Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (12 page)

Richard and Sally were not in school the Monday after the play. Carl Dane explained it to Margalo. “They always take a day off after a play. They go to the city or something like that,” he said, with an ambiguous expression, as if to say,
Who knows what they get up to? Who cares?

The mood in the cafeteria during Lunch A that Monday was jittery—excited about the upcoming holidays, but actually, now that the play had happened, worried about the next big school event, which was midyear exams in early January, just a few days after school reopened. Not everybody felt anxious about exams, of course. Not Mikey and Margalo, and not Felix, either, since he seemed genuinely uninterested in grades. In fact, he wasn't ever sure what his
grades were. “I think I'm passing,” he would say. “I'm pretty sure I am.”

“Why are we talking about exams?” Mikey asked.

“The exam schedule is posted,” Tim explained. “Teachers are starting to review material.”

“But we're only one third of the way through the school year. What are they doing talking about midyear exams now? Are they that bad at Math?”

Cassie told them, “Peter Paul doesn't believe in exams. The art exam is your portfolio from the semester's work.”

“It won't be a semester. It's three weeks short. A semester is half a year,” Mikey pointed out.

“From
semi
,” explained Margalo, deliberately avoiding looking at Mikey, as if she wasn't saying this to get Mikey going. “Which is Latin for
half
.”

“Even in Latin their math is wrong,” Mikey concluded. For some reason this particular derangement of numerical rules really griped her, more even than the constant intrusion of Latin into her life.

“Actually,” Hadrian said, then cleared his throat, getting ready to emit information. “Actually,” he said again, “it's from the Greek
semester,
which became Latin
semestris,
meaning a period of six months.”

They digested this Hadrian-like interruption, and not even Mikey—who felt somehow proved right by it—could think of anything to add.

After a while Cassie recommenced. “They tried to make
Peter Paul give real exams, on papers. You know? But he refused to, and he said if they made it a requirement, he'd write an exam where all you had to know was your own name, and everybody would get an A.”

Casey looked up from
A Prayer for Owen Meany.
“Do you think he really said that?”

“Sure.”

“Or thought of it later and wished he'd thought of it at the time, wished it so much that now he thinks he actually did,” Casey wondered.

Towards the middle of that Lunch A, as if she had eaten in a hurry to be able to come join up with them, Tanisha Harris sat down at their table, beside Hadrian and across from Mikey and Margalo. “Hey,” she greeted them, looking up and down both sides of the table. “Hey, everybody. Listen, Margalo? Mikey? That was great, what you did.”

There was a moment's hesitation. Great about the play? Had there been a particularly stunning tennis victory? What
had
gone on in the last week, besides the play, or before that, before Thanksgiving? Then the penny dropped.

“Yeah,” Hadrian agreed. “It was.”

“It was me, too,” Cassie said.

“And me,” Jace said.

“It was all of us,” Tim reminded them. “And not just us, it was people in the school, too. It was everyone, pretty much. Otherwise it wouldn't have worked.”

“And it did work, which is the important thing,” Tan said.

They thought she would get up then, to return to the table where the African-American students tended to eat lunch together, but she didn't. She leaned back, pulled her bright blue knit sweater down over the top of her flowered corduroy skirt, and looked around at them. They all waited to see what it was she was thinking, to get her smiling like that, until Mikey couldn't stand it any longer. “What is
wrong
with you?” she demanded.

Tan grinned. “I just think it's great,” she said.

At which point Ronnie Caselli pulled up a chair taken from one table over, to sit down beside Tan. “I'm glad to catch you two together,” she announced, but before anybody at the table could ask her to which two she was referring, she went on, making it clear. “You
have
to come to basketball tryouts today. I don't know why you dropped out of Track,” she said to Tan, “but it wouldn't be right if you don't play basketball. You're really tall,” she explained, “and athletic. We could be on JV together, because what I hear is that there aren't very many sophomore girls playing basketball because they don't have much chance to get on the varsity.”

Ronnie was taking a breath to start off on another persuasive point, when Tan said, “Okay.”

“Okay? That easily? What's happened?”

“Now are you going to try to talk me out of it?” Tan teased, and Ronnie laughed and shook her head, absolutely and positively No. Her long, heavy hair flowed from side to side like a curtain.

She turned to Mikey. “What about you?”

“Basketball? I don't know, Ronnie, but I guess if—Margalo, is there a winter play too that you'll be working on?”

“Besides, Margalo has a job, starting after New Year's,” Ronnie reported. “Don't you?”

Margalo, already nodding away like some big-headed bobble toy, just kept on nodding, enjoying their surprise.

“Dishwashing,” Ronnie announced. “It's a friend of my father's who owns the restaurant. Well, he's co-owner. She applied for the job, and he knows I'm in ninth grade, so he asked Dad about her, and Dad asked me. So I know she got it.”

Mikey, who had heard all about it the night before, wasn't interested in re-hearing all about it. She announced to Ronnie, “I'll play. Basketball. Even though I'm not tall, and I'm not African American,” she added because she thought Ronnie should have asked her first.

“You make up for those deficiencies,” Ronnie said, causing Cassie and Tim to laugh and the others to smile private agreement. Then, “Good,” Ronnie said, ready to rise and return to her own seat on the other side of the cafeteria, when Rhonda Ransom approached them. Rhonda stopped just behind Felix's shoulder. She smiled down at Tim and Felix, flipping her hair back over her shoulder before—reluctantly—turning her attention to Mikey and Margalo and, most important, Ronnie.

“Did anyone tell you that Toby and Sven have both withdrawn from school?” Rhonda asked Ronnie.

“Really?” asked Cassie, sarcasm dripping like horror-film blood from every letter of the word. “Are you sure?”

Rhonda reassured Cassie, who clearly had to be socially so far on the outskirts that it might as well be another country, “Yes, for sure. And nobody's talking to Harold. He's real depressed,” she reported without sympathy. “I bet Hadrian's glad.”

“I guess,” Hadrian answered. “Sure.”

“So,” Rhonda wrapped up, “Have a great vacation everyone, and good luck on exams. Good luck or a good cheat sheet,” she said, adding a current student joke. “Although I guess Hadrian doesn't need either one.”

“I guess,” Hadrian said again.

“Neither do I,” Mikey pointed out.

Rhonda's mouth made a little O at that announcement. She looked at Ronnie for silent agreement about Mikey, and then she seemed to think of something. “Are you going to be at The Gables on New Year's Eve too? Will I see you there? Chet's getting together a table—do you want me to see if I can get him to seat you with us? Who's your date?” Rhonda beamed down on them, the Queen of England, the Queen of everything, or at least of high school.

Ronnie was a nice person, and she changed the subject. “We haven't even had Christmas yet. I haven't even started my Christmas shopping, and I have two papers due before vacation.”

“I'm getting Chet a sweater,” Rhonda confided. “Turtleneck,
it'll look great on him. Gotta run. See you New Year's? Ronnie, I mean. Think about it?”

After a short silence, “Some things never change,” Tan remarked.

“Except,” Ronnie said, sounding worried, “I didn't know Chet had asked Rhonda for New Year's. That's not what I heard,” she explained, then added, “Oh well, probably I heard wrong. You know how gossip is.”

“Fortunately no,” Cassie said, and Ronnie laughed.

“But you will come to basketball? You could try out too, Cassie,” she offered, then rose, saying, “See you,” with a little wave of the hand as she left them.

Then they turned on Margalo to start asking questions, like “How hard was it to get work papers?” and “How many hours a week?” and drawing conclusions like, “You're not going to have any free time at all.”

Margalo was pleased to see that they were all a little jealous of her. She didn't blame them.

M
argalo saw it as soon as she looked at Ms. Hendriks, during the first Drama Club meeting after the vacation: There was no engagement ring on her left hand.

Where had it gone? Margalo tried to figure out if the teacher might be wearing a chain around her neck, tucked under the loose sweater. She didn't think so, although the high neck of the sweater kept her from being positive. She looked for the ring on Ms. Hendrik's right hand, but that, too, was bare.

For the first time, Margalo wished she knew someone besides Hadrian in Drama well enough to ask what they knew about this ringlessness. She couldn't ask Ms. Hendriks. You didn't ask teachers things about their private lives; you had to wait until they let something slip, or somebody happened to find something out and tell people.

Margalo hoped that if the engagement was over, it was Ms. Hendriks who had decided to end it. She had never been dumped, herself, never having been picked up and carried along by any boy, but she knew something about unrequited love or, more precisely, unrequited crush. The key word was unrequited. Unrequited was no fun.

She didn't even think of raising the question of the Drama teacher's possible dis-engagement with Mikey. Moreover, Mikey didn't give her the chance. These days, all Mikey wanted to talk about was basketball. Sometimes Margalo didn't know what she was going to do with these athletic interests of Mikey's. She would have just turned off her attention, the way she occasionally did during classes, but every now and then, trapped in the ranting and rattling-on, like a diamond trying to escape from its lump of coal, there appeared one of Mikey's really interesting ideas. You could count on Mikey for individual thought, Margalo knew that. So she had to listen to tireless complaining about a coach who only wanted people to feel good about themselves and enjoy playing the game. “That's no way to build a winning team,” Mikey said.

“Maybe it doesn't matter to her if the team wins,” Margalo said, and then, in the deep, solemn voice that movie newscasters use to announce some disaster or another, usually from outer space, she recited: “It matters not if you win or lose, but how you play the game.”

“I know, but if you don't play to win you're not playing the game right.”

“Yeah, but in the long run what does any game matter?”

“Put it that way,” answered Mikey with relentless logic, “and nothing matters, so why are you so worried about going to college, or getting a job and saving money, or even being a good dishwasher in your restaurant?”

This, Margalo had thought about. You couldn't be alive in the present world and not think about it. “Because I only get one chance to have my own one life, and it's stupid to waste any chances to make it better. Or make myself better at it.”

Mikey leaned back in her cafeteria seat, victorious. “That's why it's important to win.” But Mikey wasn't stupid and before Margalo had a chance to say it she corrected herself. “To try to win.”

By then they were no longer alone at the table, and Tim started grilling Margalo about her job. How much did she get paid an hour? How much was withheld from her paycheck? The only jobs he'd ever had had been working for his parents, like painting the porch railing or clearing out the garage. Was it different when you had a real boss?

“Baby-sitting has bosses,” Margalo told him. “And since my parents don't pay us for doing stuff at home, I don't know.”

“Do the guys in the kitchen sexually harass you?” Jace wanted to know.

Margalo just smiled. Actually she almost laughed out loud. She didn't know how to explain it to them, it was so far outside of their experience at school or even on sports teams.
“Angie—he's the cook—he runs the kitchen? Angie says nobody messes with his dishwashers, and everybody in the kitchen does exactly what he says. Nobody crosses Angie. Because the cook in a restaurant is like the absolute dictator—in the kitchen that is.”