Bad Girls in Love (2 page)

Margalo gathered up her lunch wrappers and put them into the brown paper bag. Mikey piled her dirty dishes back onto the tray. But neither one of them made a move to get up. They were in no hurry to get to an all-school assembly.

“So if you do get this part, do you have to kiss someone?”

“What is this sudden interest in kissing?” Margalo asked.

“What makes you so sure you'll be picked?” Mikey asked.

“I'm not.” The only thing Margalo was sure of was that she could hear Jennet Jourdemayne's voice in her head, speaking the lines in a cool-headed, intelligent, courageous way. She hadn't even thought of trying out until Mr. Schramm told her she reminded him of Jennet Jourdemayne. Mr. Schramm had been in a production of
The Lady's Not for Burning
out in Oregon, he'd said; he'd played Thomas Mendip; this was before he became a family man and turned in his actor's equity card for a teaching certificate. He was
glad to see that they were still reading it in schools, he told her. But didn't she have a class to get to? He wouldn't want to make Margalo late for class, he'd said, and asked, why didn't she try out for Jennet?

“What if you don't get it?” Mikey asked. “What if Ms. Larch picks someone else? Like, Rhonda,” she suggested, naming one of their long-time favorite people to dislike.

Margalo had the answer. “Then I'll have more time to sell cookies, which means I'll have more money in the bank.”

“Although you'll still have to do something for the play. All eighth graders do. I'm going to be an usher.”

“Usherette.”

“Usheress.”

“In a little short, swishy skirt,” Margalo said, grinning.

“I'll swish you,” Mikey said.

“You'll need to style your hair, like, curl it for an updo. I'll help,” Margalo offered.

Mikey's hand went up protectively to the thick braid that had finally gotten back to long enough, almost halfway down her back. “No way.”

“You'll be adorable,” Margalo promised—and they both started laughing.
Mikey
and
adorable
were vocabulary words from two different languages. Two different languages spoken on two different planets.

“You should usher too,” Mikey suggested.

“Ush,” Margalo corrected.

“When you don't get the part. It's a minimum-stress
assignment, and minimum time commitment. Unless—would they give you one of the other parts? Is there another part for someone tall and skinny?”

“Jennet is the only part I want.”

“You
could
play a man,” Mikey suggested. This was not meant to be flattering.

“It's too bad you didn't have the nerve to try out,” Margalo said.

“I thought about maybe that little priest, the one with his lute, the spacey one.”

Margalo believed that the best revenge was a quick one. She said, “I guess, because he's supposed to be so short and round, you thought you'd look right.”

“Also besides, I don't have time to learn lines. I'd have to miss a lot of practices and also I don't want to let the team down by not playing in a basketball game because of some rehearsal. Also, tennis begins in March, and I'm not about to miss that. So it's not that I didn't have the nerve,” Mikey said, with her
I-guess-I-win
smile.

Margalo's attention had moved on to the new problem: If she didn't get the part, she
was
going to have to do something else for the play. Every student in each grade—and every teacher, too—had to do something for the West Junior High School annual class projects, the dance given by the seventh grade for eighth graders, and the play given by eighth graders for everyone. She was about to ask Mikey about the ushering
committee, when Tanisha Harris pulled out one of the empty chairs—there were many to choose among near Mikey and Margalo—and sat down in it.

Tan was the only girl as serious about sports as Mikey. In grade school, when they first met her, she was serious about volleyball, but since last year she'd been serious about basketball instead. Tan had a good chance at an athletic scholarship for college, since she was a really good athlete, and smart enough, and African American. She looked at Margalo with dark, measuring eyes and said, “I've got bad news. Do you want to hear it?”

“How bad?” Margalo wondered.

“Not bad like your dog died. This is like—a dead-goldfish level of badness,” Tan said. She had always run closer to their wavelength than other people. “It's like a you'll-hate-dinner—it's on a liver-for-dinner level.”

“I don't mind liver,” Mikey objected.

“OK,” Margalo decided. “Tell.”

“My grandmother loves it,” Mikey told them.

“You know that today in assembly they're announcing who got parts in the play?” Tan asked.

Margalo nodded.

“Sautéed, with onions and red wine,” Mikey said.

“I know who's going to be Jennet Jourdemayne. Sorry, but it's not you.”

“Hah!” Mikey crowed. All victories welcome, that was her motto.

“Hunnh,” said Margalo. She was cool, nothing surprised her, nothing got her excited, nothing could upset her or disappoint her.

“I told you so,” Mikey said.

“Mikey,”
Tan protested.

“Well I did,” Mikey maintained.

Tan grinned. “You're so bad, you're perfect.”

Mikey smiled right back at her, a
So-what?
smile.

“How'd you find out?” Margalo wanted to know.

“The way they're announcing it, they're calling the people up onto the stage. I guess they think that'll make it more exciting for everyone, like the Oscars or something. Aimi told me. She's going to be Jennet. Ms. Larch told her yesterday so she'd be ready to be called up on stage, and Aimi was too excited not to tell someone.” Tan continued, “I thought you were just as good as Aimi in tryouts. You're a good liar, so it makes sense that you'd be a good actress.”

“Aimi must have been better,” Mikey pointed out. “Otherwise, why would she get the part?”

“She's black.” Tan made a point of not adding
dummy
, made such a big point that she might as well have said it out loud, which was exactly her point. “Except for that, Aimi and Margalo are built a lot alike, tall and slim, and they're both pretty enough. The only real difference I can see is Aimi's not white. So, I figure, Ms. Larch wanted someone who looked different from everybody else for Jennet, because . . . People in those days would single her out and believe she might be a
witch
because
she looked different—when they were looking for someone to blame, for a scapegoat when things went wrong.”

“That's smart casting,” Margalo agreed.

“Did she tell Aimi all that?” Mikey asked.

Tan just looked at her, eye sarcasm.

“Yeah, but then how do
you
know?” Mikey insisted. Then she said, “Wait. OK. I do get it.” In case they didn't believe her, she explained. “The play's set in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages are a lot like junior high. The Middle Ages are the junior high of history. In both places, if you look different, or act different, people are nervous, scared of you. Get people scared of you and they'll start doing things to make themselves feel un-scared, like—burning you at the stake. It's as simple as math: Different is scary, new is scary, change is scary—burn, burn, burn.” Each time she said
burn
, Mikey pointed at Margalo or Tan, as if she was sentencing somebody to be tied to a stake and roasted alive. “I'll tell you what scares
me,”
she said, as if either Margalo or Tanisha had asked. “People.”

“The Salem witch trials weren't during the Middle Ages,” Margalo pointed out.

Mikey ignored her. “By ‘they' I mean mostly men,” she said. “Because women couldn't do much of anything back then. Well, they could, and some of them did. Joan of Arc, for example, and look what happened to her because she acted different from other people, and looked different, especially
dressed different. Things haven't really changed at all since then, have they?”

Margalo considered deflating this R&R, which was what her mother called it when Mikey got going on some topic, because it was the opposite of Rest and Recreation. With Mikey, Aurora maintained, R&R stood for Rant and Rave. Margalo was about to advise Mikey to put a lid on it, when Frannie Arenberg, who'd stopped on her way out of the cafeteria to listen, did it for her. “I think the human race has made some good progress since the Middle Ages,” Frannie said.

“Yeah, but you also think Louis Caselli isn't so bad,” Mikey pointed out.

“That's because Louis has a giant crush on her,” Tan said.

Frannie never minded being teased, not about her plain, Quaker style of dressing, not about her reputation as the nicest person in school, not even about Louis Caselli's crush. She said, “I feel sorry for Louis.”

“Louis has the brains of a mushroom,” Mikey agreed. “We have to forgive him. At least,” she added, “the rest of you have to. I don't think I will.”

“Besides, as we all know, Louis is no competition for . . .” Margalo lingered on the silence before she uttered the name in a breathless, sighing voice, “Gregory Peck.” Frannie's crush on Gregory Peck had begun when they'd been shown the movie of
To Kill a Mockingbird
last year. She didn't care if he was old enough to be her grandfather—or great-grandfather by now; and Margalo did agree that he was incredibly handsome.
But there was old, and there was way old, and Gregory Peck was definitely in the second category.

As soon as Margalo mentioned the one, Mikey leaned toward Tanisha to murmur the name of the other: “Tiger Woods.” In eighth grade you wanted to be half of a couple, so if they didn't have a personal boyfriend, girls could get crushes on celebrities. The important thing was to have a name linked to yours. Almost all eighth graders were linked to someone. Not Mikey, and not Margalo, and there were a few others, too, although not many. Casey Wolsowski was one of these—unless you counted linking your name up to the hero of some book, which most people didn't. This far into the year everybody knew about Frannie's crush and Tanisha's ideal man, so they got teased a lot.

Frannie and Tan looked at each other. “Their time will come,” Tanisha promised.

“In your dreams,” Mikey answered, and Margalo let Mikey speak for her in this, as if she and Mikey were in exactly the same position, untouched, and untouchable.

“Anyway, I'm not about to waste time and erasers on a notebook,” Mikey declared. Eighth-grade girls erased their boyfriends' initials onto the fronts of their spiral notebooks. It was practically an eighth-grade art form, initialing anything you could get an eraser on. “Haven't you seen Ronnie's notebooks, with Doug's name all over them? And Rhonda—it's pitiful.
She's
pitiful. She always was, but this year she's reached new levels of pitifulness. Or Heather McGinty, the
way she drools around after whoever scored highest in the last game, whoever everybody's talking about. Acting like she's some movie-star irresistible sex goddess, hinting about how hot she is.” Mikey concluded this R&R, “The whole thing's—it's really embarrassing, and Heather's not even embarrassed.”

Then she grinned. “I'm enjoying eighth grade.”

Then she glared at Frannie. “What's so funny?”

Frannie stood up, shaking her head. “I have to get an aisle seat for the assembly,” she apologized, “because I got a part.”

“Which one?” Margalo asked, making a silent guess,
The mother
.

“The mother,” Frannie said.

“Typecasting,” Mikey announced.

“No it isn't,” Margalo said. “The mother isn't—”

Mikey held up both hands, palms out like a policeman facing traffic,
Stop
. “Leave me something to be surprised at, why don't you? Who else got parts?” she asked Frannie.

“I thought you wanted to be surprised. Anyway, we're not supposed to tell,” she added, leaving.

“Are you trying to get rid of the few friends you have?” Tan asked Mikey.

“What did I do to you? I just said his name, just Tiger. Tiger, Ti-ger.” Mikey ducked out of Tanisha's reach. “I didn't say anything about, That's a weird name, or, How dumb is it to think you're in love with some sports hero who never even heard of you and never will.”

“No different from a movie star or a rock star,” Tanisha maintained.

But Margalo disagreed. “Tiger Woods is a whole different story from Tyrese.” Then she was diverted. “Denzel Washington. I could go for Denzel Washington.”

“Or Will Smith,” Tanisha agreed.

Mikey groaned. They ignored her.

Margalo didn't remember when it had become fun to make lists of handsome guys, fun just to think about who should be on the list; but she didn't deny that she enjoyed it. It was more interesting than listing all the boys in your class, ranked in order of who you'd like to kiss, or go on a date with, or marry, which one you'd most want to be marooned on a desert island with, or—this was the currently popular list—dance with, or slow dance with or super slow dance with, which were all the same unspoken question:
Who do you want to go to the dance with? If every boy was going to ask you, who would you choose?

As some art-room kids passed by, Cassie Davis—front-runner for the title of eighth grader with the worst attitude—stopped to ask Mikey, “You coming to assembly? Or what?”

“Is there an
or what
choice?” Mikey asked, then “I'm not joking,” she protested.

“I know,” Cassie said. “That's what makes you so funny.”

“I'm not funny,” Mikey told her.