Bad Girls in Love (13 page)

“What about parties?” Cassie wondered.

“I don't go with a date. Unless it's Doug,” Ronnie said. “I'd already asked him to the dance.” That memory made her smile even more happily.

Margalo had some information about coupledom from her older stepsiblings. Susannah had been half of a couple about a hundred times already, since she was always falling for someone and then discovering he wasn't perfect. Howard
wanted
a steady girlfriend. He dreamed about it, he said; it was the next best thing to getting married, he said. But Susannah and Howie never filled her in on the details—how you talked about it, what it actually required of each person. “Did
you
really ask
him
to the dance?” Margalo asked Ronnie. “Like say,
Will you go to the dance with me?”

“Sort of.” Ronnie's smile had changed to half-mischief and half-smug. “Of course, he already knew about it because of his brother. He wanted to take me—my first big dance. He made a big deal out of that, my first big dance. So when he
said he hoped I was planning on asking him, I said I was. But that was way back, that was New Year's.”

Not way back
, Margalo corrected silently, then corrected herself. Maybe time did feel different to Ronnie: before Doug and after, BD and AD. Love took different people different ways; she had noticed that more than once, more than twice, too. She was glad it hadn't taken her the way it had taken Mikey.

“But you were already dating by then, weren't you? Did you know it was serious by then?” Margalo asked next.

Ronnie's mouth kept that same half-and-half smile as she remembered. “Our first date was December twenty-seventh because I met him Christmas Day and he called the day after to ask me out. And I didn't sleep barely at all that night. I
couldn't
I kept
thinking
about him, you know? Remembering everything, every minute, every word. I was . . . in a daze, a total daze. He asked me to a movie, but”—she giggled—”we never went, we . . . just talked and stuff. So last Saturday was our five-week anniversary. He said, on our first date?, that I was his Christmas present.” She smiled again. “He can be so sweet. You know? Romantic. I don't know
what
he'll do for the dance, because it's Valentine's Day.”

“The jacket's an anniversary present?” Tan asked.

Annaliese said, “Aren't we too young for anniversaries? I mean, my grandparents have them. My parents would, if they were still married.” She looked around for confirmation of her implied doubts.

“Doug likes to think of me wearing it,” Ronnie explained. “He said. Besides, he likes to celebrate things, like, anniversaries. He likes to make things special.”

“Do you do everything he likes to?” Margalo asked, and then—as the girls squealed, “Mar-ga-lo!”—realized what she might be understood to be asking, although she hadn't even thought of that until all those squeals started chasing her words around the room like some herd of baby pigs going after their dinner. “I mean—I didn't mean—”

“Margalo!” Ronnie was protesting at the same time, so their voices overlapped. Ronnie's cheeks were pink and she was loving this conversation.

So Margalo pretended she had meant what they thought she had. “Does that mean—what does Doug—I mean, for example, was there serious kissing on that first date?”

“Doug's in high school,” Ronnie explained, and then searched for a way to turn the conversation in another direction. “He's a junior in high school. Only little kids think—I mean, what do you think Heather and Shawn did?”

“What do you mean?” Margalo asked. “What
did
they do?” Another round of squealing. “How do you know what they did?”

“If you must ask, Shawn told me about it. We were talking. Because—you know—when you've got a boyfriend you can be regular friends with other boys. Because everybody can relax.” They made a semicircle around her, all of them reflected in the mirrors, their faces and the back of Ronnie's
head, the dark fall of her hair. Nobody else came in, enabling them to continue this private conversation.

“Shawn wanted to talk to a girl about it,” Ronnie said. While she thought about what more she wanted to tell them, Ronnie turned to face the mirror. She combed her hair with her fingers. “We're pretty good friends, me and Shawn,” Ronnie told the girls surrounding her. “I guess I'm lucky the way I get along with boys. Except,” she added, to remind them that she didn't have an entirely perfect life, “there's always Louis. Although, I did get him to stop calling Shawn names.”

“That was you?” Derrie asked. “But, I thought, Shawn asked him?”

“Not that Shawn really minded,” Ronnie told them. “But you know what? Doug's really jealous of Shawn. I mean—unreasonably, you know?” This pleased her. “I wish he'd understand how a girl can have close friends that are boys.”

“Is that why he wants you wearing his jacket? Because he's jealous?” Margalo asked.

This, however, was a cause-and-effect question:
What is the cause of this effect?
If Ronnie hadn't been busy adding, “I don't know why he picks on Shawn,” and if two groups of eighth-grade girls—a few jockettes, a couple of Barbies—hadn't entered, Margalo might have been cold-shouldered out of the room.

But Ronnie did want to exclaim over Doug's suspicions, and flaunt them, and cuddle up with them, and then the two
groups did come noisily in, so Margalo escaped the consequences of motivation analysis. Everybody greeted everybody and shifted around to share mirror space, while some girls entered the stalls. Ronnie leaned over the sink to inspect her eye shadow and lipstick, to smile at herself, before she turned eagerly around to respond to the new round of eager questions. “Ronnie? Is that—? What does it mean, I mean, that jacket?”

H
ow
could
you?” That was what Mikey wanted to ask Shawn all day Monday, and again on Tuesday—”How could you
do
that?”—when she was giving him a Chez ME bag holding chewy ginger cookies. “How
could
you kiss Heather McGinty that way?” she thought whenever she saw his face, “How could you
want
to do that?”

She didn't ask out loud, of course. Their conversations were few and brief: “I made these.” “Thank you.” Few and brief and not exactly brilliant was what their conversations were, with no space for questions like “How
could
you?”

She did leave messages at the bottoms of the chalkboards in all his classes, four little letters and the plus sign; no hearts, no arrows, just a little letterly reminder, in case he wanted to think about it. ME + SM. She hoped that it wouldn't be much longer before he did think about it. She hadn't been thinking about much of anything else for eight days already.

Heather was having another party on the weekend—of course. Shawn was going—How
could
he? But Mikey wouldn't have been able to go even if she had been invited. She had to go to her mother's again, a command performance. “It's our last time alone,” her mother had said, “and I need you to help me pack.” So while Mikey had to be back in the city doing whatever was so important to her mother, Shawn was going to a party at Heather's—
again
.

By Wednesday it was settled who was giving parties on which day, Heather on Friday and Ronnie on Saturday. Everyone—meaning primarily Shawn Macavity—would be there. But not Mikey. Not Margalo, either, which meant at least that Mikey wasn't the only person left out, but also that Mikey had nobody there who would report back to her on Sunday about what had happened at the parties. There were only ten days until the dance, and everybody knew it. If you were going to go with a date, you were running out of time to ask, or be asked.

Mikey and Margalo were having lunch together on Wednesday and talking about who already had a date, who wanted to ask who, who hoped who wouldn't ask her, and what groups were gathering to go to the dance dateless. Margalo reported, “Louis asked Frannie. Big surprise. But she said she didn't want to go with a date. So he asked Heather Mac. Then Derrie. Cheryl. Sandy. Annaliese. Then Frannie again—I think he was hoping she'd feel so sorry for him she'd say yes. But that's everybody he's asked so far. Do you think he'll ask
us? I almost hope he does,” she laughed. “But probably not. Probably over his dead body.”

For some reason Mikey needed to say to Margalo, “I really want Shawn to ask me.”

“I
am
aware of that.”

“Don't be so sarcastic at me. I really do. I mean, really really.”

“You've really, really told me that same thing about five hundred times,” unsympathetic Margalo answered.

“I
could ask
him.”

“And I've told you about five hundred times my opinion about that.”

“What makes you think you're so right? You know,” Mikey admitted, “I never wanted anything so much as him.”

“Why?” Margalo asked, looking right at Mikey. “No, seriously, why do you want him? For a kissing op? Mall op? Dating op?”

“Who says there has to be a reason?” Mikey demanded. “What makes you know so much about it anyway? You've never even wanted to have a boyfriend.” She looked closely at Margalo, staring into her brown eyes, unexpectedly unsure. “Have you?”

And what did it mean when Margalo smiled in that way? Not a
Lucky-me
smile or a
wouldn't-you-like-to-know
one, but as if she was sitting on a tack. “There was Ira,” Margalo said.

“That was just in fifth grade,” Mikey said.

“How do you know?”

“And he was never your boyfriend anyway.”

“You didn't say I never had one. You said I never wanted one.”

“If Ira asked you to the dance, would you go?” But before Margalo could answer that question, Mikey said, “You'd look pretty funny dancing with Ira Pliotes.”

“I didn't say
now,”
Margalo said, with that tack-sitting smile.

And suddenly there was Ralph Cameron standing in front of her. Ralph just loomed up behind Margalo's back, with his floppy brown hair and the rugby shirt boys were wearing that winter. “What do
you
want?” Mikey demanded.

“Hey, Ralph,” Margalo said, turning her head to look up at him and then looking back at Mikey with her eyebrows raised in a question.

“Hey, Margalo,” Ralph answered. “Listen, Mikey, I want to ask—”

“No,” Mikey said.

Margalo made a wrinkly face at her, a
What's-wrong-with-you?
face. But what was so wrong with not wanting someone to ask you to a dance when you already knew you wouldn't go with him? She'd just said her no early, that was all.

“Give me a chance,” Ralph said. “I only want to ask—”

“But why, when I already said no?” Mikey demanded.

She didn't think it was particularly smart of Ralph to ask her to the dance, when everybody knew how she felt about Shawn.

“Because we'd win,” Ralph said.

“Win what? Is there some contest at the dance?”

“Not the dance,” Ralph said, as if that was the wildest idea he'd heard all morning, or all year. “Geez, Mikey—you didn't think . . . ? How could you think . . . ? I'm taking Heather to the dance, everybody knows that. You're really weird, Mikey.”

“Oh, yeah?”

Well, maybe she was, because it was disappointment she was feeling now, finding out that Ralph didn't want to ask her to the dance.

“Yeah. You are. But I still think you'd make me a good partner in mixed doubles. For tennis. This spring. I'm talking about tennis, Mikey.”

“Mixed doubles?” At least that made sense. She tried to remember what kind of a game Ralph played. “You're asking to be my mixed doubles partner for the tennis team?” Ralph wasn't a bad player, she remembered, trying to recall his service returns, if he approached the net behind them. “I'll think about it,” she promised him.

“We could win big time,” he told her.

“I said I'd think about it,” she told him. And she would, but now she wanted him to go away, because what if Shawn saw her talking to Ralph, and thought she was fickle and had already gotten interested in somebody else, and wouldn't even consider liking her back because of that. “So—that's that,” she said, and dismissed him. “What are you hanging around for?”

And now Margalo had covered her eyes with her hands and was shaking her head,
No, no, no, no, no
.

“What?”
Mikey demanded, but before Margalo could start telling her how dumb she was, Mikey went back to what really interested her. “What days do you have rehearsals?” she asked Margalo, to which the answer was, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, when usually no teams had games, so then Mikey wanted to know, “Are these rehearsals in the auditorium?” to which the answer was, “No, in Ms. Larch's classroom. Why?”