Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (11 page)

The restraining order—“Not within 200 yards!”—was the talk of the school on Wednesday. High school was like a terrarium, an enclosed ecological system where the introduction of any new element immediately affected the whole. People measured off two hundred yards—“Two football fields, dummy”—and considered what action might be taken against anyone who violated the order. Everybody was eager for Sven and his stooges (Harold had been renamed Stooge One, and Toby Stooge Two, but Sven was always and only Sven) to show up so they could enforce the order.

On Thursday morning loudspeakers in the homerooms cracked out their usual announcements, reminders of the special schedule in effect on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving break, of the performances of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
over the first weekend in December, of a Senior Class Prom Committee meeting, and more, before it summoned the day's assortment of malefactors to Mr. Robredo's office. Hadrian Klenk's was the first name on this
list. He was instructed to go immediately to see the assistant principal, and so he did, leaving homeroom early and arriving back in the middle of English. It wasn't until Lunch A that he could report in.

“You'd think they'd make their own soups,” Hadrian said, settling his tray down on the table across from Mikey and Margalo, who were themselves enjoying (Mikey) a baguette sandwich with ham and brie, and eating (Margalo) a leftover leg of chicken, with a bread and jam sandwich on the side. “I'll trade my grilled cheese for part of your baguette,” he offered Mikey with—for Hadrian—unusual assertiveness.

She smiled,
How dumb do you think I am? Because I'm not that dumb.
“You aren't going to be one of those people who undergoes a personality transformation when your life improves, are you? Like an overnight screen sensation,” she said, thinking of Shawn Macavity's swift rise to popularity last year.

“I don't think that's a real danger,” Hadrian said. “I mean, I'm just an excuse here, aren't I? It has nothing to do with me personally. I tried to explain that to Mr. Robredo, and I think he understood. It took a while,” Hadrian said. He added, “Because at first he blamed
me
for the restraining order.”

“Oh,” said Margalo, who hadn't thought this would happen.

“Better you than me,” was Jace's response.

“What did you tell him?” Cassie asked. “How'd you get out of it?”

“I didn't tell him anything,” Hadrian said. “Not at first, anyway.”

“He threatened you?” Tim wondered.

“Why would he do that? What would he threaten me about?” Hadrian was puzzled. “He thinks it's a good idea. Although I did get the impression that not everybody agrees with him. I mean, the Principal might not because of the possibility of negative publicity, and—”

“He
likes
it?” Tim asked, surprised.

“So I told him it wasn't really my idea. Because—It wasn't my idea, so why should I get the credit? I told him it was you, Mikey, and you too, Margalo. He said he didn't know you but I was lucky to have two friends like you.” He looked at them with an eager, intelligent expression, like some scientist checking out his thesis with a microscope.

Mikey looked at Margalo. What was she supposed to say to this?

“Us too,” said Cassie. “Me and Tim and Felix did all the work. Did you tell him that?”

“What about me?” asked Jace. “I did the sketch of Sven. Everybody says it's great. Peter Paul says it's the best of the three.”

For a moment Cassie couldn't think of any response. Then she could. “Like I care. Like this is all about
you.
Which it isn't,” she pointed out. “It's about Hadrian and our restraining order.”

The effect of the restraining order was immediate; that is to say, nothing happened. Friday passed entirely without incident, however much people were hoping otherwise, or expecting otherwise. The trio kept to themselves as much as they could, and when the necessity of classes separated them, they kept their heads down and their mouths shut.

The mood at Lunch A on Friday was jubilant.

By the next Monday, Sven had withdrawn from school. Toby held out until Tuesday. Toby was going to finish out the year in Iowa, where his mother had a sister, and maybe he'd stay there for his senior year too. Sven, rumor reported happily, was heading off to a military school after Christmas, and until then he was grounded. Sven's parents had been infuriated throughout this whole process, by the police, by the suspension, by what had happened to their son—although what exactly they meant by that phrase was not clear. They decided he needed more discipline. This left Harold alone, and alone, Harold became Harold the Harmless.

Hadrian could now, they all felt, walk the halls in safety, although they all did understand that, for Hadrian, safety was a relative term. Hadrian would always—always in school, at least—have less security than most. But he now had a lot more than before, almost as much as everybody else—which, they sensed, probably wasn't as much as they thought they had. In any case, Hadrian was happy with the results of the restraining order.

“I guess you'll really be giving thanks this year,” Tim remarked, and Hadrian agreed.

As if that weren't enough, on the Monday
after
Thanksgiving, John Lawrence was absent from school, which meant that Hadrian, as his understudy, played Bottom during rehearsal. This rehearsal took place in the auditorium, on the stage, where Ms. Hendriks had moved them to give her cast time to get used to an actual theatrical setting. They were rehearsing the awakening scene, which began with people asleep all over the stage. As the scene went on, they woke up and spoke their lines and exited, until only Bottom was left. Until then Hadrian's acting had been limited to the occasional well-timed snore, which nobody had much noticed, although it made Ms. Hendriks smile to herself. As the last remaining actors went offstage, Hadrian acted Bottom waking up.

Ms. Hendriks had stood up from her seat at the center of the front row to end that rehearsal, but Hadrian started to speak. His voice was as thick and confused as if he really had been deep in an enchanted sleep. “ ‘When my cue comes, call me.' ”

At the sound of this voice Ms. Hendriks fell absolutely still, listening.

Hadrian stumbled a little, looking around him for friends who had fled long ago, then he seemed to move a few steps closer to consciousness as he came a few steps closer to the front of the stage.

Ms. Hendriks was all attention.

Margalo almost laughed out loud from the pleasure of this,
of Hadrian acting, of the teacher realizing how talented Hadrian was. This was exactly what she had predicted would happen, and there was the pleasure of Shakespeare's lines, too, the way Hadrian spoke them.

Hadrian had the part memorized, and he went smoothly on, with Bottom's unique logic. This kind of verbal befuddlement drove John Lawrence crazy, but Hadrian had no problem with it. “ ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,' ” he said, as if he was speaking perfect sense. In fact, as Hadrian said it, it did. Of course it did. It was Shakespeare.

“ ‘It shall be called “Bottom's Dream,” ' ” Hadrian announced, his face so bright with ignorant self-satisfaction that he could have been Louis Caselli. “ ‘Because it hath no bottom,' ” he concluded.

Ms. Hendriks applauded softly.

The other actors hadn't noticed any of this. Having moved offstage, they were rooting around in the pile of knapsacks and jackets to find their own, ready for the bell to ring to mark the end of the day. Only Margalo had stayed in her seat to watch.

“Hadrian,” Ms. Hendriks said. “That was . . . You were Bottom himself.”

“I wasn't sure about the pacing in the middle,” Hadrian admitted, standing at the edge of the stage and looking down at the teacher.

This admission caused her to look at him even more closely.

“I mean whether speeding up to increase the comedy would undermine the significance.”

Ms. Hendriks nodded. “Yes, I see the problem,” she said. “Well,” she said, and took a breath. “It's too late for me to give you the part.”

“That doesn't matter,” Hadrian told her, and standing there—a scrawny, underage ninth grader again, but perfectly happy—seemed to mean what he said.

The teacher ran her hand through her hair, and her engagement ring glinted, and she frowned. “It might, if I want to keep my job.”

“You
should
keep it,” Hadrian told her. “You're really good.”

She thanked him for the compliment, assuring him, “I definitely want to. But . . . I wonder how written in stone that school policy is. Which reminds me,” she said, once again the teacher talking to the student, “Congratulations on your restraining order.”

“Oh, that was Mikey, and Margalo too,” Hadrian said.

“And a lot of other people,” Margalo added.

“Well, congratulations all around, then,” Ms. Hendriks said. Now that she realized that Margalo also had witnessed Hadrian acting Bottom and was unsurprised, she looked at Margalo more carefully. But all she asked was, “Mikey? Mikey who?”

After a week of intense rehearsing, which culminated in a dress rehearsal Thursday that ran from three thirty until
nine thirty, including a break for pizza delivery, Drama Club performed
A Midsummer Night's Dream
on Friday and Saturday evening. The auditorium was packed both nights. Some people came twice to see the play, and everybody—everybody in the cast, everybody in the audience—said it was the best Shakespeare production the school had given in years. After the excitement and satisfaction of all that applause, after the presentation by Sally and Richard of an armload of roses to Ms. Hendriks, and the admiring and appreciative speech by the Principal, after the question of whether the handsome, dark-eyed, youngish man who sat at the center of the first row was The Fiancé, and the reluctance—now that it was over—to stop saying their lines, after all of that it was Monday morning again.