Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (29 page)

More Latin, Mikey thought, irritated. Then it came to her. “I should make bad calls too?”

That made Coach Sandy angry. “I never said that. What kind of a sportswoman would I be to say something like that?”

But wasn't that exactly what she'd said?

“Or what kind of a coach,” Mikey agreed.

“All I'm saying is, I want winners on my team, people who know how to do what it takes to win. Tennis is a game of figuring out your opponent's weakness and then hitting hard, right at that spot. She was no fool, that girl, she knew exactly how and where to attack you. So think about it. That's my advice to you,” and she turned her back on Mikey to call out, “All right, people! We'll start with cross-court drills. Get your feet in gear, people! We've got two matches in the next three days, and I can promise you, you've got a lot of work to do. Jacobs, Masters, Thompson and Elsinger, I want you on Court One. Go—go!”

Mikey reported in to Margalo on the phone that night, before Margalo even had a chance to ask—before, in fact, she even remembered what Mikey had told her she planned to do at practice that afternoon. Mikey wasted no time. You'd think that with so many of their combined children out of the house, Aurora and Steven would have increased the phone limit to ten minutes, or even fifteen, but Mikey didn't voice that complaint, not if she wanted to have time to hear what Margalo had to say about Coach Sandy.

“She blamed me for
not
cheating,” Mikey concluded. And waited.

“You must have heard her wrong,” Margalo decided.

“When in Rome—she quoted that at me.”

Now Margalo was surprised. “She actually said you should cheat?”

“Not exactly actually. It's what she meant, though.”

They were both quiet, wasting their time, but neither could think of what to say. Finally, “What are you going to do now?” Margalo asked.

Asked that direct question, Mikey knew the answer. “She can't make me.”

“Can you get away with not doing what she says?”

“All I want to do is play good tennis,” Mikey answered, and hung up.

Margalo took the receiver away from her ear and looked at it, as if it had a face and a long brown braid. “I'll take that as a yes.”

T
hings were going badly for Mikey. Her set in the away match on Wednesday was as riddled with bad calls as a mobster's car in a movie about the thirties. It was so full of holes made by the bad calls that the few good calls lay bleeding inside, dead bodies. None of them were Mikey's bad calls, although she was tempted. Really tempted. And furious, too, and frustrated, thwarted—the only person angrier than Mikey was Coach Sandy, who didn't even let Mikey get on the bus before she let her have it. “That's it for you and singles, Elsinger.”

“You know she was cheating,” Mikey argued. Being the object of someone's anger had never troubled her.

“And before you start telling me about how you won didn't you, let
me
tell you that the score was too close for singles. A tiebreaker! What were you thinking of? You don't have
enough experience to play singles. I'm putting you on a doubles team. With Chrissie,” Coach Sandy added.

Her own anger flamed up through Mikey like some exploding volcano. Her jaw was clenched so hard it hurt, but getting angry felt—as usual—pretty good.

However, she wasn't about to say one word. If she said one word, she didn't know what she might say next, but she was pretty sure whatever she said wouldn't be what Coach Sandy wanted to hear. So Mikey merely smiled.
Don't you wish you knew what I'm not saying?

Coach Sandy glared at her, a beady blue glare, for a long minute, and Mikey kept on smiling right back,
If you did, you wouldn't like it, not one bit.
The other members of the team moved around them, hefting their tennis bags up the steps onto the bus. Only Hal Weathersing failed to notice all the anger flowing back and forth between them. He took advantage of the silence to say, “Coach? You don't have to worry any more about my racket being stolen, because I forgot my mom took it to be restrung.”

Mikey didn't know what the coach was waiting for, but she knew she could outwait the woman; and she wasn't about to say one single word until she had a chance to talk to Margalo. She didn't even know where she would
begin
when she told Margalo about this.

What with Aurora's five-minute rule, it took three phone calls to tell Margalo about the tennis debacle. “You're
kidding
,”
Margalo said whenever Mikey stopped for a breath. “I don't believe she did that,” first about the opponent and then about Coach Sandy. “She said
that?”
At the end, the first thing Margalo said was, “That was really smart of you, not saying anything.”

“I didn't do it to be smart,” Mikey said.

“I know that, and I also know you didn't do it to be safe. I'm just saying.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think it stinks,” Margalo said. “And it's stupid, too. It's not like anyone is going to get a lot of glory if her tennis team wins a match, or get a lot of money, either. The regionals might be worth cheating on, but—”

“They aren't. And if I'm spending all my time checking to be sure if some ball is in or out, how am I supposed to set up for my shot?” Mikey lapsed into fury again.

“I think,” Margalo said, “that you're just supposed to call it out. I think,” she added slowly, “that might be Coach Sandy's point.”

“That may be what
she
thinks the point is,” Mikey muttered. “But what am I going to do?”

“I have no idea,” Margalo admitted.

“But you will by tomorrow, won't you?” Mikey answered her own question, “Probably. I hope so, because the only idea I really have for right now is to punch her in the snoot, and even I know that's not a good one. So you can stop laughing,” Mikey said, but she was starting to laugh herself,
at the satisfying picture in her head of her fist landing right on Coach Sandy's little snub nose.
Smack.

Mikey took a deep breath and focused her complete attention on the feel of the tennis ball in her left hand and the feel of the handle of her racket in her right hand. Then she exhaled slowly, picturing in her mind where the serve would land. This was a point they had to win in this no-ad scoring system. It was a game they had to win to avoid the risk of a tiebreaker. Her problem was not her serve, which was just fine and occasionally terrific. Her problem was her partner. Chrissie planted herself at net and didn't move, not to right or left, not backwards either. This meant Mikey had to stay back to cover deep service returns, which meant they couldn't take advantage of her own net game to dominate the match.

Also, the opponents had figured out pretty quickly that if they fired a service return right at Chrissie, she would give a little scream and turn her back to the ball. Also, Chrissie was the kind of partner who muttered at the end of a game that a serve that had been called out was actually in. “That serve? It was in,” she had muttered to Mikey four times in the set, and once could have been right; but even if she was right, that made no difference when it had been called out and scored out. In fact, the distraction of wondering about calls made it harder to focus.

Mikey was reaching a level of frustration—she
hated
playing a defensive game and she wasn't that good at it anyway—a level of frustration that was higher than she'd ever run into
before.
Day forty-one,
she said silently to herself.
End of week nine.
This was her mantra. She let the ball float off her left hand, up into the air, and served.

The return came cross-court to her forehand, and she put it away down the alley to win the game.
Good.

The leggy redhead across the net looked over at her partner. “Was that serve in?” she asked. “I couldn't—”

“Definitely in,” the redhead's partner said. “Nice serve.”

Mikey nodded her acceptance of the compliment. Now all she and Chrissie had to do was break the redhead's serve, which they'd already done once, so the girl was starting out demoralized. Chrissie returned the first serve, then stayed planted just inside the baseline, waiting to see first if her own shot was in and after that what the redhead would do with it. Mikey moved on up to the net, too far to the center, in hopes that the redhead would try to go down the line. The girl obliged, a low-percentage shot that Mikey would have gotten to easily and put away if the ball hadn't gone wide.

Mikey assumed position to receive serve and smiled across the net at the redhead. It was not a kind, warm smile, and she didn't intend it to be. She wasn't enjoying this match one bit.

The serve came flat and fast, skimming over the net down along the center line. Mikey had to dive for it and could manage only a weak return, an easy floater for the net person.

“Out!” Chrissie called.

The net player pulled her racket back to let the ball go by her.

Mikey transferred her not-kind smile to Chrissie. “The serve was good,” she said. “It caught the inside of the line. Your point,” she called across the net. “Sorry about the miscall.”

Chrissie objected, “I thought it was deep.”

Mikey shook her head. “I'm almost positive it wasn't.”

“That's what I mean exactly. That's why I called it out,” Chrissie explained.

Since Chrissie seemed to have missed the point, Mikey said, “If the ball's not clearly out, then it's good,” and Chrissie approached Mikey, as if for the kind of between-point conferring that doubles teams always did, to hiss, “That's not what Coach Sandy says. You can't overcall me like that, Mikey.”

Mikey didn't bother arguing about it. It was clear that she could overcall, and she had, and she hoped Chrissie understood that she would do it again.

They won the set, but it didn't feel much like a victory to Mikey. It felt like an endurance test. It felt like she didn't care if she won or not, and especially she didn't care if the tennis team made it to the regional championships if this was the way people were going to play.

Mikey and Chrissie went to the net and shook hands with their opponents. Then they left the court side by side, the way partners did. Mikey repeated her silent mantra,
Day forty-one, end of week nine.
And it was the weekend, too; it was Friday.
TGIF.

Another wave of irritation and frustration washed over her as she remembered that Margalo was working that evening. Maybe she'd see if she could work at the restaurant too. She was thinking about this, thinking that she'd have to work for free in order not to take income away from Margalo, thinking that there was no point in working and not getting paid, thinking maybe it wasn't much of an idea anyway, as she and Chrissie bent over to pack up their tennis bags, when Coach Sandy stormed over. “That's it, Elsinger. You're on the bench.”