Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (15 page)

“The two hundred and nineteen dollars?”

Margalo looked at Mikey with a dazed expression on her face, like someone trying to see through thick fog or somebody else's glasses. All of the rest of Margalo was motionless. All around them the bank noises went on, hushed voices, muted footsteps, rustling papers.

“It can't be,” Mikey decided. She reached down into the knapsack to find the bills, where they must have fallen out of the wallet.

Margalo didn't object, but she predicted, “It's not there.”

“What do you think you did with it?” Mikey asked.

“I put it into my wallet this morning. No, first I counted it, then I put it into my wallet, then I did what I always do, I put the wallet into the bottom of the knapsack. And I did
what I always do on a Friday when I'm making a deposit, I kept the knapsack with me all day.”

“You didn't leave it in your locker?”

“I just said.”

“You didn't leave it, like, on a bathroom shelf while you were in a stall?”

“I said.”

“So you must have dropped the bills out when you were taking out books for class,” Mikey decided.

“But I didn't.” Margalo took a breath. “I don't. They were
in
the wallet.”

“And besides, if you
had
dropped them, somebody would have noticed it,” Mikey agreed. “They'd have told you.” A lot of people knew Margalo's banking patterns, the same way they knew about all the baby-sitting jobs she had and this dishwashing work too. Everybody knew Margalo was already saving for college.

Mikey didn't want to say out loud what she was thinking, so she didn't. She didn't want it to be true and as long as she didn't say it out loud, it wouldn't be. She checked the facts. “The knapsack was never out of your sight all day?”

Margalo was thinking the same thing and she also didn't want it to be true, so she postponed the inevitable by answering Mikey's question. “No, never except for Drama, but we all put our stuff by Ms. Hendrik's desk, which is right there in the corner of the drama room, and everybody's always around, you know? So I couldn't have lost it there.”

“Except you must have,” Mikey said.

Margalo replaced her wallet in her knapsack and carefully set the makeup kit in with it. Then she put in her books and notebooks, the pens and pencils, her face expressionless.

“What about when you were changing books at your locker?” Mikey suddenly thought. “We should go back and look around the lockers.”

Margalo crumpled up the deposit slip and dropped it into a wastebasket under the high table. Then she turned and walked across the marble floor, going back out through the heavy glass door. On the street, she turned to Mikey and made herself say it. “I was robbed.”

And Mikey had to say it. “You were robbed.”

“Somebody went into my knapsack,” Margalo said.

“And took the money out of your wallet,” Mikey agreed.

“And then put the wallet and everything back in so I wouldn't realize,” Margalo said. She felt bad in so many different ways—bad and angry, bad and depressed, bad and disillusioned—that she felt like she never wanted to see anybody in Drama again. Ever.

They thought about it all for a minute, walking side by side. Then, “What are we going to do?” Mikey asked.

“We can't tell Aurora,” Margalo answered. “This kind of stuff really gets her down when she hears about it. Aurora has a hard enough time with the news, she doesn't need to hear about some ratfink high school student stealing my money. Stealing is just the way things are,” Margalo said. “Like
cheating on tests, or like those opponents you thought were cheating in tennis last fall.”

“They definitely were,” and Mikey smiled, not a nice smile. “For all the good it did them.”

“Everybody does it, I guess.”

“Not me, I don't,” Mikey reminded her. “Or you.”

“No,” Margalo agreed. “We just get stolen from and cheated on.”

“Maybe. Okay, obviously. But I don't like it and I'm not going along with it.”

“Hunh,” Margalo said. What else could you say to a statement like that? A statement contrary to fact, contrary to reality. She agreed with the spirit of it, and she wished Mikey luck, and she thought that if anybody could say that and mean it and do it, that somebody was Mikey Elsinger, but still, really—“Hunh,” she said again. She didn't have the energy or the interest to say more.

“And neither are you,” Mikey decided.

G
ive up, what else? That was Margalo's conclusion.

Mikey, being Mikey, disagreed. “They can't get away with this,” she said on the phone that night, and all weekend, too, more and more angrily, and she never noticed Margalo's response, which grew more and more discouraged with each repetition, “But they did, Mikey. Somebody did.”

Monday morning, first thing, Mikey demanded, “What's first?”

Margalo shook her head, hanging her long green wool coat on the hook in her locker, tucking its hem under neatly. “Nothing,” she said, still facing the inside of her locker. “What is there to do?”

“You're the one with all the ideas,” Mikey told her.

Margalo turned around and tucked her hair behind her
ears, slowly. She squared her shoulders, ready to head on into the day. She told Mikey, “It's February.”

Mikey wouldn't get that, but Margalo didn't need to be understood, not by anyone. She knew what she meant, and what she meant was that February was the long low point of the year, and the only good thing about it was that it was shorter than any other month.

Short as it was, on the other hand, February seemed to last forever, an endless, gray, cold stretch of time, like a snowfield you're going to have to cross but there's no destination in sight and you know that you might not make it across alive, or like an ocean and all you can do is swim, hoping that you're heading towards March, but you could be swimming in circles. It was February inside Margalo, as well as outside in the year. She felt alone from everybody.

“Isn't a whole weekend long enough to spend feeling sorry for yourself?” Mikey demanded.

Luckily, they had to go off to homeroom, so Margalo could escape Mikey's nagging, because how she felt—and she had been noticing this, thinking about it, getting the right words for it—was she felt stupid, and she felt ashamed.

At that, Margalo turned and ran to catch up with Mikey, her knapsack thumping against her hip. “Don't tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

“Just don't. Promise?”

“Why do I have to promise?”

“Just promise,” Margalo asked her.

“Okay, okay, don't get hysterical.”

Margalo turned back, moving among the students heading for their homerooms on this side of the central library. Hers was on the far side, so she was going against traffic, which suited her just fine.

Usually Margalo felt pleasantly superior to the other people in school, and in the world, too. Except for Mikey, of course, and in certain specific ways people like Hadrian and Tan, Ronnie Caselli even. Usually Margalo's judgment of other people was that they meant well, although they were pretty hapless and not as smart as they thought they were. Usually she felt like people couldn't hurt her, even if they wanted to.

Now, however . . . This being robbed had really gotten to her. And why should the person who got robbed feel like she must have done something wrong? And who would have done this, anyway? Everybody knew how she was working to save for college, so whoever took her money knew exactly what they were taking—money she had worked for, money she needed. They had to know that, and they just took it.

If people were going to just take things from her, and be able to get away with it, and take things from one another, too, and not just thing-things, either, but abstract things too, like ideas or self-confidence or even safety . . . . Margalo wanted to go home. She wanted to be at the kitchen table, where Aurora would be doing some GED homework, reading and taking notes, or studying for a test, or maybe writing a paper. She
could sit with her mother and read. Margalo had never been homesick at school before.

Somebody tapped her on the shoulder from behind, hard. She clutched her knapsack to her chest, not knowing who it might be or what they wanted. Or maybe it wouldn't be anybody, just somebody playing tricks on her. And if they were, what could she do about it?

“Margalo!” It was Mikey's voice. Mikey was breathing a little fast from her run down the hallway to catch Margalo and get back before the bell rang. “I was calling you!” She glared at Margalo. “What's
wrong
with you?”

Mikey's anger and that question dumped down over Margalo like a bucket of cold water. Because that was exactly the question, What was wrong with Margalo? And the answer was: Nothing. What was wrong was wrong with
them,
with whoever had gone into her knapsack and robbed her. It was pretty stupid, to let somebody else make her doubt her ability to take care of herself.
That
was what was stupid, not being robbed. Being robbed was only what could happen.

All at once Margalo felt better. She felt better, and she was getting angry, too. She wasn't going to let them get away with doing this to her.

“What!” she asked Mikey angrily. “What is it?”

“I wanted to say that I promise and I'll keep my word, but it really stinks, and maybe because you're so smart about people it makes sense to you, but I don't even
want
it to make sense to me. It's your money and they can't just take it.”

“Yeah but they did,” Margalo said again. Only this time she felt a grim, determined smile move onto her face. “Give me some time to think, Mikey.”

“You have to strike while the trail is hot.”

“The trail's already cold. Friday it was hot. Give me a little time to figure this out.”

Mikey smiled.
That's what I wanted to hear.
“He'll be sorry, whoever it was.”

“Or she,” Margalo corrected, but Mikey was already jogging away down the corridor, dodging approaching students like a football quarterback heading for the end zone, her heavy braid bouncing up and down on her back.

Margalo went on into her homeroom where, when she saw Derrie, she remembered and asked, “Did you ever find your sweater?”

“Are you kidding?
And
I had to pretend when I wrote my grandmother that I still had it?
And
my mother had to replace it? So I guess it isn't entirely bad, since I still ended up with the same sweater. But I'm not going to be wearing it to school again.”

At lunch that day Mikey and Margalo ignored the rest of the people at the table, who, it could be said, didn't notice, except perhaps for Tim, and perhaps also for Hadrian. Mikey had made herself a wrap for lunch, with slices of both dark- an light-meat roasted chicken, a sun-dried tomato spread, paper-thin slices of onion and a generous serving of dark
green arugula leaves. Margalo looked at Mikey's sandwich and then at her own, peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly on supermarket whole wheat again. She looked back at Mikey's sandwich. “It would make me feel better if you traded half your sandwich,” she offered.

Mikey smiled,
Gotcha!

“Never mind.” Margalo felt herself sinking back toward the gray February mood in which she had spent the weekend.

But Mikey reached into her brown lunch bag to pull out a second wrap, sealed in plastic, and smiled again.
Gotcha! Again!
“Now you
have
to feel better.”

“I already do,” Margalo admitted. “I've decided to talk to Ms. Hendriks.”

“Why her and not Aurora? Or you could ask my dad.”

They spoke quietly, angled towards each other, ignoring Hadrian's curious glances and not answering Tim when he tried to distract Margalo by asking, “Am I the only person who finds February just . . . dismal?”

Margalo kept her focus. “No parents. You know how crazy Aurora got when someone kept emptying Stevie's lunch box in kindergarten.”

“Well,” Mikey said. “I don't blame her. I mean, when the only way you can keep your five-year-old's lunch from being stolen by some other five-year-old is to lock it in the teacher's desk, things are pretty bad.”

“Well,” Margalo said, “things can get pretty bad.”

“Well,” Mikey said, “maybe. But I don't intend to be helpless. Do you?”

“Not if I can help it,” Margalo said. And waited.

It took Mikey—whose sense of humor wasn't a lively one—a few seconds to process the joke, and then all she did was smile.
I guess that's funny.
Then, “Do you have any idea who did it?” she asked.

“No,” Margalo admitted.

“Suspicions?”

“I suspect everybody,” Margalo said. She thought. “And it really could be any one of them, although probably not Ms. Hendriks. Or Hadrian, either.”