The World Will Know (Newsies)

19: When The City's Finally Sleeping

The dresses were back, but the green-eyed twin was not happy about it. While her father and sister went to the doctor's office that morning, her mother had confiscated Rebecca's favorite clothing and forced her to return to the green dresses she hated.

Almost every time she put them on, she felt like she was a china doll, a prize that her parents liked to show off because of the fact that she was a twin. Her parents often had gatherings at their home, and at those gatherings, she and Elizabeth were pretty much forced to dress in their similar-looking dresses from a young age. Whenever the guests talked to her, it was more like they were talking at her. She was a museum artifact to them, not even human. It was the reason she and Elizabeth befriended Katherine and Darcy so easily. They were the children of rich newspapermen as well. If anybody were to understand, they would. Of course, they didn't have the same situation, but at least they could listen to Rebecca's ranting.

When she was with the newsies, though, those things never even came to mind. At the party, when everyone was relaxing and being themselves, every one of them could just as easily have acted just like the people at her parents' parties and treated the twins like novelty guests, or they could have ignored them entirely. Katherine, at least, would have been relatively exempt from this due to her budding relationship with Jack. But they had no real reason to keep the twins around after everything was over. But those ideas never even came to the newsies' minds. They were a part of the group now, and that meant a lot to both girls.

It meant a lot to Rebecca in particular. During times like this, when her sister was gone and Katherine, Darcy, and Bill were all working at their respective papers, she still had the opportunity to go on the street and find someone to talk to. After all, there were newsies everywhere, hawking headlines and trying to make a living.

So, while Elizabeth and her father were taking care of the former's injuries that Sunday, Rebecca chose to avoid her mother's judgemental gaze and leave the house. She grabbed some coins off her dresser, threw them in a purse, and left the building, already on the lookout for one or more of her newfound friends.

As she rounded a corner and headed towards the square, she spotted some newsies who were selling copies of The Sun across the street. She flashed a smile at them, since she thought she might have seen one of them at the rally, then continued to stroll down the sidewalk.

She happened to find Davey outside a barbershop, holding up a paper and calling out some stories. Surprisingly, he was alone out there. Les was nowhere to be seen.

Rebecca crossed the road and walked up to him just as he was handing an older man a paper. "Thank you, sir," Davey told the man as he tucked the coin into his pocket. As the man walked away, he noticed Rebecca standing there and a smile formed on his lips. After they exchanged some greetings, he commented, "I didn't expect to see you today, to be honest. I thought you'd be spending quality time with your sister."

The young woman shrugged. "Well," she started, "my father took her to a doctor this morning to get her arm taken care of, so unless I wanted to stay at home under the judgmental eye of my mother, I had to go somewhere. Anyway, how's business today? Good headline?"

Davey shrugged. "Better than before. They stopped running the trolley strike as the main story, which makes it a bit easier. If they ran that again, I'd really need to rely on Jack's suggestions, and I don't wanna need that."

"Wait, don't you normally sell with Jack?"

He nodded. "Yeah, but he needed to go talk to Pulitzer about what this cartoonist job would mean and how he'd make things work with sellin' at the same time. He said he'd meet up with me tomorrow and we'd get back to sellin' like before. Today I don't have to split profits though, that whole sixty-forty thing that he started with. More money for my family and all."