Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?

  Margalo disagreed. “You know? I think we do. Not for you,” she said, and then added quickly, “Not just for you. Okay. If we have images, we can put names under them. I’m for the Three Stooges, Moe and Curly and Larry, and I think Sven should be Moe. We should do it that way,” she explained, “because if we make it a joke on them, then people will really do it. People like doing the right thing for a while, but a joke lasts much longer.”

  They argued happily about that for a few minutes, who should be Larry, if it was more of a joke if Curly had a crew cut or actually had curly hair, because Toby wore his hair in a short crew cut. Then there was a less happy argument, between Felix and Cassie and Jace, about who was going to make the pictures and what the pictures should look like. It was the should that got them into trouble.

  Finally Tim suggested, “How about one by each of you? That would work pretty well, visually, don’t you think? Three different images, wouldn’t that be more interesting? You guys decide among yourselves who’s going to do which one, but can you have them for me by Monday morning? Because we’ll want to put the notices up on Wednesday.”

  “Will we need signatures?” Casey wondered.

  “We’ll tell people what we’re doing,” they answered. “That, plus the actual restraining orders posted all over the school will do it. I can’t wait for those three to get back to school and see what we’ve got waiting for them. Can you, Hadrian?”

  They all turned to look at Hadrian. He looked both hopeful and worried. “Are you sure it’ll work?”

  “Of course not,” Margalo told him.

  “Because it could just make things worse,” he said.

  “How much worse can they get?” asked Mikey.

  “Things can always get worse,” Hadrian assured her.

  By waiting until Wednesday to post their notices, they gave rumors about what the ninth grade was up to two and a half days to be planted and to grow fat and weedy, fed by curiosity and a sense of injustice. On Wednesday they waited until Lunch A, hoping that the school—by which they meant administrators, discipliners, those in charge of keeping things orderly—wouldn’t have time in only half a school day to make a decision about how to react. This was in case their reaction was to veto the restraining order and take down the notices. Margalo argued, convincingly, that after two-and-a-half days of waiting impatiently to learn what was going on, and then half a day of knowing about it and wanting to take part, the students would be putting pressure on the school to let the restraining order stand. Probably many parents would agree, since parents could get pretty worked up over injustices and victimizations at school.

  After Lunch A on Wednesday they put up their notices wherever they thought a notice would be seen—in the glass window of the library, beside the entrance to the gym, on the Guidance Department’s student-interest bulletin board, on the glass front of the locked case that displayed all the sports trophies ever won by any of the teams, by the doors to both faculty lounges and, finally, one on each of their own locker doors. They posted their restraining orders and then they waited for whatever would happen next.

  The first thing that happened was people everywhere, in all the corridors, in all the classrooms, anticipating how Sven and his goons would react to this. “This’ll teach them” appeared to be the general opinion.

  The bad side of that enthusiastic response was, as Tim pointed out and Margalo couldn’t disagree, that somebody was bound to tell Sven et al, which meant they would lose the element of surprise.

  “What do you mean at all?” asked Mikey.

  “It’s Latin,” Margalo explained.

  “No it isn’t.”

  “Et al,” Hadrian said. “It means and everybody else, in this case, and Harold and Toby.”

  “I hate Latin,” Mikey said.

  “No you don’t,” Margalo told her, irritatingly. “You just don’t know anything about it.”

  “De gustibus non est disputandum,” said Tim, but then he ruined it by laughing. Tim wasn’t the kind of person who could keep a straight face very long.

  “What-Ever,” Mikey said. “You’re right about losing the element of surprise.”

  “But surprise only lasts a couple of minutes anyway,” Margalo pointed out. “And this way, instead of surprise they’ll feel dread, which is more what we want, isn’t it?”

  In a mood of unusual solidarity, not only the people at Mikey and Margalo’s lunch table, but almost all ninth graders too, were feeling pretty good about themselves. They were pretty sure no other ninth-grade class—with the help of some tenth graders and to the envy of the upper classes—had ever done anything like this. They thought they might have discovered an anti-bullying technique that would work anywhere. They wondered if maybe some TV station might hear about it and come interview them. “Ronnie and Shawn should be our spokespeople,” was the general opinion, which went on to recommend, “Better keep Hadrian off camera. He’s too weird.”

  The restraining order—“Not within 200 yards!”—was the talk of the school on Wednesday. High school was like a terrarium, an enclosed ecological system where the introduction of any new element immediately affected the whole. People measured off two hundred yards—“Two football fields, dummy”—and considered what action might be taken against anyone who violated the order. Everybody was eager for Sven and his stooges (Harold had been renamed Stooge One, and Toby Stooge Two, but Sven was always and only Sven) to show up so they could enforce the order.

  On Thursday morning loudspeakers in the homerooms cracked out their usual announcements, reminders of the special schedule in effect on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving break, of the performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream over the first weekend in December, of a Senior Class Prom Committee meeting, and more, before it summoned the day’s assortment of malefactors to Mr. Robredo’s office. Hadrian Klenk’s was the first name on this list. He was instructed to go immediately to see the assistant principal, and so he did, leaving homeroom early and arriving back in the middle of English. It wasn’t until Lunch A that he could report in.

  “You’d think they’d make their own soups,” Hadrian said, settling his tray down on the table across from Mikey and Margalo, who were themselves enjoying (Mikey) a baguette sandwich with ham and brie, and eating (Margalo) a leftover leg of chicken, with a bread and jam sandwich on the side. “I’ll trade my grilled cheese for part of your baguette,” he offered Mikey with—for Hadrian—unusual assertiveness.

  She smiled, How dumb do you think I am? Because I’m not that dumb. “You aren’t going to be one of those people who undergoes a personality transformation when your life improves, are you? Like an overnight screen sensation,” she said, thinking of Shawn Macavity’s swift rise to popularity last year.

  “I don’t think that’s a real danger,” Hadrian said. “I mean, I’m just an excuse here, aren’t I? It has nothing to do with me personally. I tried to explain that to Mr. Robredo, and I think he understood. It took a while,” Hadrian said. He added, “Because at first he blamed me for the restraining order.”

  “Oh,” said Margalo, who hadn’t thought this would happen.

  “Better you than me,” was Jace’s response.

  “What did you tell him?” Cassie asked. “How’d you get out of it?”

  “I didn’t tell him anything,” Hadrian said. “Not at first, anyway.”

  “He threatened you?” Tim wondered.

  “Why would he do that? What would he threaten me about?” Hadrian was puzzled. “He thinks it’s a good idea. Although I did get the impression that not everybody agrees with him. I mean, the Principal might not because of the possibility of negative publicity, and—”

  “He likes it?” Tim asked, surprised.

  “So I told him it wasn’t really my idea. Because—It wasn’t my idea, so why should I get the credit? I told him it was you, Mikey, and you too, Margalo. He said he didn’t know you but I was lucky to have two friends like you.” He looked at them with an eager, intelligent exp
ression, like some scientist checking out his thesis with a microscope.

  Mikey looked at Margalo. What was she supposed to say to this?

  “Us too,” said Cassie. “Me and Tim and Felix did all the work. Did you tell him that?”

  “What about me?” asked Jace. “I did the sketch of Sven. Everybody says it’s great. Peter Paul says it’s the best of the three.”

  For a moment Cassie couldn’t think of any response. Then she could. “Like I care. Like this is all about you. Which it isn’t,” she pointed out. “It’s about Hadrian and our restraining order.”

  The effect of the restraining order was immediate; that is to say, nothing happened. Friday passed entirely without incident, however much people were hoping otherwise, or expecting otherwise. The trio kept to themselves as much as they could, and when the necessity of classes separated them, they kept their heads down and their mouths shut.

  The mood at Lunch A on Friday was jubilant.

  By the next Monday, Sven had withdrawn from school. Toby held out until Tuesday. Toby was going to finish out the year in Iowa, where his mother had a sister, and maybe he’d stay there for his senior year too. Sven, rumor reported happily, was heading off to a military school after Christmas, and until then he was grounded. Sven’s parents had been infuriated throughout this whole process, by the police, by the suspension, by what had happened to their son—although what exactly they meant by that phrase was not clear. They decided he needed more discipline. This left Harold alone, and alone, Harold became Harold the Harmless.

  Hadrian could now, they all felt, walk the halls in safety, although they all did understand that, for Hadrian, safety was a relative term. Hadrian would always—always in school, at least—have less security than most. But he now had a lot more than before, almost as much as everybody else—which, they sensed, probably wasn’t as much as they thought they had. In any case, Hadrian was happy with the results of the restraining order.

  “I guess you’ll really be giving thanks this year,” Tim remarked, and Hadrian agreed.

  As if that weren’t enough, on the Monday after Thanksgiving, John Lawrence was absent from school, which meant that Hadrian, as his understudy, played Bottom during rehearsal. This rehearsal took place in the auditorium, on the stage, where Ms. Hendriks had moved them to give her cast time to get used to an actual theatrical setting. They were rehearsing the awakening scene, which began with people asleep all over the stage. As the scene went on, they woke up and spoke their lines and exited, until only Bottom was left. Until then Hadrian’s acting had been limited to the occasional well-timed snore, which nobody had much noticed, although it made Ms. Hendriks smile to herself. As the last remaining actors went offstage, Hadrian acted Bottom waking up.

  Ms. Hendriks had stood up from her seat at the center of the front row to end that rehearsal, but Hadrian started to speak. His voice was as thick and confused as if he really had been deep in an enchanted sleep. “ ‘When my cue comes, call me.’ ”

  At the sound of this voice Ms. Hendriks fell absolutely still, listening.

  Hadrian stumbled a little, looking around him for friends who had fled long ago, then he seemed to move a few steps closer to consciousness as he came a few steps closer to the front of the stage.

  Ms. Hendriks was all attention.

  Margalo almost laughed out loud from the pleasure of this, of Hadrian acting, of the teacher realizing how talented Hadrian was. This was exactly what she had predicted would happen, and there was the pleasure of Shakespeare’s lines, too, the way Hadrian spoke them.

  Hadrian had the part memorized, and he went smoothly on, with Bottom’s unique logic. This kind of verbal befuddlement drove John Lawrence crazy, but Hadrian had no problem with it. “ ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen,’ ” he said, as if he was speaking perfect sense. In fact, as Hadrian said it, it did. Of course it did. It was Shakespeare.

  “ ‘It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream,” ’ ” Hadrian announced, his face so bright with ignorant self-satisfaction that he could have been Louis Caselli. “ ‘Because it hath no bottom,’ ” he concluded.

  Ms. Hendriks applauded softly.

  The other actors hadn’t noticed any of this. Having moved offstage, they were rooting around in the pile of knapsacks and jackets to find their own, ready for the bell to ring to mark the end of the day. Only Margalo had stayed in her seat to watch.

  “Hadrian,” Ms. Hendriks said. “That was . . . You were Bottom himself.”

  “I wasn’t sure about the pacing in the middle,” Hadrian admitted, standing at the edge of the stage and looking down at the teacher.

  This admission caused her to look at him even more closely.

  “I mean whether speeding up to increase the comedy would undermine the significance.”

  Ms. Hendriks nodded. “Yes, I see the problem,” she said. “Well,” she said, and took a breath. “It’s too late for me to give you the part.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Hadrian told her, and standing there—a scrawny, underage ninth grader again, but perfectly happy—seemed to mean what he said.

  The teacher ran her hand through her hair, and her engagement ring glinted, and she frowned. “It might, if I want to keep my job.”

  “You should keep it,” Hadrian told her. “You’re really good.”

  She thanked him for the compliment, assuring him, “I definitely want to. But . . . I wonder how written in stone that school policy is. Which reminds me,” she said, once again the teacher talking to the student, “Congratulations on your restraining order.”

  “Oh, that was Mikey, and Margalo too,” Hadrian said.

  “And a lot of other people,” Margalo added.

  “Well, congratulations all around, then,” Ms. Hendriks said. Now that she realized that Margalo also had witnessed Hadrian acting Bottom and was unsurprised, she looked at Margalo more carefully. But all she asked was, “Mikey? Mikey who?”

  After a week of intense rehearsing, which culminated in a dress rehearsal Thursday that ran from three thirty until nine thirty, including a break for pizza delivery, Drama Club performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream on Friday and Saturday evening. The auditorium was packed both nights. Some people came twice to see the play, and everybody—everybody in the cast, everybody in the audience—said it was the best Shakespeare production the school had given in years. After the excitement and satisfaction of all that applause, after the presentation by Sally and Richard of an armload of roses to Ms. Hendriks, and the admiring and appreciative speech by the Principal, after the question of whether the handsome, dark-eyed, youngish man who sat at the center of the first row was The Fiancé, and the reluctance—now that it was over—to stop saying their lines, after all of that it was Monday morning again.

  Richard and Sally were not in school the Monday after the play. Carl Dane explained it to Margalo. “They always take a day off after a play. They go to the city or something like that,” he said, with an ambiguous expression, as if to say, Who knows what they get up to? Who cares?

  The mood in the cafeteria during Lunch A that Monday was jittery—excited about the upcoming holidays, but actually, now that the play had happened, worried about the next big school event, which was midyear exams in early January, just a few days after school reopened. Not everybody felt anxious about exams, of course. Not Mikey and Margalo, and not Felix, either, since he seemed genuinely uninterested in grades. In fact, he wasn’t ever sure what his grades were. “I think I’m passing,” he would say. “I’m pretty sure I am.”

  “Why are we talking about exams?” Mikey asked.

  “The exam schedule is posted,” Tim explained. “Teachers are starting to review material.”

  “But we’re only one third of the way through the school year. What are they doing talking about midyear exams now? Are they that bad at Math?”

  Cassie told them, “Peter Paul doesn’t believe in exams. The art exam is your portfolio from the semester’s wor
k.”

  “It won’t be a semester. It’s three weeks short. A semester is half a year,” Mikey pointed out.

  “From semi,” explained Margalo, deliberately avoiding looking at Mikey, as if she wasn’t saying this to get Mikey going. “Which is Latin for half.”

  “Even in Latin their math is wrong,” Mikey concluded. For some reason this particular derangement of numerical rules really griped her, more even than the constant intrusion of Latin into her life.

  “Actually,” Hadrian said, then cleared his throat, getting ready to emit information. “Actually,” he said again, “it’s from the Greek semester, which became Latin semestris, meaning a period of six months.”

  They digested this Hadrian-like interruption, and not even Mikey—who felt somehow proved right by it—could think of anything to add.

  After a while Cassie recommenced. “They tried to make Peter Paul give real exams, on papers. You know? But he refused to, and he said if they made it a requirement, he’d write an exam where all you had to know was your own name, and everybody would get an A.”

  Casey looked up from A Prayer for Owen Meany. “Do you think he really said that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Or thought of it later and wished he’d thought of it at the time, wished it so much that now he thinks he actually did,” Casey wondered.

  Towards the middle of that Lunch A, as if she had eaten in a hurry to be able to come join up with them, Tanisha Harris sat down at their table, beside Hadrian and across from Mikey and Margalo. “Hey,” she greeted them, looking up and down both sides of the table. “Hey, everybody. Listen, Margalo? Mikey? That was great, what you did.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation. Great about the play? Had there been a particularly stunning tennis victory? What had gone on in the last week, besides the play, or before that, before Thanksgiving? Then the penny dropped.

  “Yeah,” Hadrian agreed. “It was.”

  “It was me, too,” Cassie said.

  “And me,” Jace said.