Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (19 page)

For the next couple of days Margalo thought hard. She thought about what she knew about people, and she thought
about how to find out what you needed to know from them, if they didn't think they knew it, or if they didn't want you to know it. During the February vacation week the cast of
Our Town
was scheduled to continue rehearsals. Only Nate Emery's and Ann Witherspoon's families had travel plans for that week, which was lucky for Ms. Hendriks, since after the vacation they would move into the auditorium. It was unsettling to be on a real stage, as they had all discovered in the fall, so the first days after that move they would all get worse at whatever they were trying to do. They needed every minute of classroom rehearsal they could fit in before then, to minimize that damage. Ms. Hendriks had scheduled rehearsals from Tuesday through Friday of the vacation week. People grumbled happily about this. It showed that drama was a serious activity, as serious as any sport.

Margalo used the long Presidents' Day weekend to plan her approach—and to work at the restaurant, and to baby-sit, and to have brunch with Tim again (this time she ordered an omelet, with cheese and spinach), and to spend most of Monday at Mikey's house, with Mr. Elsinger and his girlfriend, Katherine, and Katherine's two little boys, until Mr. Elsinger and Katherine took the little boys out for a movie and a pizza dinner, leaving Margalo and Mikey to amuse themselves.

They amused themselves by making a batch of brownies and watching a few classic space movies,
ET, Starman,
and
The Last Starfighter,
interrupted only by a stir-fry dinner. Margalo talked over her plan with Mikey, who entirely
approved. “It was my idea,” Mikey reminded her. “I could do it for you. Because you're too subtle about things.”

“What would you do? How would you do it?”

“The only way. I'd go up to Richard and get right in his face.”

“Why Richard?”

“That ponytail is a giveaway.”

Margalo put a forkful of stir-fry into her mouth, watching Mikey, not saying a word.

“I'd look him in the eye and tell him, ‘I know you stole the money.' Then he'd confess.” She considered what she had said, and added, “Or not.”

“Or he'd lie,” Margalo pointed out.

“Probably the guilty person would lie,” Mikey agreed. “So I'd need to be more subtle,” Mikey said, and saved face with a smile,
I knew that all along.

“You could come with me. You'd have to sit through rehearsal, but it might work better with you lurking behind me, like a silent threat.”

“What
are
you going to say?”

“I'm working that out.”

“You could practice on me,” Mikey offered.

“That's a good idea,” Margalo said.

“You don't have to sound so surprised,” Mikey said, and then asked, because she couldn't stand not knowing, “Which idea did you mean?”

After practicing with Mikey—“Hey, if you had an extra
couple of hundred dollars, what would you buy?” “Do you ever wonder how it would feel to be stealing something and worrying about getting caught? What do you think it would feel like?” “Do you think you have the nerve to steal anything?”—Margalo decided that she would start with the easy people.

What she meant by easy was: Not strong characters, maybe shy or insecure, usually female, certainly not seniors, and if possible not juniors. What she meant was: People whom it would be easier to push off balance and get informational answers out of. She decided to start with Lisa Mikkel.

Lisa was a junior, but one of those mousy people who in class and in the halls and at parties, too, look like they don't want to be noticed, with her hesitating smile and hands that always held on to one another behind her back as she shifted from one foot to the other, with her way of wearing whatever everybody else was wearing—jeans, khakis, Ts, sweaters—but in muted colors, so that you could never remember just what it was Lisa Mikkel looked like. Onstage Lisa was transformed into a tomboyish person, fresh and quick and confident, but offstage she kept to herself. This made her a good person to start off with and also easy to get on her own.

Margalo spent Tuesday observing individual people and reviewing her plan of approach, so on Wednesday she felt ready to try it. She sat quietly down beside Lisa—who was off to the side of the Drama classroom, alone, doing some
French homework, her knapsack beside her and her notebook and book opened on her lap. Margalo hunkered down beside Lisa and said, quietly but clearly, “I know about it.” She kept her eyes on the platform, as if watching what was going on up there with Richard and Sally and Ms. Hendriks.

Margalo felt Lisa freeze, and she turned her head to see. Lisa looked like a rabbit in the headlights, or a chipmunk. Then she started talking, in a whisper, never lifting her eyes from the page of French verbs. “You aren't going to tell people, are you? Everyone knows that's not the kind of person I am. It wasn't me, I just—I was with a bad crowd last year. Otherwise I never would have. Because they made me, because I'm not the kind of person who—You won't tell, will you?” she asked, and then did look at Margalo out of watery eyes.

Half of Margalo was trying to figure out how to find out precisely what Lisa had done, and the other half was dismayed at having dug up a secret she didn't even know was there and couldn't see any use in knowing. From what Lisa had said, Margalo could make a good guess at what had gone on—one of the usual messes for teenagers, probably shoplifting or drugs, scary, and bad enough, but definitely not life threatening. But the secret Lisa was hiding wasn't the secret of Margalo's money, which was too bad, since Lisa hid her secrets so badly.

On Thursday, Margalo sat down next to Gilda Kulka, a
sophomore who had a small part as a baseball player in the second act. In these productions, there were always some male roles played by girls, since there were always more girls than boys signed up for Drama. Gilda had dark, dark hair and wore bright red lipstick; she liked vests with spangles and little bits of mirror on them; she claimed to have Russian great-great-grandparents of royal Romanov blood who had fled from that revolution to Paris first, then to America. Gilda had a loud laugh and thick, muscular legs and a giant crush on Carl Dane, proving once again that opposites attract. Although as far as Margalo could tell, Carl wasn't attracted to Gilda's opposition.

Margalo sat down on the floor beside Gilda, whose full attention was on this rehearsal of Act III. Carl had his big scene in Act III. “I know about it,” Margalo said into Gilda's ear with the same tone of voice that had worked so well with Lisa.

Gilda turned and looked right at Margalo. “What? What did you say?”

Somehow, when repeated, the line wasn't as threatening as when she said it just once, and saying it directly into the face of the person she was accusing didn't feel like the right approach, but Margalo saw no way to avoid this. “I know about it,” she repeated, looking right back at Gilda.

There was a microsecond's hesitation, and then Gilda faced back to the stage and laughed her loud laugh, as if Margalo had just made a joke.

“People, please,” said Ms. Hendriks without turning to see just who was responsible for the disturbance.

Gilda looked back at Margalo, no longer laughing, and said in a low voice of her own, “Look, I'll be friends with you. It's a good offer. I get invited to parties, so . . . There's no point in telling people about it, you know. Nobody cares, and my parents already know. Is that what you want? For me to act like your friend? I'm cool with that.”

Margalo just nodded her head. What could Gilda possibly be hiding?

“So give me a call, any time. You have my number? We're in the book. We're the only Kulkas, so there's no problem. So that's that? You're sure?”

Margalo kept on nodding. This wasn't working out the way she had thought it would. She decided that she must be doing it wrong, somehow.

To work out the weakness in her approach, she walked out of Friday's rehearsal beside Hadrian that afternoon, and as they went down the corridor to the main entrance, Margalo said casually, “You know, I do know about it.”

“How'd you figure it out?”

Margalo didn't hesitate. Hesitation could blow the cover off a good bluff. “When I thought about it, it just made sense.”

“Did you tell Mikey? Does she know? I only made the calls for a couple of months, no more than three. She said she wasn't afraid I was a stalker. I thought she liked our conversations.”

Margalo stopped in her tracks. The hallways were almost empty so there was no one around to overhear them. “You're Mikey's secret admirer?”

Hadrian's cheeks were pink. “You said it made sense.”

Now that she knew it, it did make sense, but, “Why did you do it?”

“To talk to her. Mikey's not easy to talk to, in case you haven't noticed. Wait,” he said. “Does that mean you
hadn't
figured it out? Then what did you mean? Why did you say that?”

“I'm trying to get someone to confess,” Margalo explained.

Hadrian's cheeks flushed even darker and he blinked his eyes. Margalo thought she might know what he was thinking and, in case she was right, hastened to reassure him, “I keep not finding out what I need to know,” she told him. “I was just practicing with another way to say it. All I want to know is who robbed me.”

“You already know I didn't. We proved it.”

“I was trying to figure out where I'm going wrong when I ask.”

“You should have told me.”

“Anyway, it doesn't work,” she said, and started walking along, thinking.

They walked a few steps in silence. Then Hadrian said, “I guess I understand. Are you going to tell Mikey?” and he answered his own question, “Of course.”

Margalo shrugged, not paying much attention. She had other, more important, things on her mind.

Over the weekend Margalo decided she was not going to be discouraged, not yet anyway. She could be discouraged later, when she had run out of options. But as soon as she gave up on the idea of accusing people herself, she came up with the idea of giving people a chance to accuse one another.

When school reopened after vacation, Margalo hoped it was a good time for a fresh start. She hadn't had a chance to tell Mikey her new detecting idea yet, or about Hadrian, and she was looking forward to lobbing those two grenades before homeroom on Monday morning. But before she could do that, Tanisha Harris rushed up, announcing, “All right. I've been waiting and waiting. You said you'd think about it.”

Margalo remembered: William. She had forgotten. Other things had taken over her attention. But she had her pride, and she wanted to seem as if she had spent the time considering Tan's situation, looking at the problem from all sides, thinking about all the possible contingencies. She didn't want to be found out forgetting. She started out with a safe conclusion. “It doesn't look too hopeful to me.”

“What doesn't?” asked Mikey, and for once Margalo was grateful for the way Mikey just butted into conversations. “Look hopeful.”

“I mean with Oslo and all,” Margalo said, starting to remember details.

“William,” Mikey announced. “You already know what I think.”

“Not without some idea of what's going on in
his
head,” Margalo concluded.

Tan offered, “He calls me his killer little sister.”

“Killer's okay,” Mikey decided, “but little's trouble.”

“As far as I can see,” Margalo said, her mind now focused and informed, “there isn't much you can do. You could tell him how you feel—”

“No,” Tan said. “That would be . . . No.”

“In person or in a letter. To see how he reacted.”

“He'd be polite. He'd be kind. William's really nice, he wouldn't laugh at me or anything. But . . . I couldn't do that. I wouldn't know what to say, it would be . . .” She was shaking her head. “There are too many girls after him already.”

“Or you can wait, wait and hope that—someday—”

“How long? How long do you think?”

“What is
wrong
with everyone?” Mikey demanded.

“Out of high school,” Margalo advised, “and what about college? Can you wait that long?”

“The question is, will William wait that long,” Tanisha said. “Is that all you can think of that I can do?”

“That and the usual—you know, find out what his interests are and learn as much as you can about them, keep yourself looking good, be around whenever he is, wherever, observe the girls he likes, to figure out what he likes in a girl, let him know you're sexy without putting any moves on him.”

“How do you know all this?” Mikey demanded, but before Margalo or Tan could respond, she changed her mind.
“Don't tell me. I don't want to hear about it. No wonder the divorce rate is so high, that's all I have to say.”