“Why would I?” Mikey demanded impatiently, and then she realized, “Does that mean Coach Sandy has already talked to you? Is that why you already knew who I am?”
Mrs. Smallwood’s mouth smiled gently again. “If she has—and I’m not saying that she has, only if she has—it would be a breach of confidentiality for me to tell you. I’m sure you can understand how important that confidentiality is. You wouldn’t want me telling everybody what you thought of them, would you?”
“They already know,” Mikey said.
“Yes. You know, Mikey, that may be your problem.”
Mikey repeated it patiently. “Coach Sandy is my problem.”
Mrs. Smallwood studied her again, just for half a minute—but half a minute of being studied can feel like a long time. “I think,” she finally said, and smiled again, a sad, understanding, disappointed-grandmother smile, “you had better go to homeroom now. Come back when you can see beyond your own nose, Mikey. You have a lot of abilities, we all know that. It would be a pity if you never got to realize the fruit of them.”
Mikey considered asking her just what she meant. Was the counselor talking about getting into a good college? Or getting a good job? Or having any friends, or even having a husband and family? Or was she talking about tennis, and if she was, what kind of tennis-fruits was she talking about? It felt like a threat, that compliment about her abilities, or a warning. Maybe Mrs. Smallwood knew something Mikey hadn’t thought of—or Margalo, either. But Mrs. Smallwood didn’t know much of anything about Mikey, so how could she know enough to either compliment or threaten or warn her? She couldn’t.
Neither could she help Mikey. Mikey got up from her seat, turned, and left the little room. This had been a waste of time. She found Margalo at their lockers, reported the conversation, and—there was still a lot left to say—walked beside Margalo to Margalo’s homeroom. “I’m tired of talking,” Mikey concluded. “I want to do something.”
“What? What can you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe you’re going to have to forget about it.”
“And let her get away with it?” They had arrived at the door to Margalo’s homeroom and stood facing each other.
“And we have to talk to Louis Caselli,” Margalo reminded her.
Luckily, it was raining and they had to have lunch inside, in a crowded cafeteria where nothing happened without somebody noticing. This meant that the meeting Ronnie had set up between Mikey and Margalo and Louis would take place with maximum publicity—exactly the way they wanted it. In fact, Louis Caselli came up to a table where not only Mikey and Margalo sat, but also Casey and Cassie, Tim, Felix and Hadrian, all ready to listen in on whatever got said.
Louis was short and round like a rooster, with a rooster’s bright, greedy eyes. He had put two streaks of color into his hair, running backwards from his forehead, one stripe fluorescent green, the other purple. He wore a yellow Phish t-shirt that listed the stops they made on their world tour, blue-and-red plaid shorts, and sneakers without socks. He strutted up and smirked down at them. “Ronnie says you want to talk to me.”
Ronnie had reported to them that Louis was furious that anyone—even if that anyone was someone like Chet Parker, a senior, a football player, and an early-admission acceptee at Duke University, captain of the baseball team and general all-around enviable guy—furious that anyone at all would try to get away with pulling a trick like that on one of the Casellis. He’d told Ronnie he was willing to give Mikey and Margalo a listen.
“Did you bring your books?” Margalo asked.
“What do I need books for?” Louis strutted even while standing still.
“You better sit down,” Mikey advised.
Louis did, twirling the chair around so he could cross his arms along its back. “So what’s the story?”
The rest of the table was watching. Everybody except Hadrian had a little smile of anticipation (this could turn out good) on their face. Hadrian had an attentive expression, like a scientist looking into his microscope or a therapist listening. Louis, who was always checking up on whoever was watching him, noticed this. “What’re you staring at, Dorko?”
Mikey got his attention back on them. “Personally, I’m betting you can’t possibly pass English and Math.”
“Why would I want to?” asked Louis, maintaining his reputation for cool.
“So you can take Social Studies and Science in summer school,” Margalo answered.
“Why would I want to waste my summer going to school?”
“So you can be in tenth grade next year,” Mikey explained patiently. She was enjoying this. “I don’t think you can do it, but Margalo”—she gestured towards Margalo, as if Louis might not be sure who Margalo was—“disagrees. She thinks you can. We have a bet on it.”
Louis hesitated, a little confused. This wasn’t what he’d thought they wanted to talk to him about. Then he decided—with everybody there listening in the way they were—to continue playing it cool. “My father says I’m not leaving home until I get my high school diploma. Unless I run away, and if I run away, my father says I don’t need to bother coming back. Unless I have a diploma. This upsets my mother,” Louis told them.
Margalo wanted to wonder out loud if Louis’s mother was upset because her little boy might run away or because he might end up living at home indefinitely. But she had a show to put on. “Have you realized that if you flunk this year, you’ll end up spending a whole extra year in school?”
“When the rest of us graduate, you’ll be left behind,” Mikey observed. “And I’ll have won the bet.”
“You mean if I pass Math and English, you lose?” Louis asked her.
Mikey nodded.
“And I win,” Margalo added.
“And if I flunk them, you win,” Louis said to Mikey.
Mikey nodded.
“And you lose,” he explained to Margalo. He thought about this. “Yeah, but I can’t win either way.”
They had gathered a certain amount of attention in the lunchroom by then. There was some hope that on a rainy Wednesday, still a long way from the end of the school year, something might be happening. Anything to relieve the tedium.
Margalo said, “Tell me what your class read in English this year,” and Mikey said, “Let me see your Math book.”
“With all of them listening in?” Louis asked, indicating the others at the table, Cassie and Casey, Tim, Felix and Hadrian.
There were always empty chairs at Mikey and Margalo’s lunch table, so the three of them moved away. Louis put his chair at the end, like the father on Thanksgiving, with Mikey on one side and Margalo on the other. He wasn’t sure what expression he wanted on his face, so he kept changing it, from grin to frown to boredom.
Mikey opened the Math book and looked at the index.
“What does this have to do with Ronnie? She said—”
Mikey interrupted him. “We did this in seventh grade.”
“It’s Basic Math Operations,” Louis said. “That’s the name of the course. It was supposed to be a gut, but it has homework.”
“Never mind that right now,” Margalo said. She took out a piece of paper and a pencil, as if ready to write things down, and spoke in a low voice. “About Ronnie.”
That topic focused Louis’s attention. “Yeah,” he said, leaning forward and lowering his own voice. “I told her me and Sal would work the guy over, but she said you had a better idea. Which is why I’m here,” he reminded them, in case they had forgotten.
“But you have to actually work with us too,” Margalo informed him. “Or Chet’ll see through it. Ronnie can’t afford to have Chet seeing through it.”
“I know that. I’m not a total dunce,” Louis said. He looked at Mikey. “Whatever Mee-shelle here might think. At least I’m still in school, but I don’t notice her on the tennis team anymore.” Satisfied, he sat back. “So, what’s this great idea of yours? Because if you let Chet weasel out of this—”
&
nbsp; Margalo told him. “What if your father and Ronnie’s father were talking to a lawyer, who would you tell about that? Talking about bringing a sexual harassment case against Chet, I mean,” she added.
“But they’re not. Do you think they should? It’s a stupid idea anyway, because Ronnie told me she really doesn’t want a lot of gossip. In case you can’t figure it out, that means she doesn’t want any law cases. Don’t you ever watch TV?”
“But what if,” Margalo asked, “even if they weren’t going to do that, Chet believed they were? What if he thought Mikey’s stepfather was a big-time Texas lawyer who was helping her family with the case?”
Louis considered that. “Boy,” he concluded. “I wouldn’t like it if some girl said that about me, that I sexually harassed her. Because whether I did or not, people would think I did. Especially if she took me to court.” He considered a little longer. “And Chet’s a senior.” In case they didn’t see the importance of that, he explained, “It would ruin his whole senior year if Ronnie did that. Is that what you’re thinking?”
They left him to realize it for himself.
“And I bet his hotshot college wouldn’t want someone who’d been accused of sexually harassing my cousin. In court. That’s a pretty good idea, Margalo. I have to say. I’ll tell my dad. I bet he would do it.”
“No, no,” Mikey said. “Louis, wait. Because . . .” At a glance from Margalo she skipped the explanation. “The plan is, the plan Ronnie wants is that Chet believes that’s what’s going to happen. A thing doesn’t have to happen just because it might happen, right? That’s where you come in. That’s where Ronnie needs your help. You have to tell Sal, but you absolutely can’t let him know what Chet really did. Just say something vague about a lawsuit, like you could ask him if he knows what a lawsuit is? You have to tell it as if you don’t know anything specific. All you know is that something is going on.”
Louis objected, “I thought this was Margalo’s idea.”
Margalo knew what Mikey was about to say. Mikey was about to say, “How big a jerk are you?” at which question Louis would probably answer, “Not as big as you, Mee-shelle,” and then either he would kick Mikey under the table and she would kick him back under the table, or she would shove his Math book right back at him so hard it would take his breath away—because she would aim for his gut, the obvious target. Then Louis would whomp her on the head with the book, or maybe just on the hand, or maybe Louis would get up and leave the table after he said the most cutting, sarcastic thing he could think of. For sure, the Ronnie plan would be ruined. That was the only truly predictable thing that would happen if Mikey said what she was thinking.
So Margalo intervened. “Making the bet was my idea. I can never resist a challenge.”
The diversion worked. Louis said, “You really think I could pass English? You’re supposed to be such an English genius, but I always said you aren’t as smart as everyone says.”
“And I always said you aren’t as stupid as they say,” Margalo answered. “Because nobody could be. So we’re even.”
Mikey stuck to the main point. “So, you’ll talk to Sal?”
“You think Sal will tell Chet?” Louis asked. “Sal’s not even a blip on Chet’s radar.”
“I think Sal will tell a couple of people, and they’ll tell a couple of people, and sooner or later—I’m betting sooner,” Margalo said, “Chet’ll get told. And then Chet will come to ask you about it.”
“Cool,” Louis said.
“But you won’t be able to tell him anything definite because you don’t know,” Margalo said. “Because it’s a big mystery to you, it’s just something going on that you can’t figure out.”
“I get it, I get it,” Louis said. He started to rise from his seat, but Mikey stopped him.
“How far has your class gotten in this Math book?” she asked.
“Almost to the end. The intro Algebra chapter is due next week, but—”
“What were your grades?”
“I got a D first semester, a sixty-four. I did okay the first marking period. Then it got to hard stuff—long division, you know, and fractions. And decimals,” he remembered, outraged. “And I can never do word problems.”
Mikey waited.
“I got my grade up to a fifty-five in the fourth marking period, but he’s grading me harder in the fifth. A forty-eight, he says, if I’m lucky. My father got on my case after midyears because—They called him in,” another outraged memory. “It’s not fair. There’s not supposed to be homework in the D-level classes. Is there?”
Mikey told him, “So you need a seventy-seven for the final marking period. And at least a sixty on the exam to pass the year.”
“You did that in your head?”
“So first you have to talk to your teacher.”
“He hates me.”
“And tell him you want to try to pass. Ask him if you can make up old homework assignments. I want to see the chapter one, two, and three assignments on Friday, that’s two nights.”
“That’s only two nights,” Lou protested.
“You don’t have much time,” Mikey pointed out.
“And if anyone asks you what you’re doing talking with us, tell them about this,” Margalo instructed. “About the bet.”
“I already figured that out on my own,” Louis said.
“Also, you need to ask your English teacher about extra-credit makeup work,” Margalo said.
“She hates me.”
“Plus, the reading assignments.”
“I stink at reading. You know that,” Louis protested.
“I’ll be tutoring you,” Margalo pointed out.
Louis couldn’t think of how he wanted to respond to that. “How much is the bet for?” he asked her. “You should split your winnings with me.”
Margalo just smiled—Mona Lisa, she hoped—and Mikey smiled more like the big, bad wolf. Neither one of them answered Louis, so after a brief wait he got up. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m going to find Sal. I’m only doing this because of Ronnie,” he told them. “Just to remind you about that fact.”
When he was gone, Cassie called down to them from the other end of the table, “What was that about? You don’t have crushes on him, do you?”
“Are you looking for a fat lip?” Mikey asked.
“We’ve got a bet about Louis,” Margalo said.
“What bet?” they wanted to know, and when Margalo explained the part of it she wanted people to know about, reactions varied. “You guys don’t know a lost cause when you see one, do you?” was one. “How big a bet?” was another, and a third was, “You think I believe that you don’t have crushes?”
“Believe it,” Margalo advised.
And as if Margalo hadn’t been busy enough all day, riding home alone on the late bus she had an idea, an idea so possible that she telephoned Mikey first thing. “I was thinking.”
“You’re always thinking.”
“About what you said Monday. Remember? About accusing Coach Sandy?”
“I already did. Nobody cared.”
“But what if you made your accusation a protest? What if you protested, like in the sixties, with signs and placards, like the anti-war protests, like anti-abortion placards, like when people go out on strike, protesting their wages or hours or benefits? What if we protested at tennis games? Or even just at practice?”
“We who?” Mikey wondered.
“You, me, I don’t know, Hadrian. Isn’t there anybody on the team who agrees with you about this?”
“You and Hadrian are in rehearsal every afternoon.”
Margalo hadn’t thought of that. That was like a bucket of very cold water poured down over her very hot idea. “Oh.”
“I’ll have to do it alone,” Mikey concluded. “But you have to help me with slogans. I want to start tomorrow, so you call Casey and I’ll call Cassie. Cassie can get us into the art room,” she explained, then asked, “What’s so funny?”
– 19 –
r /> Mikey on the March
On Thursday—the thirty-seventh-to-last day of ninth grade—it was still raining. Mikey and Margalo, plus Cassie Davis, their point person in the Art Department, and Jace tagging along, and also Casey Wolsowski, who happened to overhear their plans, spent their lunch period in the Art Room making posters for Mikey’s protest march.
“It can’t be a march with just one person,” Cassie pointed out.
“It’s raining, so it won’t be a march at all.” Mikey had been looking forward to circling the wire cage enclosing the six tennis courts for the whole length of the practice, not saying a word, just pumping her posters up and down. She planned to have a variety of posters, with a variety of messages. She planned to be as stony faced and unresponsive as those guards at the gates of Buckingham Palace. What she hadn’t planned on was rain. “It’s raining. In the rain, how will I be able to—”
Margalo interrupted. “Tennis will meet in Coach Sandy’s office, won’t they? A tactics class, isn’t that what you did on other rainy days? So you can stand at that window while she’s talking to them.”
She was right as usual. So Mikey could go ahead with her protest, but she had to admit to herself that she was a little tired of Margalo being so smart, and so right, and so filled up with ideas. Mikey was just as capable of having ideas. She just didn’t usually, and how could she? The way Margalo was always rushing around, waving her ideas in your face like flags, having her ideas first.
That was not a line of thought that was going to take her anywhere forward, so Mikey forgot about it. She set to painting her slogan onto the piece of poster board in fat red capital letters, easy to read: YOU SHOULD CARE. Then she added a couple of exclamation points to build it up: YOU SHOULD CARE!! The red paint was a little runny, making the letters messy. She mopped at them with a paper towel and stood back, studying her poster. It wasn’t art, but it went straight to the point. It said exactly what she meant.
Everybody had something to say, and either red or blue paint to say it in, and a sheet of poster board to say it on. Mikey took a second sheet and painted in red, being more careful this time because she didn’t actually like the smudged look: BAD CALLS MAKE BAD TENNIS.