Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (5 page)

Still patiently, Mikey said, “She's saving her money. For college.”

“I don't wear jeans,” Margalo said. She didn't need anybody's pity.

“Whatever,” Tan said. “All I'm saying is, that road looks too long and too uphill to me.”

“But you could still run the hundred meters,” Mikey pointed out. People were always veering off from the topic.

Tan just shook her head and increased her pace. “See you in class,” she said over her shoulder.

Mikey slowed down to let her pull ahead and then disappear into the crowd. “What's happened to her?” she asked Margalo.

“High school?” Margalo guessed. “Getting older?”

“I thought she
liked
sports,” Mikey said.

T
hat afternoon, which was overcast and cool, Mikey took on the last ninth grader on the girls' tennis ladder. After this win, she had to make her way through the sophomores before she could start challenging the juniors, and after them the seniors, to take her place on the tennis team next spring. It was pretty irritating the number of warm bodies Mikey had to climb over, when all she wanted was to play her best tennis against good opponents under the watchful eye of a good coach.

So far the coach hadn't noticed Mikey, which told you how overcrowded the tennis classes were, because—as Coach Sandy had assured them at the first meeting—her plan was to find the best players, and train them, and have a winning team in the spring.

Mikey's plan was to be on that winning team with Coach
Sandy. This meant that she was going to have to keep working her way up the tennis ladder, which meant waiting for her chances to play matches until a court fell empty and she was next in line to use it. Often, that also meant trying to get her set finished in the last twenty minutes of the practice time. But that Mikey could do easily. This Tammy player, for example, couldn't handle the kind of power Mikey could produce off her forehand, and her backhand, too, not to mention her serve. On the few occasions that Tammy managed to return Mikey's serve, Mikey had been at the net, waiting to put it away. She hadn't lost a single point on serve. When Tammy was serving, Mikey returned with a hard topspin drive, backhand or forehand, into a corner, backhand or forehand, and charged the net to put away whatever weak defensive shot Tammy managed to make, on those occasions when she managed to make one. As the games went along, Mikey noticed that when her shots landed close to the line, they were usually called out. Some of them she would have sworn were in for sure. She wondered if Tammy knew the unwritten tennis rule, that you call a shot good unless you're
sure
it's out. But since most of the time Mikey could place her shots unarguably in, that was what she did. It wasn't placement that was beating Tammy, it was power. Mikey took the final point of the set at the net, so she waited there for her opponent to come up and shake hands.

“They said you were good,” Tammy reported. She didn't seem to mind losing, which was okay with Mikey. “I guess they weren't kidding.”

Mikey nodded, and they shook hands to end the match. Her first coach had told them always to say something good about an opponent's game after the handshake, so Mikey—after some thought—said, “That's a nice forehand crosscourt you're working on.”

“Not so nice that you didn't bagel me.”

“But they're right about me,” Mikey explained. “I really am good.”

Tammy's smile stiffened. “Anyway, who do you play next?”

They were talking as they walked off, exiting through the gate in the high wire fence that surrounded the courts. They went up to the bench where they had dropped their tennis bags and knapsacks.

“Karen Hooper,” Mikey said.

“Wouldn't it be something if a ninth grader got to the top half of the ladder? Or even, what if a ninth grader made the tennis team?” Tammy sounded genuinely excited by the thought. If Mikey had been her, she'd have chopped her tennis racket up into little pieces, or hung it by the neck until it was dead, but maybe Tammy just liked playing and didn't mind losing.

“Well,” Mikey said, “I'm good enough.”

Tammy stared at Mikey until—nobody would say something like that seriously, would they?—she grinned and remarked, “You're certainly confident enough.”

Why shouldn't I be?
Mikey was about to ask, when she heard her name being called. “Elsinger!” So she had no chance to remind Tammy about the unwritten rule.

“Elsinger! Over here!”

Coach Sandy was standing by Court One. She wore her usual pleated skirt and Windbreaker, and she held her hand out behind her. “Somebody pass me a racket.” Somebody did. “We've got five minutes, Elsinger. I want to show you something.”

About time,
Mikey said to herself, but kept her face expressionless as she followed the coach out onto the court.

Coach Sandy had tennis balls in the pocket of her Windbreaker. “I'll serve first,” she told Mikey, and jogged to the opposite side of the court to get into position.

Mikey prepared to receive serve. She didn't know what to expect. She'd never seen the coach actually playing, so she didn't know what kind of a serve she'd be looking at. She went on full alert.

The coach tossed the ball up into the air, then sent it into the center of the service box.
Not much of a serve,
was Mikey's reaction as she pounded a backhand return, cross-court, into the coach's backhand corner and made her approach to the net.

The coach floated a lob, up, over Mikey's head and out of reach, but low enough so that Mikey didn't have time to realize what was happening and turn to run it down before it bounced in.

“Fifteen-love,” Coach Sandy said, and crossed back to the center to take her second serve, with the same smooth, easy motion, no effort to it.

The ease of the motion distracted Mikey, who admired it and tried to figure out how it worked. Perhaps that was why she was a little late on the return, sending the ball closer to the center than she'd planned, which meant she could expect a better shot from the coach, as she waited, poised behind the net, ready to put the ball away.

But the ball floated over her head, again, and landed just inside the baseline, again.

“Thirty-love,” said Coach Sandy.

The people watching stopped talking among themselves to laugh.

When Coach Sandy served for the third time, Mikey whipped a backhand down the center, right at her, and as she moved towards the net kept a careful eye on the coach's racket so that when she turned its face to lob, Mikey would have enough time to race back and put that lob away with an overhead from the baseline, another one of her killer shots.

But this time the ball went whizzing past her, a line drive into her forehand corner. “Forty-love,” said the coach.

On the next serve, determined to win at least one point in the game, Mikey was ready for anything. The coach served with the same easy motion, only this time the ball whipped into the T at the center of the court, and for all of her fast reflexes, Mikey couldn't even get the rim of her racket on it.
Where did that come from?

“Let's not waste time changing sides,” Coach Sandy told her. “Your serve.”

Mikey served one of her best, as much power as she could get into it.

It came back at her feet as she was approaching the net. At her feet and unreturnable.

“Love-fifteen,” she said, returning to the baseline, to fire another serve into the ad court and get herself to the net so fast that the coach's return wouldn't have time to be too low to return. But this one looped up over her head, a lob again! Although she raced off to run it down, all she could do was shove the ball back over her shoulder, then—wheeling around to get back in position—see Coach Sandy put it away with a backhand overhead shot that sliced the ball sideways and short, across the court.

“Love-thirty.”

For her third serve Mikey took a little power off and directed it right into the body, but the coach side-stepped neatly, and her racket sliced swiftly, and the service return barely made it over the net before it sank to the ground—a drop shot. Although Mikey, who had decided to stay back, pelted for the net at top speed, she couldn't lift the ball back over into play. “Love-forty,” she announced.

“Let's play out the next point, shall we?” the coach called.

As if Mikey hadn't been trying to play out all the previous seven.

Mikey served, down the middle to reduce the angle of the return, and when the ball came back deep to her forehand,
she got into position and waited, racket back, to step into her cross-court winner.

Except that winner came back, also cross-court. Mikey set up and sent a forehand winner down the line.

This one also came back, bouncing at mid court, drawing her forward for a shot she kept deep but couldn't get much angle on, and then she went on forward to the net to cut off the slice backhand, sending the ball short and cross-court, but that one too came back, looping high on her forehand so that she could barely get to it, and then the next return shot went into her own backhand corner. That one she ran down with a wild swing that, if she'd been intending a lob, would have satisfied her, but she never lobbed.

Coach Sandy got ready for an overhead.

Mikey got ready to try to block it back, which she did, so Coach Sandy lined up for another overhead, this time taken halfway to the net. This Mikey once again blocked back.

The next overhead Coach Sandy swung down on from close to the net, so the ball bounced close to the service line, then up, up, and out over the fence, out of the court. That overhead was unblockable, ungettable. “That's game,” Coach Sandy said. She grinned at Mikey, pleased with herself, her eyes alight with the satisfactions of an easy victory.

Mikey had been entirely outplayed, which made her feel like sort of a jerk. Even during the last point Mikey had known that even while the coach was playing shot after shot, she could have won the point any time she decided to.

“Has that taken you down a peg or two?” Coach Sandy asked as they walked off the court, adding, “You've got a lot to learn, Elsinger.”

“Okay.”

“Like, some variety in your strokes,” the coach went on.

She didn't need to go on, in Mikey's opinion. Mikey was still taking in how weak her defenses had been.

“Like, having a game plan,” the coach said.

As usual, none of the other tennis players paid any attention to Mikey as they went off to catch the Activities buses. They were all busy with their own friends and their own plans, none of which included Mikey. The coach had returned to her office in the cellar of the gym, and through the big window the players could see her talking on the phone as they filed past. She didn't look up to wave, or come to the door to chat with them. That wasn't the kind of coach she was. The kind of coach she was was exacting and strict and ambitious—a winning coach.

Mikey looked at her through the window, and half of her wanted to say,
Next time, you'll see,
while half wanted to ask,
Can't we start right now?
And half wanted to just go into that office and pop the short, blond woman on the snoot, for making Mikey feel clumsy and inept on the tennis court. The tennis court was Mikey's native habitat and Coach Sandy seemed to want to take that confidence away from her.

In fact, ninth grade seemed designed to make her wonder about herself. If she was as good a tennis player as she thought.
Or as smart a person. Or as able to look out for herself.

Mikey had a sudden—and deeply unpleasant—thought: What if ninth grade was right? What if she had peaked in eighth grade? What if there was never going to be anything she could do about anything, in ninth grade or ever again?

What if ninth grade was what the rest of her life was going to be like?

Mikey started to run for the late bus. She needed to talk to Margalo and hear what Margalo had to say about people making bad tennis calls and a coach who wanted to undermine a player's confidence.

M
ikey had to wait until the end of the day, when there were fifteen minutes between the end of the last class and whatever you were doing next—taking a bus, reporting for some sport or an activity, just hanging out or heading to work, to the library, heading for home, heading for trouble, whatever. She had to wait from lunch and through three afternoon classes, each separated by a four-minute changeover, which was much too short a time to, first, run Margalo down and then, second, be told what was up before they separated for their next classes.

Mikey wanted as much time as she could get to ask about the two bombshells Margalo had dropped onto their lunch table. Mikey couldn't even decide which she wanted to check up on first, not to mention which part of which one she most wanted to get clear. As soon as Margalo got to her locker,
Mikey—who had been waiting there, not patiently—demanded, “When did you decide to get a job?”

Margalo seemed surprised by the question, as if she didn't quite know what Mikey was talking about. “What?”

“What's
wrong
with you?” Mikey demanded. “You jabbered away all during lunch, chitter-chatter nonstop, like some talking machine. And now . . .”

The hallway was loud with the sounds of falling books and clanging locker doors, of people calling to one another—“Wait up!”—and footsteps thumping. “Look out!” was the most frequently overheard phrase in that hallway at that time on a Friday afternoon in the middle of October. The sixth Friday of ninth grade, Mikey could have told Margalo. Thirty to go.

Margalo looked over her shoulder beyond Mikey to the crowded hallway. “Have you seen Hadrian?”