Margalo grinned right back, noncommittal; they were two cool dudes eye-balling each other. “What I want is a firsthand report on your scene with Shawn.”
“But you hate him, why would you even talk to him?” Mikey asked Cassie.
“I just wound him up a little, is all,” Cassie assured Mikey.
“Where was this? When?” Mikey demanded. She leaned forward.
Cassie leaned her chair back even farther. “At Heather’s. Saturday. It wasn’t anything, it was”—she grinned more broadly—”fun. Actually. Poor little El Dente. He was telling someone—one of his groupies, or six of them actually, or maybe it was a dozen—he was telling them about how he’s going to be an actor. You know—all the world’s a stage, that whole crock? How could I pass up that opening?” Cassie asked. “I told him he looked more like a model than an actor. So he tried to figure out if that was an insult or a compliment.” She rotated a forefinger on either side of her head, “Whirra-whirra-whirra. It took a while. Right? So I told him, I meant like those models you see when you go for a haircut, in the beauty shop photo books. And he got insulted. I guess he’s the sen-sitive type.”
Margalo could pretty much picture it, the dim lighting, the loud music, people heading out the back door for privacy, in the rooms people coming and going and dancing, devouring chips and cookies and sodas. Shawn and Cassie would have been practically yelling at each other. “So I guess he decided to get even.” Now Cassie lowered her chair, leaning toward Mikey and the rest of her audience. “So here’s his idea of an insult. I guess you weren’t going in for a makeover. Yuk-yuk, right? So I said, What? I can’t hear you, and he tried again, If you were in for a makeover, you were robbed. So I said, What? What takeover? Is there a war? He just waved his hands and gave up. Poor guy, he just doesn’t know. So I tried to give him some advice. Tooth, I said, don’t even try to keep up with me. And that was that. End of scene. Except that later he tried to get me to dance with him. A slow dance. I ask you,” Cassie told them. She rolled her eyes, grinned, shook her head at the hopelessness of it.
Mikey got right to the point. “Did you?”
Cassie’s grin widened, and she ran her fingers through her short hair, then shrugged. “I felt sorry for the guy.”
This was not the answer Mikey wanted to hear. But she persisted, “What was it like?”
“What’s it ever like, slow dancing with a guy?” Cassie asked, pretending to try to remember this occasion, or—as Margalo guessed, with sudden insight—pretending to pretend, so that she could remember it all again.
“I don’t know,” Mikey pointed out. “That’s why I’m asking.”
Ronnie came to join them and say, “Asking what, Mikey? What about? The parties, right? Because of you know who. They were pretty good parties, I can tell you that—especially Heather’s, well, except. I don’t know what Heather was thinking.” Ronnie was too shocked and nice to say more.
“What does Heather Mac ever think of?” Cassie asked, and answered her own question, “Boys. And how she looks.”
Margalo was wondering why all of a sudden popular Ronnie was coming to sit at their table during lunch. They’d always gotten along OK with Ronnie, but not lunch-at-the-same-table OK.
Frannie and Heather Thomas sat down with them, and Doucelle, too, whom they’d known since sixth grade, with Casey tagging behind Frannie. Heather and Frannie had a question about play rehearsals. Doucelle pulled out a chair beside Tan. The rehearsal question—”Where are they held?”—and Doucelle’s quiet “Wanna ask you something” to Tan did not alter the main direction of the conversation. They were girls; they could talk about seven things simultaneously, or at least three.
“It’s always about looks, with boys,” Cassie said.
“Ralph doesn’t care that much about them,” Heather Thomas announced.
“What makes you so sure?” Cassie demanded.
“Because I’m not so pretty,” she told them.
They didn’t agree: “You’re kidding.” “Who told you that?” “You’ve got nice hair, a good figure, your nose is . . . a great nose.” “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not,” Heather insisted.
“You know?” Tan said. “My mother’s boyfriend is always making these cracks—like he tells her if looks mattered he wouldn’t be hanging around her.”
“Your mother’s great looking,” Mikey said.
“Gets him in hot water, every time,” Tan said. “She tells him, he’s no prize. But they’ve been together for two years now. More than two years, since the summer before sixth grade, remember?”
“So there’s hope for us? Just, we have to wait until we’re grown up? Or until they are?” Doucelle said, laughing.
“Except for Ronnie,” Margalo said. She hadn’t been enjoying the look on Ronnie’s face. It was the kind of look that made her want to scrub it off with a Brillo pad.
Ronnie made a bid for their sympathy. “It’s not all pure fun, I can tell you. You all think I have it so easy, but it’s not—I mean, I have my doubts about Doug sometimes.” She looked around at them, trusting them, deciding to confide. “I mean—doubts”
This was news, much more interesting than what Heather McGinty had gotten up to, and it was more current, a fast-breaking story.
“What do you mean, Ronnie?”
“What’s he done?”
“He hasn’t done anything wrong exactly, it’s just that he’s—” Ronnie made herself say it. “He’s kind of jealous. I mean, why shouldn’t I go to a party, even if I can’t go with him?” she asked them. “It’s not as if he didn’t know I’m in eighth grade,” she told them, pointing out a further unreasonableness. “He knew my parents won’t let me go out with anyone more than once a weekend. I told him,” she told them. “He knew all along. But now”—she leaned forward and lowered her voice—”he doesn’t want me to dance with anyone but him.”
“Is he that good a dancer?” Margalo asked, to keep things sane; but she was overruled.
“Uh-oh,” Cassie said forebodingly.
“Possessive,” Tan agreed.
“Are you going to break up with him?” Heather asked.
“He’s not that great a kisser,” Ronnie admitted.
They took this in, silent.
Mikey said, “I thought you really liked him. You said you did,” she reminded Ronnie.
“I know what I said.”
“But it’s only been a month,” Mikey pointed out.
“Longer—since Christmas. I don’t expect you to understand,” Ronnie told Mikey sadly. “Or sympathize.”
“I don’t,” Mikey said, and left the table.
They watched her charge off, and Ronnie remarked, “I don’t know why she should be so angry about me and Doug.”
In Margalo’s opinion, Mikey wasn’t angry. She just had something else she wanted to do. Given Mikey’s tunnelvision way of life, Margalo could guess who the something else probably had to do with.
Ronnie leaned forward to speak in a low voice. “I didn’t want to say this while Mikey was here, because we all know how she is.” They nodded; they all knew. “But the one Doug’s mostly jealous of is Shawn. And he doesn’t even know him. Doug’s got a brother in seventh grade, so he heard about the play and the assembly. All the attention Shawn’s been getting. He’s so suspicious—I mean Doug is. He doesn’t trust me. I trust him,” Ronnie pointed out. “I never worry about him with all those high school sophisticated girls. I even asked him, because he was doing nothing but arguing with everything I said, did he want to see other people? And the first thing he did was accuse me of wanting to date Shawn.” That was the end of her case, and she waited—worried but hopeful—for their reactions.
“Was he always jealous?”
“I used to like it,” Ronnie admitted.
“You know, jealousy can be dangerous,” Tan said.
“That’s just on TV,” Cassie told them.
“That’s not true,” Casey said. They were all a little surprised t
o hear Casey disagree, and their surprise gave her time to express her thought before they went back to ignoring her. “In Rebecca,” she argued. “And in Othello,” she added. “People can die because other people are jealous.”
Tan agreed. “Although, in real life they mostly get beat up. Like those women who have restraining orders to protect them from rejected boyfriends but still get beat up. Or shot. I saw it on 20/20.”
“My point exactly,” Cassie said.
“Do you think Doug will beat Shawn up?” Ronnie asked, alarmed.
“More likely, he’d beat up on you,” Cassie consoled her.
“You all think he’s a bad boyfriend, don’t you? You’re not saying so, and I appreciate that, but—Thanks for the good advice, guys. Doug’s going to be in trouble with me when he comes over this evening.”
“On a school night?”
She explained, “He comes over Mondays, after practice. Wish me luck?”
“Luck,” they said.
“He’s going to be surprised,” Ronnie promised them. “He thinks because he’s older and has a car, he rules. But I’m not about to be ruled.”
“You go, girl,” they urged her. “Go get him.”
“She’s already got him,” Margalo pointed out. “I thought that was the problem.” But only Frannie thought that was funny.
8
BATHROOM TALL
What does it mean?” they asked Ronnie on Tuesday when she had gathered them in the bathroom, five of them, plus Ronnie, clustering together between the line of sinks and the line of stalls.
“Just what it looks like,” Ronnie said. She leaned back against a sink, in jeans and the too-large team jacket she had worn to school. She radiated happiness and popularity, fiddling with the zipper.
Junior high didn’t have team jackets. Junior-high boys weren’t so tall that if they’d had team jackets, and given them to their girlfriends, the jackets would have hung almost down to the girls’ knees.
“Are you engaged or something?” Tan asked.
Ronnie giggled at that suggestion. “My parents would never let me get engaged, at my age.”
“So what does it mean?” Tan persisted.
“It means we’re a couple,” Ronnie told them. “I’m so happy,” she confided. “I’ve never been so happy.”
“But I thought you already were, a couple?” Derrie said.
“This means we’ve agreed not to see other people. Like, on dates.”
“But your parents only let you go out on one date a weekend,” Margalo reminded Ronnie.
“So that’ll always be with Doug,” Ronnie explained.
“What about parties?” Cassie wondered.
“I don’t go with a date. Unless it’s Doug,” Ronnie said. “I’d already asked him to the dance.” That memory made her smile even more happily.
Margalo had some information about coupledom from her older stepsiblings. Susannah had been half of a couple about a hundred times already, since she was always falling for someone and then discovering he wasn’t perfect. Howard wanted a steady girlfriend. He dreamed about it, he said; it was the next best thing to getting married, he said. But Susannah and Howie never filled her in on the details—how you talked about it, what it actually required of each person. “Did you really ask him to the dance?” Margalo asked Ronnie. “Like say, Will you go to the dance with me?”
“Sort of.” Ronnie’s smile had changed to half-mischief and half-smug. “Of course, he already knew about it because of his brother. He wanted to take me—my first big dance. He made a big deal out of that, my first big dance. So when he said he hoped I was planning on asking him, I said I was. But that was way back, that was New Year’s.”
Not way back, Margalo corrected silently, then corrected herself. Maybe time did feel different to Ronnie: before Doug and after, BD and AD. Love took different people different ways; she had noticed that more than once, more than twice, too. She was glad it hadn’t taken her the way it had taken Mikey.
“But you were already dating by then, weren’t you? Did you know it was serious by then?” Margalo asked next.
Ronnie’s mouth kept that same half-and-half smile as she remembered. “Our first date was December twenty-seventh because I met him Christmas Day and he called the day after to ask me out. And I didn’t sleep barely at all that night. I couldn’t I kept thinking about him, you know? Remembering everything, every minute, every word. I was . . . in a daze, a total daze. He asked me to a movie, but”—she giggled—”we never went, we . . . just talked and stuff. So last Saturday was our five-week anniversary. He said, on our first date?, that I was his Christmas present.” She smiled again. “He can be so sweet. You know? Romantic. I don’t know what he’ll do for the dance, because it’s Valentine’s Day.”
“The jacket’s an anniversary present?” Tan asked.
Annaliese said, “Aren’t we too young for anniversaries? I mean, my grandparents have them. My parents would, if they were still married.” She looked around for confirmation of her implied doubts.
“Doug likes to think of me wearing it,” Ronnie explained. “He said. Besides, he likes to celebrate things, like, anniversaries. He likes to make things special.”
“Do you do everything he likes to?” Margalo asked, and then—as the girls squealed, “Mar-ga-lo!”—realized what she might be understood to be asking, although she hadn’t even thought of that until all those squeals started chasing her words around the room like some herd of baby pigs going after their dinner. “I mean—I didn’t mean—”
“Margalo!” Ronnie was protesting at the same time, so their voices overlapped. Ronnie’s cheeks were pink and she was loving this conversation.
So Margalo pretended she had meant what they thought she had. “Does that mean—what does Doug—I mean, for example, was there serious kissing on that first date?”
“Doug’s in high school,” Ronnie explained, and then searched for a way to turn the conversation in another direction. “He’s a junior in high school. Only little kids think—I mean, what do you think Heather and Shawn did?”
“What do you mean?” Margalo asked. “What did they do?” Another round of squealing. “How do you know what they did?”
“If you must ask, Shawn told me about it. We were talking. Because—you know—when you’ve got a boyfriend you can be regular friends with other boys. Because everybody can relax.” They made a semicircle around her, all of them reflected in the mirrors, their faces and the back of Ronnie’s head, the dark fall of her hair. Nobody else came in, enabling them to continue this private conversation.
“Shawn wanted to talk to a girl about it,” Ronnie said. While she thought about what more she wanted to tell them, Ronnie turned to face the mirror. She combed her hair with her fingers. “We’re pretty good friends, me and Shawn,” Ronnie told the girls surrounding her. “I guess I’m lucky the way I get along with boys. Except,” she added, to remind them that she didn’t have an entirely perfect life, “there’s always Louis. Although, I did get him to stop calling Shawn names.”
“That was you?” Derrie asked. “But, I thought, Shawn asked him?”
“Not that Shawn really minded,” Ronnie told them. “But you know what? Doug’s really jealous of Shawn. I mean—unreasonably, you know?” This pleased her. “I wish he’d understand how a girl can have close friends that are boys.”
“Is that why he wants you wearing his jacket? Because he’s jealous?” Margalo asked.
This, however, was a cause-and-effect question: What is the cause of this effect? If Ronnie hadn’t been busy adding, “I don’t know why he picks on Shawn,” and if two groups of eighth-grade girls—a few jockettes, a couple of Barbies—hadn’t entered, Margalo might have been cold-shouldered out of the room.
But Ronnie did want to exclaim over Doug’s suspicions, and flaunt them, and cuddle up with them, and then the two groups did come noisily in, so Margalo escaped the consequences of motivation analysis. Everybody greeted everybody and shifte
d around to share mirror space, while some girls entered the stalls. Ronnie leaned over the sink to inspect her eye shadow and lipstick, to smile at herself, before she turned eagerly around to respond to the new round of eager questions. “Ronnie? Is that—? What does it mean, I mean, that jacket?”
9
YOU’RE NOT SICK YOU’RE JUST IN LURVE
How could you?” That was what Mikey wanted to ask Shawn all day Monday, and again on Tuesday—”How could you do that?”—when she was giving him a Chez ME bag holding chewy ginger cookies. “How could you kiss Heather McGinty that way?” she thought whenever she saw his face, “How could you want to do that?”
She didn’t ask out loud, of course. Their conversations were few and brief: “I made these.” “Thank you.” Few and brief and not exactly brilliant was what their conversations were, with no space for questions like “How could you?”
She did leave messages at the bottoms of the chalkboards in all his classes, four little letters and the plus sign; no hearts, no arrows, just a little letterly reminder, in case he wanted to think about it. ME + SM. She hoped that it wouldn’t be much longer before he did think about it. She hadn’t been thinking about much of anything else for eight days already.
Heather was having another party on the weekend—of course. Shawn was going—How could he? But Mikey wouldn’t have been able to go even if she had been invited. She had to go to her mother’s again, a command performance. “It’s our last time alone,” her mother had said, “and I need you to help me pack.” So while Mikey had to be back in the city doing whatever was so important to her mother, Shawn was going to a party at Heather’s—again.
By Wednesday it was settled who was giving parties on which day, Heather on Friday and Ronnie on Saturday. Everyone—meaning primarily Shawn Macavity—would be there. But not Mikey. Not Margalo, either, which meant at least that Mikey wasn’t the only person left out, but also that Mikey had nobody there who would report back to her on Sunday about what had happened at the parties. There were only ten days until the dance, and everybody knew it. If you were going to go with a date, you were running out of time to ask, or be asked.