“And took the money out of your wallet,” Mikey agreed.
“And then put the wallet and everything back in so I wouldn’t realize,” Margalo said. She felt bad in so many different ways—bad and angry, bad and depressed, bad and disillusioned—that she felt like she never wanted to see anybody in Drama again. Ever.
They thought about it all for a minute, walking side by side. Then, “What are we going to do?” Mikey asked.
“We can’t tell Aurora,” Margalo answered. “This kind of stuff really gets her down when she hears about it. Aurora has a hard enough time with the news, she doesn’t need to hear about some ratfink high school student stealing my money. Stealing is just the way things are,” Margalo said. “Like cheating on tests, or like those opponents you thought were cheating in tennis last fall.”
“They definitely were,” and Mikey smiled, not a nice smile. “For all the good it did them.”
“Everybody does it, I guess.”
“Not me, I don’t,” Mikey reminded her. “Or you.”
“No,” Margalo agreed. “We just get stolen from and cheated on.”
“Maybe. Okay, obviously. But I don’t like it and I’m not going along with it.”
“Hunh,” Margalo said. What else could you say to a statement like that? A statement contrary to fact, contrary to reality. She agreed with the spirit of it, and she wished Mikey luck, and she thought that if anybody could say that and mean it and do it, that somebody was Mikey Elsinger, but still, really—“Hunh,” she said again. She didn’t have the energy or the interest to say more.
“And neither are you,” Mikey decided.
– 9 –
What’s a Girl to Do?
Give up, what else? That was Margalo’s conclusion.
Mikey, being Mikey, disagreed. “They can’t get away with this,” she said on the phone that night, and all weekend, too, more and more angrily, and she never noticed Margalo’s response, which grew more and more discouraged with each repetition, “But they did, Mikey. Somebody did.”
Monday morning, first thing, Mikey demanded, “What’s first?”
Margalo shook her head, hanging her long green wool coat on the hook in her locker, tucking its hem under neatly. “Nothing,” she said, still facing the inside of her locker. “What is there to do?”
“You’re the one with all the ideas,” Mikey told her.
Margalo turned around and tucked her hair behind her ears, slowly. She squared her shoulders, ready to head on into the day. She told Mikey, “It’s February.”
Mikey wouldn’t get that, but Margalo didn’t need to be understood, not by anyone. She knew what she meant, and what she meant was that February was the long low point of the year, and the only good thing about it was that it was shorter than any other month.
Short as it was, on the other hand, February seemed to last forever, an endless, gray, cold stretch of time, like a snowfield you’re going to have to cross but there’s no destination in sight and you know that you might not make it across alive, or like an ocean and all you can do is swim, hoping that you’re heading towards March, but you could be swimming in circles. It was February inside Margalo, as well as outside in the year. She felt alone from everybody.
“Isn’t a whole weekend long enough to spend feeling sorry for yourself?” Mikey demanded.
Luckily, they had to go off to homeroom, so Margalo could escape Mikey’s nagging, because how she felt—and she had been noticing this, thinking about it, getting the right words for it—was she felt stupid, and she felt ashamed.
At that, Margalo turned and ran to catch up with Mikey, her knapsack thumping against her hip. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
“Just don’t. Promise?”
“Why do I have to promise?”
“Just promise,” Margalo asked her.
“Okay, okay, don’t get hysterical.”
Margalo turned back, moving among the students heading for their homerooms on this side of the central library. Hers was on the far side, so she was going against traffic, which suited her just fine.
Usually Margalo felt pleasantly superior to the other people in school, and in the world, too. Except for Mikey, of course, and in certain specific ways people like Hadrian and Tan, Ronnie Caselli even. Usually Margalo’s judgment of other people was that they meant well, although they were pretty hapless and not as smart as they thought they were. Usually she felt like people couldn’t hurt her, even if they wanted to.
Now, however . . . This being robbed had really gotten to her. And why should the person who got robbed feel like she must have done something wrong? And who would have done this, anyway? Everybody knew how she was working to save for college, so whoever took her money knew exactly what they were taking—money she had worked for, money she needed. They had to know that, and they just took it.
If people were going to just take things from her, and be able to get away with it, and take things from one another, too, and not just thing-things, either, but abstract things too, like ideas or self-confidence or even safety . . . . Margalo wanted to go home. She wanted to be at the kitchen table, where Aurora would be doing some GED homework, reading and taking notes, or studying for a test, or maybe writing a paper. She could sit with her mother and read. Margalo had never been homesick at school before.
Somebody tapped her on the shoulder from behind, hard. She clutched her knapsack to her chest, not knowing who it might be or what they wanted. Or maybe it wouldn’t be anybody, just somebody playing tricks on her. And if they were, what could she do about it?
“Margalo!” It was Mikey’s voice. Mikey was breathing a little fast from her run down the hallway to catch Margalo and get back before the bell rang. “I was calling you!” She glared at Margalo. “What’s wrong with you?”
Mikey’s anger and that question dumped down over Margalo like a bucket of cold water. Because that was exactly the question, What was wrong with Margalo? And the answer was: Nothing. What was wrong was wrong with them, with whoever had gone into her knapsack and robbed her. It was pretty stupid, to let somebody else make her doubt her ability to take care of herself. That was what was stupid, not being robbed. Being robbed was only what could happen.
All at once Margalo felt better. She felt better, and she was getting angry, too. She wasn’t going to let them get away with doing this to her.
“What!” she asked Mikey angrily. “What is it?”
“I wanted to say that I promise and I’ll keep my word, but it really stinks, and maybe because you’re so smart about people it makes sense to you, but I don’t even want it to make sense to me. It’s your money and they can’t just take it.”
“Yeah but they did,” Margalo said again. Only this time she felt a grim, determined smile move onto her face. “Give me some time to think, Mikey.”
“You have to strike while the trail is hot.”
“The trail’s already cold. Friday it was hot. Give me a little time to figure this out.”
Mikey smiled. That’s what I wanted to hear. “He’ll be sorry, whoever it was.”
“Or she,” Margalo corrected, but Mikey was already jogging away down the corridor, dodging approaching students like a football quarterback heading for the end zone, her heavy braid bouncing up and down on her back.
Margalo went on into her homeroom where, when she saw Derrie, she remembered and asked, “Did you ever find your sweater?”
“Are you kidding? And I had to pretend when I wrote my grandmother that I still had it? And my mother had to replace it? So I guess it isn’t entirely bad, since I still ended up with the same sweater. But I’m not going to be wearing it to school again.”
At lunch that day Mikey and Margalo ignored the rest of the people at the table, who, it could be said, didn’t notice, except perhaps for Tim, and perhaps also for Hadrian. Mikey had made herself a wrap for lunch, with slices of both dark- an light-meat roasted chicken, a sun-dried tomato spread, paper-thin slices of on
ion and a generous serving of dark green arugula leaves. Margalo looked at Mikey’s sandwich and then at her own, peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly on supermarket whole wheat again. She looked back at Mikey’s sandwich. “It would make me feel better if you traded half your sandwich,” she offered.
Mikey smiled, Gotcha!
“Never mind.” Margalo felt herself sinking back toward the gray February mood in which she had spent the weekend.
But Mikey reached into her brown lunch bag to pull out a second wrap, sealed in plastic, and smiled again. Gotcha! Again! “Now you have to feel better.”
“I already do,” Margalo admitted. “I’ve decided to talk to Ms. Hendriks.”
“Why her and not Aurora? Or you could ask my dad.”
They spoke quietly, angled towards each other, ignoring Hadrian’s curious glances and not answering Tim when he tried to distract Margalo by asking, “Am I the only person who finds February just . . . dismal?”
Margalo kept her focus. “No parents. You know how crazy Aurora got when someone kept emptying Stevie’s lunch box in kindergarten.”
“Well,” Mikey said. “I don’t blame her. I mean, when the only way you can keep your five-year-old’s lunch from being stolen by some other five-year-old is to lock it in the teacher’s desk, things are pretty bad.”
“Well,” Margalo said, “things can get pretty bad.”
“Well,” Mikey said, “maybe. But I don’t intend to be helpless. Do you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Margalo said. And waited.
It took Mikey—whose sense of humor wasn’t a lively one—a few seconds to process the joke, and then all she did was smile. I guess that’s funny. Then, “Do you have any idea who did it?” she asked.
“No,” Margalo admitted.
“Suspicions?”
“I suspect everybody,” Margalo said. She thought. “And it really could be any one of them, although probably not Ms. Hendriks. Or Hadrian, either.”
At the sound of his name, even spoken in a low voice, Hadrian’s head turned to them. They continued to ignore him.
“How many does that leave?”
Margalo counted in her head. “Twelve? Twenty? I’d have to go over who was reading.” She thought some more and added, “Most of the other people in Drama are upperclassmen and I don’t know any upperclassmen.”
“Yeah, but people aren’t that hard to figure out. They just want what they want and try to get it. Like taking your money. Which looks complicated to you trying to figure it out but it isn’t a bit complicated to the person who took it, I bet. I mean, it’s not as if you make a big secret out of going to the bank.”
“Why should I have to? No, I’m serious. There are too many bad things that you can imagine happening if you start to think like that.”
“You read too many books.”
“I plan to spend my life living it, not worrying about it. Carpe diem,” Margalo added.
“Latin.”
Margalo didn’t say anything.
Mikey didn’t say anything.
Margalo was starting to feel positively cheered up. Irritating Mikey often had that effect on her. “It isn’t as if this is the first time somebody’s had something stolen. The faculty must have ways to deal with it,” she decided.
So after the bell had ended Drama, Margalo approached Ms. Hendriks. The teacher was standing behind her desk, studying the legal pad on which she had taken her day’s notes. She was dressed in her usual loose tunic top and loose trousers. “Yes?” Then, coming out of her distraction, she smiled. “Margalo, good, I meant to ask you. I hope you’re willing to be the stage manager for this production? The actual stage manager, I mean, not Hadrian’s part. Or would you rather be assistant director?”
Margalo had no trouble with that decision. “Assistant director. But—”
“Good. I meant to ask you on Friday but it slipped my mind. I hope you didn’t think I didn’t plan to use you.”
“No, but—”
“Because you seem comfortable carrying authority. That’s what makes you so effective backstage, you know.”
Margalo didn’t know, and she was interested to hear it, but “Ms. Hendriks,” she insisted, “I want to ask you—”
Worry flashed across Ms. Hendriks’s pretty face, like the movement of a bird seen out of the corner of your eye, gone almost before you noticed it and wondered, Was there something? before you named it, Only a bird, by which time it was long gone. She asked quickly, “Is something wrong? Not Hadrian, is it?”
“About last Friday,” Margalo said. “Somebody stole money from my wallet last Friday. At rehearsal.”
Reassured about Hadrian, Ms. Hendriks was immediately sympathetic. “Oh, dear. Oh, Margalo. I am sorry.” Then she reminded Margalo, “You shouldn’t leave your wallet where people can see it.”
“I didn’t. It was in my knapsack. At the bottom.”
“You shouldn’t leave your knapsack out.”
“I left it in the pile here.”
“But why did you bring money to school with you?”
“To take to the bank on the way home. Because most banking hours I’m in school,” Margalo explained.
“Of course. That wasn’t very bright of me. I’m very sorry about this, Margalo, I really am, but what do you expect me to do?”
“I thought—You could tell me how to get my money back.”
“So you know who took it.”
“No.”
“Are you absolutely sure that you had the money in your wallet? Absolutely, positively sure of it? Because . . . You know, Margalo, we all make mistakes. It would be too bad to get people all upset over something that you weren’t absolutely positive happened.”
“I’m positive,” Margalo said.
“Because,” Ms. Hendriks went on, as if Margalo hadn’t spoken, “a dramatic production is like . . . like a very delicate ecosystem. We don’t want to disturb it. Besides, how can you know it happened here?”
“I know,” Margalo said.
Ms. Hendriks studied her for a long minute. “I’m truly sorry this happened, Margalo. I wish I could help, I really do, but I don’t see how. Unless I could give you the money myself, which—believe me—I can’t afford.”
Margalo knew a useless conversation when she was having it. And she knew how to get out of it. “I was just wondering.”
Ms. Hendriks decided, “It could just as easily have happened at any time, all day long, anywhere. A school day is so busy, you students have so many different things going on.”
“I have to catch the Activities bus,” Margalo said. She knew where her knapsack had been all day Friday—right beside her, right at her feet, except during rehearsal. When Margalo was at the classroom door, the teacher asked from behind her, “You aren’t going to talk about this, are you? Because I’d rather you didn’t. You have every reason to be upset, but will you give me a chance to think about it before you do anything? Please?”
“All right,” Margalo agreed. But why did Ms. Hendriks look so relieved to hear that?
It couldn’t be that a teacher was stealing from students, could it? If they wanted to rob someone, you’d think teachers would be smart enough to pick richer students than Margalo.
Margalo waited through the whole first week of February to find out what Ms. Hendriks would recommend, or say, or do, but the teacher never mentioned the subject, not to Margalo privately nor to the Drama group as a whole. It was as if she had forgotten, and maybe she had; but she didn’t seem to be the kind of teacher who forgot things. And Margalo didn’t forget.
Neither did Mikey, who reminded Margalo at least twice a day, “I’m keeping my promise and I’m getting tired of it.”
In short, all week nothing happened, nothing pertaining to Margalo’s problem, that is. Other things happened, of course. The JV basketball team played a game to a tie, causing a day’s jubilation among ninth graders. Another event was Cassie arriving at the lunch table carrying a piece of art to show them before
she handed it in to Peter Paul. “He thinks I’ve lost my touch,” she reported. “So look at this, it’s my Valentine’s Day assignment.”
Everybody recognized immediately that she’d painted a portrait of Rhonda Ransom in the old Americana style of Norman Rockwell. In the portrait Rhonda stood still in a crowded school hallway, with people walking around her. Rhonda was weeping, but nobody was paying any attention to that. It wasn’t that people were ignoring her, they just weren’t interested. “The assignment was ‘Love,’ ” Cassie told them. She pointed at one of the figures walking away. “That’s Chet.”
“How am I supposed to know that?” Mikey demanded.
“You aren’t,” Cassie said.
“Then why bother putting him in?” Mikey demanded.
“The artist paints for himself, not for his audience,” said Cassie.
“Does that mean you’re an artist?” Mikey asked. “Because if you are, why would you paint a picture of Rhonda Ransom crying?”
Cassie just groaned.
“But who cares about Norman Rockwell anymore?” Jace asked. He showed them what he had painted—a chunk of raw meat with tubes coming out from its top and bottom, a vaguely triangular-shaped chunk of meat set on a plate. The plate looked like it was tilting, and the meat looked like it was about to start sliding off. But not yet. “I call it Love—1,” he told them.
“That’s a tennis score,” Mikey announced.
Cassie groaned again.
“Are you feeling sick?” Mikey asked, her lips pulled up in a Don’t mess with me smile.
“Getting there,” Cassie said. “And that picture isn’t helping,” she told Jace.
The only other interesting event of that first week in February was another Louis Caselli academic crisis. In an effort to force Louis to do homework, Miss Marshall, his English teacher, had announced that Louis was not welcome back into the class until he had done the reading. Then, when Louis had done the reading, he would have to answer questions about the story, questions asked by his classmates. Anybody who wanted to could ask a question. The questions could be as difficult and tricky as anyone wanted to make them. Louis would have to answer at least 60 percent to be allowed to return.