And that reminded Margalo. “You should let us read, I mean, let Hadrian, because—”
Ms. Hendriks shook her head definitely. “There just aren’t enough parts, and there’s policy, too. But . . . Hadrian? The hair?”
He nodded without looking up, then turned away and Margalo followed him, with an apologetic look back over her shoulder at Ms. Hendriks, who for once didn’t look cheerful. She looked like someone who thought she hadn’t done a good enough job at something.
“I’ve got a comb,” Margalo said to Hadrian’s back as he bent over to pick up his knapsack. She reached down for her own, adding, “I can loan it to you.”
Hadrian said, “I just don’t want my mother . . .” He didn’t have to finish that sentence.
She accompanied him out into the emptying corridor. Hadrian kept his eyes lowered, but Margalo looked around, looking for trouble, where it might come from. Anybody knew that you could get in trouble being alone with just Hadrian Klenk. Sven and his friend Toby and their friend Harold played football, she thought, so they probably wouldn’t be in the building at that hour. As far as she knew, only those three had nothing better to think about than how to torment Hadrian Klenk; so maybe they were temporarily safe. Or Hadrian was safe for the time being. She herself was pretty much safe pretty much most of the time.
As safe, at least, as anybody was, at just about any time. Or anyway, she felt safe enough. Maybe safety was like intelligence? Margalo thought, and almost laughed. If you acted like you were smart, most people believed you. So what was real?
Thinking about reality, and what was true, and how the real danger of lying was not that you might get caught but that you might start believing your own lies, somehow led Margalo right to an idea. She grabbed Hadrian’s arm. “Tell your mother it’s a new style you’re trying.”
“What?” He pulled his arm away.
“Tell her you and some friends all moussed your hair this way. Tell her everyone did it.”
“But it looks ridiculous.”
“Tell her it was a style experiment. Think about it, Hadrian.”
He did, and she could see relief grow in him as he imagined himself telling his mother this, and what she would say, and what he would say then. His head came up and he was smiling. It was a weak and wavery smile, but still a smile. “She’ll hate it,” he predicted. “I can tell her I don’t like it much myself. That’ll make her happy.”
“She won’t ask any questions,” Margalo added.
“Thank you,” Hadrian said then. “You saved my life.”
“I saved your mother’s life,” Margalo corrected.
Mikey and Margalo didn’t need to consult each other. They moved down the length of the school bus to a rear seat. Not the rear seat, which was a long bench where others might join them, or at least adjoin them, and not the seats right in front of that bench, either. They took a two-person seat far enough back in the center section of the bus so a private conversation would be buried in all the noise and confusion.
Mikey started off as Margalo was just sitting down in her aisle seat. “I’m half-way up the sophomore section of the ladder and she actually paid me a compliment today.” Misunderstanding Margalo’s expression, she explained, “Coach Sandy.”
As soon as she was settled into her seat, Margalo started off her own topic. “He didn’t get to read. No ninth grader did.”
“She said I had a good drop shot.”
“There was never any chance he’d get a part. I should have known.”
They were ninth-grade girls, best friends since fifth grade, and they could carry on two conversations at one time, listening to both and talking about both almost simultaneously. Two was about Mikey’s outside limit, but Margalo could carry on as many as four different conversations on different topics before she lost her way.
“I’d have thought it would have been my backhand cross-court,” Mikey said.
“They moussed his hair into—a whole headful of spikes. Then they frog-marched him to Drama,” Margalo reported. “They got off on people laughing. It’s going to just make them worse.”
“At least,” Mikey said, “they’ve stopped taking his knapsack. So, what’s Hadrian going to do?”
“Understudy some parts probably. Which means he won’t appear onstage, which means . . .” She got distracted by another dismal thought. “Probably, if they’ve given up taking his knapsack, they’ll move on to something more. As we just saw.”
Mikey turned to look right into Margalo’s face, as if it was Margalo she was angry at. “I don’t like it one bit.”
“And the rest of us do?”
But Mikey had returned to her own dismal thoughts. “I don’t even have a good drop shot.”
The bus motor rumbled to life, the long iron arm closed the front doors, and the bus pulled out, swaying a little as it made the turn onto the main road. Margalo and Mikey clutched at the knapsacks they held on their laps. ME was stenciled in big red letters on the front of Mikey’s bright hunter’s orange knapsack, the color that kept you from being shot at, if you happened to be carrying your knapsack through the woods during hunting season. She had bought it last summer in Texas, where hunter’s orange was a common color. When the bus lurched forward into traffic, a few girls gave little screams and a few boys cheered the driver. “Rock on!”
After things had settled down—at least, settled down as much as a busload of high school students could—Mikey remembered to ask Margalo, “What about Aurora and a GED? Is she really going to try to do it? Why?”
“Lily’s in school all day, and Aurora would like a job. She’s already taking a class, two classes in fact, English and History. She wants to work with little children so she might even take college courses, after.”
“I thought she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom.”
“That’s what Esther says. Esther says if Aurora is going to go to school, she’s going to run away and live with her father, because she wants a mother who stays at home to be a mother.”
“But Aurora’s not Esther’s mother, she’s her stepmother,” Mikey reminded her.
“I know.”
“And, her father doesn’t want her living with him anyway. He’s got a whole new family.”
“She knows.”
“What does Aurora say?”
“She says she wants Esther to let her try it, to see how much difference it actually makes.”
“Aurora doesn’t stick up for herself enough,” Mikey announced, then asked, “What does Esther say to that?”
“She says she’ll go live with you.”
That shut Mikey up.
Margalo enjoyed being one up for just a couple of minutes before she introduced her own concern. “I know we all have folders, records, but do you think all of our teachers have read them?”
“I don’t think they’re that interested,” Mikey said, offering as proof, “Coach Sandy wouldn’t have ignored me.”
“You think not?”
“Why would she?” Mikey asked, and answered herself, “There’s no possible reason.”
Margalo could think of at least two possible reasons, but she was concerned about something else. “Don’t you think that’s an invasion of privacy?”
Put that way, Mikey got it immediately. “Do you want me to ask Jackson?” Jackson was someone who knew a lot about almost everything. They guessed that you couldn’t be a successful venture capitalist for all the years he’d been one without being pretty smart, and learning a whole lot too.
“No, not unless you want to. School records are open, I think. Even to students. At least, our own records.”
“What about teachers’ records? Are they open too? Can we read their folders? That would be fair, and administrators too.”
“But maybe I’ll take a look at mine, to make sure it’s only about, like, having the required shots, and grades.”
“Disciplinary measures will be in there too,” Mikey said, and she smiled. “I hope mine is a really fat fol
der.”
“You could work on that.” Seeing it from that new point of view, Margalo relaxed. Let the folder-keepers keep themselves busy keeping folders, and that would keep them out of her hair. “We could both work on it.”
“Yeah, but Louis Caselli is way ahead.”
“We could try to catch up.”
They were both laughing now, just like any other high school students going home on the late bus after a long school day. This was the kind of idea they liked to think about, figuring out how to do it—get a fatter student record folder than Louis Caselli—without getting into real trouble themselves with the school authorities or into real trouble with grades.
“Or maybe, maybe we should work on helping Louis increase his,” Margalo suggested.
“Louis can always use help,” Mikey agreed.
Margalo admitted, “I wish we could help Hadrian.”
“Yeah, but how? That Sven and his two friends—”
“Toby and Harold.”
“They’re . . .”
Neither of them knew the best way to end that thought. Upperclassmen? Really mean? Much bigger than we are? Unstoppable—even by the school authorities? Too smart to get caught in the act?
No, probably not that last one. They weren’t too smart for anything, in Margalo and Mikey’s opinion.
“But Mikey,” Margalo said, the unexpected comparison causing her to turn in her seat and face her friend and cohort, as if having a friend and cohort made the idea easier to have. “Are they acting all that different from the way we . . . I mean, remember getting Louis thrown out of our fifth-grade class?” she reminded Mikey, and herself, and then remembered too, “And getting him brought back in?”
“Rhonda and the roadkill,” Mikey agreed happily. She was untroubled by the comparison. “But we were getting even,” she pointed out. At all the memories she added, “I miss fifth grade. I wouldn’t mind being back in fifth grade.”
“Yes you would,” Margalo said crisply. “Think about it. Fifth grade is eight years from graduation, and ninth is only four.”
“Actually, it’ll be only three and five-sixths years when this marking period ends next week,” Mikey said.
“But are we really any different?” Margalo asked again. “When we were getting even, like—remember seventh grade?”
“They were picking on us,” Mikey reminded her, and smiled at the memories. Those were the days. “We were just picking back.”
“They thought we were weak. Powerless.”
“We weren’t.”
“But Hadrian is. I really hoped he’d get a part. And so did he, I think. That just makes it all the worse that she wouldn’t even let him read for one, when you hope for something and don’t get it.”
“Hoping’s pointless,” Mikey told Margalo.
“You sound like Cassie,” Margalo said, not as a compliment.
Mikey just went on. “The point is to do something.”
“The only thing I can think of to do is murder them.”
Mikey was willing to consider that option. “All three? How would we do it?”
“In books people use rat poison.”
“We’ve got the rats,” Mikey observed. “Now all we need is the poison.”
Mikey was giving this idea such serious consideration that Margalo felt the need to point out its obvious drawback. “I’m not about to go to jail for those three.”
“Yeah, but we might not get caught.”
“Unless,” Margalo said, “we could be like the seven-at-one-blow little tailor? Who got the ogres fighting among themselves?”
“You’re having a nervous breakdown,” Mikey told her. “I can’t even sew.”
Looking out the window, she saw that the bus was nearing Margalo’s stop. “Are you baby-sitting tonight?”
“And tomorrow night too.”
“In the morning, then,” Mikey told her. “I’ll be over tomorrow morning then. Tell Aurora I’ll make breakfast.” Mikey and her divorced father, with whom she lived, had organized their weekends. Saturday afternoons they did something together, which these days meant doing something with his girlfriend and her two little boys; Sunday mornings they cleaned house; and Sunday afternoons Mikey had league tennis practice. So Saturday morning was about the only time she and Margalo had for getting together. “Maybe I’ll make omelets. Will Lily and Stevie eat omelets, do you think?”
Margalo was getting ready to stand up. “As long as there’s nothing weird in them.”
“For the rest of us I’ll make cheese omelets with herbs,” and Mikey was off, planning a meal.
Margalo followed her, suggesting, “Chives and parsley.”
“Plus biscuits.” Mikey liked getting the last word, even if they were in total agreement.
Rising from her seat, her knapsack held against her stomach, Margalo turned to join the others lining up in the aisle. She was almost at the door when Mikey remembered, and stood up to shout down the length of the half-empty bus, “What do you think about Aurora’s GED? Margalo!”
But Margalo didn’t hear her. Mikey groaned. Now either she was going to have to telephone Margalo’s house, and risk being talked at by Margalo’s adoring stepsister, Esther, or she was going to have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out. She couldn’t decide which would be worse, waiting or Esther.
– 6 –
There’s Bad, and Also There’s Worse
That year Halloween fell on a Saturday, and it was on Friday the thirtieth of October—week eight, by Mikey’s count; twenty-eight weeks left—that the homeroom teachers handed out to the students their report cards for the first marking period, first thing in the morning. Perhaps it was the combination of pre-Halloween excitement with hot news of bad grades, or good grades, or good-enough grades, that caused Hadrian’s catastrophe. Grade news certainly exacerbated the usual high school nerviness, and everyone knew that Sven had been caught copying answers on the History unit test, so he was flunking History for sure and his parents required him to get at least a C in everything, so he was going to get it when he got home. On the whole, people were pleased that Sven was going to get it from someone. Also, people—especially the Varsity players—were nervous about Saturday’s football game against Benjamin Franklin High School, a team with a 5-0 record. Nobody liked to be wiped out, not even by a really good team. Also, there was the usual weekend excitement and anxiety about who was going out with whom, what parties were being given, who was being invited to which, and if they were going to continue getting away with the things that they had—so far—been getting away with.
By the time Mikey sat down beside Margalo for Lunch A, slowed down as she had been by students clustering in the halls to discuss their grades, or celebrate them, or bemoan them, Casey was already there and Cassie was approaching, with Tim, Felix and Jace close behind.
Margalo looked up from her bologna sandwich and opened her mouth to say something, but Mikey didn’t give her a chance. “She gave me an A minus in Spanish.” To Margalo’s inquiring expression, There’s something wrong with an A minus? Mikey said, “I shouldn’t get over a B. You know I haven’t gotten anything better than a B on any of the tests.”
“Does she give a lot of credit for homework? Or weight class discussion grades?” Margalo suggested.
Mikey shook her head. “It’s a bad A, Margalo.”
What Margalo thought about the concept of a bad A (could there be good Ds?) Mikey never found out because Cassie had news to tell, news so important that she didn’t even sit down before she announced it. “Did you hear about Hadrian?”
“Where is he anyway?” Mikey asked. “He wasn’t in Math and he’s never absent. Was he in English?”
“What’s happened?” Margalo asked, shaking her head, No, to answer Mikey’s second question.
Tim slammed his tray down on the table, announcing, “It’s just not right.” But Cassie wanted to be the one to tell them, it being something that revealed once again what rotters human beings could be, so
she told the story.
“Those guys—I don’t even want to know their names—Eenie, Meenie and Minie—Larry, Curly and Moe—Tom, Dick and Harry—”
“Mean, Stupid and Immature,” Casey suggested. She had looked up from Crime and Punishment and her lunch; she had even closed the book, although she kept a finger in it to mark her place. “I heard about it.”
“The juniors,” Margalo guessed. She did know their names, but that wasn’t the point. “What did they do to him now?”
Cassie said, “The story is they broke his arm.”
“They what?”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I thought it was his leg.”
“I heard his wrist.”
Cassie raised her voice to drown them out. “Whichever limb it was, there was an ambulance.”
This caused a silence.
Margalo broke it. “Is he all right?”
“Well, he walked to the ambulance.”
“Some girls found him in the hallway,” Tim reported. “It was a couple of seniors.”
“But why didn’t someone stop them?” Mikey asked.
“There’s never anyone around. That’s their MO,” Felix explained.
Cassie continued. “Mr. Robredo had them in his office for two hours—before he suspended them.”
“Had them in his office all three? Or one at a time?” Mikey wanted to know. She had not personally met up with the legendary Mr. Robredo, but she had heard about him. Even Louis Caselli didn’t want to mix it up with Mr. Robredo, even Louis Caselli on his most foolhardy, suicidal, delusional days.
The worrisome thing about Mr. Robredo was that he was absolutely serious about his job, and absolutely straight. He wouldn’t cut you any slack, even if he thought you were funny, even if your parents knew him socially. He wouldn’t cut anybody any slack, he didn’t take any lip off anybody, he was happy to consider expelling people, and he did what he said he’d do. Nobody wanted to be taken in to see Mr. Robredo. With somebody that fair, you couldn’t be sure how it would turn out for you.
Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? Page 6