, he saw a flash of white rippling away in the gentle breeze—the unmistakable white of Henrietta's hair ribbon.

It meant she wanted to see him.

Climbing up a fire escape while hanging onto a stack of newspapers wasn't easy, but Blink had plenty of practice and scrambled up to Henrietta's window in no time without dropping a single paper. Her window was already wide open and the moment Blink tapped on the pane with his free hand, she appeared out of nowhere, her hair all loose around her shoulders like he had never seen it before. In the four or five weeks that he had known her, Blink had never visited Henrietta in the morning, when she was still in the stages of getting ready for the day, and he liked this new, unprepared side of her.

"Ya miss me?" he asked, winking at her with his one visible eye.

"Let's run away," she said.

Blink laughed. "Looks like you really missed me. Where are you thinking of runnin' off to?"

"No, I mean it," said Henrietta, her brown eyes serious. "I want to run away from this place. With you."

"That's a fine idea, doll, but where are we gonna go? My pockets ain't full of money or nothin'."

"We'll go to your lodging house first, and then we'll make a plan from there. What do you say?"

Blink kissed her, letting his hands get tangled up in the loose curls of her hair. "If ya wanna go, then we'll go," he said. "I gotta sell off these papers, of course, but I'll get ya to the lodging house in no time, all right?"

"All right," Henrietta agreed. "I've already packed the things I want to take."

"What about your pop?"

"He's in his study, reading some dull political book like he always does. He won't miss me at all. In fact, I bet he'll say good riddance when he discovers he won't have to keep me in line any longer."

"Well, if you say so." Blink had seen his share of irate fathers who looked askance at the newsies who wanted to take their daughters out, and if Henrietta was convinced that her father wouldn't pester them, then that was just fine with Blink.

He leaned against the wall, next to the open window, and watched her grab a worn traveling bag and pull her coat from its peg on the wall. She was a petite thing, shorter than most girls he knew, but she sure as hell wasn't petite in spirit. That was what Blink admired most about Henrietta; she wasn't afraid of anything, and she didn't mind that he was poor and could offer her nothing more than the streets he had claimed as his own.

Henrietta cast one last look at her closed door, and satisfied that no one was coming for her, she pecked Blink on the cheek and gently pushed him towards the window. "Let's leave this place," she said.

They stepped out onto the fire escape together and Henrietta briefly set down her bag so she could pull her hair ribbon from the railing, intending to tie back her hair and become respectable once more.

"Don't." Blink stopped her hand. "I like your hair when it's loose."

The ribbon dropped down, down to the street below, and Blink thought Henrietta looked wild and free as she reclaimed her traveling bag and began the careful descent down the fire escape. She was free and she was all his, a thought that made him grin as he followed her down the escape and grabbed her coat for her so she wouldn't drop it. Perhaps if Blink had lived some other life, a life like David's for example, he would have discouraged a young girl from cutting loose into the streets, but Blink himself had run away from home and he didn't ever want to go back. Hell, kids all over New York ran from their homes every day, and it wasn't like Henrietta would be on her own out there.

He would have her back, every step of the way.

Blink landed on the street next to Henrietta and handed her coat back, still thrilled that she had chosen him instead of an easier life with her father. "To the lodging house then?" he asked.

Henrietta smiled at him. "To the lodging house."

"Henrietta?" a female voice cut in from just a few feet away. "What on earth do you think you're doing?"

Dismayed at the intrusion, Blink turned his head to discover Hannah Rosenthal, Henrietta's childhood friend, staring at the two of them.