Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (44 page)

“Just do it,” Margalo ordered him. “Mikey!” she urged, since Mikey was still sitting there, looking up at her, not moving.

Mikey had her role to play in this scene, so she followed. But as soon as Margalo was out in the hallway, she stopped. “I thought you had to go to the bathroom,” Mikey protested.

“Remember Dumbo?” Margalo answered.

“Dumbo? Are you having a nervous breakdown? Are you worried about your play?”

“The movie. You remember, the elephant with big ears.”

“You want me to rent a video of
Dumbo
for you?” Mikey guessed. This was weird, even for Margalo, whose mind was a natural bungee-jumper.

Margalo shook her head impatiently.

“It's playing downtown and you want to go?” Mikey guessed. “You want me to go, and take Stevie and Lily?” What was this, twenty questions? “Is it bigger than a bread box?”

“No, don't be so . . . .”

Stupid,
Margalo was going to say
stupid,
and Mikey wasn't about to take that, even from Margalo, because if there was one thing she knew she wasn't, it was stupid. She was about to tell Margalo just that, when Margalo went on.

“I mean, remember Dumbo's magic feather?”

“The one the crows gave him?”

“Exactly.”

“But it wasn't magic,” Mikey pointed out, trying to figure out where Margalo's wavelength was so she could get on it. “You didn't do any funny drug stuff, did you?”

“Mikey!” Margalo protested, exasperated. “Just listen. Louis needs a magic feather.”

“Oh, of course.” Mikey knocked on her head with her knuckles. “Silly me. I can loan him mine.”

“Not literally, not a real feather. But . . . what if he really believed he could do this work? Learn this material. What if he really believed he could do well enough to pass the exams?”

“He'd have to be even stupider than I think he is if he can't. But he doesn't work.”

“That's because he's afraid it's too hard. He's afraid that even if he works, he'll fail, and then he'll look seriously like a loser, if he's trying. But he's not abnormally stupid. He might not even be stupid at all once he gets out of school,” Margalo said. “So I think we ought to try a magic feather. Not literally,” she said again. “But I mean, what if we can persuade him that he can do it?”

“But he
can.
We already know that.”

“So could Dumbo,” Margalo pointed out.

“Oh,” Mikey said. “Oh, okay. Okay. I get it, but . . . What's this non-literal feather going to be?”

“I think we should tell him we think he can.”

“He'd believe us?”

“He'd want to believe us.”

“But he still won't do the work.”

“He will if he thinks it's easy.”

Mikey worked it out. “And if we convince him he can do it, he'll be convinced it'll be easy—because if it wasn't, he wouldn't be able to do it—so he'll do it.”

Margalo smiled as if Mikey was a student who had been having trouble learning and finally got it, as pleased as any teacher.

Mikey returned that smile,
You are very close to a punch in the snoot,
and Margalo stepped back a little. “Let me do the talking,” she said.

“With pleasure,” Mikey said.

But when they had seated themselves again, and Margalo had taken the sheet of paper Louis had shoved across at her, Mikey had an idea. She charged in.

“You shouldn't have made all these mistakes,” she said to Louis, indicating the Math homework.

He shrugged. He could care less. Getting him through these courses was
their
job.

Mikey waved the imaginary feather. “You're too smart to make this kind of mistake in long division.”

“Yeah. Right,” Louis answered.

“So do the first three problems again,” Mikey told him. She copied them onto a clean sheet of paper.

“I already did them and got them wrong.”

“You couldn't have been paying attention. What is it, were you watching television at the same time? Because nobody as good at weaseling out of situations as you are would make those mistakes, unless he was trying to watch television and do homework at the same time.”

“I didn't want to miss the game. Jeez, Mee-shelle, I thought you were such a sports person.” But Louis took the paper, and maybe took the bait, too, because he looked carefully at her corrections. The thing about non-literal magic feathers was that you couldn't see Dumbo wrapping his trunk around them and starting to flap his ears. You could only hope.

Margalo was glaring at her, but Mikey didn't care. Her idea was: Louis would probably believe her before he'd
believe Margalo, because he knew for sure how much Mikey had never thought much of him. Whereas Margalo was always harder to figure out.

When Louis had finished the three problems and shoved the paper across the table to Mikey, Margalo looked up from the papers he had shoved at her and said, “This is exactly what I meant. Exactly right. Now, think about who is in each of these scenes—”

“Do nonhumans count?” Louis asked. “Like, what about that deer the ants eat, is the deer a character in the scene?”

“You're getting ahead of me.”

“I am?”

“Can you slow down a little?”

“Sure,” Louis announced. “But I'm including the ants as characters,” he told her. “And the deer, no matter what you say, and I can prove it too. Because they're there.” He jabbed his finger onto his paper with lists on it.

“These problems are all correct.” Mikey passed his paper back to him.

“You don't sound surprised.”

“Why should I be surprised?”

“I told you he was smart enough,” Margalo said to Mikey, as if Louis was invisible.

“I never said he wasn't,” Mikey played along. “I just said he wasn't going to do the work.”

“I don't have time to sit here and listen to you two arguing,” Louis said to them. “I've got better things to do than—Can
we just get to work? Because if you think I'm going to go without any lunch, you've got another think coming.”

So they all got a chance to have lunch. When Mikey and Margalo sat down at their table, Cassie announced that, after all, she did want to help with calling the lines at the next day's match. “Because even if it's not going to change anything, sometimes the only thing worth doing is the right thing. The same time as Tuesday? The same outfit?”

“Yes,” Mikey said. And then—because if she hadn't, it would have been breaking a habit she'd gotten used to, as unnerving as forgetting to brush your teeth—she added, “Today's day thirty-two.”

“But I'm not calling any away matches. I'm not spending hours trapped on a bus filled with people having school spirit.”

“That's up to you,” Mikey said.

“Robredo's going to be chewing nails over this,” Cassie added.

Mikey reassured her, “It's totally my responsibility.”

“Believe me, I've already figured that out.” Cassie grinned.

Then, passing Mikey in the hallway on the way to class, Tan turned back to say, “I'll be there for the lines tomorrow.” So the numbers were mounting.

Her anxiety should be mounting too, Mikey knew, since she had no idea what Mr. Robredo would do when she directly and personally disobeyed
him.
She would guess
suspension, if she had to make a guess. She didn't mind suspension. If she didn't have to be at school, she could go downtown to Margalo's restaurant and apply for a job, so it wouldn't be entirely wasted time. But there was missing the work with Louis, for one problem, and for a bigger problem there was whether she would go ahead and call the lines for a third time when she got back to school from however many days of suspension Mr. Robredo gave to her.

Mikey thought probably she would.

Margalo had a slightly different point of view. “It's turning into a no-win situation, like the cold war. All it can do is escalate,” she said to Mikey at lunch on Friday.

“Day thirty-one, it's already day thirty-one,” Mikey answered. “The year is really almost over.”

“Or it's like Thomas More in
A Man for All Seasons
,” said Hadrian. “They cut off his head because he wouldn't compromise his principles.”

“What kind of principles would be worth getting your head cut off over?” Jace wondered.

“Religious,” Hadrian told him. “Personal integrity. Afterwards they mounted his head on a stake on the walls of the Tower of London.”

“Ick,” was Tim's response, but Cassie said, “Like the hands in a Grünewald crucifixion,” and Casey's opinion was, “That's barbaric. Like hanging criminals in cages and letting them starve to death, then letting the bodies rot in the cages until they're only bones.”

“Or putting them into jails,” Felix suggested.

Hadrian continued, “Che Guevara. Martin Luther King Jr. Think of Jesus Christ. People frequently die for their principles. And Socrates.”

Margalo pointed out, “Mikey's not going to get assassinated for arranging to have the lines called in a tennis match.”

“I know that,” Cassie said. “But there's the ninth-grade equivalent.”

“Suspension,” Mikey supplied. “I guess they could expel me, and then I guess I'd have to move to Texas to go to school.”

“A bad idea,” Margalo said, promising, “We could stop them from expelling you, somehow. We could stage a sit-in or take them to court.”

Casey reminded them, “My father is one of them, don't forget. He's not going to agree to expel Mikey about this.”

“Yeah, but what can one
teacher
do?”

Casey continued, “They're not bad. They really do want us to learn and graduate and succeed in life.”

“Some of them can be pretty bad,” Cassie maintained. “In it for the power, for example. Or the ego trip. Peter Paul,” she named one.

Jace quarreled with that. “You just have it in for him because he thinks—”

“Thinks what?” Cassie demanded. “What does he think? That I'm boring? Talentless? Or does he just think I'm
female, which is about as low as you can get on the Art ladder.”

“Maybe he just doesn't think you're any good,” Jace said.

“Well, it's mutual,” muttered Cassie. “Not that it matters anymore.”

Mikey ignored the sweethearts. “This is just making an athletic event go more smoothly. It's just calling lines for a single match, or a few matches. It's not—”

“Don't you dare say it's not important,” Margalo warned her.

When Mikey led her group out onto the tennis courts that afternoon, there were only five of them, Cassie having met up with Mikey at the end of the last class of the day to say that it wasn't that she didn't agree, but she didn't want to become an activist, she didn't want to start being a member of any group, she didn't want people thinking they knew what she would do. Mikey nodded and rearranged in her own mind the disposition of her small group for maximum effectiveness. But as the five of them crossed in front of the bleachers, Cassie ran up to join them. “If an artist can't do what her conscience tells her, she might as well go to work for some Wall Street brokerage house.”

Mikey just nodded and readjusted her readjustment. She repeated the instructions of Tuesday, again giving them in a loud enough voice so everybody—the home players and the visitors—would hear. “Remember, if you're not sure it's out,
you call it in.” Then she assigned linespeople to the courts on which singles would be played, since line calls interfered most with those games, where the players lacked partners to correct or corroborate a call. This Harry Truman High School team had some objections. “Hey,” they protested, and, “Hey, man,” and, “What're you doing?”

“We'll call the lines,” Mikey explained.