“Because the coach doesn’t agree with me about calls.”
“Complaining about a teacher is personal, Mikey.”
Mikey hastened to explain. “What she doesn’t like is that I won’t call a ball out if I’m not sure.” Now she thought about it, Mikey wasn’t sure that Mrs. Burke knew anything about tennis and how it was scored.
“When you complain about how the tennis coach is treating you, that does sound personal, Mikey.”
“Except there’s a principle involved, about fair play.”
Mrs. Burke started rolling up the sleeves of her blouse. She always wore khaki pants and a blouse to work; in cold weather she put on a cable-stitched cardigan sweater over the blouse, but when it was warm, she rolled up her sleeves, to get to work. “The bell’s going to ring any minute,” she said. “My homeroom will be arriving.”
“No, but listen, Mrs. Burke,” Mikey said. She tried to think of how to make the teacher understand. “If you threw someone out of your course for—I don’t know, copying or being disruptive or—”
Mrs. Burke was shaking her head. “But I can’t throw someone out of Science. Teachers can’t do that, so the analogy doesn’t hold. Classrooms aren’t sports teams.”
“It’s all education, though. Isn’t it?” Mikey argued. “It’s all school. It’s all to teach us, isn’t it?”
“You know what I mean,” Mrs. Burke argued.
“No, I don’t,” Mikey said.
“Don’t you have an adviser?” Mrs. Burke asked.
Finally Mikey realized: Mrs. Burke wasn’t going to talk to her about this. That was what she meant by “nothing personal,” no non-Science-class problems.
“I do know what you mean,” Mikey said. “But it’s wrong.”
“That’s as may be,” Mrs. Burke said. “Was there anything else I can do for you?”
Mikey was tempted. She thought maybe she would just plant herself right there in front of the desk and make Mrs. Burke listen to all the bad stuff that went on in ninth grade, the bullying and stealing and unearned grades—both unearned bad grades and unearned good ones. The teachers playing favorites and kids being cliquey, teachers smoking in a No Smoking Zone and kids smoking in the third-floor bathroom, a cafeteria that served pizza and french fries in the same lunch, just for starters, just off the top of her head. But really, Mrs. Burke was right. Her job was to teach Science, not to fix the world, not even the little world of high school. So Mikey shook her head, No, nothing else, and she left.
She did, however, take the one piece of advice Mrs. Burke had sort of offered. She asked Mr. Wolsowski if she could come see him after last period. “Today?” he wondered. The English class was leaving the room in its usual hurry and he was erasing the board, clearing it for his next class, so she wasn’t sure he’d really heard her.
“Today. Two fifteen today,” she said.
Mr. Wolsowski had a long face and short hair. He wore a jacket and tie to school, every day. He wore the same style of glasses as his daughter, and also like Casey, he could surprise you. “Today?” he asked again, and Mikey finally got it: He was teasing. “Of course you can,” he said then. “That’s today, right?”
Actually, what with everything else going on in school, classes were kind of relaxing. Mikey didn’t have to think about classes. She was a smart person who did her homework; classes were easy, and sometimes fun if she had an opinion she wanted to tell people about, especially if someone tried arguing with her. Sometimes classes were even interesting. They were certainly easier than hallways and cafeteria, and everything that was going on.
For example, this tennis stuff. For another example, Ronnie. Mikey was not looking forward to lunch and whatever it was that Ronnie was up to. “What could she possibly want with us?” Margalo said when they saw Ronnie coming towards them, long legs in jeans, long hair in a ponytail. Then they watched her stop, and head off in a different direction.
The day was warm enough for eating outdoors; Ronnie had been carrying some kind of sandwich in her hand; so it wasn’t the weather and it wasn’t hunger that had diverted her.
“You two—You’ve gotta tell me what you think of this. I think it’s my masterpiece,” said the voice of Cassie Davis, and turning their heads at the same time, they understood why Ronnie had turned away. Mikey opened her brown bag to take out a ham and cheese sandwich on rye, with lettuce and tomato, as if nothing Cassie Davis might get up to could interest her much because she was too cool to be curious. But Margalo didn’t try to keep the surprise out of her voice. “Cassie?”
Cassie Davis had dyed her hair—and dyed her eyebrows, too—a bright fluorescent pink. She was, for just a few seconds, unrecognizable, because the effect of hair that pink was to grab all the attention. That hair could have been wearing anybody’s face underneath it.
“I’m not asking about this.” Cassie smiled in satisfaction and ran her fingers through her short pink hair. She opened the big art folder that she had set down on the ground beside her feet—she wore yellow clogs—resting it against her legs, shapeless within paint-spattered Dickies overalls, and pulled out a piece of stiff cardboard almost as big as a movie poster. “I’m talking about this,” Cassie said.
She turned the cardboard around to show them. Bits and scraps of paper, some with pencil marks, some with colors, plus bits and rough scraps of painted canvas, plus bits and rough scraps of black-and-white photographs—all had been glued onto the cardboard. It looked like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when they are first dumped out of the box onto the table. Only there was a sort of thick, curved white fence holding them in. A bowl? And the more you looked at it, the more it looked like all of the scraps were swirling around the middle of the picture.
Margalo wasn’t sure what to say. “It’s very modern,” she tried.
“Ha!” responded Cassie, meaning I knew you’d get it.
“It looks like it took a lot of work,” Margalo said.
“You’re right about that.”
Mikey, however, knew exactly what she thought and said so. “It looks like a toilet to me,” she said, and went on to be specific, “Flushing.”
Margalo started to laugh.
“I’m not joking,” Mikey told her.
Margalo opened her own lunch bag and jammed a straw into her drink box. “I know you’re not. That’s pretty clever, Cassie.”
Cassie grinned. Even the heavy eye makeup she was wearing couldn’t make much of a stand against the bright pink hair. “It’s even better than you know. Because I ripped up all the assignments from the fall and winter—those yellow pieces? They’re the still life he said was so good. Ha! Some life drawings.” She was pointing at different scraps and pieces. “The pencil portraits, remember them? I’ve titled this Art I. Get it? Or maybe I should call it Freshman Art Class—which do you think? It’s a collage.”
“What will Peter Paul say?” Margalo wondered.
“The way he’s hated everything I’ve done since Christmas?” Cassie asked. “He’ll hate it. Big deal.” She stopped grinning. “I’m never taking another art class in my life.”
“I thought you were going to Art School,” Mikey said.
Cassie shook her head. “What’s the point? If I’m not any good. Like you not playing on the tennis team.”
“That’s different,” Margalo said.
“Why? Because she was thrown off for not doing what she was told? I think my C minus in Art is exactly the same thing. I mean, how can anyone get a C minus in Art? I’m hoping he’ll flunk me for the year.”
“What about Jace?” Margalo asked. “Is he dropping Art too?”
“Actually”—and Cassie grinned again—“Jace is getting an A. I think Peter Paul is trying to break us up.”
“Why would he bother?” asked Mikey.
“If I were painting the way he does? I’d do anything I could think of to keep from having to see how my work stank. Like your tennis coach, Mikey. They take out their failures on us. I’ll tell you, I’d wash dishes
before I’d teach Art,” Cassie declared.
Margalo, who knew what she was talking about, told Cassie, “The benefits aren’t as good. Or the pay, or the hours.”
Cassie looked down at Margalo and announced, “You’re making fun of me. But it’s not funny,” she said, and packed her flushing toilet collage back into the folder. Then she looked out over the clusters of students trying to improve their tans. “I gotta let Jace see this. He won’t know what to think. Ha!” and she walked away.
Mikey had time to finish up her sandwich before Ronnie at last approached and sat down on the far side of Margalo. Close up Ronnie didn’t look too good. Maybe she was tired, maybe she hadn’t paid attention to her makeup? “Hey Margalo,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure that was the right thing to say. Then she leaned around Margalo, with a smile that stretched her mouth out wide and made her look definitely sad. “Hey Mikey.”
They had seen Ronnie looking good in all kinds of situations, looking good happy, looking good weeping, looking good athletic or studious, for so many years that both Margalo and Mikey sat up straight. “What is wrong with you?” Mikey demanded.
Ronnie’s big brown eyes filled with tears, and they already looked tired from crying. “You have to help me. I don’t know what to . . .” She stopped, gulped, tried again. “I can’t tell any—”
“You’re not pregnant,” Margalo said.
“No, no, that’s not—But it’s—It’s embarrassing.”
Usually Mikey didn’t have anything much to do with Ronnie Caselli. She didn’t dislike Ronnie, but she didn’t trust her for much or care very much what she got up to, since their interests seldom coincided. But now Mikey was worried. Because if Ronnie Caselli wasn’t on top of the world, who knew what could happen to the rest of them?
“Drugs?” Mikey asked. “Are you sick? Not HIV.” Because kids didn’t get AIDS, did they? But they did, didn’t they? “Cancer? Are your parents getting divorced? C’mon, Ronnie.”
“It’s Chet,” Ronnie murmured. One tear pooled out of her eye and started down her cheek. She wiped it away, with another one of those sad, sad smiles.
It was one of Ronnie’s love crises, and who cared about that?
“What’s happened?” Margalo asked. Mikey leaned back and took a bite of apple turnover, ready not to be surprised.
But she was. Shocked, in fact, and so was Margalo, even though Margalo’s face didn’t give that away. Margalo’s expression didn’t change at all when Ronnie started telling them. What Chet wanted—Well, that wasn’t surprising, Mikey guessed, everybody said boys just wanted to have sex—and then what he had threatened to do.
“Rhonda,” Margalo said.
“What?” Mikey asked, and then she got it. Rodents! Was she going to start feeling sorry for Rhonda Ransom, too? As if she didn’t have enough problems in her own life.
“But why would he want to if you don’t?” Mikey demanded.
“He’s a guy,” Ronnie explained. Now that she had stated her problem out loud, she seemed a little more normal, for which Mikey was grateful.
“And it’s his Senior Prom,” Ronnie added, as if that explained something.
“And if you won’t sleep with him,” Margalo said, stating it clearly, “he’ll tell everyone that you did.”
Ronnie nodded. “And then he’ll ditch me.”
“You mean you haven’t already broken up with him?” Mikey demanded.
Margalo asked, “When did all this happen?”
“Yesterday. Last night. We had a study date, at my house because I’m not allowed to go out on school nights.”
“He said this in your own house?” Mikey demanded.
“He was whispering,” Ronnie explained.
“He can’t get away with that,” Mikey declared.
“They’ll believe him,” Ronnie explained to Margalo. “They will, and everybody knows how much I love him.”
“You have to stop all this falling in love,” Mikey told Ronnie. “It’s not like you really are, anyway, because”—she raised her voice to drown out their objections—“if you really are in love, it’s not that easy to fall out of it. You’ve been in love three times that I personally know about, and we’re not even friends, and that’s just in one year.”
“Never mind that,” Margalo said. “Who have you told about this?”
“Nobody. He does love me,” Ronnie explained.
“Like I believe that,” Mikey muttered.
“He says I’m breaking his heart.” Ronnie smiled again. She was about to weep again.
“Right,” Mikey said, but Margalo, she could see, was thinking about something else, so Mikey reassured Ronnie, “I’ll be happy to tell him what I think. And punch him in his baby blues, too.”
“You can’t,” Ronnie said. Her voice was low, urgent. “You can’t do that because he’ll say it then—about me. And you know everybody will believe him. Because they’ll want to believe him about me,” she said, and, “Do you think I have to do it with him? I don’t want to. I don’t want to have sex with anybody, not yet,” Ronnie whispered, as if that embarrassed her too. But it was the first smart thing she’d said since she started all this falling in love, as far as Mikey was concerned, so why should it embarrass her?
“Maybe you should tell your parents,” Margalo suggested.
“I can’t. No, really, I can’t. They—They don’t know anything about how things are for me. They’d—they’d probably ground me for a whole year or make me change schools. What if they didn’t believe me? They don’t understand what it’s like for me, so whatever they did . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she explained simply, “They’re grown-ups.”
“Okay, then, what about your adviser?” Margalo suggested.
“The faculty tells everything to anybody, about students. They talk about us, you know they do, especially if you’re having problems. Then everybody would know, and then Chet would—”
“Mr. Robredo?” Mikey suggested, but Ronnie looked alarmed and maybe even frightened at that suggestion.
“I couldn’t,” she said. “Really, I just couldn’t. Could you?”
“Of course,” Mikey maintained, although she wasn’t so sure of it. But she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t, either, and besides, this wasn’t a problem she expected to be running into.
“All right,” Margalo said, leaning forward and resting her elbows on her knees, to think. “All right, then. I have an idea. To make it work, we’ll need Louis’s help and you’re going to have to—How good a liar are you? Or how good an actress, because you’re going to have to pull the wool over Chet’s eyes.”
“He’s a senior,” Ronnie protested.
Margalo ignored that. “And we’re going to need to get it set up fast, today, right away. So you have to start lying right away. And go put on some makeup, too. People are already wondering what’s wrong. The way you’re talking privately with us. The way you’re looking not at all good.”
This was true. Neither Mikey nor Ronnie had noticed it, but they were getting looks from some people. Mikey Elsinger and Margalo Epps were not the kind of girls that someone like Ronnie Caselli had what looked like it might be a private conversation with. Curiosity was building as to what this private conversation might be about.
“I’ll tell them . . .” But Ronnie was too upset to think of a believable lie.
Then Margalo asked, “What do you know about Mikey’s stepfather?”
“Jackson?” asked Mikey, as if she had a choice of stepfathers. What was Margalo doing asking Ronnie about Jackson? Talk about non sequiturs.
“He’s from Texas. He’s somebody important. Rich,” Ronnie added. “Why?”
Margalo said, “Let’s say he’s a lawyer, and you asked Mikey to get his advice.”
“Is he?” Ronnie asked.
“Because you’re thinking of bringing a sexual harassment suit against Chet,” Margalo said.
“What?” asked Ronnie.
“Brilliant!” cried Mikey. “Why not date
rape?”
“That’s a serious crime. We don’t want to mess around with something like that,” Margalo said. “But listen, Ronnie—If Mikey has a stepfather who is a lawyer, and if she asked him about what constituted sexual harassment, and if Chet knew she was doing that for you,” Margalo said, setting out the points of her plan. She concluded, “He’ll head for cover. He’ll be frightened, I’m pretty sure of it.” She began her instructions. “If I were you, I’d start by asking Rhonda if Chet sexually harassed her, and then just one or two other girls he’s been out with, like that tenth grader between Rhonda and you—”
“Candy DeAngelo?”
“Her. Ask her if she’s ever been sexually harassed. They’ll talk to their friends about your asking that question, you can count on it. You don’t have to tell them exactly what happened, you just bring up the subject, like a reporter gathering information. But Louis is key to this plan. You need Louis to talk to people about how your family is thinking about doing what Jackson advises.”
“But everybody’s furious at Louis for messing up in school, his father especially, so Louis isn’t in the mood to help the family. Although he might help me,” Ronnie said. Just thinking about this plan was reestablishing her self-confidence. “He’d do it to help me,” she assured Margalo and Mikey. “I’ll get him to come talk to you. You stay right here,” she said. She rose, already looking better, with some sparkle to her eyes and some straightness in her shoulders. “What’s your stepfather’s name?” she asked Mikey.
“Jackson. But he’s—”
“Don’t say it,” Margalo advised.
That was irritating, Margalo giving orders like that, but Mikey obeyed. This was one of Margalo’s best ideas ever. This was fighting fire with fire, rumor with rumor, taking an eye for an eye, really getting even and maybe even getting ahead. “Do you think it’ll work?” she asked Margalo.
That question alarmed Ronnie. “What if it doesn’t?”
Margalo just grinned, like a little kid who got excused from taking a spelling test she forgot to study for. “I don’t know,” she told Mikey. “I just thought it up, I haven’t thought it through. But it could.”