Bad Girls in Love

  At last Margalo raised her head, lowered her fist, unsqueezed her face. “No,” she said. And moved on into the school building, with Mikey beside her.

  “Ha ha,” Mikey said. Then, as they walked past the policeman watching over the entrance, she started in on how if you want to keep kids from shooting one another in school, you’re going to have to get guns out of the hands of grownups. “Kids aren’t the problem,” Mikey said. “Grown-ups are the problem.”

  “Politicians are the problem,” Margalo contributed.

  “This is a democracy,” Mikey reminded her. “Politicians are elected to office.” She got the last word. “By grown-ups.”

  It was always refreshing to start the day with a little R&R. It put Margalo’s brain on alert. At their lockers she demanded, “Show. Show me what you’re wearing.”

  Mikey offered her a cookie instead. “Try this.” Then, without unzipping her jacket, she unpacked weekend homework books and papers into her locker, reserving those she would need for the first two periods.

  Margalo persisted. “I’ve noticed the jeans, and that you’re wearing shoes.”

  “I always wear shoes,” Mikey pointed out.

  Margalo wondered what exactly Mikey had hidden under the jacket. “I mean, you’re not wearing sneakers.”

  “It’s a recipe I made up,” Mikey said. “Actually, it’s my adaptation of a standard recipe.”

  Margalo took a bite and watched Mikey, waiting for the jacket to be unzipped. She chewed, swallowed, taste-tested. “Good.”

  “I brought some for Shawn,” Mikey told her, that gleam in her eye again. She had some plan of attack, Margalo thought. The cookies were part of it and whatever was under her jacket was part of it, and there was probably more. Sometimes, Margalo didn’t care how tunnel-visioned and self-involved Mikey was; she just admired her for reaching out with both hands to try to grab what she wanted. Mikey didn’t play things safe. She didn’t worry about what people might think, or say, she didn’t get embarrassed about her own feelings, she just went after what she wanted—in this case, Shawn Macavity.

  Margalo took another bite. She chewed, swallowed, and watched Mikey, waiting to see what there was to see.

  * * *

  Mikey couldn’t delay it any longer, but she kept her back to Margalo while she took off her jacket and folded it into her locker. Then she whipped around to get whatever Margalo was going to say over with. But Margalo didn’t say anything. She just looked. Then, after a good long stare, Margalo raised her hand and twirled it in the air, the forefinger raised.

  Mikey wanted to pretend that she didn’t understand, but she turned in a stupid circle.

  Her mother had called it cute—almost enough to make Mikey refuse to own the thing, despite its broad vertical stripes (“So slimming,” chirruped the saleslady) in rusty brown and browny orange colors that Mikey happened to like. “She has lovely skin,” the saleslady had murmured to Mikey’s mother. “From her father’s side? She’ll make a nice-looking woman when she grows up.”

  Mikey’s mother had answered without lowering her voice, or as if Mikey wasn’t there, or couldn’t hear, or something. “I have no idea what she’s going to make, except things hard on herself,” she’d said, while Mikey stood there, furious because she actually wanted the thing.

  Mikey rotated twice for Margalo, and still Margalo didn’t say anything. So she told her about that shopping scene. “My mother said that, even after I was her perfect shopping companion, all day. Muck and mire, Margalo, I went along with everything. I don’t know what she wants.”

  “Money,” Margalo said, still absorbed in staring. “Your mother wants the things money can buy, like status and envy and fancy vacations in fancy vacation destinations. Although I have to admit, she has good taste. That’s a great top.”

  Mikey staggered, backwards—two staggering steps—until she crashed into the wall of lockers. She patted frantically at her heart with one hand. “A compliment,” she gasped. “A clothing compliment.”

  “Well it is,” Margalo insisted. “Coming?”

  Mikey shook her head. If Margalo thought the top was great, probably it was, which was just what Mikey hoped for. And now she had cookies to deliver. Last Friday, after lunch, she’d given Shawn a chocolate chip cookie when he was on his way to change for gym. “Unh, thanks. It looks good,” he had said and “It is,” she had promised him, then hung around for a few seconds to be sure he didn’t have anything else to say. Today she had six oatmeal raisin macadamia-nut cookies for him, and she hadn’t set her eyes on him since Friday afternoon when she watched him step up into his bus. A weekend was about as long as she could stand without seeing Shawn Macavity’s face, but she didn’t say this to Margalo. To Margalo she just said, “You go ahead.”

  Margalo’s loose-leaf notebook was crammed with papers, probably some special extra-credit science work she asked Mr. Schramm for so she could get a perfect 100 in science. She said, “You look good, Mikey.”

  “Who cares?” Mikey asked, before she remembered that to look good was why she was wearing these clothes and realized what a dumb thing she’d just said. But by then Margalo had moved off and Mikey’s full attention returned to Shawn. She didn’t have a single class with him but he was in Mrs. Brannigan’s homeroom; she had found that out.

  “Whoa, whazzis?” somebody—Cassie—asked from behind her. “Mikey? Is that you?”

  “Who’d you think it was?”

  “Somebody who cared about how she looked.” Cassie fell into step beside her. “Which is not you. That El Dente really is a miracle worker if he can change you.”

  Mikey shook her head, denying it.

  Cassie just put on a You-might-deny-it-but-I-know-better kind of smile that—before she realized how stupid fighting was—used to make Mikey want to pop the smiler a good one. “Why should I want to change?” she demanded.

  “For Shawn.”

  “For who?” Mikey didn’t want to talk about Shawn to Cassie, who was not—as in not one bit, not at all, not in the slightest—a fan of his. In fact, Cassie was getting a reputation for how little she thought of Shawn Macavity.

  “Shawn. Him with the one little brain rattling around in his pretty head. El Dente—the tooth. You know exactly who I mean and the way he’s got you playing dumb is just another of his wonderful transformations of the entire female population of West Junior High into babbling idiots. Into babblinger idiots than usual, I mean.”

  “What do you have against him?” Mikey asked.

  Cassie shrugged. “He thinks he’s so great,” she explained. “Just because—” She didn’t finish that sentence. “I’m sick of him already and it isn’t even homeroom. Gotta go. Did you two hear about Heather’s party?” she asked over her shoulder. “Wait’ll you hear,” and she had joined up with Jace.

  Mikey had someplace to get to anyway, and no time to waste. In fact, she had just wasted all the spare time she had and now she would be late to homeroom. Too bad, she decided, and jogged down the hall.

  People got in her way from both directions as she ran. Sometimes someone noticed her, but mostly not. “Looking good,” Tan said and “Where’d you get the top?” Derrie wondered. Heather McGinty took time off from her intense conversation with Rhonda Ransom to comment, “Very hot,” in her pruniest voice.

  Mikey didn’t care about any of them, although she did notice that Rhonda looked angry, and weepy around the eyes, limp in the hair. Heather, by contrast, looked bright and shiny.

  “It was a mis-take” Heather said to Rhonda, who didn’t seem to believe her.

  “I don’t care,” Rhonda—a bad liar—lied.

  “An honest mistake,” Heather said. She was a better liar than Rhonda, but not a better actress, and the little twitching of smile, a smirky smile that was dying to get out, gave her away.

  “I just want to be told,” Rhonda whined.

  Then somebody whistled and Mikey wheeled around—but saw nobody who looked whistly—and maybe the person wa
sn’t whistling at her, or maybe it was sarcastic whistling, and she wasn’t about to care. Being whistled at made her want to go home and put on a blanket.

  But not before Shawn Macavity had seen her in this new outfit.

  She found Shawn at the center of a group of boys and girls, all eighth graders, standing outside his homeroom door. Mikey’s plan was to think of a question she could go into the room and ask Mrs. Brannigan about; then, on her way out of the room, she would stop by Shawn’s desk to give him the cookies. That was her plan, and it was a fine plan, except that as soon as she saw Shawn her brain froze. Stopped. Stopped working and just—

  She had forgotten his smile. Forgotten his long legs in their black jeans. She slowed down, even though her plan was to go right on into the homeroom.

  Shawn was saying no to something Ralph was asking him; he shook his head, no, and smiled, while their audience watched them.

  Mikey went slowly by—he was wearing a blue V-necked sweater over a black T-shirt; and she had remembered correctly, he did have blue, blue eyes—to enter the bright, square homeroom and head up to the teacher’s desk. But Mrs. Brannigan was accepting a note from a student, and reading it; so Mikey waited by the chalkboard behind the teacher’s desk. Picking up a piece of yellow chalk, she wrote Shawn’s initials, SM, in tiny letters at the bottom of the green board. In front of them she wrote ME, and then she put a plus sign in between. It felt good to join their initials. She imagined Shawn seeing it, the mini parade of initials, his and hers.

  By then the two voices behind her had finished their conversation. Mikey turned back to the teacher, who was seated at a big desk with her blue attendance book open in front of her.

  Here was a surprise. On Friday, in seminar, Mrs. Brannigan’s hair had been turning gray, and now it wasn’t. On Friday the short brown curls had had splotches of gray, giving Mrs. Brannigan’s head a mottled effect, like a camouflage cap or moldy chocolate pudding. Now her whole head was brown, with red highlights. But Mrs. Brannigan was definitely not the makeover type.

  What was going on with everybody? She’d better read up on sunspots, Mikey thought, and then burst out, “Mrs. Brannigan, do you think that America is like the Roman Empire? Or that the former Soviet Union was, because of the way it broke up into different countries?” This could be considered a reasonable question because in seminar they had been talking about the fall of the Roman Empire.

  “What?” Mrs. Brannigan looked up. “Mikey?”

  “It’s not urgent,” Mikey said. “Never mind.”

  “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Brannigan asked.

  The bell rang then and Mikey asked, “Can you give me a yellow slip for homeroom?”

  Without even thinking—as if her mind was entirely elsewhere—the teacher pulled a pad of yellow slips out of her drawer, filled one in, signed it, and gave it to Mikey.

  “Good,” Mikey said, and turned to leave.

  “What are you doing here?” Mrs. Brannigan asked.

  “Nothing,” Mikey said.

  When she turned to face the room, Shawn Macavity had seated himself. She had her plan, and arriving at his desk, “Hi, Shawn,” she said.

  He looked up, looked right at her. When their eyes met, her heart jumped.

  This was the strangest feeling she had ever had. In her whole life. The way her heart twitched in her chest. And her ribs closed around her lungs, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. Wordlessly, she passed Shawn the Chez ME bag. Wordlessly, he took it.

  But she hadn’t turned entirely into a bowl of mush. Seeing a paper sticking out of his science book she asked, “Is that your earth science homework?”

  She focused her attention on what she could see of the penciled words, the letters nothing special, pretty scrawly, a normal boy’s handwriting. She would know that handwriting anywhere now.

  “Yeah,” Shawn answered her. “Schramm always gives big weekend assignments. I only do what I feel like.”

  “Me, too,” Mikey said.

  He waited. When she didn’t leave, he asked, “Are these more cookies?”

  Mikey nodded.

  “Thanks,” he said. “It’s Mikey, isn’t it?”

  Mikey nodded.

  Then Shawn leaned behind her, across the aisle to say something to Jason about, “I’ve got rehearsals after school three days a week, can you believe it?” as if Mikey had already left.

  So she left.

  * * *

  What with the disproportionate time required by classes, all that time when you couldn’t talk, it took Margalo most of the morning to collect information on the weekend’s major developments. She learned that Ronnie’s boyfriend, Doug, had been her date for Rhonda’s party on Friday and brought along a couple of his high school friends. Cassie had been flirting with one of these, which made Jace jealous enough to dance with Melissa Martinez too many times—that is, enough times to look like there might be a breakup in the offing. Aimi Hearn had gone for a long walk with the other one—a talk-walk, she said, but people suspected there was more to it. Not that anyone thought she’d done anything, just . . . people had heard him saying he’d call her, but didn’t she already have one boyfriend somewhere? Was she going to try having two? And the lead in the play? Some people had noticed that Ronnie didn’t seem overly friendly to Doug at Rhonda’s, and she looked like she was having a better time at Heather’s on Saturday, without him. That was what Margalo was told, that was the rumor on Monday morning. But everybody’d had more fun at Heather’s, she heard. Everybody’d said it was the best party of the year—until they found out.

  Margalo spent all of her free time that morning gathering and sifting gossip, so that by the time she and Mikey entered the cafeteria for lunch, Margalo knew not only about Heather McGinty’s trick—the really big story of the weekend—but also about a lot of minor eruptions of excitement, like the way Cassie did a flamenco dance whenever Shawn came near her, calling out, “Ole! It’s El Dente!” and how Casey tried to make her stop but, of course, couldn’t, and how Frannie—when she found out that Heather’s parents weren’t staying home to chaperone the party—called her father to come get her, which only Frannie could do without being a social outcast forever.

  When they were seated at their usual table, and Mikey had picked up her limp grilled cheese sandwich, Margalo asked, “Did you hear about Heather’s party?”

  A headshake. Mikey’s attention was on where Shawn Macavity stood in the lunch line.

  “About what Heather did?”

  Another headshake. Mikey didn’t care what Heather McGinty did.

  “You didn’t hear about Shawn and Heather?”

  “What?” Mikey demanded, turning to glare at Margalo. “What happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Margalo took a bite of bologna sandwich, with cheese and lettuce and tomato added for flavor and nutrition. She chewed and smiled, enjoying her moment, dragging it out.

  But Tan ruined it. She set her tray down on the table, sank into a chair, and asked Mikey, “So how do you feel about Heather and Shawn?”

  “Heather and Shawn? What happened?” Mikey suggested the worst thing she could think of: “He hasn’t asked her to the dance, has he?” Then she thought of something worse than worst: “She’s his girlfriend? Oh, sludge,” she said. “I knew I should have stayed home and crashed the party.”

  “You mean you haven’t heard?” Tan asked. “Margalo hasn’t told you?”

  “Somebody better tell me,” Mikey warned them.

  Margalo let Tan do it. “Heather says it was a mistake,” Tan reported, “but I don’t know one single soul who believes her. Everybody knows that Heather told Shawn—when she invited him to her party—that it was going to be over a half hour later than she told everybody else. So he wasn’t picked up until half an hour after everyone else.”

  “He was alone with her for half an hour?” Mikey asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mikey protested.

&nbs
p; “Her parents weren’t there either,” Margalo reported.

  “That’s cheating,” Mikey protested.

  “Heather’s not as dumb as we thought,” Margalo said.

  “And they kissed,” Tan said. “A lot.”

  “How do you know that?” Mikey demanded.

  “She told everyone. She thinks—” Tan grinned and shook her head at the idiocy of some people. “I don’t know what-all she thinks. Rhonda’s furious, and jealous. Well, everybody’s jealous, but—at Rhonda’s party the night before—on Friday?—there wasn’t anybody special he danced with. He danced with at least half of the girls, all the popular ones, Aimi and Rhonda, Melissa, Heather Thomas . . . all of them. Except Ronnie, of course. Slow dances, too, never the same girl twice, so everybody thought he didn’t have a girlfriend. Then today, Heather’s talking as if he’s hers. But”—and Tan leaned forward to tell Mikey the best bad news of all, before she started in on her lunch—”I happen to know he didn’t ask her to the dance.”

  “Never mind the dance,” Margalo said. “What does Shawn say? Has anybody asked him?”

  “Yeah,” Mikey echoed. “Did he say why he kissed her?”

  Margalo set Mikey straight. “Shawn’s a guy,” she explained. “They’ll kiss anyone who shoves her mouth into their faces.”

  “Will they?” Mikey asked.

  Margalo said, “I wouldn’t worry about the kissing, Mikey.”

  “I’m not worried,” Mikey said. “I’m just jealous.”

  “Shawn says he got out of the house as soon as he could. He says he waited out front for his father to come pick him up,” Tan reported.

  “Yes!” Mikey crowed, punching the air with her fist.

  Margalo wondered, “Do you believe him? But then, when he can have practically any girl he wants, why would he want Heather McGinty?”

  “Yeah,” Mikey agreed.

  “I gather you’ve all heard the news.” Cassie approached the table and pulled out a chair. “I, for one, am mightily shocked,” she said, sitting down. “Ha-ha,” she said. “Joke,” she explained. She leaned her chair back on two legs and grinned at them with lips painted so dark a red they looked black.