But Margalo wasn’t the last one down when she entered, her hair still a little wet and definitely stringy from a shower. Aurora and Steven were the last to come to the table, and they didn’t come in talking the way they usually did. Aurora had a book in her hand, her finger marking her place, and Steven had his chin stuck out. When they entered, everybody at the table got quiet. The silent parents took seats side by side.
Mikey set a second platter of pancakes on the table and exchanged a look with Margalo. As far back as Mikey could remember, Aurora had never fought with anyone, never sulked at anyone, and, though she sometimes raised her voice, never yelled. And as far as she’d seen, Steven had never taken advantage of that. In fact, he always looked at Aurora as if she was more fun than anybody else—except maybe the children. As if he’d rather look at her than anybody, even some movie star. Mikey didn’t think she could stand it if Margalo’s parents started having what they called marital difficulties. She counted on Aurora and Steven.
“I have a big test on Monday,” Aurora said, to nobody in particular.
Mikey refilled the jug with warm syrup and put it beside Aurora. She moved the butter plate from where it had come to a halt between Esther and Georgie, setting it down between Aurora and Steven.
“History,” Aurora added. This was not good news.
“Tests are hard,” Esther announced to no one in particular, and Stevie added, “I hate spelling tests.” Margalo offered, “Can I help you study?” but Steven stepped in quickly, “I want to do that.” Lily took advantage of the lack of attention to start feeding herself chunks of sticky, syrupy, buttery pancake with her fingers. Then things got back to normal, with everybody talking about nobody needing forks and spoons in olden days, and nobody thanking Mikey for cooking breakfast. Mikey didn’t care about that. She cared about going off with Margalo while other people washed dishes, to get Margalo thinking again so Mikey could get to work on this theft problem. “Let’s go for a walk,” Mikey suggested.
Once they had left the house and were out on the sidewalk, they wasted no time deciding where to go—it was always the same place, the playground of their old elementary school, a mile and a half away—and they wasted no time talking about schoolwork, or gossiping. They walked along, side by side, shoulder to shoulder, and got started.
First they checked in. “My father is proposing to her,” Mikey reported. “She’ll say yes, I’m pretty sure.”
“Good. But what if they have another baby?”
Mikey tried to imagine that. She couldn’t. She tried to think of a worst-case scenario—triplets? All-boy triplets? All-girl triplets?—and she realized, “There probably wouldn’t more than one pregnancy before I’ll have graduated from high school, so it won’t make much difference to me. But what about Steven and Aurora? Is something wrong? Because they were weird this morning.”
“Steven is worried that if Aurora gets her GED she’ll go on and take college courses,” Margalo reported. “At least, I think that’s what’s wrong, because he only has a high school diploma. But if Aurora wants to work with children, she’ll have to have at least some college training. I think he’s afraid she’ll get too educated for him. And then she won’t . . . admire him anymore.”
“Do you think that will happen?”
“I don’t know what I think exactly, but I hope she gets the high school diploma. And she’d be really good working with children, so I guess I’m hoping for college, too. Mostly,” Margalo admitted, “I hope Steven is the kind of man who can still love someone who has more education than he does. Howard and Esther’s father had a master’s degree, so Aurora knows what she’s missing. She knew it when she married Steven. Aurora’s pretty smart,” Margalo said, and stared right at Mikey.
“I know that,” Mikey said. “She always liked me, didn’t she?”
“You aren’t going to start trying to make jokes, are you?”
“Probably not,” Mikey said.
“Although it was funny,” Margalo admitted.
“Do you think I should start?” Mikey asked.
“Is that another one?” Margalo asked back.
They were walking fast.
Mikey had waited as long as she could. “What about Drama? What about being robbed? What are you going to do now?”
They had walked past the houses and were now walking around the outside of the high fence that protected the school playground. That was their walk, down to the elementary school and back again. It was already half over.
Margalo shook her head. “The only thing that I didn’t try was one of those reconstructions, reenactments, you know? But by now—”
“I can help,” Mikey said. “We’ll gather everybody together in the Drama room and have them all do and say the exact things they did at the time. Now what’s so funny?”
“You think the thief will reenact robbing me?” Margalo asked.
Well, that was pretty funny. But, “Maybe,” Mikey said. “It would make things a lot easier if they did. Or forgot and gave themselves away. Richard and Sally aren’t all that smart, are they?”
“Forget Richard and Sally. Forget the whole thing, in fact. That’s what I’m going to have to do and it won’t help me if you keep on . . . not forgetting it.”
“But that’s not right.”
“Nothing about the whole thing is right.” Margalo upped her walking pace, in a hurry to have this conversation over with.
And that also wasn’t right. It wasn’t like Margalo and it was all wrong. Maybe Mikey would keep quiet for now, to Margalo, but she wasn’t going to keep quiet in her head. But now she changed the subject. “I have a plan. For our lives, I mean. I think we should go into business together. After school. After college, I mean, and I may go for an MBA, although maybe not right away. I mean,” she clarified it, in case Margalo missed her point, “I plan for us to stick together even after high school.”
Margalo had an idea of what was worrying Mikey. It had to do with all the things that made friendships fade away, like boyfriends and differing activities in school, like differences in families and different interests, and wishing the other person had made different choices from the choices she had made, and didn’t play tennis or didn’t have a job. It worried her, too. “That would be all right by me,” she said, trying to imagine being an adult in business with a grown-up Mikey, remembering having been a kid in business with her. “I might want to have an MBA too, though. Because I’d want to be an equal partner, not with you as my boss.”
They stopped walking, turned to face each other.
“Deal,” Mikey said, and held out her hand.
“Deal,” Margalo said, and they shook on it, like doubles partners at the end of a good match, or like two pirates about to set off together after riches on the high seas.
“So I’ll be at rehearsal on Monday,” Mikey announced. She had no plan, but any plan she decided on was going to require her to hang out with the Drama group, and rehearsal was where she was going to find them all, these days.
“Why?” Margalo asked.
Mikey had to tell the truth because she couldn’t think fast enough to think up a good-enough lie. “I don’t know.” Then she thought to say, “Solidarity.”
On Monday, Mikey had a little trouble tracking down Drama Club. It was almost as if someone didn’t want her to find it. The Drama classroom was empty and dark, its door locked. Mikey had to go to the office and ask the secretary to hear that rehearsals had moved to the auditorium. “But it’s rather late for someone to be in the building. Do you have a hall pass? Are you going home with someone in the play? Do you have a note from your mother? Are you one of the lighting crew?” the secretary asked, the questions coming too fast for Mikey to even start thinking of how she wanted to answer them. “Could you tell Ms. Hendriks to please be more organized about hall passes?” the secretary asked, and Mikey got in a quick “Sure.”
When she entered the auditorium, Hadrian was standing alone on the wide stage. Students were scat
tered around in the front rows—Richard and Sally off to the far side of the third row, with their heads close together, Mikey noticed, grateful that it was their heads and not their lips. Margalo and the teacher were sitting alone together at the center of the first row. They were both looking up at Hadrian.
Onstage Hadrian looked older and taller; he sounded older and taller too. He was wearing his usual khakis, belted up high, and his usual shirt, but for some reason he had a tie loosened around his throat. Every now and then, as he went through his lines, he fiddled with the tie, almost as if he was a man getting dressed up to go to work, or dressing down after his day’s labors.
“Try taking a couple of steps towards rear center stage on that line,” Ms. Hendriks instructed Hadrian. He nodded, then repeated his lines—which Mikey recognized as coming from the very start of the play. “ ‘Up here,’ ” said Hadrian as he moved towards center stage, indicating with a large gesture of his arm some invisible line across the stage, “ ‘is Main Street.’ ”
“That’s good,” Ms. Hendriks said. “That’s just what I meant. Keep moving, now.”
“ ‘Way back there,’ ”—another gesture towards something offstage—“ ‘is the railway station; tracks,’ ”—he turned, gesturing—“ ‘go that way.’ ”
The way Hadrian was pointing, and acting as if he could see something where he was looking, Mikey could almost actually see what he was talking about, in a distance that stretched beyond the walls of the auditorium. For a minute she believed in this town Hadrian was talking about, even though she had held the book in her hand and read the words of the play in it and knew it was imaginary. Margalo was right about Hadrian. He could act.
Sometimes it was pretty tiresome how right Margalo always was.
Still not knowing what she planned to do, Mikey went on down the dimly lit aisle and slipped into a row, sidling along until she was behind a group of boys and girls. They turned their heads to see who it was, then turned back to face front, not interested. Some of them had schoolbooks open on their laps, a couple were writing in notebooks, a couple studied their copies of the play. When they spoke, they kept their voices low.
Mikey decided to play this like a tennis match, waiting to see what the opponent would send across the net to her. Once she knew that, she would know how she wanted to respond. She leaned forward in her seat and eavesdropped. They were talking about a couple of new releases, their senior research papers, and how Chet Parker was still dating Ronnie Caselli—“That ninth grader, the beautiful one, it’s been almost a month.” This topic led them to plans for a restaurant dinner before the prom. (The prom? The prom wasn’t until May and they were already talking about it? What was wrong with these people?) Every now and then one or another of the girls would slap her book, saying, “I just can’t.”—Can’t get this scene right, can’t do this problem, can’t decide whether to buy the CD or not. The boys were talking about how the pre-season games looked, what kinds of summer jobs they wanted, seriously cool CDs, and one or two grumbled, or boasted, “I’m going to have to just bluff my way through the scene.”
After several minutes of eavesdropping Mikey leaned even farther forward to say—speaking to no one in particular, just speaking between two heads to anyone close enough to hear—“I don’t know what to think about Margalo being robbed. What do you think about it?”
“We don’t,” said Ann Witherspoon, a junior who planned to apply to Berkeley and so didn’t encourage trouble. “We think about the play.”
“Like how different the world then was from the way it is now, and why we’re putting so much work into something so irrelevant,” said Carl Dane.
Mikey had heard from Margalo what people were saying, and she had her own idea about that, so this was a shot she could make a good return on. “You’re all wrong,” she told Carl. “You’re not getting it.”
He turned his head to ask, “Oh yeah?”
“Oh yeah,” Mikey assured him, and smiled back, a Look out, Buster smile. “Because you know how sometimes things seem simple but they’re really not? Like when Agassi’s game is on, he makes it look easy to make those shots. But if you think it really is easy, you’re missing the best of his play.”
From the row in front John Baker said, “I can dig that.” He turned to Missy, beside him, to ask, “Can you dig that?”
“You mean like that Picasso drawing of the dove of peace?” asked Ann. “I guess, if you put it that way—”
“Put it that way,” Mikey advised. Now that she had their attention, she asked again, “So what about Margalo’s money?” a hard shot straight down the center, to see what kind of a return that would draw.
“Look, Mikey,” they began.
“How do you know who I am?”
“Word gets around,” said Carl, sounding sarcastic.
“We’re sorry she got robbed and all, but—you know—what was she doing bringing all that money to school? And leaving it in her knapsack?”
“You mean it’s her fault?” Mikey demanded.
Ms. Hendriks turned around to shush them, and Margalo saw Mikey but was too occupied to greet her. Hadrian saw her too. Mikey lowered her voice. “You think it’s her own fault if she got robbed? So, what is it? If you run over a dog it’s the dog’s fault for being there?”
“If it ran out in the street,” someone pointed out.
“So if Hadrian gets his collarbone broken by the Three Stooges, it’s his own fault for—For what? Being in school? Being so smart he skipped grades? No, wait, I get it, he shouldn’t have been in the hallway where they could see him.”
“I didn’t mean that. But Mikey, I didn’t do it, what do you want me to do about it?”
“It’s not like we can fingerprint her wallet.”
“After all this time.”
“And the money’s long gone by now, so what’s the point?”
“It’s not like we even know who did it.”
“So what do you want from us?”
When they asked like that, Mikey discovered that she had an answer. “Pay her back.”
“What?”
“Why?”
“Well,” Ann said thoughtfully, “you know, if I’d been robbed, I’d feel better if people cared. It would show we cared if we did that.”
“Yeah, but I don’t happen to have two hundred dollars to give away,” John Baker pointed out.
“People!” called Ms. Hendriks, clapping her hands sharply together. “May I ask you to please, please keep it down? You’ve got Hadrian so distracted he can’t remember half his lines.”
“Hadrian? Forget a line? I wish,” Carl murmured after the teacher had turned her back again.
Ann whispered, “But John, you have ten dollars, don’t you? Or five? I mean, I’ve got ten I could spare easy, and there are enough of us in the cast . . . we could do it. No, I’m serious. Because, personally, I’ll feel better if we do, because . . . I don’t like anybody being robbed, do you? And we’re all supposed to be so tight, in a play.”
“Yeah, but do you think enough people will chip in?”
“We could ask. Ms. Hendriks, too, she’d probably put in a fifty—”
“Teachers don’t have fifties.”
“—just to save the play.”
“But why should I pay for something I didn’t do?” John Baker asked.
“Because,” Mikey told him, “it’s the only thing you can do.”
“Besides,” whispered Ann, “what if it was you who was robbed?”
“I don’t leave stealable stuff around in Drama,” he assured her. “Not anymore.”
“Exactly,” Ann said, and waited.
“How much are you going to put in?” John Baker asked Carl Dane.
Mikey’s work was done. She leaned back in the seat and took a look at the stage. Hadrian was still alone there, but now he had come to the edge and was kneeling down to talk to Ms. Hendriks, and a couple of times he looked up to where Mikey was sitting, almost directly in front of him. Mikey waved,
but he didn’t respond. Finally Ms. Hendriks shooed him offstage, calling, “Alice? Missy? Let’s do your Act I scene now.”
Hadrian, meanwhile, disappeared behind the curtains. Mikey watched for where he would emerge. But he didn’t come out, not from either side of the stage.
Probably he was scurrying around backstage, hiding behind some flats or something. She didn’t know why he should be scurrying away from her, and she planned to let him know that as soon as he came out. It wasn’t as if she was about to stuff him into trash cans or anything. She’d thought he was someone who liked her, or at least someone who didn’t mind her. Especially if he was her secret-admirer telephone caller from last year.
Mikey was feeling pretty relaxed and good about herself. She had the feeling that, beginning with her brilliant Andre Agassi comparison, she had entered the zone. If this was tennis, and she was playing in the zone, what she would do next would be to go on the attack. She would head for the net and try to force an error. Mikey slid on over to the aisle and strode up it until she came to row three. There she went in to sit right up next to Sally.
“Who—?” Sally said.
Richard kept his arm tight around his girlfriend’s shoulder. “Can’t you tell when you’re not wanted?” He leaned forward a little bit so Mikey could see past Sally’s head to his unfriendly face.
Sally’s was the question Mikey chose to answer. “I’m Margalo’s friend. In fact”—she smiled at the two of them, You don’t want to hear this, but you can’t stop me—“I was with her when she discovered she’d been robbed.”
She waited, in case either one of them had something to say. Like, for example, “You mean after I stole her two hundred and nineteen dollars?” But they just looked at her as if she was seriously weird. Neither one of them spoke.
Their silence surprised her. She’d have thought Richard at least would say something, like “So what?” Without their saying something, Mikey couldn’t think of what came next. She just sat there staring back at them, waiting, like a player who has made a weak net shot watching the ball sit up high, watching the opponent draw his racket back to fire off a shot right past her. She was cross at herself. She should have had something ready to say next. But what could it have been? Maybe—