Cassie and Jace worked together to paint a pointing finger attached to a hand, a copy of the famous World War I enlistment poster where the finger points right at the viewer. ARE YOU A CHEAT? they wrote at the bottom.
IMPEACH COACH SANDY! Cassie wrote on another poster, in bold longhand letters, like graffiti on a wall. “What do you think?” she asked Margalo, who asked, “Can you impeach someone who hasn’t been elected?”
Casey took that piece of poster board and turned it over to write: “Tennis players of the team, unite! You have nothing to lose but your coach!” There wasn’t enough room for capitals, so she had to write it out in lowercase letters, and at the looks on their faces she had to explain, “It’s what Karl Marx said.” That didn’t make anything any clearer, so she added, “ ‘Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains.’ ”
“Who’s Karl Marx?” Mikey asked.
“Are you a Communist?” Margalo wondered.
“He was actually a political philosopher,” Casey said. “I like the way it sounds, and anyone who knows the original saying will really get it.”
“That’ll be you and who else?” Cassie asked.
“Me, actually,” Jace admitted.
“Communism isn’t the big enemy anymore,” Mikey reminded them. “Besides, I like it, even if I didn’t really get it. But have you noticed?” she asked Margalo. “There’s always some big enemy. Why do people always want to have an enemy? The Soviet bloc had us,” she pointed out. “It wasn’t just us having them.”
Cassie said, “You have Coach Sandy.”
“I don’t have her for an enemy. I just want her fired,” Mikey said. “That’s different. An enemy you have to keep around, and keep making bigger so that you can keep on fighting against them.”
Margalo’s poster was finished. She pushed it down the long table for Mikey to see. COACH SANDY 15, it said, and right underneath that, like a scoreboard, FAIR PLAY 1.
Margalo’s was the best, no question. It was so good a best that Mikey couldn’t even be jealous.
Mikey was leaning against the wall opposite Coach Sandy’s office. She had set the posters up against the wall, facing in. Most people ignored her, finishing their own conversations—“Sally finally had to ask Richard to the prom, she got so tired of waiting for him to ask her.” “Does it ever burn you how Chet Parker gets the best of everything and now Ronnie Caselli too?” “Do you have the Chemistry homework? Have you done it? Can I see it?” A couple of players greeted her as they went past, going in for the rainy-day tactics class. “You cost us our chance at the regionals, I hope you know.” “Are you here to apologize?” Only Mark Jacobs said simply, “Hey, Mikey, how are you?”
Mikey shrugged in answer. She was fine, just fine. It was Coach Sandy they should be worrying about; and a lot of them, now she thought of it, should be worrying about themselves.
Through the wide plate-glass window Mikey watched the squad settle itself facing a blackboard on wheels that stood beside the desk. Some people sat on folding chairs that had been set out, some chose the floor. When they had all gone in and the door had been closed behind them, Mikey picked up her pile of posters and approached the window.
All she could see through it were a couple of rows of backs of heads and the profiles of the people sitting against the side walls, under promotional materials from the big sports companies, pictures of big-name players in full swing, and Coach Sandy standing facing her at the front of the room beside the blackboard, with a piece of chalk in her hand, her short pleated skirt swinging. She saw Mikey standing in the window, stared coldly for a couple of seconds, and then pretended there was no one there.
The coach started talking, and Mikey let her get settled into whatever speech she was making before raising the first poster to the window. With the poster held up in front of her, Mikey couldn’t see any reactions. All she could see was the blank white surface of the back, so she stepped off to one side, stretching out her arms to keep the poster level.
The coach had noticed it. How could she miss it? And she had read it. So also had a couple of other people, who shrugged and rolled their eyes at each other. Then the coach went back to pretending nobody was doing anything outside of her window, while people nudged one another and, under pretense of taking out a pencil or a sheet of paper, whispered to one another.
Mikey switched from YOU SHOULD CARE!! to BAD CALLS MAKE BAD TENNIS. More heads turned—quickly—to see what was going on and then turned—just as quickly—back to the coach. She had called them sharply to attention, was Mikey’s guess. After a few minutes she raised the ARE YOU A CHEAT? poster and saw some heads lowered, as if that was a question they didn’t want to be asked. She held that one up for a while, letting Coach Sandy get some good looks at it.
She couldn’t hear anything that was being said in the room, although the coach had started to draw Xs connected by arrows on a rectangle on the board, the rectangle divided in half by a line that was probably the net. It looked like she was telling them when to move up to the net in doubles and when to fall back. Mikey raised another poster. This one was Casey’s, so while Mikey could see Cassie’s IMPEACH COACH SANDY! slogan, the coach herself, and some of the people in the room, read Casey’s more literary-historical message urging them to unite.
Mark Jacobs was grinning to himself when he turned back to face the front of the room, but Coach Sandy went to her desk and picked up her phone. Since she wasn’t watching them, the people in the room could now look at Mikey, trying to express without words whatever feelings they were having. Not many of the feelings were positive. A lot of them were expressed by a waving of the arm, Scram, Get lost, Beat it.
Mikey smiled, You don’t get rid of me that easily, and held up Margalo’s poster. This one she held right in front of her, putting it smack in the middle of the window. She held it up for a long time so they could work it out.
She expected, at any moment, that Coach Sandy would burst through the door. She didn’t know what the woman would say to try to make her stop. She had decided that she wouldn’t say anything in response. Not one word. She’d just keep holding up her posters, one after the other, for everybody to have to see.
She was waiting to hear the door open. She was waiting to hear her name called, and at last she did.
“Michelle Elsinger?”
But that was a man’s voice.
Mikey turned her head and saw Mr. Robredo jogging down the corridor. She turned her head back to stare at the blank back of the poster.
Mr. Robredo?
Mr. Robredo!
As soon as he’d seen her see him, Mr. Robredo stopped jogging and started walking, fast and firm, right up to her. Mikey kept the poster up, but she turned to watch the assistant principal.
When he got up to her, he didn’t waste a minute. “Come with me,” he said. He didn’t sound angry, he just sounded like he expected to be obeyed. “Bring those placards, too.” Turning on his heel, he marched abruptly away, back down the corridor. He never even looked to be sure Mikey was following.
Mikey picked up her knapsack and the posters and followed his straight back, keeping eight paces behind, maybe ten. She wasn’t about to catch up with him, and she wasn’t about to lag too far behind, either. She followed Mr. Robredo up the wide staircase and down the hallway where glass cases displayed various trophies won by various teams at various times in the school’s history. She followed him through the broad gym doors and across into the classroom building. She followed him past the closed doors of empty classrooms. She followed him into his office.
There he let her step past him before shutting the door behind her. “Sit,” he told her, and turning to a tall file cabinet, he pulled out a long drawer and from that pulled out a single file folder.
Mikey’s chair was alone on its side of the desk, like the criminal’s chair in a police interrogation scene.
Mr. Robredo sat down in his chair and opened the file.
The only sound in the ro
om was the rustling of papers as he read. Mikey looked around her. The walls were completely covered, by bookcases, file cabinets, and posters—Habitat for Humanity, Oxfam, HIV/AIDS in Africa, FINCA, Heifer Project.
Then, since she didn’t feel like sitting around doing nothing, she leaned down and took out the notebook in which she was making a list of math skills Louis Caselli would have to have mastered in order to do the makeup homework assignments and pass the unit tests so he could have a chance of passing his final exam with a high enough grade to enable him to pass Math for the year. The basic math operations, and fractions, decimals—she needed to check him on those; then there was the problem of word problems. If people who were bad at Math—even Margalo, who always got A’s in English—had trouble with word problems, she could just imagine what a hash Louis would make of them.
Although, that word-problem problem was odd, since Margalo never had trouble with poems, and those struck Mikey as merely giant word problems, just without the convenience of numbers to help figure them out.
Mr. Robredo cleared his throat. Mikey looked up, all attention.
“Michelle,” he said. He was looking right at her, his expression serious. “This—”
“Mikey,” she interrupted. Then she explained, “Call me Mikey.” Then, since he was waiting, she added, “Please.”
He nodded, satisfied with how the discussion was going. “May I see those placards?”
She passed them to him, one at a time. He read them, one at a time, and passed them back to her. Then he rose to come around to the front of the desk and lean back against it. She couldn’t tell if this was a more threatening posture or a friendlier one. She pushed her chair back a little.
“Did you do all of this yourself?” he asked.
The question took Mikey by surprise and she hesitated. “Why?” Because she wasn’t about to rat on her friends, if that was what he was after.
Mr. Robredo was relaxed, half sitting on his desk, calm, in control of the situation. “Because they sound like different minds to me. If they were all yours, I’d want to know that about you.”
Mikey wished she had done them all, had thought of them all herself. But she had to tell him, “It was other people too.”
He nodded. He’d been proved right.
“Just exactly what is the problem here?” he asked.
“I got thrown off the tennis team.”
“I know that,” he said, indicating with his hand the open file behind him. “And I know why.”
“It’s not true,” Mikey said.
“What’s not true?”
“What she said.”
“What did she say?”
Mikey had to admit, “I don’t know. But not the truth, I bet.”
“What is the truth? According to you.”
He already knew that from reading the posters, but Mikey answered his question anyway. “Because I wouldn’t cheat on calls. All right, not exactly cheat, but—Do you play tennis?”
He shook his head.
Mikey waited for a while, and when he didn’t add anything, she asked, “What sports do you play?”
“Tai chi,” he said, and something in her face made him smile before he added, “In school I played baseball and soccer. I swim.”
Well, he was in good shape. He wasn’t muscular and he wasn’t a big man, but he wasn’t flabby at all, not like a lot of men who work in schools, teachers and administrators. Mikey tried to explain, “Tennis is different. Because you don’t have referees or umpires or anything. The players call lines themselves. Even if it’s a close call.”
He nodded, listening.
“And if I want to get to a ball and get a good shot off of it, I have to focus on the ball itself, but I’m watching it so I can hit it, not so I can call it in or out. So whenever it’s close, the way it’s traditionally done in tennis, when it’s close it’s called in. In fact, it’s easier that way.”
He nodded and waited.
Mikey couldn’t believe he couldn’t work out the rest for himself. “She got angry at me for doing that in a match.”
“Tell me something. Do the other players on the team also make their calls in the traditional way?”
Mikey wasn’t about to rat on the people on the tennis squad either. “I’m talking about matches,” she said. “Sometimes I’ve had opponents make bad calls.”
“You’re sure of that?”
Now Mikey was the one nodding and waiting. She had completed her case.
“So Coach Delorme asked you to cheat?”
Mikey had to admit, “Not in so many words. But that was what she meant.” She didn’t know if he believed her or not, but she was guessing probably not. Adults, in schools, tended to stick together and stick up for one another.
“Coach Delorme reported”—he indicated the file behind him again—“that you refuse to take instruction. Your insubordination is having a bad effect on the team.”
Mikey smiled, What else do you expect her to say?
“There haven’t been any other complaints about her,” Mr. Robredo pointed out. “The opposite, in fact.”
Mikey could see where this conversation was going. Day thirty-seven, she said silently to herself. It was almost down to only seven more weeks of school.
“So I’m wondering if we aren’t dealing with a personality conflict here,” Mr. Robredo said.
“We certainly are,” she agreed, and that surprised him. He didn’t look like someone easy to surprise, and it cheered her up to be the one to do it.
“Can I take it, then, that there will be no more of these placards?” he asked her.
Mikey shrugged and gathered them together into a pile. She picked up her knapsack. It wasn’t as if the tennis team had risen up to support her. It wasn’t as if the school wanted to do anything about Coach Sandy. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t figure that out for herself. “Okay,” she said, and walked to the door. There she turned around to see if he had anything else to say, but he didn’t, so she left.
Margalo was as glum as Mikey on the Late Activities bus. “Robredo, hunh?” was all she had to say when Mikey reported in. “Was it bad?” was all she asked.
Mikey was pleased to be able to report, “He’s not as tall as he looks.” Then she waited, but Margalo was seated next to the window, looking out. Then, “Chet doesn’t look worried,” Margalo reported.
“Maybe he hasn’t heard?”
“This is high school. He’s heard. Maybe he’s bluffing?”
Mikey had a nasty idea. “Maybe he doesn’t believe it.”
Margalo had an equally bad one. “Maybe he doesn’t care?”
“Maybe he knows nobody cares.”
They were both looking out the window at the gray, rainy afternoon.
Finally Margalo asked, “So, what about tennis?”
Mikey shook her head. “I can’t think of anything else.”
Margalo sympathized. “I can’t either.”
“But you’re the idea person,” Mikey protested. “You have to have an idea.”
– 20 –
Brainstorm Alert!
Mikey didn’t exactly think of it. She woke up with it. When she opened her eyes in the morning, the idea was in her head and she knew how good it was. As good as anything Margalo had ever thought of. Mikey hadn’t felt as pleased with herself, or as eager for whatever was going to happen next, since the day she moved into the top spot on Coach Sandy’s tennis ladder.
Part of her gladness was the idea itself, but the other part—the biggest part—was that she’d had it by herself. It was her own idea and no help from Margalo.
She waited impatiently for Margalo to arrive at school that Friday morning—day thirty-six, a great day for Mikey and a beautiful end-of-April day too—so she could present her idea. When she saw Margalo coming down the hallway towards her, she started smiling. Just wait until you hear this.
Margalo was swishing along in some skirt with flowers on it. She was grinning right back at Mikey, as if sh
e already knew what Mikey planned to show off to her with. Well, maybe she did. Sometimes Margalo was so smart about people even Mikey was surprised.
“Listen to who—,” Margalo said. Mikey said, “Wait till—”
Neither one of them said You go first.
Mikey said, “You hear—,” and Margalo said, “Called—”
Mikey shoved her idea ahead, keeping it short, simple. “Linespeople. To call lines at matches.”
“But that’s brilliant!” Margalo exclaimed.
“It is, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
Both at the same time, they reached out to shake hands on it, like Stanley and Livingstone finally meeting up in the jungles of Africa.
Mikey already had her books for her morning classes, so they went to Margalo’s locker.
“Who are you going to ask to do it?” Margalo asked as she worked her combination lock. (L1-R5-L6-R4, as Mikey happened to know, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, just the kind of combination Margalo would choose. She herself used the first primes and reversed the order, so it was L7-R5-L3-R2, much easier to remember.)
If Margalo thought Mikey hadn’t already thought about who to ask, she was wrong. Mikey could make plans as well as have ideas. “You and Hadrian,” she said. “We’ll have to pick which sets to call, because they play on all six courts, but—”
“Hadrian and I have rehearsals.”
“But that leaves only me! You need a minimum of two people to call lines, one for each side of the court.” Nevertheless, Mikey wasn’t about to give up her idea. “All right, it’ll be hard, but if I’m always on the receiver’s side, I can do it,” she decided. An idea this good should never be given up on.
“What if—”
The homeroom bell interrupted Margalo, and Mikey was still solving her problem out loud. “Plus, I’ll have to figure out which matches are likely to be the crucial ones.”
“What is wrong with you?” Margalo demanded. But they had to head off, and Mikey had no time to answer.