“It was all of us,” Tim reminded them. “And not just us, it was people in the school, too. It was everyone, pretty much. Otherwise it wouldn’t have worked.”
“And it did work, which is the important thing,” Tan said.
They thought she would get up then, to return to the table where the African-American students tended to eat lunch together, but she didn’t. She leaned back, pulled her bright blue knit sweater down over the top of her flowered corduroy skirt, and looked around at them. They all waited to see what it was she was thinking, to get her smiling like that, until Mikey couldn’t stand it any longer. “What is wrong with you?” she demanded.
Tan grinned. “I just think it’s great,” she said.
At which point Ronnie Caselli pulled up a chair taken from one table over, to sit down beside Tan. “I’m glad to catch you two together,” she announced, but before anybody at the table could ask her to which two she was referring, she went on, making it clear. “You have to come to basketball tryouts today. I don’t know why you dropped out of Track,” she said to Tan, “but it wouldn’t be right if you don’t play basketball. You’re really tall,” she explained, “and athletic. We could be on JV together, because what I hear is that there aren’t very many sophomore girls playing basketball because they don’t have much chance to get on the varsity.”
Ronnie was taking a breath to start off on another persuasive point, when Tan said, “Okay.”
“Okay? That easily? What’s happened?”
“Now are you going to try to talk me out of it?” Tan teased, and Ronnie laughed and shook her head, absolutely and positively No. Her long, heavy hair flowed from side to side like a curtain.
She turned to Mikey. “What about you?”
“Basketball? I don’t know, Ronnie, but I guess if—Margalo, is there a winter play too that you’ll be working on?”
“Besides, Margalo has a job, starting after New Year’s,” Ronnie reported. “Don’t you?”
Margalo, already nodding away like some big-headed bobble toy, just kept on nodding, enjoying their surprise.
“Dishwashing,” Ronnie announced. “It’s a friend of my father’s who owns the restaurant. Well, he’s co-owner. She applied for the job, and he knows I’m in ninth grade, so he asked Dad about her, and Dad asked me. So I know she got it.”
Mikey, who had heard all about it the night before, wasn’t interested in re-hearing all about it. She announced to Ronnie, “I’ll play. Basketball. Even though I’m not tall, and I’m not African American,” she added because she thought Ronnie should have asked her first.
“You make up for those deficiencies,” Ronnie said, causing Cassie and Tim to laugh and the others to smile private agreement. Then, “Good,” Ronnie said, ready to rise and return to her own seat on the other side of the cafeteria, when Rhonda Ransom approached them. Rhonda stopped just behind Felix’s shoulder. She smiled down at Tim and Felix, flipping her hair back over her shoulder before—reluctantly—turning her attention to Mikey and Margalo and, most important, Ronnie.
“Did anyone tell you that Toby and Sven have both withdrawn from school?” Rhonda asked Ronnie.
“Really?” asked Cassie, sarcasm dripping like horror-film blood from every letter of the word. “Are you sure?”
Rhonda reassured Cassie, who clearly had to be socially so far on the outskirts that it might as well be another country, “Yes, for sure. And nobody’s talking to Harold. He’s real depressed,” she reported without sympathy. “I bet Hadrian’s glad.”
“I guess,” Hadrian answered. “Sure.”
“So,” Rhonda wrapped up, “Have a great vacation everyone, and good luck on exams. Good luck or a good cheat sheet,” she said, adding a current student joke. “Although I guess Hadrian doesn’t need either one.”
“I guess,” Hadrian said again.
“Neither do I,” Mikey pointed out.
Rhonda’s mouth made a little O at that announcement. She looked at Ronnie for silent agreement about Mikey, and then she seemed to think of something. “Are you going to be at The Gables on New Year’s Eve too? Will I see you there? Chet’s getting together a table—do you want me to see if I can get him to seat you with us? Who’s your date?” Rhonda beamed down on them, the Queen of England, the Queen of everything, or at least of high school.
Ronnie was a nice person, and she changed the subject. “We haven’t even had Christmas yet. I haven’t even started my Christmas shopping, and I have two papers due before vacation.”
“I’m getting Chet a sweater,” Rhonda confided. “Turtleneck, it’ll look great on him. Gotta run. See you New Year’s? Ronnie, I mean. Think about it?”
After a short silence, “Some things never change,” Tan remarked.
“Except,” Ronnie said, sounding worried, “I didn’t know Chet had asked Rhonda for New Year’s. That’s not what I heard,” she explained, then added, “Oh well, probably I heard wrong. You know how gossip is.”
“Fortunately no,” Cassie said, and Ronnie laughed.
“But you will come to basketball? You could try out too, Cassie,” she offered, then rose, saying, “See you,” with a little wave of the hand as she left them.
Then they turned on Margalo to start asking questions, like “How hard was it to get work papers?” and “How many hours a week?” and drawing conclusions like, “You’re not going to have any free time at all.”
Margalo was pleased to see that they were all a little jealous of her. She didn’t blame them.
II
Margalo in Winter
– 8 –
Heartbreak Alert!
Margalo saw it as soon as she looked at Ms. Hendriks, during the first Drama Club meeting after the vacation: There was no engagement ring on her left hand.
Where had it gone? Margalo tried to figure out if the teacher might be wearing a chain around her neck, tucked under the loose sweater. She didn’t think so, although the high neck of the sweater kept her from being positive. She looked for the ring on Ms. Hendrik’s right hand, but that, too, was bare.
For the first time, Margalo wished she knew someone besides Hadrian in Drama well enough to ask what they knew about this ringlessness. She couldn’t ask Ms. Hendriks. You didn’t ask teachers things about their private lives; you had to wait until they let something slip, or somebody happened to find something out and tell people.
Margalo hoped that if the engagement was over, it was Ms. Hendriks who had decided to end it. She had never been dumped, herself, never having been picked up and carried along by any boy, but she knew something about unrequited love or, more precisely, unrequited crush. The key word was unrequited. Unrequited was no fun.
She didn’t even think of raising the question of the Drama teacher’s possible dis-engagement with Mikey. Moreover, Mikey didn’t give her the chance. These days, all Mikey wanted to talk about was basketball. Sometimes Margalo didn’t know what she was going to do with these athletic interests of Mikey’s. She would have just turned off her attention, the way she occasionally did during classes, but every now and then, trapped in the ranting and rattling-on, like a diamond trying to escape from its lump of coal, there appeared one of Mikey’s really interesting ideas. You could count on Mikey for individual thought, Margalo knew that. So she had to listen to tireless complaining about a coach who only wanted people to feel good about themselves and enjoy playing the game. “That’s no way to build a winning team,” Mikey said.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to her if the team wins,” Margalo said, and then, in the deep, solemn voice that movie newscasters use to announce some disaster or another, usually from outer space, she recited: “It matters not if you win or lose, but how you play the game.”
“I know, but if you don’t play to win you’re not playing the game right.”
“Yeah, but in the long run what does any game matter?”
“Put it that way,” answered Mikey with relentless logic, “and nothing matters, so why are you so worried abou
t going to college, or getting a job and saving money, or even being a good dishwasher in your restaurant?”
This, Margalo had thought about. You couldn’t be alive in the present world and not think about it. “Because I only get one chance to have my own one life, and it’s stupid to waste any chances to make it better. Or make myself better at it.”
Mikey leaned back in her cafeteria seat, victorious. “That’s why it’s important to win.” But Mikey wasn’t stupid and before Margalo had a chance to say it she corrected herself. “To try to win.”
By then they were no longer alone at the table, and Tim started grilling Margalo about her job. How much did she get paid an hour? How much was withheld from her paycheck? The only jobs he’d ever had had been working for his parents, like painting the porch railing or clearing out the garage. Was it different when you had a real boss?
“Baby-sitting has bosses,” Margalo told him. “And since my parents don’t pay us for doing stuff at home, I don’t know.”
“Do the guys in the kitchen sexually harass you?” Jace wanted to know.
Margalo just smiled. Actually she almost laughed out loud. She didn’t know how to explain it to them, it was so far outside of their experience at school or even on sports teams. “Angie—he’s the cook—he runs the kitchen? Angie says nobody messes with his dishwashers, and everybody in the kitchen does exactly what he says. Nobody crosses Angie. Because the cook in a restaurant is like the absolute dictator—in the kitchen that is.”
“Why would he say that about dishwashers?” Cassie wondered. “Does he have his eye on you for himself?”
Then Margalo did laugh. They just didn’t have any idea. “Nothing like that. It’s because dishwashing is such a scut job. If he can get somebody to do it, and do it well, and be reliable, he wants to keep them happy.”
“You’re going to be banking a lot more money,” Tim said. “But when do you get a chance to go to the bank?”
At that question, Mikey could enter the conversation. “We walk downtown every other Friday after school, and then Steven gives us a ride home. He stays on a few minutes late at work, waiting for us.”
“You are so organized about your life,” Tim said to Margalo, with obvious admiration.
Of course she was flattered. She might not have the usual-sized normal streak in her, but she still had one. “Yeah, well, thanks,” she said, for some reason not able to look directly at Tim.
Mikey, whose normal streak was about a half a millimeter wide, asked, “What are you thanking him for?”
Luckily for Tim, at that moment Derrie approached their table to ask Casey and Margalo, “Did either of you by any chance pick up my blue cardigan from gym class? I left it on the bleachers.”
Neither of them had.
“I just got it, for Christmas, from my grandmother, and it was, you know, cashmere? Did you see it? I haven’t even written her a thank-you note.”
“It’s two weeks after Christmas and you haven’t finished thank-you notes yet?”
“You write thank-you notes?”
Derrie left, almost in tears, and Tim remarked, “Doesn’t she know any better than to leave a good sweater out in the open?”
However, watching Derrie as she walked away, Margalo glimpsed Rhonda Ransom, and that glimpse made her look again. Rhonda looked terrible, terrible in a new way, entirely different from her usual ninth-grade sex-bombshell terrible. “What’s wrong with Rhonda?”
“What isn’t wrong with Rhonda?” Mikey asked without looking up.
Casey, who could move on the fringes of the more popular groups of girls, knew. “Chet dumped her. After Christmas, I think, just before New Year’s; so she didn’t have a date New Year’s Eve, which made it even worse. Chet told her she was getting too serious and she needed to chill out. He’s been dating a sophomore—she’s cute, and on the honor roll too. Candy something, DeAngelo?”
“But Candy’s too smart to fall for Chet Parker,” Felix protested.
“Not noticeably,” Tim told his friend. “You know, just because a girl is smart, that doesn’t mean she can’t make stupid choices.”
“What I’ve heard,” Cassie offered, “is that when her about-to-be ex-boyfriend told Rhonda he wanted to go out with someone who sometimes said something interesting . . . . You know what she told him?”
They didn’t, and waited to hear.
“She told him, ‘You should have taken out Margalo.’ ”
“Margalo?”
“Why Margalo?”
“All he did was smirk. Chet’s a good smirker. He didn’t even ask Margalo Who? He just smirked and said, ‘Maybe that’s good advice. Maybe I will.’ ” Cassie grinned around at all of them.
“I’d like to see him try,” said Mikey. “Wouldn’t you?”
“No,” Margalo answered, and even Mikey got the joke of that.
But Rhonda was a misery. Her eyes were red with constant weeping, her long blond hair was lank and dull, her sweaters droopy. The rumor on the first Friday after vacation—by Mikey’s private countdown, number fourteen (only twenty-two to go!)—was that she and Chet had been having sex, and then the next Monday the rumor was that Rhonda was pregnant, which certainly explained her unrelenting unhappiness.
Mikey and Margalo, who had for years enjoyed their fully-reciprocated dislike of Rhonda Ransom, didn’t know how to deal with this information. Even for Rhonda Ransom this seemed like more than she deserved. A little heartbreak, a little humiliation, that they greeted happily. But this . . . Who did Chet Parker think he was, anyway?
Fortunately, Rhonda could assure Heather, who could assure Derrie, who could spread the glad tidings, that she wasn’t pregnant. “Which means,” Margalo pointed out to Mikey, “that she could have been.”
Tim fumed. “How could her mother not let her take sex ed and then let her date Chet Parker?”
“Parents don’t know,” Cassie said. “They don’t want to know.”
“I don’t want them to know,” said Jace.
“We should think about this like a mystery story,” Margalo advised. “Why Mrs. Ransom would do that. You know, cui bonum. Who benefits,” she translated.
“I knew that,” Mikey claimed. Then, being a painfully honest person—although usually it was somebody else who felt the pain—she added, “Anyway, I might have known it. I bet I’ve seen it somewhere. Besides, the point is, does anybody benefit? If Rhonda doesn’t know anything about contraception and,” she drew the logical conclusion, “gets pregnant.”
They thought about this, considering everybody involved, whether directly or indirectly.
“Unless Rhonda would be, like, a warning to everybody else? The example of what can happen,” Casey suggested.
“Or unless you hated her,” Mikey decided. “But even I don’t hate her that much, do we, Margalo? Do you think her mother hates her? I’d hate being her mother.”
Cassie had her own idea: “People who want babies to adopt?”
They made their slow way across January, with basketball and Drama Club to look forward to at the end of each day. On the Friday the school year was sixteen weeks old, “Half over!” Mikey announced, then went on to complain, “The JV has only four games and one tournament, which is only JV and doesn’t count for much. Only four games. How can we learn to play like a team?”
“You never play like a team,” remarked Ronnie, who with Tanisha Harris was sitting with them. During the basketball season Ronnie and Tan sometimes ate lunch at Mikey’s table.
Teachers had had to get exams corrected and grades handed in the previous Wednesday, so they learned that day what their first-semester grades were, and by lunchtime every ninth grader had heard that Louis Caselli was in serious trouble. Seriously serious trouble, like on academic probation and scheduled for a conference with Mr. Robredo first thing Monday morning. Louis had passed only one of his five courses, and that one was wood shop, in which his grade had gone down to a C. But still, Louis went strutting around the cafeteria during Lu
nch A as if he’d just scored the winning basket in a game.
According to Ronnie, the family was furious at Louis, who kept promising his father that he could bring all his grades up, easy. “But I don’t know if Uncle Eddie believes him anymore.”
“I never do,” Mikey said happily. “Do you think he’ll be held back?”
“That wouldn’t be until next year,” Margalo said.
“We can’t figure out what’s wrong with him,” Ronnie admitted.
Mikey and Margalo were both on honor roll, although not high honor roll, as Hadrian was. Tim was impressed, and told Margalo so.
“You’re always being impressed by Margalo,” Mikey accused him. “What’s up?”
This remark caused Tanisha to ask as she accompanied Margalo out of the cafeteria after lunch, “What’s with Mikey? Doesn’t she know anything about boy-girl relationships?”
First Margalo denied it. “Tim’s not having a boy-girl relationship with me.” Then she added, “Mikey had that crush on Shawn last year—”
“Don’t remind me!”
“And she had a secret admirer, too.”
“A what? She never said.”
“He used to call her up, and they’d talk. They never met in person, and he stopped this summer, but . . . It’s not that she doesn’t know about relationships, it’s just . . . Mikey. But do you really think Tim thinks he’s having a relationship with me?” she asked. Not that she thought she was having one with him. But not that she’d mind if he did think it.
Mikey went to basketball, and Margalo to Drama. In March, Drama Club was putting on a production of Our Town, and as with the December production, they started out talking about the play. But this time they concentrated on the staging, with its unconventional sets, and on the way Thornton Wilder broke the usual rules that separated the audience from the actors. He even had a character named Stage Manager, who was like an overvoice for everything and everybody in the play, who talked directly to the audience. Thornton Wilder even put actors in the audience, pretending to be theatergoers who quarreled with the Stage Manager. Our Town wasn’t like any other play they’d read, or performed, any of them, ever. It was also pretty old-fashioned, and they weren’t sure about that. Ms. Hendriks was sure about it and excited to be presenting it. She was still not wearing her diamond ring.
Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? Page 9