Bad Girls in Love

  “And you’re learning a great deal, too, about the theater,” Ms. Larch told her, adding one of those pronouncements teachers like to make about students, “although you don’t know it.”

  And how she knew that, Margalo couldn’t have said, since it was false anyway. But she smiled and bobbed her head and was in fact quite pleased with this conversation.

  * * *

  It wasn’t Mikey’s turn for the window seat, but she got there first so she took it. All the windows in the bus were opened from the top to freshen the air inside which stank of the sweat worked up in basketball practices, especially the smell of boys’ sweaty sneakers. Mikey huddled inside her jacket, trying to stay warm. This dressing to look good often meant you weren’t comfortable, and she looked out the window, thinking about how cold she was. Then she turned to glare at Margalo. “You should go into business designing clothes.”

  She could see that Margalo had been thinking about something else. Something that made her happy, and Mikey had no idea what it might be. She thought about asking what the good news was.

  Instead, “You should design comfortable clothes,” Mikey said. “Comfortable and good looking.” Sometimes she wished she could be more like Margalo, and not just to be thin. Mikey would have liked to be able to forget what Louis Caselli had said, one of his garbagy fat jokes. Or at least she’d like to be able to keep to herself how those cracks of his got through to her. Or maybe she’d just like to still be the kind of person who would pop him one on his big mouth. She heard herself telling Margalo, “I can diet, you know. If I want to. Even if the doctor said—I told you, didn’t I?—she says I’m the middle of the upper third of the weight curve for my height.”

  “That’s just Louis being a jerk,” Margalo told her.

  Mikey knew that. “I tried going on a diet,” she said. “Last week. I didn’t eat anything all day.”

  “That’s not a diet, that’s a hunger strike,” Margalo said.

  The bus jerked to a stop, let some people out, closed its doors and jerked going again.

  “There’s a difference between dieting and starving, and why would you do that, anyway?” Margalo asked. “What’s wrong with the way you look?”

  Mikey’s opinion exactly. She just wanted corroboration. That settled, she asked, “So, what’s got you so happy?”

  “Oh,” Margalo said. “Nothing,” she said. “Just things,” she said. “A good rehearsal. I like being assistant director, it’s interesting. You know who’s really good? Hadrian Klenk. He’s got a terrific voice; he can sound like anybody. And Aimi’s good too, Aimi’s going to be good in that part.”

  “You’re a behind-the-scenes person,” Mikey announced. “I’m the center-stage kind.”

  “I noticed,” Margalo said. She gathered her book bag onto her lap as they approached her stop. “She’s not as good as I would have been, though,” she said, getting the subject of conversation back to herself, Mikey noticed.

  Well, Mikey admitted, she was pretty self-centered herself, and she thought most people were. In her experience. Only, being Margalo’s friend meant that Margalo included Mikey in her self-center a lot of the time. That’s what being friends was, wasn’t it?

  And, Mikey thought, thinking on, that’s what love was too, only more so. “You know what gets me?” she asked Margalo.

  Margalo was rising up, holding on to the back of the seat in front of her for balance as the bus lurched. “Everything,” she answered.

  “No, besides that. What gets me is the way—I mean, I know I’m not in love. Not love,” Mikey said. “But what is the word for what I’m in? There isn’t one,” she told Margalo.

  “Crush,” Margalo suggested. “Infatuation. Puppy love.”

  “Those are such put-downs. What kind of a word is crush, for a feeling?”

  “Lust?” Margalo suggested.

  “Doesn’t that have to mean sex? I mean, real sex,” Mikey asked. She switched back to her own thoughts. “And then, I love lasagna.”

  Margalo was walking away now, so Mikey said to her back, “Call me. I’ll call you.”

  * * *

  Later that evening, when the phone rang, Mikey answered it cautiously. “Hello?” She didn’t know, these days, who might be on the other end of the line.

  “Lurve,” Margalo said. “We’ll call it lurve. Spelled with a u-r. Think about it, Mikey. You’re in lurve—like a combination of lurch and love.”

  Mikey didn’t waste time thinking. She tried the word on, as if it was some dress in a department store. “I’m in lurve with Shawn Macavity,” she said.

  “You certainly are,” Margalo agreed.

  10

  WHO SAYS IT’S BETTER TO GIVE THAN TO RECEIVE? WHO SAYS IT’S BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST?

  Friday morning Mikey bolted out of homeroom two minutes before the bell rang, looking—she hoped—as if she had some bathroom emergency, and zipped down the nearly empty hallways, lickety-split, splickety-lit, to station herself outside of the door to Mrs. Brannigan’s classroom. Through the glass top of the door she could see the homeroom breaking up into groups, people getting themselves out of their desks, turning to pick up their books or backpacks, talking, waiting out the last seconds before the bell. Mikey watched Shawn talking to a couple of boys, while Heather McGinty and a couple of other girls waited nearby. Shawn wore his usual black jeans and boots, this time with a loose Hawaiian shirt, all tropical flowers and bright birds on a red background. Nobody but Shawn would dare to wear a shirt like that.

  Finally, the bell rang.

  Mikey waited where he’d have to go past her, keeping her eye on him as if he was a tennis ball about to come off the racquet of a good server. She heard someone say, “Hey, Mikey,” and answered, “Hey, see you,” but she didn’t take her eyes off of Shawn.

  He might get right past her if she didn’t stay focused. If she let herself get distracted, he might move to where she couldn’t get a good shot at him.

  As soon as he stepped into the hall, Shawn was surrounded, but Mikey ignored his companions. Shawn was the one she blocked. “Hey, Shawn,” she said, planted right in front of him.

  “It’s Mikey, right?”

  “You know who I am,” she told him. “I want to talk to you.”

  “I have to—”

  “Just for a couple of minutes. You won’t be late for class,” she promised him. “You go ahead,” she told the girls, smiling. Don’t even think about it, her smile said, and they obeyed, reluctantly, looking back to Shawn as though if he just said the word, they would return to rescue him.

  “Listen,” Shawn said. He had his hands jammed into his back pockets.

  Mikey reminded him, “I tried to tell you last night on the phone.”

  “I had homework. I couldn’t talk.”

  Mikey looked up, keeping eye contact. “I got this for you,” she said, and thrust the bag at him. “Here.”

  He was too surprised not to free his hands and take the bag from her. “Urban Outfitters,” he commented with that lift to the voice that says, without saying the word, Cool.

  She was waiting for him to see the shirt. “Open it,” she urged.

  “But it’s not my birthday,” he told her.

  “Open it.”

  “Why should you get me something?”

  “Just look. You’ll see.” She jammed her own hands into her own rear pockets and watched his face.

  As he opened the bag his face looked puzzled. As he pulled out the black fabric his face looked nervous. “You shouldn’t ha—,” he was starting to say as he unrolled the T-shirt, held it out in front of him, read what it said. Then his face looked maybe angry, or maybe alarmed; Mikey couldn’t be sure.

  She reassured him. “It wasn’t expensive.”

  “What is this?”

  “I got one for myself, too. Mine’s white.” She had told her mother that this black one was a present for Margalo and had to be a medium because Margalo was so tall, even if the shirt turned out to be a lit
tle broad across the chest. “Do you think it’ll fit?”

  “Listen,” Shawn said. “Mikey,” he said. He was rolling the shirt up and returning it to the bag. “I don’t want this.” He held the bag out to her.

  She didn’t take it. “Why not?”

  “That’s a joke, right?” he asked, then shook his head at her. “It’s not a joke, is it? You’re too weird,” he said. He pulled the shirt out again and held it open in front of her—as if she hadn’t already seen it.

  Mikey liked that shirt, liked it a lot, in white or in black. I ME, it said—the I and the ME in big, fat white letters, the heart red and a little outsize. Just looking at that shirt made Mikey feel good. Her mother hadn’t agreed, but “I don’t see any harm in it,” she’d said. “You two will wear the shirts once and you’ll learn.” Learn what? Mikey hadn’t asked, since she figured she could fill in the blank without her mother’s help: Learn your lesson. Learn you can’t. But every time Mikey saw that shirt, in white or in black, she felt like laughing. Out loud. Because it made her so glad to be herself, Mikey Elsinger.

  “Isn’t it great?” she asked Shawn.

  “Listen, Mikey,” he said. He sounded so serious she changed the expression on her face to match. “I want to ask you . . .”

  He stopped speaking.

  She waited as long as she could before what she hoped was the end of his sentence burst out of her: “To the dance?”

  “No!” Shawn cried. “Absolutely—Mikey!” he cried. “Don’t you get it?”

  “No!” she cried right back at him. “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re weird!” he cried.

  “What’s wrong with weird?” she demanded, finally feeling comfortable to talk with him now that they were having a normal conversation.

  “Everything,” he told her. “Just for once can’t you listen? I’ll keep it simple. One: I don’t want your cookies. They’re good, but I don’t want you giving them to me. Two: I don’t want this shirt with this—logo, your—on it. Now do you get it? Get this, too, Mikey, this is the big one. Three: I don’t want you for a girlfriend,” he said, then repeated the words with big spaces in between them. “I . . . won’t . . . ever . . . want . . . you . . . for . . . a . . . girlfriend.”

  “Oh,” Mikey said. “I get it.” Not that she was exactly surprised. “OK.” She was deflated, like an emptied balloon, squashed like a bug, but not surprised. It wasn’t as if she’d totally lost her grip on reality. She had figured out that Shawn Macavity wasn’t exactly madly in love with her. But she was sure he should be, so she hoped he would be. She tried to explain to him. “But—”

  “Can’t we just be friends?” he interrupted—the TV-show solution to awkward relationship situations—looking over her shoulder and down the hall. He wanted to get going, that was obvious.

  Well, Mikey was ready to get going too. “Sure,” she said. “You can think of me as a friend. I’d like that. But it won’t change how I feel,” she told him.

  He stared at her. “And you don’t think that’s weird?”

  “Or change what I think of those scummy girls who hang around you all the time,” she told him.

  “Unlike you,” he said.

  “That’s different,” she told him. “Because we’re friends. You just said,” she reminded him, proving her point.

  He turned to walk away, and she watched him—but then he stopped and turned back to her, smiling, and that smile squeezed at her heart. “Mikey,” he said, smiling. “If we’re friends,” he said. “Then can I ask you to do something?”

  Was he going to ask her to the dance after all? Unlikely, improbable—but what else could it be?

  “Sure,” she said, looking right into his eyes. Looking into Shawn Macavity’s eyes was like falling asleep when you were really tired, like the first bite of pizza or the follow-through of a one-handed backhand. Looking into Shawn Macavity’s blue eyes, you didn’t ever want to stop looking. Mikey had never met up with that feeling before in her life, and she couldn’t get enough of it—even if he didn’t want any of it, that didn’t change how she felt. How could it? Why should it? She asked him, “What is it?”

  “Don’t put those initials on the chalkboards anymore. Will you? It’s embarrassing,” he said.

  Not the dance, then.

  Worse than not the dance.

  “Sure, OK,” she said. “No problem,” she said, feeling now as if the words were blocks of wood she hacked off from her wooden brain and sent on out of her mouth to clatter on the floor.

  “Great,” he said, and turned away again.

  He moved so fast toward the crowd of boys and girls ahead of him that he didn’t even hear her joke. “Not exactly great.”

  But it probably wasn’t much of a joke anyway. She wasn’t feeling too jokey right now.

  11

  TELEPHONE MADNESS MULTIPLIED

  On that Sunday, Mikey’s mother got her back home by nine thirty.

  A.M.

  Actually, it was 9:21 A.M., so unexpectedly early that Mikey’s father wasn’t there. Mikey let herself into the empty house, put her duffel bag down on her bed, and called Margalo. Esther answered on the first ring, as if she’d been waiting by the phone.

  “Esther it’s me and I want to talk to Margalo,” Mikey said. “Right away.”

  “Hi Mikey! I missed you.”

  “That’s great, Esther. Get Margalo.”

  “They’re still asleep.”

  “It’s nine thirty,” Mikey protested.

  “They’re all in the living room.”

  “Why are they sleeping in the living room?”

  “For the sleepover,” Esther explained. “Wait . . . I hear—”

  Margalo’s mother got on the phone. “Mikey? It’s Aurora, she’ll be here in just—go get Margalo, Esther—are you at your mother’s?”

  “No.”

  “I have to—hold on a minute,” Aurora said. Mikey heard her put the phone down and heard distant muffled voices. She hung up. What was Margalo doing having a sleepover and not inviting her, and not even telling her?

  In about one-half minute the phone rang, but Mikey knew who it was. She listened to the message as Margalo recorded it onto the answering machine. “I know you’re there. I bet you’re angry. But it’s not—this didn’t even get planned until Friday afternoon, when you were already gone to your mother’s. It just happened, we just decided on the phone Friday, it’s only four of us who weren’t going to Ronnie’s, you weren’t—”

  The machine cut her off.

  The phone rang again—one ring, two, three, four—and then the machine picked up: “We’re the Elsingers. Leave us a short message.”

  “Mikey, for slime’s sake.” Pause. Humming of tape. “Pick up the phone.” Pause. Humming of tape. “Come on, Mikey—” Cut off.

  Again: “Don’t be a total hairball, Mikey. Pick up the phone, I know you’re listening.” Pause. Tape humming. “I don’t know why you think I don’t know you’re there. I bet I even know where you’re standing. And what you’re wear—”

  Ring, ring, ring, ring. “We’re the Elsingers. Leave us a short message.”

  “OK, Mikey. I have a baby-sitting job this afternoon, until late. So call me back or don’t, it’s up to you. If you’d rather be angry at me, even though there’s no reason, go right ahead.”

  Click. Beep. End of message.

  Best friends since the first day of fifth grade? Ha! Topsoil! Margalo knew Ms. Barcley’s phone number. She could have called and—

  And what? And Mikey would have known she was missing the sleepover. Was it worse to miss it and know it, or miss it and not know it?

  Never mind that. Mikey needed to get angry—it felt pretty good, in fact—at somebody, anybody. And it felt better to be angry—and besides, Margalo knew Mikey well enough to know that Mikey would have wanted to know about it even if she couldn’t go. (Just like Mikey knew Margalo well enough to know that Margalo would have included her in the sleep-over.) Mikey went o
ut to the kitchen and poured a bowl of Cap’n Crunches, and poured milk over the crisp miniature pillows, and ate standing up. The milk-and-sugar taste, combined with the friendly crunching sound inside her head as she chewed, made her feel like a little kid.

  When the phone rang again after about fifteen or twenty minutes, she still didn’t answer it. “I thought you might have figured it out, but I guess not,” Margalo said. “This is slimeing stupid, Mikey.”

  Mikey knew that. Sometimes she liked being stupid.

  Margalo waited a full ten seconds, then hung up again.

  Mikey finished her cereal, rinsed the bowl, rinsed the spoon, put them both into the dishwasher. Her father wouldn’t expect her home for a couple of hours at the soonest, so she didn’t expect to see him until then. And where was he, anyway? Maybe she’d call Shawn. Because they were friends, that was what he’d said. Friends called each other up and talked, just to talk, so there was no reason for her not to call him now that he said they were friends.

  She dialed his number and asked the man who answered if she could speak to Shawn. The first thing that popped out of her mouth when she heard his “Hello?” was: “Where’s your mother?”

  “At church. Why? Who is this?”

  “Because she never answers the phone. Mikey.”

  “Listen, Mikey, I can’t talk now. I’m leaving—my dad’s—I’m meeting some people at the Mall.”

  “Oh. Oh, OK. Maybe—”

  “Bye.”

  Mikey held on to the phone for a minute, then set it down. If that was the way everybody was going to be, she’d just do homework. After she finished her homework, she could make a spaghetti sauce for dinner if she got started with defrosting hamburger right away. So she did that. She could call Margalo later, after Margalo’s overnight guests had left and before her baby-sitting job started. Let Margalo stew for a while. It would serve her right for—they could have called last night, couldn’t they? Just taken a short break from their fun to call. Mikey started on homework.

  She was partway through the science reading—who cared how rocks were formed?—when the phone rang, and she had to race from her usual homework locale at the kitchen table to go out to the living room and answer it. She got there just before the machine picked up. “Hello?”