Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (2 page)

The Who's Who of ninth graders was pretty short. There was Ronnie Caselli, of course, immediately one of the most popular girls in the school, and her cousin Louis Caselli, known as the biggest goof-off in the class. Rhonda Ransom got noticed as the big blonde, Mikey Elsinger as supposedly an ace tennis player, Hadrian Klenk as the perfect nerd, big brain and all—the kid was taking Calculus, a junior advanced-level class! And Chemistry for his elective! of all the jerkwater choices. Ira Pliotes was famous as the kid whose father owned a movie theater, Shawn Macavity as planning to be on TV he was so handsome (and didn't he know it), Cassie Davis as the urban nightmare artist bad-attitude chick. Those were the ninth graders the whole school knew. The rest, well, maybe you ran into a couple in an activity or a non-Varsity sport, or one of the mixed-grade
classes, like Creative Writing, Band, or Art. But it was hard to tell one ninth grader from another this early in the year. They all looked alike. Except for the ones like Hadrian Klenk who went around looking so weird, it was no wonder he got picked on.

“We don't mind having you here,” Mikey assured Hadrian.

“Drama starts today,” Margalo reminded him.

Hadrian said, “I didn't tell my mother—”

“You can call her.”

“Tennis started right off, like football,” Mikey told them, not for the first time.

They ignored her. “You said you would,” Margalo reminded Hadrian.

“We're already playing on tennis ladders, separate for boys and girls, and my guess is the top six players on each will be the varsity squad.”

Hadrian shrugged, then looked at Margalo out of big brown eyes, like some spaniel asking for mercy or food.

She was unmoved. “I don't know why—since we both know what a good actor you are—you don't do a tough-guy act.”

“My Arnold Schwarzenegger imitation?” Hadrian asked with a high-pitched laugh. He made his hands into fists and began assuming body-builder poses in his chair.

They laughed too, but Margalo insisted, “You know what I mean. You
could
.”

“Yeah, but I
am
acting. I'm acting invisible. It's just that I'm not successful.”

“You'd do better to act tough,” Mikey advised.

“I couldn't do much worse,” Hadrian admitted. “But once I really learn the layout, I'll be able to keep out of harm's way.”

“You're coming to Drama,” Margalo repeated. Giving him a chance to become a star onstage was the only thing she could think of that might help Hadrian out. She knew it wasn't much of an idea and there wasn't much of a chance. After all, they were just ninth graders. But since it was the only idea and chance around, she stuck with it.

“I've already won two matches,” Mikey reported. “That makes me number eighteen on the girls' ladder.”

Cassie Davis cut this non-conversation short. She ruffled Hadrian's hair as she sat down beside him. “You're like some friendly little animal,” she told him, “all brown and bushy. I can't resist.” She reached out again and he drew back, as far away as he could get without leaving the table. For a long moment, Cassie held her pose, forcing him to hold his.

With her long-fingered hands, the nails kept short so they wouldn't interfere with her artwork but painted maroon to make her fashion statement, and her artificially black hair cropped short and then tipped with bright blue, Cassie looked like a witch. In ninth grade she had given up wearing any makeup except heavy mascara and had taken up wearing Dickies work trousers, which were white and stained with many colors in oil and acrylic, pastels and india ink. Her black tank top showed splotches of the brightest slices of the color
wheel, white and yellow and red, pea green and aqua. Cassie settled down to her cafeteria lunch of two bowls of fruit salad and a grilled cheese sandwich, plus a container of milk and a basket of fries. “Say hey, Hay, what's new?” she asked.

Hadrian shook his head, Nothing, you already know that. He folded his hands on the table in front of him, studying his own fingers.

Casey Wolsowski joined them at that point, at about the same time as Jace, but not together with him. Jace was together with Cassie, and had been for most of eighth grade, despite her complaints about him and his about her. He sat beside Cassie and reached over to take a couple of french fries, before picking up a spoon to begin on one of the bowls of fruit. “Got you a banana,” he told her.

“I took two fruit bowls because that's what I want for my own lunch.”

“You like bananas,” Jace said, setting the fruit down on her tray and removing one of the fruit bowls to his own.

Casey meanwhile circled the table, to sit with her back to the wall next to Margalo, with whom she shared an interest in reading and the most advanced freshman English class. Round little Casey seemed to spend her life in hiding, behind big glasses, behind shapeless denim, behind a book. Seated, her knapsack at her feet, her tray beside her, she pulled a paperback book out of the big pocket on the front of her jumper. To read, Casey took
off
her glasses. She opened the book flat on the table in front of her and picked up her fork.

Margalo was always impressed by Casey's ability to eat without looking. She was also curious about the book. It looked old, and often read, and it seemed to be poetry.
John Brown's Body?

“Art Club meets today,” Cassie told them. “Peter Paul's the advisor. Did you know he shows at a gallery in New York? You should have signed up for it,” she told Jace.

He protested. “You hate activities.” She shrugged. “You hate clubs.” She shrugged again. “Outings,” he reminded her. “Outings on buses.”

“An artist can't be a hermit. Not if she wants to be relevant to her time.”

“Yeah, but I didn't even try out for the soccer team because of you. And now it's too late.”

“Hey, man, don't blame me. That was your choice.”

“So I guess I'll try Art Club, since we have until the thirtieth to pick activities.”

“I'm playing tennis,” Mikey told this new audience. They already knew, or would have guessed, and were not interested.

“What's the book?” Margalo asked Casey.

“My grandmother gave it to me.”

“Is it good?”

“It won the Pulitzer,” Hadrian reported.

“I wouldn't mind winning a Pulitzer,” Cassie announced. “But they don't give one for Art. Peter Paul says I've got talent.”

“And here I was busting my brain to solve the mystery of
your sudden interest in Art Club,” said Jace. “While I should really be trying to figure out who walked off with my Oakleys. Those glasses cost my mom a
fortune
.”

“Have you looked in the Lost and Found?” Casey suggested.

He snorted, disgusted. “Get real.”

Casey returned to reading while she ate, or eating while she read.

“I wanna show you all something,” Cassie said, and reached down into the knapsack at her feet.

“Not this again,” Jace grumbled.

Cassie pulled out her eight-by-ten sketchbook, telling them, “If Peter Paul can stick around for all four years, I might just graduate high school.”

As if in response to Cassie's declaration, the cafeteria loudspeakers blared out their Attention! signal, a long whistle call. It silenced all but the most talkative students in the big room, and even those were reduced to whispering. People stared up at the two loudspeakers, one on each side of the entryway, as if they were faces with expressions that could be read. Even ninth graders, by the third Friday of the school year, were accustomed to the crackle and buzz and then the long whistle that halted a class in its tracks. (Announcements were never made during the four-minute changeover times between classes because the hallways were so crowded and noisy nobody would hear them. Also, there were no loudspeakers in the halls.)

A woman's voice reeled off five names in rapid succession,
four boys—Bill Somebody, Walter Somebody Else, a Daniel, and a Martin—and one girl, Janice Timmer. “Report to Mr. Robredo's office at the end of Lunch A,” the voice instructed the five.

“Way to go Janice!” someone cheered, and a few people applauded and whistled, causing the faculty members on lunch duty to move closer, like a flock of birds gathering in the sky, ready to fly towards trouble.

After a reminder about where the Late Activities buses departed from, the loudspeakers gave a closing whistle and fell silent.

Immediately, conversations roared back to life. The noise of trays being stacked and utensils and plates being tossed onto the conveyor belt added to the confusion.

“Like any ninth grader is going to get to do anything in any activity,” Cassie told them. “Or club, either, unless maybe something like the Community Aid Club.”

Casey disagreed from behind her book. “On the literary magazine everyone gets to help with proofreading. In pairs. And we all vote on every submission.”

“The magazine comes out, what? Twice a year? Art Club is actually an open studio. It's really just extra studio time. Peter Paul sets up subjects, still lifes, problems to solve, and he's talking about live models in the spring. He only wants people who are serious about art,” she warned Jace, before saying to the rest of them, “Look at this.” She opened the sketchbook to show them three small sketches, all on one page: one of an
ear and the hair around it, one of a braid, and one of a hand.

They passed the sketchbook around, and Cassie watched their reactions as she explained, “The assignment was a portrait, in pencil.”

“
She
—what else, right?—she did something entirely different from everybody else,” Jace remarked, but whether it was pride or irritation in his voice wasn't clear. When, like Jace, a person has become a cynic by osmosis, not nature, it isn't always clear what his sarcasm means. “Like this,” and he pulled out his own sketch pad, opening it to a drawing of Cassie's face—a lot like her in the eyes and hair. You'd recognize her easily if you knew she was the one Jace was likely to want to draw. Nobody said anything.

“That's Mikey,” Hadrian said, turning back to Cassie's sketches and indicating an ear you could barely see behind a section of thick braid. Although it wasn't shown in the picture, there was probably a hand pulling the braid forward, but the braid was the star of the sketch. That braid knew its own mind. That braid knew where it was going and how to get there. “It
is
Mikey, isn't it?”

“And that's me,” Margalo said of the ear with hair tucked smoothly behind it, everything neat and orderly, except that the whorls of ear seemed to curl into secret places and disappear there.

“See?” Cassie asked Jace.

“But who's that, the one with the finger like God's finger
on the Sistine Chapel?” asked Casey, and then she guessed, “Peter Paul?”

“You should have done the top of his head,” Jace said. “With that bald spot he tries to hide.”

“Those are really good drawings,” Hadrian said.

Cassie nodded, agreeing. She folded the sketchbook closed.

Not to be outdone, Mikey reminded them, “Coach Sandy wants the team to get to the regionals this year. We might even win and go to the statewides. Because this year I'll be on the team.”

“Right,” said Cassie. “I'm sure she won't notice that you're a ninth grader.”

“Sports are about how you play, not what grade you're in,” Mikey told them, not mentioning the speech Coach Sandy had made to the people who came to sign up for tennis on the second day of school. About learning the game and doing the drills. About serving your time on the bench to earn your position on the team. Once the coach saw the kind of tennis Mikey played, she'd change her tune. “Coach Sandy knows how to win. She played pro tennis.”

Cassie was the cynic by nature. “If she's so good, what's she doing coaching a high school sports team?”

“A person might ask the same about Peter Paul,” said Jace.

Cassie shook her head pityingly at him. “Art's different. Art's harder.”

Casey looked up from her book to ask, “What's easy?”

Responses surged at her from both sides, and from across
the table, too. “Cheerleading.” “Computers.” “Cooking.” “Football.” “Business.” “Teaching.” “Politics, once you're elected.” “Math.” “Science.”

Everyone named things they had no interest in trying to do or talent for doing.

Casey didn't add anything. She put on her glasses and looked at them all, letting the variety of responses speak for themselves.

They were speaking to deaf ears. “Reading,” Mikey concluded, glaring at Casey.

D
rama Club met in the Drama classroom, which was as large as one of the labs, but instead of being filled with high tables, tall stools and locked cupboards, the room was mostly empty space. Beside the door was a big wooden teacher's desk, and benches were stacked up along the opposite wall, ready to be set out in rows. A triangle-shaped wooden platform built out from one corner covered about a quarter of the floor space, making a low stage. On the walls hung framed posters advertising famous plays—
Death of a Salesman, King Lear, Hedda Gabler, Our Town, Carousel, Into the Woods, Blithe Spirit
. Some of these Margalo had heard of, but most not. She studied the posters while she waited just inside the doorway for Hadrian.

People moved past her, upperclassmen mostly, old hands at Drama. They dropped their knapsacks behind and beside
and in front of the teacher's desk before settling themselves down on the carpeted floor, facing the stage. When it became apparent that Hadrian was not going to arrive, Margalo sat down alone at the back of the room. The only other ninth graders there were not people who wanted to be seen sitting with her—Shawn Macavity and Heather McGinty, one of the few girls who still had a leftover hopeless crush on him.