Nobody, also, knew where Hadrian was. They had all been looking up occasionally at the door, or glancing around at the edges of the room for a scurrying figure in case they had missed his entry. All now included not only the usual—Mikey and Margalo, Casey, Cassie and Jace—but also two new lunch companions. Tenth graders. Boys. Tim had joined Casey one lunch to continue his attempts to talk her into changing her mind about accepting one of the submissions to the literary magazine (he had succeeded in this) and then had fallen into a ridiculous and, he claimed, useful discussion with Margalo about the “Dear Stella” advice column in the school newspaper, which he wrote, along with occasional op-ed pieces. The next day he had been back, and with him his friend Felix—one of those skinny, long-haired boys whose shoelaces are often untied. Felix claimed to be a photographer, although he never had a camera with him at school because he didn’t want it ripped off and he didn’t take Photography or any other Art course because he didn’t want anybody messing with his talent.
Not one of them, for all the looking, had seen Hadrian Klenk that lunch period.
Margalo gave voice to their concern. “He’s taking a long time getting here today.”
“Everything in ninth grade is taking a long time,” Mikey pointed out. The tennis coach hadn’t spoken to her except to assign her to one court or another for drills.
“Probably he’s spooking around somewhere—in the library?—waiting for a chance to bolt for the cafeteria,” Jace suggested.
“Who are those goons anyway?” Margalo asked Tim and Felix. “Do you know them? Are they in your class?”
“No, they’re eleventh graders, they did the same kind of things to some of us last year. It’s—”
He was interrupted by the arrival of Ronnie Caselli at their table. In the surprised silence that greeted her she pulled out a chair opposite Mikey and Margalo, Hadrian’s usual chair if she had known it.
“Hey everybody,” she said, dividing her smile equally between the girls and the boys. “Am I interrupting?” she asked, aware that, for this lunch table, to have Ronnie Caselli sitting and talking with them would cause a big boost in their ratings. But Ronnie wasn’t one of those stuck-up popular high school girls; she also managed to be a pretty nice person, at least a lot of the time, especially when there wasn’t any boyfriend situation in question. Now she asked them, but looked to Margalo to answer, “You know, I haven’t had a chance to catch up with you since . . .” She hesitated, figuring out how long it had been.
“Sixth grade?” Mikey suggested.
Ronnie laughed. “Come on, Mikey, it hasn’t been that long. But how was your summer? Did you play a lot of tennis?” and then she asked Margalo, “Did you have time to do anything besides baby-sit? Because that savings account of yours must be getting sort of fat by now, even without any Café ME money. But why did you decide to close it down?” she asked them both.
“When we were in Texas—,” Margalo began.
“That’s right! You went to see Mikey’s mother and her new husband. I forgot all about that.” Ronnie turned to explain to Tim and Felix, “I get distracted because in August a whole lot of Italian boys come over to work for a month at a restaurant—the owner’s a friend of my dad’s. They come to improve their English, and Sophie—she’s my cousin, she graduated last year—she and I sort of have to show them around.” Ronnie grimaced, not unhappily and turned back to Mikey. “Is your new stepfather as rich as they say?”
“I don’t know. How rich do they say he is?” Mikey asked, and Ronnie laughed again. Ronnie had a good laugh, as warm and quiet as soup bubbling on the stove. It made you want to join in on enjoying whatever was so funny. That Mikey hadn’t meant to crack a joke never entered anybody’s mind when Ronnie laughed.
“He’s a businessman,” Margalo went resolutely on, even though she suspected Ronnie’s attention wasn’t on her own question.
“Venture capitalist,” Mikey specified.
“—and he advised us,” Margalo said, “to either drop out of school and really concentrate on making Café ME a success—”
“Which he said it could well be,” Mikey added.
“—or close it down,” Margalo concluded. “If we weren’t ready to take it as far as we could make it go. Which we aren’t because we have to go to school.”
“But what will you do instead?” asked Ronnie, who got Mikey and Margalo in a way most people didn’t.
“That’s it, exactly,” Mikey agreed.
“Concentrate on getting out of ninth grade alive?” Margalo suggested.
Ronnie seemed to think that, of the two of them, it was Mikey who made jokes. Margalo she had labeled The Serious One, so she reassured her, “Ninth grade’s not all that bad.”
“I guess, as long as you’re not Hadrian Klenk,” Margalo said.
“I know,” Ronnie agreed immediately. “He has lunch with you, doesn’t he? Where is he?”
“He’s gone missing,” Cassie reported.
As if Ronnie hadn’t noticed Cassie sitting there between Jace and Tim, “Cassie, hey,” she said. Then she asked, “You’re Mr. Paul’s prize pupil, you’d know—does he realize how people are ripping off his art room supplies? Not me, but . . . I can see them doing it. They think it’s a joke.”
“He thinks it’s a joke too. But the joke’s on them because it’s the school that pays for the supplies and it’s their parents who pay the taxes that pay for the school. Peter Paul doesn’t care what they do.”
This puzzled Ronnie. It pleased Cassie and irritated Mikey, and it made Margalo wonder what supplies and for what purposes, other than art, they might be taken, and further whether, if they were taken for art purposes it was really stealing. It confirmed Jace’s opinion that Cassie paid entirely too much attention to things Peter Paul said, it worried Casey, it made Tim consider an editorial on teacher attitudes, and it didn’t interest Felix in the slightest, but Ronnie was simply puzzled to hear this.
After a brief silence, “We were actually talking about those three eleventh graders who . . . follow Hadrian around,” Casey said.
“Do you think they’d stop if I asked them?” Ronnie wondered. “Like Louis last year. Although, Louis likes doing things for me and these guys aren’t my cousins, and . . . so I guess I can’t, and I don’t know who I’d ask to do it for me. But I’ll think about it,” she promised them. “They’re just stupid anyway,” she assured the table. “I’d never date any of them, even if they are upperclassmen.” She glanced at Tim and Felix and added, in case they were getting their hopes up, “I don’t date underclassmen anymore.”
Since they had each privately been thinking of maybe getting their hopes up about Ronnie Caselli, it was actually sort of kind of her to say that straight out. She knew how pretty she was, with her heavy dark hair and big brown eyes and that great body. She knew how most boys reacted to her.
“Poor Shawn,” remarked Cassie, not sincerely.
“Shawn’s way over me,” Ronnie told her, then realized, “I know who they are, those three. The red-haired one, he’s sort of their leader, he’s Sven. And one of the others, I don’t know which one, is Toby, and the third I think is maybe Harold? I’m not sure about him.”
“I’m not sure about any of them,” said Margalo.
“I am,” Mikey said. “And I’m sure I’d like to punch them out.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Cassie agreed. “Then we’d all go with you to the emergency room, wouldn’t we?”
“But you know,” Tim said, with an apologetic smile that crinkled up the skin beside his bright blue eyes, his usual expression when he was being entirely sincere but didn’t want to appear uncoolly earnest, “this kind of thing happens in high school. It’s part of the experience. It’s not just Hadrian, and it’s not just boys who do it either. Girls do it too, although in different ways. And it’s not just high school, either. It’s just worse in high school.”
“Yeah, but where is Hadrian?” Mikey insisted.
Ronnie sa
id, “I have to get going, but I wanted to ask you, Margalo? If you’ve talked to Tan, if she’s mad at me or something. Because she dropped out of fall Track, did you know that?”
They didn’t.
“And when I asked her about it, she just . . . she brushes me off. You know?”
They didn’t know that, either.
“So could you ask her?” Ronnie asked them. “Because you guys always got along all right, and if she’s mad at me, if I’ve done something? Would you tell her I’m sorry? I’d be real grateful if you will,” Ronnie concluded, rising, pulling her scoop-necked t-shirt down over her slim hips, brushing back her long hair, heading towards her usual lunch table among upperclassmen, particularly the athletic upperclassmen. “See you.”
Only Tim and Felix were attending to this because that was the moment that Hadrian Klenk materialized without warning at the table, like some teleported character on Star Trek.
“You’re late,” Mikey accused him, reaching into her jeans pocket to pull out a couple of dollar bills for him.
“I can pick up a grilled cheese sandwich on my way out,” he told them, sitting in the chair Ronnie had just vacated.
“Yeah, but where were you?”
“What happened?”
“Where’s your knapsack?”
Hadrian said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got copies of all the homework for my afternoon classes in my locker, and I can get tonight’s assignments again from people. You have the English assignment, don’t you, Margalo?”
“But what about your books? And your notebooks?”
“I’ve got a good memory and more notebooks in my locker. I always have a spare notebook, and I have a full copy of class notes at home, on my computer. I bring it up to date every day,” he assured them.
“But Hadrian,” Casey insisted gently, “what happened?”
He blushed, pink spreading up to stain his high cheekbones, spreading down his skinny neck into his shirt collar. “I was in the bathroom, alone. And they—So I locked myself in a stall, but they waited. So I told them, if they broke down the door they’d leave fingerprints and get in trouble for vandalism. I knew that only one of them at a time could crawl under, and they don’t like doing things one at a time. So all I had to do was wait,” Hadrian told them, still red in the face. “After a while people came in after lunch, so—You know, they mostly don’t like to do anything to me when there are people around. So all they did was take my knapsack, which I had dropped by the sinks when—”
“Doesn’t that mean you have to keep replacing books?” Felix asked. “Don’t the teachers, like, notice? It’s got to be expensive, all those books.”
“I usually leave the textbooks at home, except Calculus, and that one he lets me keep in the classroom,” Hadrian explained.
“Usually,” Tim told him, “after a few months Sven moves on to someone new.”
“That’s a relief,” Cassie responded in her most sarcastic tone.
“And after sophomore year, once you’re an upperclassman,” Tim continued, “I don’t know why, really, but this kind of bullying almost never happens among upperclassmen.”
“No,” Hadrian agreed. “By then everybody just hates you. And ignores you.”
“Not hate,” Tim said.
“Okay, despise,” Hadrian agreed. He also agreed, “That would be better. But I’m mostly concerned about making it from Monday to Friday. Today’s Friday,” he reminded them more cheerfully.
“Yeah, but it’s only the fourth Friday, and look at you already,” Mikey pointed out. Then, as was her way, she continued on with her own line of thought. “There are thirty-six weeks in the school year—six six-week marking periods—and if today’s the fourth, that means we have thirty-two weeks to go.”
“It also means there’s only a couple of weeks until this marking period ends,” Felix said. “Which means a whole bunch of unit tests coming up so teachers can get some grades on us,” he explained.
“Hard times for Louis Caselli,” Cassie announced happily.
Margalo stuck with Mikey. “You’re forgetting that the first week of school was really only half.”
“Thanksgiving week fills that out,” Mikey answered.
“Thanksgiving’s not until the end of next month,” Margalo pointed out.
“Okay, Thanksgiving week will fill out the first week, when I don’t count it, at the end of next month,” Mikey said, ever reasonable.
“You’re going to keep count?” Jace asked.
“It’s not like it’s some massive mathematical project requiring dozens of computers all linked up together,” Mikey told him. “And it’s not like I have too much to do, without Café ME to work on.”
“And it’s not like I care,” added Cassie, getting up from her seat. “C’mon, Hay. Come with me. I’ll be your bodyguard.”
Hadrian looked a little doubtful at this offer.
“Just to the cafeteria doorway,” Cassie told him. “Unless you want to come to Art with me?”
“I have Calculus,” Hadrian explained, rising to go with her. “Don’t forget I want to get my lunch.”
Tim and Felix and Casey left together, as did Mikey and Margalo, who didn’t have to bother with trays so they could make a quick exit. They dropped their crumpled-up brown paper bags into the waiting receptacle and joined the throng streaming out of the big room. Mikey was chewing her bottom lip in an I’m thinking way, so Margalo just waited for her to start talking.
Finally it burst out. “What are all those people doing at our lunch table?”
Margalo smirked. “It’s your magnetic personality.”
“Right.” Mikey smiled right back at her, with teeth.
“Okay, it’s my magnetic personality.”
Mikey kept smiling.
“Besides, there aren’t that many of them,” Margalo said. They had just stepped out into the hallway when they were joined by Tanisha Harris. “Hey, you two, so what takes you so long at lunch?”
“We were waiting for Hadrian,” Mikey said.
“You should do something about Hadrian,” Tan told her. “You really should. Hey, Margalo.”
“Ronnie thinks you’re mad at her,” Mikey said. “Are you?”
“Not particularly. No more than at anybody else.”
Mikey looked at Margalo, eyebrows raised. Was Tan joking? “Does that include me? Why would you be mad at me?”
For her part, Margalo observed, “You’re wearing a skirt again. And that’s a great-looking top.”
Tan smiled, a secret, satisfied smile. She knew how good she looked. Her long gold skirt swished around her legs. The square-necked top was striped on the diagonal in rich oranges, bright yellows, turquoise blues, and the occasional thin black line, for contrast and emphasis.
“When did you turn into a skirt wearer?” Now that she noticed it, Mikey was a little outraged.
“Nothing wrong with growing up,” said Tan.
That was the difference, Margalo realized. That was the right name for the change. Tan was in their class, a ninth grader, but this year she looked much older than the rest of them. Tan was tall anyway, with long, strong legs, and she wore her dark, curly hair cut short. Tan held herself straight, a natural athlete, confident in her body. She walked along the high school hallways like she should be a queen approaching her throne, or a movie star ignoring her fans. Her dark eyes and high cheekbones, her silky, dark skin—somehow Tan was giving the impression this year of being different, from the rest of them and from who she had been before. Maybe it was her sandals? They weren’t Tevas or Birkenstocks or flip-flops or jellies. They were lady sandals, a broad brown leather band across the foot, a ring into which she had slipped her big toes.
“But mad why?” asked Margalo.
“Not exactly mad,” Tan said. “I just wish you’d do something for Hadrian.”
“We are,” Mikey said.
“Why us? Why not you?” Margalo asked.
Tan stopped, with a little swirl of skirt
, and looked at them. “Think about what would happen if a black kid attacked a white kid.”
“Yeah, but you’re a girl, and you’re wearing a skirt,” Margalo pointed out.
“You think there wouldn’t be some getting even? You think being female is any protection? What century are you living in, girl? Because I can promise you, even in that century being a girl wasn’t much protection. Maybe even the opposite,” and Tan turned away, started walking again, but faster and angrier. They speeded up beside her.
“Yeah, but we’re in school,” Margalo argued. “School’s not exactly a normal social environment.”
“It’s normal enough,” Tan promised her.
“Is that why you’re not taking Track?” Mikey asked. “Because of the bad social environment? Because what about college? What about your athletic scholarship?” Both Tan and Margalo had longer legs than she did so she was almost jogging.
“What about not kidding myself,” Tan countered. “Ask Margalo. She knows what I’m talking about.”
“What’s she talking about, Margalo?”
“She’s talking about how it can be really hard—for some people especially, people who aren’t white, people who aren’t male or rich or somehow influential—to get where you want to go. And that’s if you have somewhere you want to get to. It’s almost worse if you do have somewhere you want to get to. Am I right?”
Tan grinned. “Yes, ma’am. Yes indeedy. You are about one hundred percent correct.”
Mikey explained patiently, “But that doesn’t have anything to do with Track.”
“You tell her,” Tan said to Margalo, then didn’t give Margalo a chance. “Why do you think Margalo works at all those baby-sitting jobs all the time—to buy designer jeans?”