Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (23 page)

When she entered the auditorium, Hadrian was standing alone on the wide stage. Students were scattered around in the front rows—Richard and Sally off to the far side of the third row, with their heads close together, Mikey noticed, grateful that it was their heads and not their lips. Margalo and the teacher were sitting alone together at the center of the first row. They were both looking up at Hadrian.

Onstage Hadrian looked older and taller; he sounded older and taller too. He was wearing his usual khakis, belted up high, and his usual shirt, but for some reason he had a tie loosened around his throat. Every now and then, as he went through his lines, he fiddled with the tie, almost as if he was a man getting dressed up to go to work, or dressing down after his day's labors.

“Try taking a couple of steps towards rear center stage on that line,” Ms. Hendriks instructed Hadrian. He nodded, then repeated his lines—which Mikey recognized as coming from the very start of the play. “ ‘Up here,' ” said Hadrian as
he moved towards center stage, indicating with a large gesture of his arm some invisible line across the stage, “ ‘is Main Street.' ”

“That's good,” Ms. Hendriks said. “That's just what I meant. Keep moving, now.”

“ ‘Way back there,' ”—another gesture towards something offstage—“ ‘is the railway station; tracks,' ”—he turned, gesturing—“ ‘go that way.' ”

The way Hadrian was pointing, and acting as if he could see something where he was looking, Mikey could almost actually see what he was talking about, in a distance that stretched beyond the walls of the auditorium. For a minute she believed in this town Hadrian was talking about, even though she had held the book in her hand and read the words of the play in it and knew it was imaginary. Margalo was right about Hadrian. He could act.

Sometimes it was pretty tiresome how right Margalo always was.

Still not knowing what she planned to do, Mikey went on down the dimly lit aisle and slipped into a row, sidling along until she was behind a group of boys and girls. They turned their heads to see who it was, then turned back to face front, not interested. Some of them had schoolbooks open on their laps, a couple were writing in notebooks, a couple studied their copies of the play. When they spoke, they kept their voices low.

Mikey decided to play this like a tennis match, waiting to see
what the opponent would send across the net to her. Once she knew that, she would know how she wanted to respond. She leaned forward in her seat and eavesdropped. They were talking about a couple of new releases, their senior research papers, and how Chet Parker was still dating Ronnie Caselli—“That ninth grader, the beautiful one, it's been almost a month.” This topic led them to plans for a restaurant dinner before the prom. (The prom? The prom wasn't until May and they were already talking about it? What was
wrong
with these people?) Every now and then one or another of the girls would slap her book, saying, “I just
can't
.”—Can't get this scene right, can't do this problem, can't decide whether to buy the CD or not. The boys were talking about how the pre-season games looked, what kinds of summer jobs they wanted, seriously cool CDs, and one or two grumbled, or boasted, “I'm going to have to just bluff my way through the scene.”

After several minutes of eavesdropping Mikey leaned even farther forward to say—speaking to no one in particular, just speaking between two heads to anyone close enough to hear—“I don't know what to think about Margalo being robbed. What do
you
think about it?”

“We don't,” said Ann Witherspoon, a junior who planned to apply to Berkeley and so didn't encourage trouble. “We think about the play.”

“Like how different the world then was from the way it is now, and why we're putting so much work into something so irrelevant,” said Carl Dane.

Mikey had heard from Margalo what people were saying, and she had her own idea about that, so this was a shot she could make a good return on. “You're all wrong,” she told Carl. “You're not getting it.”

He turned his head to ask, “Oh yeah?”

“Oh yeah,” Mikey assured him, and smiled back, a
Look out, Buster
smile. “Because you know how sometimes things seem simple but they're really not? Like when Agassi's game is on, he makes it look easy to make those shots. But if you think it really is easy, you're missing the best of his play.”

From the row in front John Baker said, “I can dig that.” He turned to Missy, beside him, to ask, “Can you dig that?”

“You mean like that Picasso drawing of the dove of peace?” asked Ann. “I guess, if you put it that way—”

“Put it that way,” Mikey advised. Now that she had their attention, she asked again, “So what about Margalo's money?” a hard shot straight down the center, to see what kind of a return that would draw.

“Look, Mikey,” they began.

“How do you know who I am?”

“Word gets around,” said Carl, sounding sarcastic.

“We're sorry she got robbed and all, but—you know—what was she doing bringing all that money to school? And leaving it in her knapsack?”

“You mean it's her fault?” Mikey demanded.

Ms. Hendriks turned around to shush them, and Margalo saw Mikey but was too occupied to greet her. Hadrian saw
her too. Mikey lowered her voice. “You think it's her own fault if she got robbed? So, what is it? If you run over a dog it's the dog's fault for being there?”

“If it ran out in the street,” someone pointed out.

“So if Hadrian gets his collarbone broken by the Three Stooges, it's his own fault for—For what? Being in school? Being so smart he skipped grades? No, wait, I get it, he shouldn't have been in the hallway where they could see him.”

“I didn't mean that. But Mikey, I didn't do it, what do you want me to do about it?”

“It's not like we can fingerprint her wallet.”

“After all this time.”

“And the money's long gone by now, so what's the point?”

“It's not like we even know who did it.”

“So what do you want from us?”

When they asked like that, Mikey discovered that she had an answer. “Pay her back.”

“What?”

“Why?”

“Well,” Ann said thoughtfully, “you know, if I'd been robbed, I'd feel better if people cared. It would show we cared if we did that.”

“Yeah, but I don't happen to have two hundred dollars to give away,” John Baker pointed out.

“People!” called Ms. Hendriks, clapping her hands sharply together. “May I ask you to please, please keep it down?
You've got Hadrian so distracted he can't remember half his lines.”

“Hadrian? Forget a line? I wish,” Carl murmured after the teacher had turned her back again.

Ann whispered, “But John, you have ten dollars, don't you? Or five? I mean, I've got ten I could spare easy, and there are enough of us in the cast . . . we
could
do it. No, I'm serious. Because, personally, I'll feel better if we do, because . . . I don't like anybody being robbed, do you? And we're all supposed to be so tight, in a play.”

“Yeah, but do you think enough people will chip in?”

“We could ask. Ms. Hendriks, too, she'd probably put in a fifty—”

“Teachers don't have fifties.”

“—just to save the play.”

“But why should I pay for something I didn't do?” John Baker asked.

“Because,” Mikey told him, “it's the only thing you
can
do.”

“Besides,” whispered Ann, “what if it was you who was robbed?”

“I don't leave stealable stuff around in Drama,” he assured her. “Not anymore.”

“Exactly,” Ann said, and waited.

“How much are you going to put in?” John Baker asked Carl Dane.

Mikey's work was done. She leaned back in the seat and
took a look at the stage. Hadrian was still alone there, but now he had come to the edge and was kneeling down to talk to Ms. Hendriks, and a couple of times he looked up to where Mikey was sitting, almost directly in front of him. Mikey waved, but he didn't respond. Finally Ms. Hendriks shooed him offstage, calling, “Alice? Missy? Let's do your Act I scene now.”

Hadrian, meanwhile, disappeared behind the curtains. Mikey watched for where he would emerge. But he didn't come out, not from either side of the stage.

Probably he was scurrying around backstage, hiding behind some flats or something. She didn't know why he should be scurrying away from her, and she planned to let him know that as soon as he came out. It wasn't as if she was about to stuff him into trash cans or anything. She'd thought he was someone who liked her, or at least someone who didn't mind her. Especially if he was her secret-admirer telephone caller from last year.

Mikey was feeling pretty relaxed and good about herself. She had the feeling that, beginning with her brilliant Andre Agassi comparison, she had entered the zone. If this was tennis, and she was playing in the zone, what she would do next would be to go on the attack. She would head for the net and try to force an error. Mikey slid on over to the aisle and strode up it until she came to row three. There she went in to sit right up next to Sally.

“Who—?” Sally said.

Richard kept his arm tight around his girlfriend's shoulder. “Can't you tell when you're not wanted?” He leaned forward a little bit so Mikey could see past Sally's head to his unfriendly face.

Sally's was the question Mikey chose to answer. “I'm Margalo's friend. In fact”—she smiled at the two of them,
You don't want to hear this, but you can't stop me
—“I was with her when she discovered she'd been robbed.”

She waited, in case either one of them had something to say. Like, for example, “You mean after I stole her two hundred and nineteen dollars?” But they just looked at her as if she was seriously weird. Neither one of them spoke.

Their silence surprised her. She'd have thought Richard at least would say something, like “So what?” Without their saying something, Mikey couldn't think of what came next. She just sat there staring back at them, waiting, like a player who has made a weak net shot watching the ball sit up high, watching the opponent draw his racket back to fire off a shot right past her. She was cross at herself. She should have had something ready to say next. But what could it have been? Maybe—

“Where was that, exactly?” Sally asked, politely curious. “On the bus?”

Why would Sally want to pretend to be interested in where Margalo was when she found out she'd been robbed? This was making no sense to Mikey, but in tennis terms it was a returnable shot so she said, “At the bank. She'd already
filled out the deposit slip.” And why
not
go for a put-away? “Personally? My theory? I think you did it.”

“Me?” asked Richard, and, “Me?” asked Sally. They looked at each other, little private smiles dancing up at the corners of their mouths.

“Who do you think you are—Columbo?” Richard said, mocking.

“No, she's Jessica Fletcher. You know, Richard, in
Murder, She Wrote
.”

“You watch that?”

“My grandmother does,” Sally explained.

“If you want an alibi,” Richard told Mikey, smirking, “at the time of the crime me and Sally were in a place we know. A private place. We were
together.
Do you want to know more?” He raised and lowered his eyebrows at her, and Sally giggled, burying her face against his shoulder, protesting, “Richard! You're terrible!”

Mikey got up then, but before she went away she leaned towards them to ask—angling the ball over so close to the net nobody could possibly get to it—“Did I say, I think you could have been in it
together?”

That was her exit line. Where
had
Hadrian scurried away to, anyway? She was already going to be in trouble for being late to basketball so she'd have to ask Margalo about it on the way home.

But Margalo derailed that conversation by starting out, “Ms. Hendriks doesn't want you at any more rehearsals. She
said that no nonparticipants should be present, but she really meant you.” After that they had to talk about abuses of power, if this was one, and democratic rights, if the auditorium was a public place, open to everyone, and then if students had any democratic rights. So Mikey just had to act on her own.

She telephoned Hadrian after supper. This, when she thought about it, really served him right, since it was his own phone calls last year that had gotten him into whatever trouble he thought he was in with her. She dialed the number she found in the phone book, the only Klenk listed, and when a woman answered, she asked for Hadrian.

The woman said, but not to her, “It's for Hadrian.”

“A phone call for Hadrian?” said a man's voice.

“It's a girl, I think.”

“A girl's calling for Hadrian?” the man said.

“You get him,” the woman said. Then, “Hello? He'll be here in a minute. You hold on.”

Mikey held on.

After a few long seconds the woman said, “Are you there? Did you hold on?”

“Yes,” Mikey told her. Was it possible that Hadrian was the most normal person in his family?

“I couldn't hear you breathing.”

Mikey waited some more, until finally the woman asked, “Are you still there? Because here he is.”

After muffled conversation—which sounded like, “Give it
to me,” and, “I was just holding her on the phone for you”—“Hello?” came Hadrian's cautious voice.

Mikey had decided to give him a taste of his own medicine. “So I want to talk to you tomorrow morning, before homeroom, in the library. You don't have to worry. You won't be alone with me,” she said, and hung up before he could say anything. Hadrian Klenk wasn't the only person who could ambush people on the phone.