Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (35 page)

“I get it, I get it,” Louis said. He started to rise from his seat, but Mikey stopped him.

“How far has your class gotten in this Math book?” she asked.

“Almost to the end. The intro Algebra chapter is due next week, but—”

“What were your grades?”

“I got a D first semester, a sixty-four. I did okay the first marking period. Then it got to hard stuff—long division, you know, and fractions. And decimals,” he remembered, outraged. “And I can never do word problems.”

Mikey waited.

“I got my grade up to a fifty-five in the fourth marking period, but he's grading me harder in the fifth. A forty-eight, he says, if I'm lucky. My father got on my case after midyears because—They called him in,” another outraged memory. “It's not fair. There's not supposed to be homework in the D-level classes. Is there?”

Mikey told him, “So you need a seventy-seven for the final marking period. And at least a sixty on the exam to pass the year.”

“You did that in your head?”

“So first you have to talk to your teacher.”

“He hates me.”

“And tell him you want to try to pass. Ask him if you can make up old homework assignments. I want to see the chapter one, two, and three assignments on Friday, that's two nights.”

“That's only two nights,” Lou protested.

“You don't have much time,” Mikey pointed out.

“And if anyone asks you what you're doing talking with us, tell them about this,” Margalo instructed. “About the bet.”

“I already figured that out on my own,” Louis said.

“Also, you need to ask your English teacher about extra-credit makeup work,” Margalo said.

“She hates me.”

“Plus, the reading assignments.”

“I stink at reading. You
know
that,” Louis protested.

“I'll be tutoring you,” Margalo pointed out.

Louis couldn't think of how he wanted to respond to that. “How much is the bet for?” he asked her. “You should split your winnings with me.”

Margalo just smiled—Mona Lisa, she hoped—and Mikey smiled more like the big, bad wolf. Neither one of them answered Louis, so after a brief wait he got up. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I'm going to find Sal. I'm only doing this because of Ronnie,” he told them. “Just to remind you about that fact.”

When he was gone, Cassie called down to them from the other end of the table, “What was that about? You don't have crushes on him, do you?”

“Are you looking for a fat lip?” Mikey asked.

“We've got a bet about Louis,” Margalo said.

“What bet?” they wanted to know, and when Margalo explained the part of it she wanted people to know about, reactions varied. “You guys don't know a lost cause when you see one, do you?” was one. “How big a bet?” was another, and a third was, “You think I believe that you don't have crushes?”

“Believe it,” Margalo advised.

And as if Margalo hadn't been busy enough all day, riding home alone on the late bus she had an idea, an idea so
possible that she telephoned Mikey first thing. “I was thinking.”

“You're always thinking.”

“About what you said Monday. Remember? About accusing Coach Sandy?”

“I already did. Nobody cared.”

“But what if you made your accusation a protest? What if you protested, like in the sixties, with signs and placards, like the anti-war protests, like anti-abortion placards, like when people go out on strike, protesting their wages or hours or benefits? What if we protested at tennis games? Or even just at practice?”

“We who?” Mikey wondered.

“You, me, I don't know, Hadrian. Isn't there anybody on the team who agrees with you about this?”

“You and Hadrian are in rehearsal every afternoon.”

Margalo hadn't thought of that. That was like a bucket of very cold water poured down over her very hot idea. “Oh.”

“I'll have to do it alone,” Mikey concluded. “But you have to help me with slogans. I want to start tomorrow, so you call Casey and I'll call Cassie. Cassie can get us into the art room,” she explained, then asked, “What's so funny?”

O
n Thursday—the thirty-seventh-to-last day of ninth grade—it was still raining. Mikey and Margalo, plus Cassie Davis, their point person in the Art Department, and Jace tagging along, and also Casey Wolsowski, who happened to overhear their plans, spent their lunch period in the Art Room making posters for Mikey's protest march.

“It can't be a march with just one person,” Cassie pointed out.

“It's raining, so it won't be a march at all.” Mikey had been looking forward to circling the wire cage enclosing the six tennis courts for the whole length of the practice, not saying a word, just pumping her posters up and down. She planned to have a variety of posters, with a variety of messages. She planned to be as stony faced and unresponsive as those guards at the gates of Buckingham Palace. What she hadn't planned
on was rain. “It's raining. In the rain, how will I be able to—”

Margalo interrupted. “Tennis will meet in Coach Sandy's office, won't they? A tactics class, isn't that what you did on other rainy days? So you can stand at that window while she's talking to them.”

She was right as usual. So Mikey could go ahead with her protest, but she had to admit to herself that she was a little tired of Margalo being so smart, and so right, and so filled up with ideas. Mikey was just as capable of having ideas. She just didn't usually, and how could she? The way Margalo was always rushing around, waving her ideas in your face like flags, having her ideas first.

That was not a line of thought that was going to take her anywhere forward, so Mikey forgot about it. She set to painting her slogan onto the piece of poster board in fat red capital letters, easy to read:
YOU SHOULD CARE.
Then she added a couple of exclamation points to build it up:
YOU SHOULD CARE!!
The red paint was a little runny, making the letters messy. She mopped at them with a paper towel and stood back, studying her poster. It wasn't art, but it went straight to the point. It said exactly what she meant.

Everybody had something to say, and either red or blue paint to say it in, and a sheet of poster board to say it on. Mikey took a second sheet and painted in red, being more careful this time because she didn't actually like the smudged look:
BAD CALLS MAKE BAD TENNIS.

Cassie and Jace worked together to paint a pointing finger
attached to a hand, a copy of the famous World War I enlistment poster where the finger points right at the viewer.
ARE YOU A CHEAT?
they wrote at the bottom.

IMPEACH COACH SANDY
! Cassie wrote on another poster, in bold longhand letters, like graffiti on a wall. “What do you think?” she asked Margalo, who asked, “Can you impeach someone who hasn't been elected?”

Casey took that piece of poster board and turned it over to write: “Tennis players of the team, unite! You have nothing to lose but your coach!” There wasn't enough room for capitals, so she had to write it out in lowercase letters, and at the looks on their faces she had to explain, “It's what Karl Marx said.” That didn't make anything any clearer, so she added, “ ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.' ”

“Who's Karl Marx?” Mikey asked.

“Are you a Communist?” Margalo wondered.

“He was actually a political philosopher,” Casey said. “I like the way it sounds, and anyone who knows the original saying will
really
get it.”

“That'll be you and who else?” Cassie asked.

“Me, actually,” Jace admitted.

“Communism isn't the big enemy anymore,” Mikey reminded them. “Besides, I like it, even if I didn't really get it. But have you noticed?” she asked Margalo. “There's always some big enemy. Why do people always want to have an enemy? The Soviet bloc had us,” she pointed out. “It wasn't just us having them.”

Cassie said, “You have Coach Sandy.”

“I don't have her for an enemy. I just want her fired,” Mikey said. “That's different. An enemy you have to keep around, and keep making bigger so that you can keep on fighting against them.”

Margalo's poster was finished. She pushed it down the long table for Mikey to see.
COACH SANDY
15, it said, and right underneath that, like a scoreboard,
FAIR PLAY
1.

Margalo's was the best, no question. It was so good a best that Mikey couldn't even be jealous.

Mikey was leaning against the wall opposite Coach Sandy's office. She had set the posters up against the wall, facing in. Most people ignored her, finishing their own conversations—“Sally finally had to ask Richard to the prom, she got so tired of waiting for him to ask her.” “Does it ever burn you how Chet Parker gets the best of everything and now Ronnie Caselli too?” “Do you have the Chemistry homework? Have you done it? Can I see it?” A couple of players greeted her as they went past, going in for the rainy-day tactics class. “You cost us our chance at the regionals, I hope you know.” “Are you here to apologize?” Only Mark Jacobs said simply, “Hey, Mikey, how are you?”

Mikey shrugged in answer. She was fine, just fine. It was Coach Sandy they should be worrying about; and a lot of them, now she thought of it, should be worrying about themselves.

Through the wide plate-glass window Mikey watched the squad settle itself facing a blackboard on wheels that stood beside the desk. Some people sat on folding chairs that had been set out, some chose the floor. When they had all gone in and the door had been closed behind them, Mikey picked up her pile of posters and approached the window.

All she could see through it were a couple of rows of backs of heads and the profiles of the people sitting against the side walls, under promotional materials from the big sports companies, pictures of big-name players in full swing, and Coach Sandy standing facing her at the front of the room beside the blackboard, with a piece of chalk in her hand, her short pleated skirt swinging. She saw Mikey standing in the window, stared coldly for a couple of seconds, and then pretended there was no one there.

The coach started talking, and Mikey let her get settled into whatever speech she was making before raising the first poster to the window. With the poster held up in front of her, Mikey couldn't see any reactions. All she could see was the blank white surface of the back, so she stepped off to one side, stretching out her arms to keep the poster level.

The coach had noticed it. How could she miss it? And she had read it. So also had a couple of other people, who shrugged and rolled their eyes at each other. Then the coach went back to pretending nobody was doing anything outside of her window, while people nudged one another and, under pretense of taking out a pencil or a sheet of paper, whispered to one another.

Mikey switched from
YOU SHOULD CARE!!
to
BAD CALLS MAKE BAD TENNIS.
More heads turned—quickly—to see what was going on and then turned—just as quickly—back to the coach. She had called them sharply to attention, was Mikey's guess. After a few minutes she raised the
ARE YOU A CHEAT?
poster and saw some heads lowered, as if that was a question they didn't want to be asked. She held that one up for a while, letting Coach Sandy get some good looks at it.

She couldn't hear anything that was being said in the room, although the coach had started to draw
Xs
connected by arrows on a rectangle on the board, the rectangle divided in half by a line that was probably the net. It looked like she was telling them when to move up to the net in doubles and when to fall back. Mikey raised another poster. This one was Casey's, so while Mikey could see Cassie's
IMPEACH COACH SANDY!
slogan, the coach herself, and some of the people in the room, read Casey's more literary-historical message urging them to unite.