Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (30 page)

Mikey straightened up. What? Where did this come from? Coach Sandy, like any other adult, and especially teachers and especially coaches, figured that no answer meant she should lecture on.

“The team follows its coach's instructions,” Coach Sandy said. Chrissie stayed hunched over her bag. Coach Sandy continued. “Because the coach knows the game. I'm keeping this simple for you, Elsinger. The team's job—and the job of every player on the team—is to do what you're told. It's like an army, obedience is required.”

“This isn't a war,” Mikey pointed out.

“Teams function when they work together towards a common goal.”

“It's a game,” Mikey continued.

“I was doing you a favor, trying to teach you how to be coached,” the coach announced. “Now I'm doing the team a favor and getting rid of you.”

“You're not doing me any favors trying to get me to cheat,” Mikey said. She suspected there might be some other way to phrase it, which Margalo would have thought of, something that would have made the coach stop and think; but Mikey didn't know how to say what she was thinking any other way than straight out. “Or the team, either, without me on it.”

Coach Sandy's eyes sparked, and her short, curly, highlighted hair practically crackled. She beat her hand flat against the side of her pleated skirt. “Get out of my sight,” she said to Mikey, and then mumbled, just like a kid grumbling at unfair adult treatment, “These hotshot kids. They think they're such hotshots.”

Mikey
could
keep her mouth shut, so that was what she did. She went to the bleachers to watch Mark Jacobs play his singles set, and cheer him on, if cheering him on would help his game. “Good match?” somebody asked her, moving down along the bench to give her room. “Ask Chrissie,” she said, and heard Chrissie say, “We won,” as if that answered the question.

When she heard about Mikey being benched, Margalo wasted no time on sympathy. “Are you positive your shots are in?”

“No, but . . . but I'm pretty sure they're not out. Mudpies, Margalo, just think about it, you're supposed to be so good at thinking. I have to get myself set up to hit a return shot, and hit a good return shot, hit a winner if I can,
and
I'm supposed to worry about seeing if a close ball is in or out? Nobody can
do that,” Mikey announced. “Not and play her best. So in tennis you call it good unless you're sure it's out, because we don't have linespeople to call for us. Nobody in the county league makes bad calls like that,” she argued, but then, remembering some questions she had had, she repeated with a changed emphasis, “Not like
that.
Probably Coach Sandy's going to tell people I'm benched because I don't have school spirit,” she predicted gloomily.

“You don't,” Margalo reminded her. They had breakfasted—poached eggs on English muffins, sausage links, home fries—and walked to the elementary school playground. They paid no attention to the boys and girls playing basketball on the asphalt court on a sunny Saturday spring morning. They went straight to the little-kid swings, which offered the pleasing awkwardness of having to bend their legs at the knees to splay them out to the sides, which in turn made swinging difficult. But this wasn't about swinging. It was about tennis.

Mikey settled herself into a low rubber seat. “What would you do about it? If you played tennis and Coach Sandy was your coach and she benched
you.
Because you wouldn't make bad calls.”

“What
can
you do? I thought coaches were expected to rule with an iron fist. If the team is winning, that's all anybody cares about.”

“So you think I should tell her I'll start cheating? But I can win without doing that.”

“You couldn't cheat. Could you?”

Mikey doubted it.

“I could,” Margalo claimed. “If I wanted to.”

“She wants me off the team.”

Margalo couldn't argue with that; the evidence certainly pointed in that direction.

“But the team needs me to win. And they know it.”

Day forty,
Mikey reminded herself,
week eight.
She took a deep breath to announce, before the tennis players could divide up over the courts for Monday's practice session, “I want to say something.”

Everybody turned to look at her, then turned to look at Coach Sandy. Some of the boys batted rackets against their calves in either impatience or unused energy. The girls smiled politely. Coach Sandy was not smiling politely, but neither did she look worried. Maybe she didn't know the kind of person Mikey was so she couldn't guess the kind of thing the kind of person Mikey was would do.

Or maybe she wasn't worried because she knew there was nothing to worry about.

It was too late to think about that now, even if Mikey had wanted to. “I want to say that Coach Sandy has benched me. The reason she doesn't want me playing is because of my calls. Because unless I'm sure a ball is out, I call it in,” Mikey told them, in case there was someone who didn't already know that.

They didn't seem too interested. Probably they already knew she'd been benched. A couple of people said, “What's
your point?” and one asked, barely loud enough to be heard, “Who cares?”

Mikey said, “I'm wondering what you think about that.”

Then there was a silence. They looked at one another, not wanting to look at her. Now Mikey began to think maybe she should have talked this over with Margalo, what to say, how to say it. But what other choice was there?

Coach Sandy was the only one looking at Mikey. Everybody else looked embarrassed. But what did they have to be embarrassed about? Mikey was the one speaking out in public.

“Well,” said Anne Crehan, “If you're not sure it's out then it still could be. Out, I mean. I mean, it doesn't have to be in just because you're not sure. So, why call it in?”

Mark Jacobs answered this, “Giving your opponent the benefit of the doubt.”

What did that mean? Did it mean he was on her side? Or was he on the opposite side and just explaining her point of view?

“It's not as if opponents don't do exactly the same thing,” Hal Weathersing said.

Murmurs of agreement greeted this point.

“Perhaps I can add a different perspective to the question,” Coach Sandy said. “Perhaps if we look at it from the point of view of the team—that being the way a coach is supposed to think—because we don't play just for ourselves, do we? We play for a team.”

This discussion was going the wrong way. Mikey tried to get them to see what she meant. “It's cheating,” she said. “Or, to be perfectly accurate, sometimes it is.”

With that she lost them entirely. She could see it. Too late she figured it out. They all felt a little guilty because, like everybody else, they hadn't been perfect all of their lives, and they wondered about some of their own close calls, as well as remembering—maybe—some deliberately dishonest ones. Mikey tried to change what she'd just said. “I know everybody cheats . . . but—”

“Speak for yourself.”

“What do you mean, do you mean I cheat?”

“Who
cares?
Let's play.”

Mikey overrode them all. “But I don't want that to be my policy. Do you?”

“What makes you so sure I cheat?” demanded Chrissie.

Mikey could only smile.
You're not asking seriously, are you?

But others also began protesting. Who needed some ninth-grade squirt coming in and telling them they were cheaters when they weren't. Were they? “I'm not. Are you?”

“That's not what I mean,” Mikey said. “I mean I shouldn't be benched because I won't call what I'm not sure I've seen.” She glared at Coach Sandy, who was looking calmly at her, the grown-up in a kid-grown-up confrontation.

“And when did I ask you to do that?” Coach Sandy asked. “I don't believe that is what I asked you to do. I believe I was talking about being a team player, and how a player is foolish
not to take the advice of an experienced coach. Rather than turning it into yet another authority conflict,” she said.

Mikey ignored her. “Because that's not what a coach is supposed to do. Is it?” she asked the gathered squad of tennis players. Most of them were looking at their sneakers now, as if wondering about the quality of the knots—would they hold up to two hours of play?—or fingering the strung heads of their rackets like Sampras between points. Although, a few people were staring right at her, too surprised to look away, like rabbits in the headlights of an oncoming truck.

Only Mark Jacobs was looking at her as if she was saying something interesting, something he found worth thinking about, something he was thinking about right then.

“A coach is supposed to teach you to play better, and play fair, and play together if you're a doubles team. A coach isn't supposed to care so much about winning.”

Coach Sandy answered this. “Get real, Elsinger. In the real world winning is what matters. Winning is all that matters.”

“I don't call it winning when I cheat to do it,” Mikey said. “And I don't call it coaching when that's what you tell me to do.”

“That's it!” Coach Sandy slammed her clipboard down onto the ground. “I have had it up to here with you, Elsinger,” with her hand raised flat in front of her eyes. “You are off the team. Off the squad. Out of tennis and my life. Get!” she said. “Go!”

A surprised silence answered her. Mikey looked around. Nobody was going to protest this, she could see. Well, if
nobody else was going to argue, she certainly wasn't. If they were too stupid to see, or too chicken to say anything, or—and this was not a pleasant thought—if they all agreed with Coach Sandy, she was not about to want to be on their team. She nodded her head, slowly, once, turned her back, and walked away. She walked at her usual pace, not faster, not slower. Their loss. Their problem.

But she really, really didn't think Coach Sandy should be able to get away with it.

“I know, but what can you do?” Margalo asked Mikey on the phone that night. “It's not as if you can ignore what she said and show up and expect to play.”

Mikey had never thought of doing that. Now she wondered if she could. She pictured it to herself, and she didn't see how she could pull it off. “They should fire her.”

“Of course they should, but they won't.” Margalo had already pointed this out, and more than once.

“I could get her fired.”

“Probably not,” was Margalo's opinion.

“Remember Louis Caselli in fifth grade?” Mikey reminded Margalo.

“This isn't fifth grade,” Margalo reminded her right back. “This isn't another student. This is a teacher, and teachers don't side with students against other teachers. It's like in a business, if you were the CEO of a business, and somebody's secretary—or something like a file clerk, somebody way low
down on the ladder—came to tell you that her boss wasn't doing his job right, wasn't talking to customers the right way—”