Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (31 page)

“You mean I have no clout.”

“Partly that. But also, if you think about it compared to a business, you can see why people might not pay any attention to you. Why would they think you know anything? So you have to get people on your side.”

“They don't want to be on my side. That's what I was asking them.”

“Well then,” Margalo said. They were silent for a few seconds. “And besides,” she said, “you can still play competitive tennis with the league. You already do that.”

“I know,” Mikey said. “I know. But still—I'm going to talk to Mr. Wolsowski. He's my adviser.”

“Waste of time,” Margalo predicted.

“Or maybe Mrs. Burke.”

Suddenly Margalo was tired of being negative. “Mrs. Burke gave really sensible advice about STDs and contraceptives,” she agreed. “She might know something.” Although Margalo couldn't think of what that might be. But they both admired Mrs. Burke, so, “Why not try her?”

“Unless—Is it too late to accuse Coach Sandy of stealing your money?” Mikey asked, her voice getting excited at this prospect. “Richard and Sally never confessed, so who would know? Do you think Hadrian would say he saw her doing it? They'd fire her for stealing, wouldn't they?”

“See you tomorrow,” Margalo said, and hung up.

As soon as the phone was back on its stand, it started ringing again. Mikey picked it up. “Margalo?” She wondered what sudden new idea Margalo had had.

“Mikey?” a girl's voice asked.

“Who is this?”

“It's me. It's Ronnie Caselli.”

“Ronnie Caselli?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you calling me?”

“Margalo's phone was busy. I want to ask—I want to talk to you two tomorrow. Both of you. At lunch, but . . . Can we go somewhere private? Meet me outside, okay? Because you have to help me.”

M
ikey had agreed to meet up with Ronnie during lunch the next day, Tuesday, day thirty-nine, but that was about all the attention she had paid to the phone call. “What do you think it's about?” Margalo had asked when Mikey called to relay Ronnie's request, and Mikey had answered, “I'm going to ask Dad to drive me to school tomorrow, instead of the bus.”

“It must be serious for her to want to talk to us,” Margalo said.

“That way I can see Mrs. Burke before homeroom,” Mikey explained.

Mikey's father didn't mind going half an hour out of his way before work in the morning. What did it matter? A half hour, an hour—He and Mikey had lots to talk about, like how they could add on to their two-bedroom house to make room
for the new, larger family, and like what kind of a wedding everyone wanted, and where, and when. Mikey didn't even have to pretend to listen. She just sat there while wave after wave of happiness, tireless as an ocean, washed over her. She was glad for her father, but that didn't distract her from her own concerns.

At school she didn't even stop by her locker before running up the stairs to the second-floor faculty lounge. It was Peter Paul who answered her knock on the door. His bright red t-shirt declared
ART MATTERS
in black letters, and he looked back over his shoulder to finish what he'd been saying when her knock on the door interrupted him. “You don't expect kids to
know
anything, do you?” Then he turned to fix Mikey with a bored glance (not an Art student) and ask, “Yeah?”

Mikey kept it simple. “Mrs. Burke.”

“Lillian Burke? She doesn't mingle with us.” Mikey caught the whiff of cigarette smoke—but this was a No Smoking Zone, the whole building! “You could try her classroom,” Peter Paul advised, and had the door closed before she had a chance to say anything else, if there had been anything else she needed to say.

“Thanks a lot,” Mikey muttered at the door, and as if they had heard her and thought the feeble sarcasm was funny, laughter sounded from within.

Luckily, Mrs. Burke was in her classroom, correcting papers with a red pen. The door was open so Mikey walked alongside the rows of desks up to the front.

Mrs. Burke put down her pen and looked up at her. “Mikey?” Mrs. Burke was a fading person, her hair a fading gold, her eyes a fading hazel, and her body fading into shapelessness. “What is it?”

“Can I ask your advice on something?”

“Nothing personal.”

Mikey thought about it and decided that her question qualified. “I've been thrown off the tennis team.”

“This sounds personal,” Mrs. Burke objected. She might look faded, but she had a crisp mind.

“Because the coach doesn't agree with me about calls.”

“Complaining about a teacher is personal, Mikey.”

Mikey hastened to explain. “What she doesn't like is that I won't call a ball out if I'm not sure.” Now she thought about it, Mikey wasn't sure that Mrs. Burke knew anything about tennis and how it was scored.

“When you complain about how the tennis coach is treating you, that does sound personal, Mikey.”

“Except there's a principle involved, about fair play.”

Mrs. Burke started rolling up the sleeves of her blouse. She always wore khaki pants and a blouse to work; in cold weather she put on a cable-stitched cardigan sweater over the blouse, but when it was warm, she rolled up her sleeves, to get to work. “The bell's going to ring any minute,” she said. “My homeroom will be arriving.”

“No, but listen, Mrs. Burke,” Mikey said. She tried to think of how to make the teacher understand. “If you threw
someone out of your course for—I don't know, copying or being disruptive or—”

Mrs. Burke was shaking her head. “But I can't throw someone out of Science. Teachers can't do that, so the analogy doesn't hold. Classrooms aren't sports teams.”

“It's all education, though. Isn't it?” Mikey argued. “It's all school. It's all to teach us, isn't it?”

“You know what I mean,” Mrs. Burke argued.

“No, I don't,” Mikey said.

“Don't you have an adviser?” Mrs. Burke asked.

Finally Mikey realized: Mrs. Burke wasn't going to talk to her about this. That was what she meant by “nothing personal,” no non-Science-class problems.

“I do know what you mean,” Mikey said. “But it's wrong.”

“That's as may be,” Mrs. Burke said. “Was there anything else I can do for you?”

Mikey was tempted. She thought maybe she would just plant herself right there in front of the desk and make Mrs. Burke listen to all the bad stuff that went on in ninth grade, the bullying and stealing and unearned grades—both unearned bad grades and unearned good ones. The teachers playing favorites and kids being cliquey, teachers smoking in a No Smoking Zone and kids smoking in the third-floor bathroom, a cafeteria that served pizza and french fries in the same lunch, just for starters, just off the top of her head. But really, Mrs. Burke was right. Her job was to teach Science, not to fix the world, not even the little world of high school.
So Mikey shook her head,
No, nothing else,
and she left.

She did, however, take the one piece of advice Mrs. Burke had sort of offered. She asked Mr. Wolsowski if she could come see him after last period. “Today?” he wondered. The English class was leaving the room in its usual hurry and he was erasing the board, clearing it for his next class, so she wasn't sure he'd really heard her.

“Today. Two fifteen today,” she said.

Mr. Wolsowski had a long face and short hair. He wore a jacket and tie to school, every day. He wore the same style of glasses as his daughter, and also like Casey, he could surprise you. “Today?” he asked again, and Mikey finally got it: He was teasing. “Of course you can,” he said then. “That's today, right?”

Actually, what with everything else going on in school, classes were kind of relaxing. Mikey didn't have to think about classes. She was a smart person who did her homework; classes were easy, and sometimes fun if she had an opinion she wanted to tell people about, especially if someone tried arguing with her. Sometimes classes were even interesting. They were certainly easier than hallways and cafeteria, and everything that was going on.

For example, this tennis stuff. For another example, Ronnie. Mikey was not looking forward to lunch and whatever it was that Ronnie was up to. “What could she possibly want with us?” Margalo said when they saw Ronnie coming towards them, long legs in jeans, long hair in a ponytail.
Then they watched her stop, and head off in a different direction.

The day was warm enough for eating outdoors; Ronnie had been carrying some kind of sandwich in her hand; so it wasn't the weather and it wasn't hunger that had diverted her.

“You two—You've gotta tell me what you think of this. I think it's my masterpiece,” said the voice of Cassie Davis, and turning their heads at the same time, they understood why Ronnie had turned away. Mikey opened her brown bag to take out a ham and cheese sandwich on rye, with lettuce and tomato, as if nothing Cassie Davis might get up to could interest her much because she was too cool to be curious. But Margalo didn't try to keep the surprise out of her voice. “Cassie?”

Cassie Davis had dyed her hair—and dyed her eyebrows, too—a bright fluorescent pink. She was, for just a few seconds, unrecognizable, because the effect of hair that pink was to grab all the attention. That hair could have been wearing anybody's face underneath it.

“I'm not asking about
this
.” Cassie smiled in satisfaction and ran her fingers through her short pink hair. She opened the big art folder that she had set down on the ground beside her feet—she wore yellow clogs—resting it against her legs, shapeless within paint-spattered Dickies overalls, and pulled out a piece of stiff cardboard almost as big as a movie poster. “I'm talking about
this
,” Cassie said.

She turned the cardboard around to show them. Bits and
scraps of paper, some with pencil marks, some with colors, plus bits and rough scraps of painted canvas, plus bits and rough scraps of black-and-white photographs—all had been glued onto the cardboard. It looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when they are first dumped out of the box onto the table. Only there was a sort of thick, curved white fence holding them in. A bowl? And the more you looked at it, the more it looked like all of the scraps were swirling around the middle of the picture.

Margalo wasn't sure what to say. “It's very modern,” she tried.

“Ha!” responded Cassie, meaning
I knew you'd get it.

“It looks like it took a lot of work,” Margalo said.

“You're right about that.”

Mikey, however, knew exactly what she thought and said so. “It looks like a toilet to me,” she said, and went on to be specific, “Flushing.”

Margalo started to laugh.

“I'm not joking,” Mikey told her.

Margalo opened her own lunch bag and jammed a straw into her drink box. “I know you're not. That's pretty clever, Cassie.”

Cassie grinned. Even the heavy eye makeup she was wearing couldn't make much of a stand against the bright pink hair. “It's even better than you know. Because I ripped up all the assignments from the fall and winter—those yellow pieces? They're the still life he said was so good. Ha! Some
life drawings.” She was pointing at different scraps and pieces. “The pencil portraits, remember them? I've titled this
Art I.
Get it? Or maybe I should call it
Freshman Art Class
—which do you think? It's a collage.”

“What will Peter Paul say?” Margalo wondered.

“The way he's hated everything I've done since Christmas?” Cassie asked. “He'll hate it. Big deal.” She stopped grinning. “I'm never taking another art class in my life.”

“I thought you were going to Art School,” Mikey said.

Cassie shook her head. “What's the point? If I'm not any good. Like you not playing on the tennis team.”

“That's different,” Margalo said.

“Why? Because she was thrown off for not doing what she was told? I think my C minus in Art is exactly the same thing. I mean, how can anyone get a C minus in Art? I'm hoping he'll flunk me for the year.”

“What about Jace?” Margalo asked. “Is he dropping Art too?”

“Actually”—and Cassie grinned again—“Jace is getting an A. I think Peter Paul is trying to break us up.”

“Why would he bother?” asked Mikey.

“If I were painting the way he does? I'd do anything I could think of to keep from having to see how my work stank. Like your tennis coach, Mikey. They take out their failures on us. I'll tell you, I'd wash dishes before I'd teach Art,” Cassie declared.

Margalo, who knew what she was talking about, told Cassie, “The benefits aren't as good. Or the pay, or the hours.”

Cassie looked down at Margalo and announced, “You're making fun of me. But it's not funny,” she said, and packed her flushing toilet collage back into the folder. Then she looked out over the clusters of students trying to improve their tans. “I gotta let Jace see this. He won't know
what
to think. Ha!” and she walked away.

Mikey had time to finish up her sandwich before Ronnie at last approached and sat down on the far side of Margalo. Close up Ronnie didn't look too good. Maybe she was tired, maybe she hadn't paid attention to her makeup? “Hey Margalo,” she said, as if she wasn't sure that was the right thing to say. Then she leaned around Margalo, with a smile that stretched her mouth out wide and made her look definitely sad. “Hey Mikey.”

They had seen Ronnie looking good in all kinds of situations, looking good happy, looking good weeping, looking good athletic or studious, for so many years that both Margalo and Mikey sat up straight. “What is wrong with you?” Mikey demanded.