Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (13 page)

“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 Lunch 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.

Just before the bell rang to dismiss them that Friday, Sally King finally raised her hand and asked the question they almost all—you could never tell with Hadrian—had been wondering about. “Ms. Hendriks? We don't know, if you're still, like, engaged?”

Ms. Hendriks looked at her left hand, as if she had forgotten it was ringless. “Oh. No. No, I'm not, I'm afraid. We've decided not to get married. So I gave him back the ring.”

“Why?” Sally asked.

Ms. Hendriks elected to talk about the ring, not the failed romance. “Because we're no longer engaged.”

“But I always thought, the ring belongs to the girl,” Sally said.

“That didn't seem fair to me,” Ms. Hendriks said.

Sally continued explaining it to the teacher. “Like the wife gets the silver and china and glassware, too, if they get divorced. You should make him give it back to you.”

“Look out, Richard,” a low voice said, and people laughed. Sally's cheeks turned pink, but she pretended not to have heard.

“Well.” Ms. Hendriks smiled. “That's moot anyway, since he's moved to Florida.”

“But you came here to be with him,” Sally insisted. “That's why you took this job. You should never have let him have the ring back. You changed your whole life for him and now look what's happened.”

“Well,” said Ms. Hendriks, with a quick glance up at the clock. “I found a job I really like. That happened too.” Then she changed the subject before Sally could add any more insistences. “We don't have as much rehearsal time for this production as we did in the fall, so I hope you're already thinking about what parts you want to read for. Tryouts will be early next week. Can you be ready?”

They could. Sally wondered if the Stage Manager had to be a man, and Richard reminded her that there was a young couple—“George and Emily, they're who the play is
about”—and that Sally had promised him that after
A Midsummer Night's Dream
they could do a couple. “Besides, we're seniors, this is our last chance to star together, because the spring play's a musical and you can't sing,” he reminded her.

“Or dance,” added Sherry Lansing, at which Margalo leaned over to Hadrian where they sat at the rear, near the pile of knapsacks and sweaters and coats by the teacher's desk, to whisper, “What do you bet Sherry can dance? And she probably sings all right too.”

But Hadrian had his attention on his copy of the play. “Am I too short to play the Stage Manager?” he asked her. “What do you think? I don't think it matters, do you?”

It was during that week of tryouts, the last week in January, that Tanisha Harris took Margalo aside, Mikey following, as they left lunch A on Wednesday. “I've been wanting to talk to you,” she said, “but there wasn't time.” Monday had been a snow day and Tuesday a late-opening day; in fact, the tryouts were now scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, which concerned Margalo because Ms. Hendriks had promised them she would have a cast list for them on Friday. Margalo was thinking about if there was anything she could do to help Hadrian get a part, so she just nodded her head at whatever Tan had said. Then Tan got her fall attention. “I need your advice,” she said. “You can't tell anyone.”