It's Not Easy Being Bad

  “That’s what I thought,” Hadrian said.

  “You’re good at this,” Margalo said.

  Hadrian looked hopefully back to Mikey.

  “Okay, so I like it,” she said. “So what?”

  “You do?” he answered.

  “But we’re done with this petition, Hadrian.”

  “I know that.” He picked up his piece of paper, folded it, and jammed it into his rear pocket. “But there’ll be more, you know. Before we get out of school, there’s every likelihood of more petitions. Although I don’t know yet what they’ll be for,” he said, speaking to himself, really, as he wandered away.

  Margalo picked up the second half of her sandwich, leftover turkey and mayonnaise.

  “I don’t have a turkey sandwich,” Mikey pointed out.

  Margalo chewed. “Too bad.” She didn’t think Mikey would care but she told her anyway, “I went shopping with Aurora and Esther on Saturday, at the New-to-You.”

  Mikey wouldn’t even fake interest. So Margalo didn’t tell her about the incredible sweater she’d found, with an Italian name on its label, costing only one dollar and twenty-five cents, which was more expensive than most of the other selections at that store. Mikey would find out about the sweater soon enough.

  Frannie came by, sat down beside Mikey, said hey, and declined Margalo’s offer of a Fig Newton. Mikey took two. “What time are you assigned to the bake sale table?” Frannie asked.

  The way the committee had divided up the assignments, the people who baked for that day didn’t have to sell, and the people who were assigned to the table didn’t bake.

  “We’re baking,” Mikey said. “We’re always going to be baking.”

  “Can you do that?” Frannie wondered. “Nobody else is.”

  Mikey just smiled, a Just-watch-me smile, and Frannie laughed. “Did Hadrian show you his new design for the petition?” she asked now. “He’s really good with graphics.”

  * * *

  On Friday morning, both Mikey and Margalo carried a big shopping bag into the school. Each shopping bag had three shoe boxes piled up in it. Each shoe box held two dozen chocolate chip cookies. “Which means that together we’re a gross,” Mikey said to Margalo.

  “Better than being plain gross,” Margalo answered as they went down the hall to the principal’s office. To create a larger desire for her cookies by making it look like there weren’t very many, Mikey had decided to leave one of the shopping bags in the office, with the secretary. She hadn’t told Mrs. Chambers about this yet.

  Knapsacks in one hand and shopping bags in the other, they stood in front of the secretary’s desk. Mrs. Chambers was on the phone and tried to learn without talking to them what they wanted, so she could refuse without interrupting her call. She put a hand up to her forehead as if she was feeling for a temperature. Mikey and Margalo shook their heads. No, they weren’t feverish. Mrs. Chambers pointed down her throat with two fingers, and they shook their heads. No, they weren’t nauseated; or maybe no, they didn’t have sore throats. Mrs. Chambers, waiting with the phone held up against one ear, seemed puzzled. She wrote Cramps? on her little notepad, turned it around to face them; and they shook their heads, no cramps. With all of that information gathered, all of it ne a-tive, Mrs. Chambers made her decision. With her free hand she waved them away, Go away, go to homeroom, the bell’s about to ring.

  Mikey and Margalo shook their heads, No.

  Finally, Mrs. Chambers said into the phone, “We’ll give the class a study hall in the library until you get here. As soon as you can,” she said, and hung up the phone. “Then what?” she asked Margalo.

  “Will you keep this shopping bag in your office, please? It’s for the bake sale table.”

  “Mrs. Draper is in charge of bake sale goods,” Mrs. Chambers said.

  “They’ll be safer with you,” Margalo said.

  Mrs. Chambers agreed about that, but said, “I can’t let you. What if everybody wanted to?”

  “But everybody doesn’t,” Mikey said.

  “I don’t need added responsibilities,” Mrs. Chambers said.

  “They’re marked with our initials,” Mikey pointed out.

  The telephone rang, Mr. Saunders called out, “Marie?” from behind the open door into his office, then Mr. Cohen entered to find out where his homeroom students who were scheduled for Mrs. Sanabria’s gym class should go for first period, since she was out sick, and another teacher entered with two eighth-grade boys who glared at one another across the width of the teacher.

  Mrs. Chambers punched a button and picked up the ringing phone. “West Junior High School, good morning.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Margalo said, and set her shopping bag down behind the secretary’s desk. The bag was labeled ME. Each shoebox in it was labeled ME.

  Out in the corridor, Mikey told Margalo, “You take my shopping bag to Mrs. Draper’s room.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I’ll get your books and put your lunch in your locker.” Mikey reached out for Margalo’s knapsack, passing over her own shopping bag.

  “I want to get my own books,” Margalo protested. “I know what I need. Why don’t you run your own errands?”

  “Jumping Jehoshaphat, Margalo, you’re supposed to be so smart about people. You know what’ll happen to cookies people think I made. Just do it my way, okay? It’s only for this week, until the cookies sell themselves.”

  Well, there was a seventh-grade form of the grade school cootie game, Margalo couldn’t deny it. But, “Why does your way mean I have to run around doing your errands? And probably getting in trouble because probably I’ll be late to homeroom,” she groused.

  “You will if you don’t get going,” Mikey agreed.

  * * *

  Mikey had a whole marketing strategy worked out. Her idea was to give Mrs. Draper half of the cookies—three shoe boxes—for the lunchtime bake sale table. Then, at the end of lunch, when those three boxes had sold out, Margalo would bring one more to the table. They would bring the last two boxes out for the after-school sale.

  Mikey had explained it all to Margalo, at length. “My cookies will be better than anything else they have, so everybody will want them. When they run out, people will want them more. Because,” she explained, “consumers want what they think is hard to get. Like Beanie Babies, like Pokémon dolls.”

  “I never wanted any of those.”

  “I didn’t say you, I said people.”

  “I’m people,” Margalo pointed out, on principle.

  “Leaping Lizards, Margalo,” Mikey argued, exasperated. “What is with you? You know I’m right.”

  “I’m just helping you stay calm,” Margalo said.

  “How can you help me stay calm by picking stupid fights with me?” Mikey demanded.

  “By burning up your excess energy,” Margalo explained.

  “This is just basic marketing, creating a need,” Mikey explained.

  Mikey talked confident, but she refused to go anywhere near the bake sale table. They had stapled blue and white crepe paper streamers to hang down over the flowered sheet that Casey Wolsowski’s mother had donated to the decorating committee, and Mikey said she didn’t want to be anywhere near it. “What if cute is contagious?” she asked, and Margalo promised, “You’re immune.” Her cookies were being grabbed up as soon as the boxes were opened, but all Mikey would say about it was, “They’re jerks to sell my cookies for only ten cents. I’d charge at least fifty cents. For the bake sale. I bet I could get a dollar on the street.”

  She and Margalo were pretending not to care, although both of them felt entirely victorious, especially because some time before the end of first lunch, word got out that those were Mikey Elsinger’s chocolate chip cookies that were the most popular item on the table.

  “I could make the committee buy my cookies,” Mikey realized.

  “Are you trying to increase your unpopularity?” Margalo demanded.

  “As if I care.”

>   “Yeah, but the petition changed—”

  “The petition wasn’t about getting popular. It was about tennis, only nobody knows that. Except you.”

  “And besides,” Margalo returned to the point, “the cookies donated to the bake sale are to benefit the class. You can’t charge for them.”

  “I worked it out,” Mikey told her. “It costs thirteen cents a cookie—say, fifteen cents, to be on the safe side—and at fifty cents apiece, that’s thirty-five cents’ profit for each cookie. So selling a gross would get me about fifty dollars in profit. Actually, fifty dollars and forty cents, as I worked it out. If I charged the committee even just a quarter a cookie, I’d make money.”

  “If you tried it, you’d make nothing but trouble.”

  “If I made money, I could buy you a ticket to California. I looked it up on the Net; it’s four hundred seven dollars. Round trip. Booked more than three weeks in advance. Nonreturnable.”

  That stopped Margalo, shut her up, because if there was any way she could pay for a plane ticket out to California, and stay with Mrs. Elsinger for free . . . but that was more hope than she could tolerate, and besides, Mr. Saunders would never let Mikey do that, and besides, the dance was only a couple of months away, minus Christmas vacation, so they didn’t have enough bake sales to cover the price of a ticket, anyway.

  “There’s nowhere near enough time, Mikey. I thought you were so good at math.”

  “You know,” Mikey snapped at her, “computers aren’t the only kind of geniuses people can be.”

  Margalo bit back, “Now you’re a genius? I guess that explains why nobody likes you.”

  “You like me,” Mikey reminded her. She proved her point. “You’d come to California with me if you could, wouldn’t you?”

  12

  Margalo Solo

  Margalo knew ahead of time that Mikey was going to be absent on Monday. Mikey came down with the flu at her mother’s, who returned Mikey on Saturday so she could be sick at home. On Sunday night Mikey called Margalo to tell her this. “How bad do you feel?” Margalo asked.

  “You have to get my assignments,” Mikey said.

  “I wanted you to bring me one of your T-shirts,” Margalo complained. “For this new sweater—”

  “All of the classes. Not just the ones we’re in together.”

  “You will lend me one, won’t you?”

  “Don’t think you can keep me off high honor roll by pretending to forget,” Mikey said.

  “One of the gray ones,” Margalo said.

  “I’ve got three of the five classic flu symptoms. No nausea. No muscle aches.”

  “Maybe Frannie will eat lunch with me.”

  Neither one of them asked Are you listening to me? They each knew that the other was listening.

  “Dad’ll come by for my books after work. He’s staying home with me tomorrow if my temperature isn’t below a hundred.”

  “Do you think you’ll be well enough to come to school on Tuesday?”

  “Don’t forget.”

  * * *

  Margalo felt a little uneasy arriving at West Junior High School when Mikey wasn’t going to be there. She scurried down off the bus and scurried right on into the building, went to her locker and then to the library. She could always read something while sitting in the, stacks, which was maybe two degrees less obviously unpopular than doing your homework in the library. And she did have her civics current events topic to get, too. This was Mr. Cohen’s way of getting students to at least look at a daily newspaper.

  Margalo usually got her items from the library’s copy of the Monitor while Mikey—who took her topics from her father’s copy of the Sunday New York Times—usually hovered around, interrupting. The Monitor had all the big stories on its back page, both national and international, as well as a column of odd facts, like which cities were the most expensive to live in, or if some bank robber had crashed his getaway car right into a police station. Looking for a topic would give Margalo something to do.

  But arty-smarty Cassie was sitting at a table with the Monitor open in front of her. Margalo got into position, hoping that Cassie wasn’t the kind of person who minded people reading over her shoulder.

  “Hey, Margalo, what’s new?” Cassie asked. She indicated the empty chair beside her. “Park your buns. I guess you have Cohen for civics, too.”

  Margalo nodded, sat. “Seventh period.”

  “Weren’t you surprised to find him at the head of that army of revolutionaries?” Cassie asked.

  “I think he was the surprised one,” Margalo commented. Cassie thought that was funny, which made it So far, so good for Margalo, on her own in junior high for the first time. She looked down at the newspaper. “He lets you bring in arts items?”

  Cassie shrugged. “Art’s important. Uncle Tom’s Cabin started a war.”

  No, it contributed to starting the war, Margalo corrected, but not out loud. Out loud, “I guess you’re right,” she said. “Or Picasso,” she added. You could always mention Picasso and be right about art.

  “Exactly,” Cassie said, so probably she didn’t know anything about Picasso, either. She went back to reading but pointed with a finger to a paragraph, to mark her place, and looked up again to say, “Except he doesn’t allow anything about TV. I tried.”

  Cassie had painted her fingernails a light metallic blue, and they were cut short, not even reaching the tops of her fingers; this was not a look Margalo admired. “Cool nails,” she said.

  “Okay, I’m done,” Cassie announced. “I never spend more than twelve minutes a day on homework. What they get is what they get.” She grinned. “Don’t you just hate it?”

  “School?” Margalo asked, not exactly agreeing with Cassie, not exactly disagreeing.

  “Can’t you barely wait until we get out?” Cassie commiserated.

  “I take it you don’t mean just Christmas vacation,” Margalo said.

  Cassie thought that was funny, too. “Are you taking in that item about gangs in schools?” she asked Margalo now.

  “Do you think we have gangs here at West?”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” was Cassie’s opinion. “Saunders would be all over them. ‘Here at West Junior High we have no gangs, only cliques,’ ” she said in a soft, saleslady voice.

  “Which are just wanna-be gangs,” Margalo commented.

  “On the nose, Mar,” Cassie commented, as if she wasn’t, herself, a member of a clique. “I’m taking the article to see what Cohen says.”

  Frannie approached them and greeted them, asking Margalo if she was finished with the Monitor. “Where’s Mikey?” she wondered, and Margalo said, “Home sick.”

  “Tell her I hope she feels better,” Frannie said, and wandered back to the table she came from, carrying the paper.

  “That girl is so nice,” Cassie remarked. “I mean, like, she really is. And pretty, too, isn’t she? I shouldn’t like her.”

  “I can’t not, either,” Margalo agreed. “But, Cassie, how do you get homework essays written in only twelve minutes?”

  Cassie liked being asked that question. “I manage. Sometimes, I keep them really short. Short and brilliant. Or I use an old one. It’s not cheating,” she assured Margalo, in case Margalo wondered. “It’s just—school’s a place I’m serving time, like a criminal in the penitentiary, and my crime is being a kid, until I turn sixteen and can go to art school.”

  “Can you go to art school at sixteen?” Margalo asked, but the bell rang then, so Cassie said, “Talk to you later,” and they hurried off to their homerooms.

  Definitely So far, so good.

  Going down the hall toward English class, she greeted Ronnie, “Hihowareyou?” and was answered, “Cool, how’re you?” to which her answer was, “I’m cool.” Heather McGinty approached them, her face all saddened by fake sympathy, to say, “I meant to tell you how sorry I am that your petition didn’t make any difference.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Margalo said, faking acceptance
of the fake sympathy, and added, “I’m sorry your lemon bars didn’t sell any better.”

  Heather accepted that as if she thought she had cornered the insincerity market. “It’s funny because my mother’s bridge club just loves them, which is why she made them for us. But Frannie bought four, one for each person in her family. She wanted them for Friday dessert. You can tell when someone’s mature,” Heather McGinty informed Ronnie, “by their mature taste.”

  “Did you guys see the hunk on the cover of the new J.Crew catalog?” Annie Piers asked as she came up to join them.

  “No,” Margalo said truthfully.

  “He’s the cutest,” Annie said. “I’ll bring it in.”

  “I always think the best-looking guys are the ones in the Brooks Brothers catalog,” Lacey said. “Even the old guys in there are handsome, and—they all look so rich.”

  Margalo’s house didn’t get any catalogs. Years ago, Aurora had written some special address to cancel all mail-order catalogs, regardless of price, content, or source. Aurora shopped sales, not catalogs. But Margalo agreed with Lacey, anyway, and when Ronnie disagreed, Margalo got pretty emotional. “Holy moley, Ronnie, there’s just no comparison.”

  Ronnie started to giggle. Margalo went right on. “Those J.Crew guys all look so soft. You know? Soft, sensitive types.” She was making it up as she went along.

  “That’s why I like them,” Ronnie said, grinning. “You’re just arguing for the sake of arguing, Margalo.”

  “Her and Mikey, they disagree with everybody about everything,” Heather McGinty announced. “They just want to be different.”

  “Of course,” Margalo agreed. “Otherwise it would be too boring.” And since she was ahead, she detached herself from the group, exiting with Ronnie’s comment, “You’re just bad.”

  Everything went along excellently. At noon, Margalo entered the cafeteria, her lunch bag in her hand and an eye out for Tanisha, because she knew Tan from way back. And if Tan’s jockette friends refused to welcome Margalo? Well, she could eat standing by her locker, get down at least enough to get through the afternoon before some teacher caught her. After lunch was going to be the worst time, and she could spend that in the library.