“Did you tell Mikey? Does she know? I only made the calls for a couple of months, no more than three. She said she wasn’t afraid I was a stalker. I thought she liked our conversations.”
Margalo stopped in her tracks. The hallways were almost empty so there was no one around to overhear them. “You’re Mikey’s secret admirer?”
Hadrian’s cheeks were pink. “You said it made sense.”
Now that she knew it, it did make sense, but, “Why did you do it?”
“To talk to her. Mikey’s not easy to talk to, in case you haven’t noticed. Wait,” he said. “Does that mean you hadn’t figured it out? Then what did you mean? Why did you say that?”
“I’m trying to get someone to confess,” Margalo explained.
Hadrian’s cheeks flushed even darker and he blinked his eyes. Margalo thought she might know what he was thinking and, in case she was right, hastened to reassure him, “I keep not finding out what I need to know,” she told him. “I was just practicing with another way to say it. All I want to know is who robbed me.”
“You already know I didn’t. We proved it.”
“I was trying to figure out where I’m going wrong when I ask.”
“You should have told me.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t work,” she said, and started walking along, thinking.
They walked a few steps in silence. Then Hadrian said, “I guess I understand. Are you going to tell Mikey?” and he answered his own question, “Of course.”
Margalo shrugged, not paying much attention. She had other, more important, things on her mind.
Over the weekend Margalo decided she was not going to be discouraged, not yet anyway. She could be discouraged later, when she had run out of options. But as soon as she gave up on the idea of accusing people herself, she came up with the idea of giving people a chance to accuse one another.
When school reopened after vacation, Margalo hoped it was a good time for a fresh start. She hadn’t had a chance to tell Mikey her new detecting idea yet, or about Hadrian, and she was looking forward to lobbing those two grenades before homeroom on Monday morning. But before she could do that, Tanisha Harris rushed up, announcing, “All right. I’ve been waiting and waiting. You said you’d think about it.”
Margalo remembered: William. She had forgotten. Other things had taken over her attention. But she had her pride, and she wanted to seem as if she had spent the time considering Tan’s situation, looking at the problem from all sides, thinking about all the possible contingencies. She didn’t want to be found out forgetting. She started out with a safe conclusion. “It doesn’t look too hopeful to me.”
“What doesn’t?” asked Mikey, and for once Margalo was grateful for the way Mikey just butted into conversations. “Look hopeful.”
“I mean with Oslo and all,” Margalo said, starting to remember details.
“William,” Mikey announced. “You already know what I think.”
“Not without some idea of what’s going on in his head,” Margalo concluded.
Tan offered, “He calls me his killer little sister.”
“Killer’s okay,” Mikey decided, “but little’s trouble.”
“As far as I can see,” Margalo said, her mind now focused and informed, “there isn’t much you can do. You could tell him how you feel—”
“No,” Tan said. “That would be . . . No.”
“In person or in a letter. To see how he reacted.”
“He’d be polite. He’d be kind. William’s really nice, he wouldn’t laugh at me or anything. But . . . I couldn’t do that. I wouldn’t know what to say, it would be . . .” She was shaking her head. “There are too many girls after him already.”
“Or you can wait, wait and hope that—someday—”
“How long? How long do you think?”
“What is wrong with everyone?” Mikey demanded.
“Out of high school,” Margalo advised, “and what about college? Can you wait that long?”
“The question is, will William wait that long,” Tanisha said. “Is that all you can think of that I can do?”
“That and the usual—you know, find out what his interests are and learn as much as you can about them, keep yourself looking good, be around whenever he is, wherever, observe the girls he likes, to figure out what he likes in a girl, let him know you’re sexy without putting any moves on him.”
“How do you know all this?” Mikey demanded, but before Margalo or Tan could respond, she changed her mind. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to hear about it. No wonder the divorce rate is so high, that’s all I have to say.”
“Okay,” Tan said, talking to Margalo, ignoring Mikey. “I hear you. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Or maybe I should tell him?”
“I wouldn’t,” Margalo said.
“I would,” Mikey said.
Tan grinned then. “That answers that question,” she said, and walked away.
Then there was no time to tell Mikey anything because the homeroom bell rang and separated them.
There was also no time during lunch because Ms. Hendriks asked Margalo to meet with her to go over, for almost the last time, the list of props. Margalo could only explain to Mikey, “It’s the play. The play’s the week after next, there are only three rehearsal weeks left,” before she rushed away. So she never got to hear what Mikey thought of her new idea.
This was something of a relief, but also a little worrying, since Mikey could be counted on to plunk her finger right down on whatever was weak or false in an idea. That was one of Mikey’s most irritating habits, sticking her fingers in like that.
By rehearsal, after school, when they had all gathered together in the auditorium, knapsacks and jackets in a long jumble at the foot of the stage, Margalo had given a name to this approach: Operation Stirring Things Up. Stirring things up would be easy because the first week of rehearsals in the auditorium had everybody jumpy. Even Ms. Hendriks upped her anxiety level when they were in the actual place where they were actually going to perform. All week Margalo carried out operations.
To do this, she moved around among the actors who, when they weren’t onstage, clustered into groups in the first few central rows of the auditorium—except, of course, for Richard and Sally, who either withdrew together to a dark rear side aisle or were in the front row, watching one or the other performing his or her scenes. The actors got used to having Margalo come up to them, or slip into a seat behind them, and join in their conversation or ask their opinion about a line.
Margalo joined a group and stirred things up. How she stirred, with what spoon, in what direction, depended on the group. With Sue Kind and her boyfriend, Leland Potts, who liked to hang out with another of Drama’s steady couples, Tracey Walker and Bill Terramino, she talked about the props they would need for their scenes and where those props would be set out, adding, “That’s if nobody walks off with the baseball stuff. John Baker was saying how short the baseball team is on equipment and how Leland was griping about that last year. You don’t think there’s any danger someone will take our props, do you, Leland?” she asked as Sue jumped to his defense, “Leland wasn’t griping. It’s just that if you have old, cracked bats, it’s hard to learn how to hit well.” To which Tracey responded, “Bill never talked about bad bats. Did you, Bill?” At which Bill grunted and glared at Tracey, who glared right back at him. “What? What is it? I can’t even talk about the baseball team?”
To John Baker and John Lawrence, sitting with Ann Witherspoon, who was, as usual, working on a homework assignment and not wasting time, she raised the question of Missy Selig’s hinting that maybe John Lawrence wasn’t as trustworthy as he might be, the kind of person who asked somebody out but never called her up to confirm, and never showed up, either, which meant that when Margalo got to Missy and Sally and Gilda, who were talking about Chet Parker’s new love interest, another ninth grader this time, who had stolen him away from Candy DeAngelo after he’d promised Candy she was his one and only, sh
e could report that, “John Lawrence was wondering if Missy was the kind of person who might steal. Or I thought that’s what he was hinting. That’s what it sounded to me like he was hinting at, and you know, sometimes a guilty person will point the finger at someone else. So do you think John Lawrence could have done it?”
All during that school week Margalo stirred things up and waited to see what would float to the surface, suspecting everybody she talked to and every reaction she noticed. She stirred and prodded and poked. She watched and wondered and waited. But she didn’t find out anything. At the end of all this detective work she’d found out that Ronnie Caselli was Chet Parker’s new girlfriend and that some business had donated a whole new set of practice bats to the baseball team, but she had no more idea of who had taken her money than she had had at the first moment she realized it was gone.
And, she realized as the rehearsal drew to a close the last Friday in February, she was out of ideas, too.
She told Mikey about this on the bus home. It took a couple of tries to get Mikey’s attention. At first Mikey was interested in reminding Margalo that this was the end of week twenty-one of the school year, which meant there were only fifteen weeks to go. Then she needed to remind Margalo that in March—which was the month it would be when they got to school the next Monday—tennis started up again. “Mid-March. The fifteenth,” Mikey said. “Nobody but me has been playing all winter, so I’ll be able to knock off the last of the people on the tennis ladder. And that means I’ll play varsity,” she announced, in case Margalo couldn’t follow this logic.
“That’s good,” Margalo said, not paying attention either.
“You don’t sound impressed. You should be impressed.”
Margalo turned to look at Mikey. “I’m never going to be able to figure out who took my money,” she explained.
“You always think up something else,” Mikey told her.
Margalo shook her head and looked out the window again. The sky was low and gray, but the temperature wasn’t cold enough for snow, so it would be rain. On cold, rainy Friday nights in February a lot of people wanted to eat out, so there would be a massive pile of dishes to wash and—worse—a massive pile of pots to scour clean. “I just have to accept that it’s happened,” she said, looking out the window. “Like bad weather. Nobody can help me and I can’t figure out how to detect it. I’m not much of a detective.”
“I guess not. But neither am I.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Margalo demanded even though—for some reason—it did.
– 11 –
Our Town’s in Trouble
Not that Margalo cared, but rehearsals went really badly that week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—every day they had a bad rehearsal. People arrived late, spoke their lines carelessly, wandered around the stage as if they’d never blocked out any of the scenes, and, no matter what Ms. Hendriks said, didn’t get themselves focused, wouldn’t stop talking in the auditorium seats while other scenes were rehearsed, and didn’t care.
Hadrian was the exception, of course, and even Margalo found herself thinking it was sort of a pain the way Hadrian kept being so much better than the rest of them. By Friday every one of them could think only of how glad they were that the next two days were a weekend, when there wouldn’t be rehearsals.
A number of the actors were hoping to come down with some communicable disease that would keep them home from performances. “Hadrian knows everybody’s lines, he can be a one-man show.” Margalo didn’t feel quite that strongly, but she was certainly looking forward to the weekend as she sat taking notes on a long yellow legal pad while the teacher, having tried to rehearse the final scenes of Our Town, was offering useful advice to her uncooperative actors. Margalo’s notes varied from “Alice, a more relaxed and gossipy tone” to “Indirect lighting too dim” and included probably insoluble difficulties like “Set for Act III static.”
Ms. Hendriks sat on the edge of the stage, with Margalo at her side; the cast sat in the first rows of seats, facing them. At that point Ms. Hendriks was talking to individual actors. “Carl,” she said, “you have to remember that you’re a man who killed himself. Who hung himself. Imagine that. Imagine actually tying the rope—”
“Let’s not.”
“Then throwing the rope over a tree limb, climbing up on a chair to put your head—”
“Ick.”
“I get it, okay? I get it.”
“I saw this movie—”
“So that,” Ms. Hendriks continued, “when you say that human life is ‘ignorance and blindness,’ you really mean it. You mean exactly and precisely that. You have to really mean it, because if you’re wrong—Think about it, Carl, what if it turns out you’ve killed yourself over something you got wrong?”
“I wouldn’t want to have to figure that out,” Carl said. “I’d be afraid to even think it. Because then I would have—Yeah, I see what you mean, Ms. Hendriks. I guess this isn’t such a dorky play after all,” he remarked, speaking to no one in particular and everyone in general.
That caused an uncomfortable silence to settle down over them all like a collapsed parachute, crowding out everything except what nobody wanted to say out loud. People shifted their legs, looked at their watches, turned to look at the clock on the wall, didn’t look at the teacher.
After a moment’s thought Ms. Hendriks stood up and waved her hand, gesturing to Margalo to go sit among the students.
Margalo moved to the side and to the rear; she sat alone. She was just as glad not to have to look at the mostly empty auditorium. Like everybody else involved with this production, she was aware that a week from that day—a week!—an audience would occupy all those seats, an audience where only some of the people were their parents and other relatives, because the rest would be people from school, people they had to see every day in the hallways and the cafeteria and the classrooms. So if they blew it with this play—or if someone thought they were blowing it, or if someone decided the play was weird or dumb—when you already felt like maybe a jerk for daring to try to act . . .
A stage meant real risks of real embarrassment. Margalo knew that for Our Town to work, they all had to have confidence in the play, and they also had to trust the teacher, but especially they had to trust one another, and she personally didn’t trust—except Hadrian—anybody. So Margalo wasn’t surprised that Ms. Hendriks took advantage of this opening to try to improve things by asking Carl, “Can you clarify for me what you mean by dorky?”
Carl, being a senior and about to leave the school forever, was willing to speak straightforwardly, if he had to. “What I mean is that it’s . . . so old-fashioned, I mean—and so serious. It’s like it’s trying too hard. It’s too obvious, you know? Everything in it is so obvious.”
When one person had spoken, others were willing to join in.
“The characters are stereotypes.”
“People aren’t that way, really. Do you personally know anyone who’s so—I dunno, so uninformed and wants to be so nice to everybody as Emily? I mean—I dunno, she’s just too good. Nobody’s that innocent and good, not anymore at least, if they ever were.”
“They never were.”
“The worst thing they do in this play is gossip. What’s so bad about gossip?”
“And the costumes? Seriously dorky.”
Ms. Hendriks took all of this in, then, “It won the Pulitzer Prize,” she reminded them.
“Yeah, we know, but . . . That doesn’t make it good for now.”
“Maybe you need to be better actors than we are to make a play like this look good.”
“And have better lighting, and our acoustics aren’t—”
“I mean, what does this play have to do with me? It’s nothing to do with my life.”
“And it acts like there’s no sex in the world.”
“They get married and she dies having a baby, so there has to have been sex. Dunnh.”
“You know what I mean.” r />
They did. He meant: Everybody who has anything to do with this play could look like a total loser.
“People aren’t like that, Ms. Hendriks,” somebody concluded. They liked the teacher, and they felt bad for her because her boyfriend had broken the engagement, so they explained it tactfully, so as not to upset her with the news.
“Real people are greedy, and afraid. It’s fear and greed that are people’s main motivations, everybody knows that, everybody says, I think even Freud. They go together, and it’s not just about money.”
Ms. Hendriks made a connection. “This has to do with the theft of Margalo’s money, doesn’t it? But I’m sure Margalo has forgotten all about her money by now. Haven’t you?” she asked Margalo.
Margalo knew what the right answer to that question was. She was scratching crisscrossing lines on her yellow pad and thinking—not about the money but about how she was all alone here, how she was the only person on her side.
It wasn’t a feeling she liked.
But she had also been thinking that this was what usually happened to Mikey. Right or wrong, Mikey tended to be the only person on her side. Even when other people agreed with her, Mikey stood alone. Somehow. Margalo was thinking about that, wondering if it was maybe because Mikey was so ready to fight for things.
“Margalo?” Ms. Hendriks asked again. “You have forgotten all about that money, haven’t you?”
The trouble was, Margalo did think it was important, being robbed, robbers getting away with it. Besides, she knew this was only school. If nothing else, school was a good testing ground for finding out who you were and who you wanted to be. It was a place where the prizes weren’t very big, but neither were the penalties. If you couldn’t go after what you really wanted in school, you probably never would. So, “No,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten.”
There came the windy sounds of many exasperated sighs and a few whispers. “What is wrong with her?” “Doesn’t she care about us?” “Doesn’t she care about the play?”