Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (26 page)

“Do you think Kellie would ever go to the prom with me? Or does she already have a date?”

“I can't believe I didn't get an A. Mine was the longest report of anybody's.”

“Chet Parker's getting a car for graduation, did you hear? And he's letting Ronnie go with him to pick it out.”

“It's just the usual—my parents are so convinced the other one is letting me get away with stuff, and my dad can't stand my mom's boyfriend, so yeah, life's not too much fun for me these days.”

“Don't let them get you down.”

“They never want me to leave the house. I wish they'd just trust me a little.”

“Don't let them get you down.”

“Did you hear about Rhonda? She's been born again. Check out her hair—and her shoes.”

“Are Richard and Sally breaking up? Because what I heard is, he hasn't asked her to the prom yet.”

“Maybe I'll go out for Drama next year. I don't have a chance for the tennis team anyway.”

“But when else will you get to have a professional—I mean a real professional—for a coach? I mean, you know how we did last year, and there's Mikey now. How good is she really?”

“She can't be as good as she thinks.”

Ha!
Mikey thought. But maybe she was, and what if she was? She was miles better than any other girl, except for Fiona—and she expected she could beat Fiona without too much trouble. First, however, she had to get herself into the number two position. She figured that wouldn't take more than a week.

Coach Sandy tossed a spanner into that plan right away. “Before we head out to the courts,” she said to her assembled players, “I want to announce that there will be no ladder challenges played until next Wednesday. That is, a week from Wednesday. The twenty-fourth. Everybody got that?” She looked right at Mikey, and smiled, to explain, “Nobody would want to have an unfair advantage just because they happened to play all winter, would they?”

Mikey wasn't so sure about that. If you worked and got ahead, did that constitute an unfair advantage? She went up to the coach as they all left the gym to go down to the tennis courts, but Coach Sandy didn't give her the chance to say
anything. “Don't get yourself in a dander, Elsinger. I want you playing on my team. You're not the only one who really wants to win.”

So Mikey challenged Deborah for the twenty-fourth, or the twenty-fifth if they couldn't be scheduled onto a court first thing. Deborah was a junior, too old, you'd think, to have any illusions about the level of her tennis skills. But her blue eyes teared over when she was challenged, and she said, “I knew it. I've never been on a varsity team, and now—if I'm number six, anyone could challenge me. And I can't re-challenge you for a week.” She said this as if she hoped that hearing it would make Mikey not ask for the match.

But if it wasn't Mikey knocking Deborah down the ladder, it would be somebody else, so Mikey offered the only consolation she could think of. “There's next year. Fiona and Chrissie and Bev are all seniors. If you work, you should have a shot at it next year.”

“Thanks a lot,” Deborah said, and walked away, whipping at the air with her racket, going up to a couple of other juniors to say something that caused them all to look over at Mikey.

Well, she didn't care. She'd never been popular, and it wasn't as if she thought playing good tennis was going to change that.

“But I don't get it,” she told Margalo that weekend. “Everybody wanted Martina Hingis to get to be number one, and that was in the whole world. We're just a high school tennis team.”

“She was cute,” Margalo explained. “She was perky. When she won the Australian, she went running over to the stands to jump up and kiss her mother.”

“Can you imagine my mother if I tried something like that on her?” Mikey asked. “They can't stop me,” she said.

“Do you think they want to?”

“I think they'd like to.”

“You could pretend to be perky and cute. I could help, we'd buy you some clothes, we'd cut your hair and—Have you ever used a curling iron? I could loan you some mascara, too, and what about lipstick? Do you even own a lipstick?”

“Ha, ha,” Mikey said. “They can't turn me cute, and they can't stop me either.”

Certainly, on the Wednesday, Deborah couldn't stop her; she couldn't even hold serve. The next day Mikey played Bev, who got the ball back, high and soft. Bev did manage to take one game off of Mikey, and it was one of Mikey's service games too, a long deuce game, with Mikey running all over the court trying to get a good shot. Then Mikey netted a backhand overhead and then—this was weird—double-faulted, on a first serve so neatly tucked into the corner that Mikey would have sworn it was in, and then a second serve that went just wide. Since Mikey was still up 5-1 in games, she just won the next one to take the set.

Anne Crehan, on Friday, did hold serve once, when a couple of Mikey's shots went long—“Just barely,” Anne
called, calls Mikey agreed with—and then a couple of Anne's drop shots took Mikey by surprise before she learned to look out for them. But Anne was the kind of player that as soon as she thinks she's going to lose starts playing badly. Trying too hard for a winner, thinking too much, caring too much. So by the last weekend in March, Mikey was the number three girl player and had challenged Chrissie for Monday, Fiona the day after. Chrissie would be no trouble, Mikey was sure of it.

But she was wrong, as she realized at 3-all on Monday afternoon when time ran out on them. She had broken Chrissie once, and Chrissie had broken back right away, although . . . Mikey wasn't sure. How could she be sure without a camera on the ball? There was that unwritten rule that if you weren't sure the ball was out, you called it in. It was a fair-play rule, and it meant that you could play a match without someone there to make the line calls for you. If you couldn't play without an umpire, you wouldn't be able to play at all, most of the time, unless you were a professional. So this was the kind of rule that actually worked to everybody's advantage. But with Chrissie, if there was any chance that a ball of Mikey's might be out, it was called out. Sometimes, Mikey thought, a ball was called out even when there was no chance at all.

“It's no fun playing like that,” she told Margalo on the bus going home. Margalo was already working on her next production,
Oklahoma!
It was a musical, and Mikey had let
Margalo know pretty clearly how she felt about musicals. It was a mild end-of-March day, practically warm. “How can she feel like she's won if she's cheated?”

“Are you sure about it?” Margalo wondered, although she thought, Mikey being Mikey, she would be sure, and she was probably right, too.

“How
can
I be sure? I'm on the other side of the net. I'm watching her, I'm getting set to return whatever her next shot is. I can barely make good calls on my own side of the net, which is why there's this unwritten rule. I'm going to have to figure out how to keep her from doing that,” she announced. “Any ideas?”

“Easy—don't give her the chance. I mean, she wouldn't cheat openly, would she?”

“
That
she'd never get away with.”

“So are you good enough to keep everything well inside the lines?”

“Of course. But you're right—Maybe I'll just fire everything right down the center, right at her. That'll teach her.”

That was what Mikey did when they finished their match on Tuesday. She whipped her ground strokes as hard as she could—and that was pretty hard—either right down the middle or right at Chrissie, and sometimes both. That finished off the set and put her in second place. She challenged Fiona for the next afternoon's practice before she went to report to Coach Sandy's office about the results of that day's match.

“I saw some pretty aggressive play from you,” Coach Sandy remarked.

Was this praise or criticism? Mikey couldn't tell.

“I wonder how you'll do against Fiona,” the coach said, not as if she cared very much. “Fiona's got some good shots, a nice variety, and she plays a smart game. She's going to give you a match,” the coach predicted.

The coach was correct. The match between Mikey Elsinger and Fiona Timmerley took three days to complete. There were deuce games that lasted for eight or ten ad points. There were points that took ten or more shots to complete. Fiona kept Mikey deep in the court with hard, flat shots and low-arcing lobs that she couldn't run down; Mikey followed her serve into the net to draw a put-away or force a low-percentage passing shot. They left the court on Wednesday and Thursday, the set incomplete, both of them tired, exhilarated, and resolute. Mikey was ahead four games to two, with one service break. On Friday she took both games, both of them hard fought, the deuce advantage veering back and forth between the two players, both playing error-free tennis. Mikey won the set, but it had never been a sure thing. “That was good,” she said, shaking hands at the net. “I wouldn't mind doing that again.”

“Don't I get a week to recover?” Fiona grinned.

A few other team members had stopped to watch them play: Roy Garo, Mark Jacobs, and Hal Weathersing; Tammy Evans, whom Mikey hadn't played with, or noticed, since the
fall, hand in hand with another ninth-grade tennis player, Ralph, who was reminding everyone, “I was her doubles partner last year.” Mark approached the two girls to say, “Good game.”

“Yeah,” Mikey agreed.

“Not quite good enough,” was Fiona's opinion.

Walking to the bank, Margalo asked, “How were the calls this time?” Mikey's answer was immediate, “Fine, of course.” All of the calls had been as good as they could be when you were calling balls for yourselves. The set had been tennis the way it's supposed to be. Then Margalo asked, “What did Coach Sandy have to say about you winning the top spot?” and Mikey realized that the coach hadn't said anything.

“Not that I
want
her to say anything,” Mikey said. “Not that I care. But you'd think—”

Margalo had a theory, of course. “Some coaches make it as hard as they can, like drill sergeants? They're particularly hard on the most promising players.” They were crossing in front of her restaurant then, and she looked inside to see if there were any early diners, but the big room was empty, the tables set and waiting.

“That
is
Coach Sandy's style,” Mikey said. “She really wants to win the regionals this year, and after that probably the state championships, too. She did pretty well last year with her team, and this year they're probably better because they've had a year more of her coaching. And there's me, too.”

“Unless she thinks if everybody on the team hates having
a ninth grader at the top of the girls' ladder, they'll all try harder. Play better. If they all really want to bring you down,” Margalo suggested.

That made sense to Mikey. In fact, she kind of liked the possibility. She smiled,
Let them try.
In fact, she was feeling pretty good, walking downtown with Margalo on a spring afternoon with a lot of daylight left. “How did Aurora do on that paper you helped her with?” she asked Margalo, to spread some of her good feelings around.

The next Monday, which was the first Monday in April, twenty-six school weeks done and gone, Mikey felt for the first time as if ninth grade might not be so bad after all. She was the number one girl player on the tennis team, which impressed the few people who didn't mind her, and annoyed the majority, who did. If she couldn't be impressive, Mikey was satisfied to be annoying, and besides, she was playing a lot of tennis, six days a week, all spring long, how could she not feel good? Thinking of all spring long, she realized—and announced—“There are only ten weeks left. To the school year,” she specified, since most of the people at the lunch table greeted the news with blank faces.