Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (39 page)

“Heard what?” Mikey also had a bus to catch, and Margalo to run down before that. She opened her locker. “Don't believe everything you hear,” she advised Rhonda.

“I want to say, I'm sorry for always being so . . . mean to you,” Rhonda mumbled, looking about at Mikey's waist. Since Mikey was wearing jeans and an un-tucked-in t-shirt, Mikey was pretty sure her outfit wasn't being admired.

“Okay,” Mikey said. She didn't care if Rhonda was mean to her or not, as long as she didn't have to spend any time with her.

“But I'd like to help.”

Mikey turned to face her, her arms full of books, to say
Please, No,
when Rhonda went on, “But I can't because I can't agree with what you're doing. Rebelling. Trying to break things down. I don't agree with that, Mikey. I never have. And you've always done it and you never got in enough trouble, especially about the squirrel.” Rhonda was getting wound up now. Her eyes filled with tears at the remembered injustice.

“That was Margalo.” Mikey felt better. This was Rhonda being her old self. She didn't look like her old self, but Mikey knew, You can't judge a book by its cover.

“I don't know what's going to come of you,” Rhonda said, her tone of voice revealing the hope that whatever it was would not be anything good.

“Neither do I.” Neither did anyone, did they?

“But I would like to help you,” said Rhonda the New. But did she mean help in general? Or help in this particular case?

“I don't need help,” Mikey said.

“You already have enough people?” Then, in another flash of her old self, she asked, “Don't you and Margalo worry about getting all these people into trouble?”

“Nope,” Mikey said, which was the truth, and then, not wanting to give up a chance to give Rhonda a chance to practice having good and generous thoughts, she added, “Margalo can't do it anyway because of the play.”

T
uesday was a good day for tennis—warm but not hot, windless, and the overcast sky meant no late-afternoon sun in your eyes. The six tennis courts out behind the gym had two teams warming up on them, one in orange shirts and black shorts, the other in maroon shirts and blue shorts. Beside Courts One and Two there were bleachers, only three tiers high, but tennis never drew much of a crowd. If you wanted to watch the play on Courts Three, Four, Five or Six, you had to stand at one or the other end behind high wire fencing.

Mikey had gathered her linespeople behind the bleachers. Even if anybody had been looking to see if anyone was getting up to anything, her linespeople would have been hard to spot. Since the coaches were busy giving their players last-minute instructions, and since the stands seemed to be unusually crowded—maybe half-full already and people still
arriving—nobody paid any attention to the cluster of ninth and tenth graders behind the bleachers.

They all wore khaki trousers—in a couple of cases khaki skirts—and white shirts. Mikey looked around at them and felt weird.

She felt weird because she was going to be on the courts but not playing. Also because she was used to being the person in a group of people who was going off in her own direction, alone, but on this occasion she was the leader, with followers. And really, even if she hated to admit it, she felt weird because Margalo wasn't there to let her know as things went along how they were going.

Not that Margalo wasn't involved. They had discussed who to pair with whom and how to use twelve people to cover each of the four courts they could monitor. “Don't put Louis with you,” Margalo had advised. “You bring out the worst in him. You could put him with Tim, he thinks tenth graders are cool. Or Ira, Ira's good with anybody. And if you put Sal with Tan, she'll keep him calm, or Danny with Ronnie because he's got a crush on her, and—What do you think? Keep Cassie and Jace apart? But Casey and Felix would be okay together.” They had also talked about when the linespeople should make their entrance. That is, when it would be too late for Coach Sandy to send them away but early enough to allow the players to get used to their presence before the actual matches started.

Now, here, without Margalo, Mikey was going to have to
decide what to say to her people to be sure they wouldn't change their minds on her before they even started, or even quit after they'd begun. She had decided what they should wear and what hand signals they should use and how much about the game and the lines they needed to know; but it seemed to her that everything was about to start happening and she didn't know if she could count on them or not.

She told them, “Remember, if you're not sure it's out, then it's in.”

“Even against our own players?” Louis asked, not for the first time.

“Absolutely,” Mikey said, so uneasy that she wasn't even impatient with him.

And that was something else unpleasantly weird. She wasn't nervous and excited, the way she was before a match. She was nervous and uneasy—no fun at all.

“Remember,” she said. “Only
Out
gets called out loud.”

“How many times are you going to tell us this?” grumbled Cassie.

“You never call
In
,” Mikey persisted.

“You're like some Hitler dictator,” Cassie kept on. “Isn't she, Jace?”

This was more than Mikey could be patient for, and she felt a welcome anger. “You want to leave, Cassie? Because now's the time if you do.”

“
I
want to leave,” Louis volunteered.

“You don't have the choice,” Mikey told him.

“I don't need to be told the same stuff over and over,” said Cassie.

“What, are you saying the rest of us
do
need to be told?” demanded Jace.

Ira turned to Cassie and asked with what sounded like genuine curiosity, “Do you two always quarrel like this?”

“You have a problem with that?” Cassie answered.

Whistles blew, the signal that the coaches were gathering their teams back together.

“Dad says we should be ready to get in trouble,” Casey warned everybody.

“You told your father?”

“Of course, but—Dad and I have a deal. Unless somebody's in physical danger—or psychological danger too—neither one of us will disclose what the other has told him. Or her. You can trust him,” Casey assured them. “Personally, I'm ready to get in trouble over this.”

“I'm already in enough trouble,” Louis pointed out, and, “Me too, actually,” Felix said. “I've been doing a lot of class cutting.”

Casey explained this to them. “He's working in the darkroom.”

“I had an idea,” Felix said, and his face lit up. “An unofficial yearbook. You know, all the things they don't want going into the official yearbook?”

“I'm writing the captions,” Casey said. “We're using pseudonyms.”

Mikey got them back on track. “Okay. Okay. It's time. You all know where to go and what to do.”

“Besides,” Louis observed, not unhappily, “if anyone gets in trouble, it should be Mikey.”

Mikey smiled grimly.
Trouble? Bring it on, I'm ready.
“Let's go,” she said, and led them out from behind the bleachers, out onto the courts. Because of the audience seated on the bleachers, she and Margalo had decided they didn't have to worry about bad calls on Courts One and Two, so Mikey led her linespeople down to the gates between Courts Three and Four, leaving a set of three people at each of those courts, and then went with her remaining five people to the gate between Courts Five and Six.

That was where Coach Sandy caught up with her. “Stop right there, Elsinger. What do you think you're doing? You're off the team.”

Mikey smiled and held out her empty hands.
Look, Coach, no racket.

“So what are you doing on the court?” Coach Sandy stood back to let the girls who would be playing on those courts go past her, and as they passed, she advised her players, “Cover the alleys. Go down the middle. Rush the net,” before she turned back to Mikey. “Well?”

“We're going to call the lines,” Mikey said. “We want to help out,” she said loudly.

Whatever Coach Sandy was thinking of saying in response to this got stifled by the approach of the opposing coach.

“Sandy, you really are a wonder,” the other coach said. It was a man, about the age of Mikey's dad, long legged, tanned, wearing white shorts and an orange Windbreaker. “I wish I could assemble some linespeople so my players could concentrate on playing. I wish I could get my school more enthusiastic, too, about tennis. You've got a real crowd here.”

Both Mikey and Coach Sandy turned their heads to look down the line of fencing and see that the bleachers now had a lot of students sitting on them, with a few mothers huddled together at one end of the bottom row. All of the students were backing the home team.

“I do, don't I?” said Coach Sandy suspiciously, with another evil eye for Mikey.

“I wish I knew how you did it,” the other coach said. Then, “Good luck to all of them,” he said. “Let the games begin!” he called, and blew on his whistle.

Mikey ran to take up her position, chosen for maximum visibility of her half of the court. The opposing team had won the toss and were serving first. Chrissie would receive serve, and Mikey knew exactly the serve she would have tried against Chrissie—out wide to the forehand to draw a cross-court response that the net person could put away.

That was exactly what this server did and exactly what happened. Mikey didn't even begin to think about how much she would rather be playing in this game than calling lines for it. She didn't let herself wish she was in Chrissie's place against this intelligent opponent. She concentrated on calling the lines.

Vaguely, as if from a distance, she heard calls being made on other courts.

Margalo slipped out of the rehearsal a few minutes early so she could get to the tennis courts in time to see how the line calling was going. She almost ran, down the hallway and across to the gym entrance, then through the gym, down the stairs and out the rear to the tennis courts. The first three courts were still being played on when she got there. Each of those courts had four linespeople on it. She heard occasional calls,
Out,
and the servers calling out the scores,
fifteen-thirty, forty-love.

Margalo went up to the side of the bleachers and asked one of the team members sitting there, “How's it going?”

“Mark won his singles, but Fiona lost hers, but we took two of the doubles sets, so it's not too bad,” she was told.

“It could still go either way,” somebody added.

“You're that friend of Mikey's.”

“Yes,” Margalo said.

“Can you get her to come back on the team?”

“Jerk, it's not up to her. It's up to Coach Sandy.”

“But Coach Sandy has it in for her.”

“I don't think she'll give up.”

“Who, Coach Sandy?”

“No, dummy. Coach Sandy would give up in a minute if Mikey would let her save face. It's Mikey who won't. It doesn't help that she's right.”

“You mean Mikey is?”

“Exactly.”

Margalo moved on. She had heard enough, and it was pretty much what she expected to hear. Coach Sandy was standing behind the fence, watching over the game being played on the middle court, clapping loudly for good shots and calling out encouragement.

Mikey was crouched down on the service line to make her calls, and Jace was at the right rear, watching the sidelines and the end line. The air was full of the
thwap
sound of the tennis ball hitting the sweet spot on the racket.

Margalo thought tennis was like most sports, not all that interesting to watch unless Mikey was playing. So she spent her time looking around, trying to match up kids and parents, enjoying the temper tantrum one of the opposing players let himself have when he double-faulted. It wasn't even set point, and he still slammed his racket down onto the court as if it was set point—set point and more, match point at the U.S. Open on national TV.

Because she wasn't watching the matches very carefully, Margalo was one of the first to notice Mr. Robredo emerge from the gym. As far as you could tell from looking at him, Mr. Robredo was here to see how the games were going and to support the tennis team. He went to stand next to Coach Sandy, every now and then saying something to her. He was wearing a suit and tie, she was wearing a short blue pleated skirt and a maroon shirt. From the rear they looked built to
the same model, both compact, carrying no extra weight, both with short, practical hairstyles, both of them adults dressed for their jobs.

Margalo turned her attention to Ronnie, calling lines for a boys' doubles match on Court One. “Out!” Ronnie called, and when the player protested—“You can't be serious!”—she turned her smile on him. “It really was out.”