It's Not Easy Being Bad

by Cynthia Voigt

  Mikey clanged her locker door shut and exited the scene. Margalo didn’t even notice if she was there or not.

  But by lunchtime, everything had changed.

  Mikey didn’t know how she knew this, but she was sure of it. It was like a tennis match, when the person who was winning—say, Serena Williams—just starts losing points against, maybe, Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario. Everybody in the stands can tell that everything has shifted, although nobody knows why, especially Serena. The announcers stop talking about “the Williams serve” and start talking up “the Sanchez-Vicario scramble.” Even people sitting at home in front of their television sets can tell that things have shifted.

  Things had shifted against Margalo, Mikey could tell.

  People still looked at her, but then they looked away quickly, as if they didn’t want to be seen staring—the way people don’t want to be caught staring at a homeless person. But how could Margalo go from queen to homeless person in half a morning? And why didn’t Margalo say anything?

  They moved along the line, Mikey behind Margalo—even though Margalo was only there while Mikey got her lunch. Grilled cheese sandwiches and french fries today, a crisp brown fatty meal; maybe Mikey would try some salad. She could top it with peas; peas had flavor.

  Maybe she’d go on a diet and never eat lunch again, and get as thin as Margalo so she could look like some thirty-year-old French model. H.A.H.A., Mikey talked to herself inside her head, since Margalo seemed to have moved into another dimension.

  Something had definitely happened. At her table, Heather McGinty had everybody hanging on to every word that came out of her mouth. They were all looking over at Margalo, and then covering their mouths to hide something—maybe laughter, maybe things they didn’t want to be heard saying, although if you asked Mikey, they were making sure Margalo could see that they were maybe laughing, maybe saying private mean things.

  As soon as they were seated, Mikey planned to make Margalo explain, but it turned out that she didn’t have to ask anything. Margalo didn’t even open her lunch bag, and Mikey could see that Margalo had fled to that other dimension to hide out. So instead of demanding answers, Mikey said, “You better take out your lunch.”

  Margalo obeyed. Then,” Do I have to eat it, too?” she asked.

  This was more like Margalo. “Only if it’s not something I like,” Mikey said. “Is it something I’d want?”

  “Cream cheese and jelly.”

  “What kind of jelly?”

  This was a perfectly normal conversation they were having, and anyone watching could see that they were doing what they always did, comparing lunches, trading.

  “Grape.”

  “Crud, Margalo, you know how I feel about grape jelly. Why not strawberry?”

  “Grape was on sale.”

  “On sale at Sam’s?”

  Margalo nodded.

  “So it’s what you’ll be bringing for a month?” At Sam’s Club, you had to buy in quantity. That was part of what made it such a savings to shop there. “Hey, I should join Sam’s Club, and Aurora can take me shopping with her for the cookie ingredients.”

  “You hate shopping.”

  “Not for food.”

  “I hate shopping for food,” Margalo pointed out.

  “You can stay home. It’ll be a bonding experience for me and Aurora,” Mikey said.

  That at least made Margalo smile. “She says being alone with you makes her nervous.”

  “Being alone with me makes me nervous.”

  “I don’t get it,” Margalo said now. “I just don’t—do you know what’s going on?”

  “You’re the one who’s supposed to be so smart about people,” Mikey reminded her.

  “I am, but—” Margalo thought, while Mikey watched. Watching, she saw Margalo get angry, deep in her eyes, far behind the outside of her face. Margalo got cold and stony angry, unlike Mikey, who went in for fast and furious.

  “It’s got to be the sweater,” Margalo decided. “But—I don’t get it, Mikey. I know it’s a great sweater, but all of a sudden Heather from Hell looks like she just heard she won the war. Let’s get out of here. Hurry and finish. I need to look in a mirror.”

  But before they could finish, Heather McGinty had come over to their table, with Annie Piers right behind her. The Barbies, at a nearby table, all turned their big-haired heads to watch.

  “That’s an unusual sweater, Margalo,” Heather said. She was carrying half a grilled cheese sandwich and nibbled it.

  Mikey remembered how good it felt to take a poke at a face like the one Heather McGinty was wearing. The face hung over her scoop-necked pink jersey shirt, with the little short-sleeved pink blouse over it. And a little gold chain around her neck so thin, it would probably snap if somebody were to try strangling Heather with it.

  Margalo was wary. “Heather. Hihowareyou.” Not a question. No answer required. Nobody thought Margalo gave one hoot how Heather was.

  Heather smirked happily. “That sweater looks—I don’t know anything about this, of course—but it looks foreign” Heather said, taking another little nibble. Nibble, nibble. “Where’d you get it?”

  Margalo shrugged. With elaborate care, she folded up the wax paper her sandwich had been wrapped in.

  “You know,” Heather said, all fake surprise as if she had just thought of this, all fake big-eyed wonder, “I bet—is that a La Scala, Margalo? A genuine La Scala?”

  Margalo kept cool, but she was surprised. “You’ve got a good eye.”

  “Better than you know,” Heather said, and turned away, her sandwich at her mouth again, her little white teeth going nibble nibble.

  Mikey took a look at Rhonda’s happy face at the Barbie table, and at the red back of Ronnie’s neck. She saw the way Tanisha was watching Heather lead her pack of followers back to her own table. Something was definitely wrong, and other people knew what it was. She’d make Ronnie tell her, or Tan. They both owed her.

  “Let’s go,” Margalo said suddenly. She left the cafeteria, followed by Mikey and many pairs of eyes.

  In the bathroom, Margalo studied herself in the mirror. “What is it?” Mikey demanded, and Margalo unbuckled her belt, unbuttoned the sweater, and took it off. In the baggy gray T-shirt, she looked like a skinny kid, any seventh grader. “Can’t you tell?” Mikey asked, but Margalo’s attention was fixed on the mirror. She put the sweater on, buttoned it up to the top, buckled the belt—and looked like-the cover of Elle again.

  “What are you doing?” Mikey demanded. “And what are we going to do about Heather McGinty? She’s up to something.”

  “It is a great look,” Margalo said, sounding both more puzzled and more confident.

  The door opened, two seventh-grade girls looked in, saw who was there, and left. Behind them, four eighth graders entered, talking about Christmas shopping and some boy named Alex.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Margalo said.

  She wouldn’t talk, but she was thinking hard. Mikey—for once—just followed Margalo without asking questions. Mikey couldn’t think of anything else to do. They lurked among stacks in the library for a while, and then went early to seminar, where they sat together at the long table and played tic-tac-toe until Margalo, at last, announced, “First we have to figure out what’s wrong. I did ask Ronnie, before lunch. She said”—Margalo whined the next word—“ ‘nothing.’ But her eyes said, I can’t tell. Ronnie’s a rotten liar.”

  “Ronnie is going to the dogs,” Mikey announced, and marked down her X. “What about your new friend Casey, who loaned you her mascara?”

  “That was Cassie.” Margalo placed an O that gave away the game. “Casey’s the one who loaned me a book.”

  “What about your new friend Casey who didn’t loan you her mascara?” Mikey drew another tic-tac-toe grid on the paper. “Why don’t you ask her?”

  “If I did”—Margalo set her O in the center—“she’d probably lie to me, and if she lied to me, then she’d never feel like I could trust he
r, and she’d know I’d be right not to, and that would make her feel bad, so she’d stop liking me.”

  “Zooks, Margalo,” Mikey said, placing her X in the corner so the game would play out to a tie and she wouldn’t loose.

  “Odds bodkins,” Margalo agreed, putting her O under Mikey’s X.

  Mikey quickly marked X in the column opposite, and Margalo put her third O under her second. Mikey put in the deciding X. There was no way Margalo could stop her now. “So how are you going to find out?” she asked, as other members of the seminar entered, Mrs. Brannigan with them.

  Margalo shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t . . . It’s something that when I don’t know it, that’s the way Heather wants it, so maybe—Maybe we’ll never find out,” Margalo said.

  But Frannie told them.

  She told them after school, between homeroom and buses. She told them in the hallway by their lockers. She told them in the middle of everybody, and she told them more than she knew she was telling them.

  Frannie came right up to them, looking worried. “Hey, Mikey, hey Margalo. Do you know what they’re saying about your sweater, Margalo?”

  “No,” Margalo said, and, “No,” Mikey said, “what?”

  “Heather says we shouldn’t tell you we know. She thinks if you know we know, you’ll be embarrassed.”

  “Know what?” Margalo asked in a stiff, thin voice, and Mikey said, “I’ll embarrass her.”

  “Where you got your sweater,” Frannie explained.

  “What about where I got my sweater?” Margalo asked, and “So what?” Mikey demanded.

  “Heather says it’s a sweater her mother’s old aunt got in Rome. The aunt and a lot of other old ladies went on a trip to Italy this fall, and she sent Mrs. McGinty this Italian sweater. Mrs. McGinty wouldn’t even try it on. She gave it to her cleaning lady. But the cleaning lady didn’t want it, either, so she gave it to her church thrift shop. Heather called home at lunch to find out. Today is one of the days their house is cleaned.”

  “We clean ours on Saturday,” Mikey announced. She thought that Margalo was standing so still and stiff that she could probably break her in half between thumb and forefinger, the way you snap a strand of spaghetti. “I vacuum, and Dad mops. When do you clean?” she asked Frannie.

  Frannie was not diverted. “I thought someone should tell you,” she said. “I thought you ought to . . . know.”

  “Thank you,” Margalo said to Frannie. “Thank you, too,” she said to Mikey.

  Mikey ignored that. “I think Margalo looks about twenty. Don’t you?” she asked Frannie.

  “Why would you want to look twenty?” Frannie asked Margalo.

  “Like a model,” Mikey explained.

  “Oh. Well, you do,” Frannie said to Margalo. “You don’t see many models in junior high. No wonder,” she said.

  And for some reason, that struck Margalo as funny. She started to laugh, and so did Frannie. Mikey would have liked to join in, but she didn’t get it.

  “See you. Tomorrow,” Frannie said, and went off.

  Mikey and Margalo stood with their backs to the hall, and everyone in it. The noise of people moving along, getting books and papers ready to take home on the buses, getting ready to go to locker rooms and change, began to fade behind them. Mikey looked sideways at Margalo, who seemed lost in thought. “Are you taking the late bus today?”

  Margalo nodded.

  “Doing homework in the library?”

  Margalo nodded.

  “Do you believe Heather McGinty really wanted to spare your feelings?”

  Margalo shook her head.

  “Neither do I,” Mikey said. “Not for one nanosecond. What are you going to do?”

  Margalo shrugged.

  Mikey stared into Margalo’s face, and eyes. Cold and stony.

  Well, okay. Maybe Margalo wasn’t going to do anything. But Mikey would. She didn’t know what, but she’d think of something—something to make Heather McGinty sorry she’d tried her poison snake tricks on Mikey’s friend, Margalo.

  A satisfying fury was building up in Mikey’s chest. “She’s not going to know what hit her,” Mikey promised Margalo. “But it’s going to be me.”

  14

  Godzilla vs Thumbelina

  Mikey greeted Margalo with a question the next day, Thursday. “Who was on the phone at your house all last night?”

  Margalo wore a long woolen winter coat on this cold morning, and jeans. She didn’t look like a queen anymore, or a model. She looked like someone very far away.

  “It wasn’t you, was it?” Mikey demanded. “Who would you talk to all night, except me? Anyway, what happened to Aurora and Steven’s five-minute rule?”

  “Susannah had another fight with her boyfriend,” Margalo said, without walking any slower to talk, without turning her head to look at Mikey, “so they had to make up. Aurora canceled the five-minute rule because Susannah has to keep the no-dates-on-school-nights rule.”

  They were going in to school and then down the hall, both carefully paying no attention to anybody around.

  “For liberal types, your parents can be pretty strict,” Mikey observed, but Margalo didn’t rise to that bait the way she usually would. Mikey said, “You’re coming home with me today, aren’t you? You have to; we have baking to get done. You said you would.”

  “Did I say that?” Margalo asked.

  “You are, aren’t you? You have a note from Aurora, don’t you?” Mikey didn’t know what was going on with Margalo, and that irritated her.

  At their lockers, Margalo put some books in, and took some books out, doing nothing about her coat. Mikey didn’t want to stare and she didn’t want to ask, but she was getting impatient, and she was curious—for once, she was interested in what Margalo was wearing to school. Also, she wanted to get to the library, where they could huddle in the stacks and start planning their revenges. It took Mikey about ten seconds to get her books ready for the first morning classes, but Margalo dawdled away, fiddling around with papers and her lunch bag, her back to the hall and everyone in it.

  Finally she took off her coat. She took off her coat and folded it up into a thick pillow shape, to store it in the locker. Then she turned around to face Mikey, and anyone else who might be passing by.

  Mikey almost cheered. She almost jumped up in the air as if she was wearing a cute little pleated skirt, jumped up in the air and waved her hands as if she was carrying pom-poms, to start off the cheer “Give us an M!”

  Because Margalo was wearing that sweater again.

  Everything was all right if Margalo was going to wear that same sweater the very next day, and not be squashed by Heather McGinty. It wasn’t that Mikey actually thought Heather McGinty could squash Margalo, but suspecting, and guessing, and hoping aren’t the same thing as seeing. Seeing, as they say, is believing.

  “What?” Margalo demanded. “What’s the matter with you, Mikey?”

  But she knew. She knew exactly what.

  Mikey was also glad to see the top of her gray T-shirt showing close around Margalo’s neck. She wanted to have a part in this. But what she said was, “Did you wash the T-shirt last night?”

  “Who cares?” Margalo was glaring at Mikey.

  “Jeez Loueez, Margalo. I’m not the enemy. I was wondering if you want me to bring in another one, so you don’t have to wash every night.”

  “Who says. I’m going to wear—” Then Margalo gave in, and grinned back. “Yeah, I’d appreciate that.”

  “Hey, girl,” Tanisha said, coming up, stopping just long enough to punch Margalo gently on the shoulder, moving quickly on.

  “Okay, then, what else are you thinking of?” Mikey asked. She had no trouble letting Margalo be boss of this. “For your revenge.”

  “What revenge?” Margalo asked.

  At that point, Cassie interrupted. “You aren’t going to let Heather get away with this, are you?” She stepped right in between them, said, “You’re Mikey. You make those cookies.
I’m Cassie,” then turned back to Margalo, her dark eyes dramatic. “We can protest, with signs, with slogans. Poor and proud of it. Paupers are people, too. You can count on me,” Cassie said, and dashed off.

  “Who are these people?” Mikey demanded. “You’re making too many friends,” she accused Margalo, but Margalo was accepting a copy of a paperback book from one of the preppies, a thick book with its pages fanned out the way paperbacks get when they’ve been read over and over. The Fellowship of the Ring.

  “I thought you’d like to borrow this. It’s my own copy,” the girl said, her short brown hair in loose curls, probably natural. Then she was called away and ran down the hall, the sweater she wore tied around her neck swaying on her back.

  Mikey reclaimed Margalo’s attention by asking, “What are you going to do about Heather?” but Frannie Arenberg stepped up before Margalo could answer.

  “I never think it means anything how much money someone has,” Frannie told Margalo and Mikey. “Do you? I don’t think money’s anything more than another difference, like your religion, or race.”

  “We’re not the ones who don’t know that,” Margalo answered.

  Nobody even noticed Mikey. Except Cassie had. Cassie might be okay, Mikey thought.

  “I already told Heather,” Frannie said.

  “You did?”

  “Of course, why shouldn’t I? See you at lunch?” and she ran off.

  “I guess you’ve got some plan all worked out,” Mikey said. “So what is it?”

  “I plan to ignore it. Pretend it never happened.”

  “Right,” Mikey said. “Sure. I guess that’s why you’re wearing the sweater again. And probably all the rest of the school year, too, every day. To ignore it.”

  Margalo smiled. “Otherwise, how will Heather know I don’t care? Besides, what else can I do, Mikey? I mean, she’s right. I bought this sweater at the New-to-You. It’s something her mother threw out. Those things are true, and I can’t think of any useful lie to tell about them, not any lie that anyone would begin to believe.”

  “But—” Mikey said, but Margalo shook her head.