Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (10 page)

The table paid no attention, except for Mikey, who corrected him, “Two until Thanksgiving,” and then corrected herself, “Two weeks minus one day. Thanksgiving's always a Thursday,” she explained, in case anyone at the table hadn't grasped this fact.

Nobody paid much attention to Mikey, either. Including Hadrian.

He said, “I mean until they come back. Until the suspension is up. I've been thinking, and I think I'm going to need some help, at least at first, and maybe for a while after, so I was wondering—Will you help me?” He looked around at all of their faces, one after the other.

Casey had her nose buried in
Gone with the Wind,
but the others returned his glance, wondering what he was talking about.

Hadrian clarified it. “They come back to school next Friday.”

“Who they?” Mikey demanded impatiently until she realized just as Margalo said it, “The Three Stooges.”

“And they're going to be really angry. At me.”

None of the people at the table had thought of this, but as soon as Hadrian mentioned it they all fell silent, thinking
unhappy thoughts. Even Casey looked up from her book to join in, silently.

He was right. He was right, and they were sorry, but what could they do?

“Would you like me to write an editorial?” Tim asked Hadrian. “Raise public awareness? Most people—I mean the vast majority—they don't like this kind of bullying.”

“I know, but what difference does that make?” Hadrian asked, an entirely reasonable question.

“It's pretty dumb of them to be mad at
you
,” Mikey observed.

“Pretty dumb just about describes them,” Cassie observed. “So that's no surprise.”

“But will you help me?” Hadrian asked again.

“Help you do what?” Margalo asked him. “What do you want to do? Can you . . . for example, can you get a restraining order to keep them—what is it?—two hundred yards away from you?”

“I don't think so,” Hadrian said. “I'd have had to have filed complaints all along to do that. And if I'd filed complaints . . .” He didn't need to finish that idea. They knew what would have happened to Hadrian if he had had the courage—or the fool-hardiness—to complain to the school authorities.

“What do you want
us
to do?” Mikey asked.

“I was thinking, if you were my bodyguards? You and Margalo.”

“We don't have the time. Besides, I have tennis until
Thanksgiving, and we're in mostly different classes. What about Louis Caselli? Could you hire him? He's probably going to have to repeat the year, so he won't care about cutting classes.”

“I could ask,” said Hadrian in a voice so full of doubt they knew he'd never do it. “But it would be three against one, and Louis isn't exactly big.”

“Louis is bad at Math,” Mikey observed. “He might not figure out the odds, and you'd have time to get away while they were dealing with him.”

“It's more likely that Louis would manage to make everything worse,” Margalo predicted.

“Can you afford to transfer to a private school?” Casey wondered. “Or you could probably get a scholarship to one, with your grades.”

“You're telling him to run away?” Mikey asked.

“There's Drama,” Hadrian argued. “And if they send me to private school, what about my sisters?”

“I thought you were an only child.”

“They're both younger,” Hadrian said.

Margalo had been thinking. “What if you get people in each one of your classes to stick close to you? I will in English, and Casey will too, won't you?”

“I'll do Math,” Mikey offered.

Hadrian reminded them, “It's the hallways not the classrooms where things happen. And bathrooms. And outside.”

They
knew
that. They didn't need Hadrian Klenk reminding
them. Sometimes, they wished he'd just keep his mouth shut and disappear. They felt sorry for him and all, and they knew it wasn't fair at all, but still . . .

Bad feelings—irritated, annoyed, impatient feelings, feelings that blamed Hadrian for their existence, that suspected it was somehow his fault, that just wanted not to have to deal with this—all of those feelings started to rise up, invisible, yes, but they felt like a flooding river rising slowly up over its banks and lapping up around their feet.

Hadrian pulled his feet up onto the rung of his seat. He hunched his skinny shoulders and dug with his spoon into the bowl of pudding on his lunch tray.

That was when Margalo had her idea.

“A
restraining order!”

“But I told you—,” Hadrian started to say.

“No,” Margalo interrupted him. “I mean, if you can't get a restraining order from the police, what if you got one from the ninth grade? No, listen. Think,” she said, raising her voice over Cassie's “Right, like . . .” and Casey's “No one has ever . . .” “What if the ninth grade, or a lot of us, anyway—I bet a lot of people would, never mind their motives. What if we put our own restraining order on the three of them? To keep away from Hadrian.”

“But we don't have the right to do that,” Hadrian pointed out.

Felix asked, “Why just the ninth grade? Why not include tenth graders too? I mean, those three guys used to go after me sometimes, last year, and not just me. I didn't even get it
all that badly, but it was no fun, I can tell you, so you can count me in. What about you, Tim?”

“Why would they bully
you?”
Casey wondered but Tim was saying, “They never went for me personally, but I wouldn't mind. I mean, in a democracy it's up to the majority to control the bad elements itself.”

“Those aren't bad elements,” Mikey said. “They're stupid elements. If there's a restraining order posted, they'll believe it,” she told Hadrian. “You write one, Margalo,” she said, giving the order, then explaining to the others, “She'll know how to make it sound official.”

Margalo hastened to modify Mikey's bossiness. She turned to Casey. “Would you be willing to advise me? Would you look at a draft? Or I can call you and read it to you.”

“Exactly when are they coming back to school?” Tim asked.

“Friday.”

“The eleventh Friday,” said Mikey. “Only twenty-five to go.”

They ignored her.

Tim said, “We can post copies on the bulletin board outside of the library and by the gym entrance.”

“One at the main entrance too,” Casey suggested.

“Like one of those Most Wanted posters in the post office?” Jace suggested.

“If most people in our two grades enforce it, it'll be a de facto restraining order,” Tim announced with pleasure.

“You're taking Latin too?” Mikey demanded.

“I can print out as many copies as we want. I've got some good heavy paper,” Tim offered. “But we'll need some kind of images, don't you think? Felix?”

“What
is
it with Latin?” Mikey demanded.

“Give me negatives and I'll print pictures,” Felix offered.

“I can draw pictures,” Jace said while Cassie announced, “Just give me a couple of minutes.”

Then Tim was having second thoughts. “What do you think the school will say about doing this?”

“Like I care,” Cassie answered.

Quietly Casey told them, “My dad would get it, and he's not the only one on the faculty who would. They mean well, you know. Really, they do.”

“All we can do is try it and see what happens,” Margalo suggested.

“Well,” Mikey announced, “I don't care what the school says, and neither should any of us.”

Tim pointed out, “But some of us do.”

Hadrian said then, “I don't want to get anyone in trouble. You don't have to do this.”

Margalo disagreed. “You know? I think we do. Not for you,” she said, and then added quickly, “Not
just
for you. Okay. If we have images, we can put names under them. I'm for the Three Stooges, Moe and Curly and Larry, and I think Sven should be Moe. We should do it that way,” she explained, “because if we make it a joke on them, then people
will really do it. People like doing the right thing for a while, but a joke lasts much longer.”

They argued happily about that for a few minutes, who should be Larry, if it was more of a joke if Curly had a crew cut or actually had curly hair, because Toby wore his hair in a short crew cut. Then there was a less happy argument, between Felix and Cassie and Jace, about who was going to make the pictures and what the pictures should look like. It was the
should
that got them into trouble.

Finally Tim suggested, “How about one by each of you? That would work pretty well, visually, don't you think? Three different images, wouldn't that be more interesting? You guys decide among yourselves who's going to do which one, but can you have them for me by Monday morning? Because we'll want to put the notices up on Wednesday.”

“Will we need signatures?” Casey wondered.

“We'll tell people what we're doing,” they answered. “That, plus the actual restraining orders posted all over the school will do it. I can't wait for those three to get back to school and see what we've got waiting for them. Can you, Hadrian?”

They all turned to look at Hadrian. He looked both hopeful and worried. “Are you sure it'll work?”

“Of course not,” Margalo told him.

“Because it could just make things worse,” he said.

“How much worse can they get?” asked Mikey.

“Things can always get worse,” Hadrian assured her.

By waiting until Wednesday to post their notices, they gave rumors about what the ninth grade was up to two and a half days to be planted and to grow fat and weedy, fed by curiosity and a sense of injustice. On Wednesday they waited until Lunch A, hoping that the school—by which they meant administrators, discipliners, those in charge of keeping things orderly—wouldn't have time in only half a school day to make a decision about how to react. This was in case their reaction was to veto the restraining order and take down the notices. Margalo argued, convincingly, that after two-and-a-half days of waiting impatiently to learn what was going on, and then half a day of knowing about it and wanting to take part, the students would be putting pressure on the school to let the restraining order stand. Probably many parents would agree, since parents could get pretty worked up over injustices and victimizations at school.

After Lunch A on Wednesday they put up their notices wherever they thought a notice would be seen—in the glass window of the library, beside the entrance to the gym, on the Guidance Department's student-interest bulletin board, on the glass front of the locked case that displayed all the sports trophies ever won by any of the teams, by the doors to both faculty lounges and, finally, one on each of their own locker doors. They posted their restraining orders and then they waited for whatever would happen next.

The first thing that happened was people everywhere, in
all the corridors, in all the classrooms, anticipating how Sven and his goons would react to this. “This'll teach them” appeared to be the general opinion.

The bad side of that enthusiastic response was, as Tim pointed out and Margalo couldn't disagree, that somebody was bound to tell Sven
et al,
which meant they would lose the element of surprise.

“What do you mean
at all?”
asked Mikey.

“It's Latin,” Margalo explained.

“No it isn't.”

“
Et al
,” Hadrian said. “It means
and everybody else,
in this case,
and Harold and Toby
.”

“I hate Latin,” Mikey said.

“No you don't,” Margalo told her, irritatingly. “You just don't know anything about it.”

“
De gustibus non est disputandum
,” said Tim, but then he ruined it by laughing. Tim wasn't the kind of person who could keep a straight face very long.

“What-Ever,” Mikey said. “You're right about losing the element of surprise.”

“But surprise only lasts a couple of minutes anyway,” Margalo pointed out. “And this way, instead of surprise they'll feel dread, which is more what we want, isn't it?”

In a mood of unusual solidarity, not only the people at Mikey and Margalo's lunch table, but almost all ninth graders too, were feeling pretty good about themselves. They were pretty sure no other ninth-grade class—with the help of some
tenth graders and to the envy of the upper classes—had ever done anything like this. They thought they might have discovered an anti-bullying technique that would work anywhere. They wondered if maybe some TV station might hear about it and come interview them. “Ronnie and Shawn should be our spokespeople,” was the general opinion, which went on to recommend, “Better keep Hadrian off camera. He's too weird.”