It's Not Easy Being Bad

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Michelle Elsinger?” he asked, looking from one to the other.

  “Yes,” they answered together.

  But there was no way Margalo could convince Mr. Saunders that she deserved to go back to the office with him, too. In fact, she only asked once because his refusal was so large and loud a NO that it took all her nerve to look slowly over at Mikey, shrug, and say, “See you later.”

  Mikey went off at Mr. Saunders’s side, glaring up at him with unconcealed fury.

  4

  Junior High Justice

  “You don’t think I’ll end up pregnant, do you?” Mikey demanded.

  Margalo had been on a slow boil all afternoon, thinking about those dinner guests, and in homeroom at the end of the day she’d taken the first chance she’d had to ask Mikey what had happened with Mr. Saunders. And this was all Mikey could say? “I think you’ll be lucky to end up married,” Margalo answered.

  “You can get pregnant without getting married,” Mikey reminded Margalo.

  “Crikey, Mikey.” Margalo watched Mikey’s eyes narrow at the cute little rhyme and then said, “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.”

  “He thinks I will.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Saunders. He said so,” Mikey said. “After he told me I’d have to apologize to Heather, and I told him he couldn’t make me. But he knew, Margalo. He knew all about my party. So everybody must know, so she must have told everybody. But he figured out pretty quickly that if he tried to make me apologize, he’d end up having to expel me. He’s a smart guy.”

  “Mr. Saunders thinks you’ll get pregnant and you say he’s smart?”

  “It’s what rebellious girls do. He read it in a book: Antisocial boys get violent; antisocial girls get pregnant.”

  “Boys can’t get pregnant. That’s the only reason they don’t,” Margalo observed.

  “He said he looked up my record and he knows all about me,” and Mikey grinned. “That means he looked at yours, too.”

  Margalo stuck to the point. “If it’s not to apologize, what is your punishment?” This was their first real run-in with junior high justice, and she was curious.

  “I have to help clean the cafeteria after first lunch for the rest of the week.”

  “Maybe Mr. Saunders is okay,” Margalo said.

  “Or maybe he doesn’t think girls merit big-time punishments,” Mikey answered. “Maybe he doesn’t think a girl can get up to anything all that disruptive. That’s my guess, anyway. Remember the first assembly?”

  “You mean with Louis Caselli?”

  “All Louis did was lip off a little, and Saunders was all over him.”

  “Get real, Mikey. You know what Louis is like.”

  “But it was the first assembly, and all Louis did was say, ‘Yes, SIR,’ the way they do in the army, in the movies. But Mr. Saunders gave him the works, don’t you remember? The silent stare. The leaning over the podium. The calling by name.” She quoted, “ ‘Lou-is Ca-sel-li, if I’m correct,’ ” in a deep, looming voice.

  “But in the end, all Mr. Saunders did was say he didn’t share Louis’s sense of humor,” Margalo made her final, winning point and smiled. “I remember perfectly.”

  Mikey made her own winning point. “This afternoon, he didn’t even know at first if I was me or if I was you. He started out school knowing the boys’ names, especially the troublemakers. But he hadn’t even looked at the girls.”

  “He’s not supposed to be looking at the girls.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It was a joke,” Margalo said.

  “Not very funny.”

  “It is, if you have a sense of humor.”

  “He doesn’t respect girls,” Mikey said. “He doesn’t think we’ll give him any trouble. He doesn’t even think we can. Do you think he’s right?”

  “It’s never girls who get national headlines,” Margalo admitted. “But in that case, you’d think he’d respect us more.”

  Mikey followed her own train of thought. “Because things really are different in junior high. We’re all getting different. You are, too.”

  “You’re not,” Margalo pointed out.

  “I was about to,” Mikey admitted.

  It took Margalo a minute to figure this out. She asked, “The party?”

  “The”—and Mikey interrupted herself—“it’s really lucky that what happens in junior high doesn’t mean the rest of your life will be like that.”

  “Yeah,” Margalo agreed.

  “Because otherwise, ninety percent of the people in the world would have killed themselves by now.”

  “Mikey,” Margalo asked, light dawning, “exactly who did you invite? Besides me.”

  They were seated on the bus, Mikey beside the window because Margalo had had it Friday. Mikey looked out the window, watching kids filing into the other buses as she listed off all the names in a low voice. “Heather James, Annie Piers, Stacey Beard, and Lacey Gleason and Tracey Tomlinson. Linny Mitchell, and Tanisha, and Ronnie. Rhonda Ransom. And Frannie.”

  Margalo honed in like a heat-seeking missile. “Rhonda Ransom? You asked Rhonda Ransom? Why would you do a thing like that?”

  Mikey shrugged, avoiding looking at Margalo, avoiding the question.

  “Because she’s popular this year? And you know that’s just because she’s turned into a Barbie with the way her figure—”

  Mikey shrugged and kept looking out the window. The bus pulled away from its space at the curb.

  Under cover of the grinding gears, Margalo didn’t have to lower her voice to state the obvious. “You hate Rhonda Ransom.”

  Mikey’s shoulders shrugged.

  “And she hates you.”

  Shrug.

  “What was it, did you pick out the most popular girls?”

  Shrug, shrug.

  They were silent for a couple of stops until Margalo said, “So now we know about our old friend Ronnie Caselli, and our old friend Tanisha Harris. Linny never liked us, anyway, so she doesn’t count.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” Mikey warned her.

  “I don’t. You were pretty stupid, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “Well, you should have.”

  “But you told me you couldn’t come.”

  “You know what I mean, Mikey. But I thought Ronnie was okay, and Tan, too. I really did.” Margalo wasn’t used to being wrong about people.

  “We’re in seventh grade now, remember?” Mikey explained.

  The bus surged, and stopped, unfolded its doors and let people out. Then it pulled in its signs and turned off its lights, and surged along again.

  “Especially Tan,” Margalo said.

  “Hairballs on all of them, Margalo,” Mikey decided. “They don’t matter. Not to me, anyway. Not anymore.”

  Mikey sounded like she meant what she was saying.

  “I mean, I spent the last six weeks trying to pass as normal so I’d be acceptable to these people. I feel like I had the six-week flu, or went temporarily insane. No, I mean it, now I feel—after this party—like I’ve been let out of a cage. I didn’t even know I was in a cage, Margalo, I didn’t even know I was sick. Boy, do I feel better,” Mikey said.

  If it was a sickness, wanting to be liked, wanting to fit in and mix in, then Margalo had it. But not, she realized, because she wanted to be popular. What she actually wanted was people thinking she was popular, so that it would be easier to be Margalo.

  Most people didn’t want you to be yourself, and now they were trying to get at Mikey because Mikey couldn’t be anything else. But Margalo wouldn’t let them get away with that, and she bet Mikey wouldn’t, either. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “There’s a fifteen-and-under tournament this weekend,” Mikey said. “Five clubs are signed up for it, lots of players, and that means I’ll get lots of matches.”

  “I mean to get even with them,” Margalo said, “and so should you.”
r />   “I already did,” Mikey said, and went back to what interested her. “There’ll be both doubles and singles matches. Probably, I’ll win both. I’m developing a slice serve—you want to come watch?”

  Maybe Mikey didn’t want to think about it, and Margalo could understand that, but she’d find ways to get them, especially Tan and Ronnie, who were at least supposed to not be Mikey’s enemies.

  And Rhonda. It was always fun getting back at Rhonda.

  And that snotty Heather McGinty, her too.

  Margalo was cheering up. This would give her lots to think about, especially if she planned not to get in trouble over it; and that was her plan. A good revenge had to be out in public, like Mikey’s humiliation was, so that everybody would know. Also, a good revenge was one where the revengee knew better than to try to get even back. Also, a good revenge would show people they couldn’t get away with trying that kind of trick on Mikey and Margalo.

  5

  The Revenge of the Ant People

  It turned out that Mikey did sometimes take Margalo’s advice. The very next day, Tuesday, Heather McGinty once again had food splatter over her as she waited in the cafeteria line when Mikey, already served, passing by, stumbled, tilted her tray as she tried to keep from losing her balance, and happened to dump her lunch all over Heather.

  “Oops,” Mikey said.

  On Wednesday, while Heather was carrying her tray over to join her friends at their table, Mikey happened to be going by in the opposite direction, and happened to swing her arm to show Margalo how John Travolta danced in his old movie. Heather’s tray flew up into the air and covered her arms and chest in slices of hot turkey, and the gravy the sandwich was smothered with, and the dark red cranberry sauce that was served on the side; then it clattered onto the floor.

  “We have to stop meeting this way!” Mikey cried.

  A few disloyal giggles could be heard.

  After the first attacks, Heather McGinty could never be sure what might happen. She took to keeping a clean shirt and sweater in her locker. She took to hovering in the center of a circle of friends whenever she was in the cafeteria, like the nucleus of an atom.

  Meanwhile, Mikey had also gone up to Tan and Ronnie, to tell them to their faces, “You stink, both of you.”

  “Heather told us it was a joke, didn’t she, Tan?”

  “You know I don’t have any sense of humor.”

  “We thought you’d changed, didn’t we, Ronnie?”

  “Why would I change?” Mikey demanded.

  “Because it’s junior high,” they explained.

  Margalo, who was watching this, almost laughed out loud.

  “You’re lying,” Mikey told the two girls. “You don’t expect me to believe that you believed Heather McGinty, do you?” she asked.

  Tanisha, in jeans and a sweatshirt, studied the toes of her Nikes, but Ronnie stuck to her guns. “And why shouldn’t we?”

  Mikey didn’t bother arguing the point. “You’ve turned into total wimps, doing whatever Heather tells you.” For a long time she stared right into Ronnie’s face; then she aimed her hostile glance right at Tanisha.

  “This is really stupid,” Ronnie said, but Tan admitted, “Maybe we wanted what she was saying to be true.”

  “Because you wanted to go to Rhonda Ransom’s party,” Mikey told them. “You total toadstools.”

  “You just want to boss everybody!” Ronnie said.

  “Rats on that, Ronnie. I just want people to call up and say they aren’t coming to my party, when I’ve invited them Regrets Only, and they aren’t going to come.”

  “All right,” Tan said. “We will.”

  “As if I’d ever ask you again,” Mikey said.

  After Tanisha and Ronnie walked off, Mikey turned to Margalo and mimed twirling a pair of six-guns around her fingers, then returning them to imaginary holsters. “Not too shabby, was I?” she remarked, with a smile that asked its own question: Aren’t I something? Then she said, “What are you going to do about Rhonda, Margalo?”

  Margalo could surprise people, too. “I’m already doing it. You mean you haven’t noticed?”

  * * *

  Margalo’s revenge on Rhonda was subtle, but it didn’t take Rhonda long to figure it out. When Margalo slipped in among the big-haired girls, and sidled up to greet her—“Hey, Barbie, how’s it going?”—Rhonda was immediately alarmed, just a flash of fear, like a rabbit startling at the sound of a dog’s bark. Then she sniffed and turned away, as if she hadn’t even heard Margalo, and couldn’t see her, anyway.

  Margalo repeated the greeting two or three times that first day. On the next day, she called across the gym to Rhonda, “Yo, Barbie! What’s happening?”

  People turned to see who this Barbie was, since there was no Barbie in the gym class. They began to make the connection. “Why does she call you Barbie?” Rhonda’s friends asked her. “Did you change your name for seventh grade?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Rhonda said, “and I don’t know why. She’s just some dork from my old school. Nobody liked her; she’s not normal.”

  When Margalo saw Rhonda talking to an eighth-grade boy in the cafeteria, she moved in without hesitation. Rhonda was winding her hair around a finger and smiling up into his face, flirting, being flirted with, and knowing that everybody who saw her was jealous.

  Margalo approached from the direction Rhonda was facing, a big fake smile on her fake friendly face. “Hey, Barbie,” Margalo greeted her.

  Rhonda’s cheeks turned pink with anger. “That’s not my name and you know it!”

  “And I see you brought Ken to school with you today,” Margalo said, passing them by.

  She heard laughter spreading around, the way ripples of water circle out when you drop a penny into a wishing well. She pretended not to notice.

  Ken—or whatever his name was—backed off from Rhonda like she’d tried to kiss him or something, and she tossed her head of big hair before she flounced off to join her formerly jealous friends.

  Margalo joined Mikey at the table.

  “I’m saving my coleslaw for Heather,” Mikey told her.

  “You ought to eat the coleslaw and give the hot dog to Heather,” Margalo advised.

  “I like hot dogs,” Mikey protested. “Even boiled, like this, as long as there’s mustard and onion—”

  Margalo shrugged. You never could tell Mikey anything.

  “What about Linny?” Mikey asked.

  As soon as the question was asked, Margalo had the answer. “Linny’s my new best friend.”

  First Mikey’s face pinched with anger. Then she got it and “She should be mine,” Mikey said.

  “Why? It’s my idea.”

  “Because I’m the one she’ll hate having around the most. You could turn out to be okay, but I’m permanently out of it.” As Margalo opened her mouth to say, So what? Mikey pointed out, “It’s your own fault for being well-dressed,” and then added, “You know I’m right.”

  Margalo shrugged. That day she was wearing a red-and-white-striped sweater over a calf-length black skirt, and she thought her shrug must make her look even more French.

  Mikey didn’t notice that. “You really know how to get people where it hurts, Margalo,” she said, admiringly. “You really understand people.”

  “You could, too,” Margalo told her friend.

  “Maybe, but it would take too much time. And most people aren’t worth the trouble. Except for you,” Mikey said. “I understand you.”

  “What makes you so sure about that?”

  “You’re like Machiavelli,” Mikey said.

  At that point, Frannie joined them at their table so they could go to seminar together, and asked, “Who’s like Machiavelli?”

  “Margalo.”

  “I don’t think so,” Frannie said, and turned her brown spaniel eyes on Margalo.

  “You never think anything bad about anyone,” Mikey pointed out.

  Frannie didn’t care about that. “Margalo wants peo
ple to like her, so she can’t think it’s better to be feared than loved. And that’s Machiavelli’s main point, isn’t it? So you’re the one like him, not Margalo.”

  Margalo was impressed. “She’s right, Mikey. You’re right, Frannie. I thought I was, but it’s really Mikey.”

  “He was wrong, anyway,” Frannie went on.

  “Oh, yeah? Take a look at recent history,” Mikey advised her.

  Frannie didn’t argue. “I know,” she said.

  “Or like gangs,” Mikey added. “Even kids in gangs run people by fear.”

  Frannie pointed out, “It’s no big deal, scaring people. Everybody can be frightened. But Machiavelli was saying was that it’s better government to be feared than loved, and all I’m saying is, I don’t agree. Are you two ready to go to seminar? Because you haven’t finished your coleslaw, Mikey. Unless you’re going to dump it on Heather? Or is this a dumpless day?”

  That inspired Margalo’s next revenge. It was easy steps from dumpless to dumpling, from dumpling to the Miss Dumpling Award, and from that to the Little Miss Muffin Award.

  * * *

  Margalo only included Mikey in the planning of this final revenge because she had to, but she had to admit that with the two of them working on it, it improved. Mikey had her dad’s computer graphics program, and a color printer, so the award certificates looked pretty professional. “They’re terrific,” Mikey informed Margalo.

  “You always think that what you do is terrific.”

  “Usually it is.”

  “You’re pretty cheerful these days,” Margalo remarked.

  “It’s a load off my mind not trying to be popular. And what’s so funny now, Margalo Epps?”

  “You. You are.” She changed the subject. “These certificates are going to look great.”

  “All we have to do now is find out which lockers—” Mikey started to say, but Margalo was way ahead of her on that. “I already did. It wasn’t exactly high espionage, Mikey. You just watch people.”