Bad Girls in Love (21 page)

“But Margalo does,” Casey said.

“No she doesn't,” Mikey said.

“You think you're so smart, Mikey, but really you're—you're just bossy,” Casey announced, surprising all three of them. She picked up her tray and left them alone.

“There's hope for her,” Mikey said, while Margalo was telling her, “Good going, Mikey.”

“What is making you so sarcastic?” Mikey demanded.

“I'm not. Not about that, I mean, not about Casey.”

“You're angry at me, aren't you?” Mikey guessed. “Because of the dance.”

“I was,” Margalo admitted.

“Angry because you
do
want to go,” Mikey guessed.

“Don't you?” Margalo asked. “Secretly, don't you want to go?”

“Not really.” But maybe she did. She wasn't exactly sure of herself on this point. And besides, Margalo hadn't said
I told you so
, not once. So Mikey said, “If you want to—I've got a dress, so if you want to we could go. The two of us. If you insist.”

“What do you mean, if I insist?”

“Take it or leave it,” Mikey said.

“I don't have anything to wear,” Margalo said.

“That settles it then. End of topic.”

But Mikey wasn't entirely happy about this conclusion, because once she thought about going, she thought that if she went she might get to dance with Shawn. What if the dance she danced with him was a slow dance?

“We've never even been to a party with dancing, with boys,” Margalo pointed out. “Probably nobody will dance with us,” she told Mikey, as if the going-to-the-dance question was still an open one.

“I thought it's all just everybody dancing with everybody,” Mikey said. “Except for slow dances.”

“And lots of people stay back during those. There'll be a food table, like last year—”

“Only no Chez ME outside, with
good
food,” Mikey reminded her. “But I thought you couldn't go. Because of not having a dress.”

“I could find a dress,” Margalo said. She announced, as if it was now settled, “You have to come shopping with me.”

Mikey didn't feel she had
that
much to make up to Margalo for. “I've got basketball practice. You've got rehearsal. It's not possible.” All at once, Mikey really
didn't
want to go to this dance. Because it was one thing to go to school during the day and not have any boy like you or want to go to the dance with you; but if you actually went, nobody there would care at all about your ability to pick up rebounds or serve an ace or even make really good chocolate chip cookies. Everything important for a dance was things Mikey wasn't good at.

“Don't be a total blotch, Mikey,” Margalo said. “We'll go
to the Next-to-New Friday. After school. Aurora will take us.” Margalo was grinning now, enjoying this. “Or are you going to chicken out?”

“I never chicken out,” Mikey said. “Besides, I'll be doing you a favor, since you want to go so badly. Even if you'd never admit it,” she concluded, and won that argument.

Then she realized—She was going to the dance.

How had that happened?

M
argalo's first question to Mikey when she arrived at school on the Monday morning after the dance was the same as her last question before Aurora dropped Mikey off at tennis on Sunday: “Do you want to talk about it?”

Mikey gave the same answer Monday as she had all Saturday night and all Sunday morning: “No.” Also, she was wearing her cargoes.

“Have you retired the CK jeans?” Margalo asked.

“No,” Mikey said.

So that subject was off-limits too.

But Margalo had confidence. She knew her friend. Sooner or later Mikey would talk, maybe not exactly about how Shawn had ignored Mikey at the dance, or even not exactly about what he'd done to Casey, maybe not exactly about Shawn. But sooner or later, one way or another, Mikey would
have an opinion on something about the dance, and the subject would be open.

Margalo knew what she planned to say to Mikey when Mikey did decide to talk. She planned to tell her what Aurora had said: “You can't learn anything if you never make mistakes.”

Then Aurora had put it another way. “Making mistakes is how you learn.

“So there are no such things as mistakes,” Aurora concluded.

Margalo didn't know about that, and she didn't know about Aurora's logic, but she knew what she'd say to Mikey when the time came. She waited patiently, knowing that with Mikey, there wouldn't be very long to wait.

At their lockers Frannie dashed up to ask, “Isn't it great?”

“You looked like you were having a good time,” Margalo answered.

“Not the dance,” Frannie said. “The dance was just a dance. I mean Mrs. Brannigan.” At their expressions, she explained. “Didn't you hear? Her husband's back.”

Mikey had half unzipped her jacket, but she zipped it up again and demanded, “She let him come back? After what he did?”

Frannie nodded, with the kind of smile that happy was named after.

Because she was always looting on the good side of people and events, Frannie Arenberg sometimes missed the obvious,
so Margalo pointed it out. “He ran off with another woman and she still wants to be married to him?”

“If my father took my mother back, I'd think he was nuts,” Mikey said. “If my mother asked him to, I'd know
she
was.”

“People are different,” Frannie said.

“How do you know this is true?” Margalo asked. The way rumors grew and spread in junior high, it was like they practiced several different forms of propagation all at the same time—roots spreading underground to pop up as plants in new places, seeds dropped on the soil accidentally by birds or animals, spores blown by the wind or sometimes moved to where they were needed by nature's plan. Rumors had a life cycle of their own. You couldn't always believe what you heard, Margalo knew. “Who told you?” she asked.

Frannie cited her source. “Doucelle's mother went to a workshop—you know how teachers have to keep on getting credits to keep their certification?”

“Why would I know that?” Mikey demanded. “Don't they already have enough to do teaching?”

Frannie ignored this chance to be sidetracked by one of Mikey's R&Rs. “It was a workshop on the self-esteem component of adolescent psychology, and Mrs. Brannigan was there too, but her husband was picking her up at the end. They were going out to dinner.”

“Her ex-husband,” Margalo said. “Isn't he?”

“I'm not sure about that. But Doucelle told me yesterday after church they're back together.”

“I thought you went to Quaker meeting,” Mikey objected.

“After
she
got back from church,” Frannie specified patiently. “Isn't it great news?” she asked again.

Neither Mikey nor Margalo were willing to commit to that opinion, so Frannie moved on to find a more sympathetic and enthusiastic audience.

“The really good thing about this is, it'll distract people from the dance,” Margalo said.

“I told you, I don't want to talk about it,” Mikey answered.

That, Margalo ignored. “Unless anything interesting happened that I missed.”

“You missed almost everything,” Mikey reminded her. “All you did was hide out with the chaperones.”

Margalo smiled mysteriously and—she hoped—irritatingly, as if she knew things Mikey couldn't even suspect. Which she did. She smiled and took the conversational offensive. “I thought you didn't want to—”

“I don't.”

Mikey turned her back to Margalo and opened her locker. She made the book and paper transfers that would get her through the first two periods. Then she took off her jacket and stuffed it into the locker, keeping her back to Margalo, as if she was hiding something.

Margalo noticed this—how could she not? She also noticed that Mikey was wearing a nonbaggy white T-shirt. The T-shirt actually fitted sort of close to Mikey's back—not tight, but close—and actually looked sort of good with the
loose-fitting cargoes. Then Mikey turned around and Margalo saw what was written on the front: I ♥ ME.

Margalo didn't know what to think.

She didn't even know what to say.

It was so—so bold, so outrageous, so blatant—and so sludging stupid. It was just like Mikey to wear a T-shirt that said I ♥ ME. Just exactly like her, and Margalo had to laugh. “That'll get you an A in self-esteem,” she said.

Tanisha Harris, passing by, had something to say too: “You tell ‘em,” she said.

Heather McGinty had a question: “What is
wrong
with her?” she asked her friends as they swept popularly and importantly by.

Ronnie Caselli addressed Mikey directly: “It's not too smart to wear that shirt.” Ronnie looked even prettier than usual, so probably she was totally happy being in lurve with Shawn, never mind how he'd acted toward some other people at the dance. Ronnie started to explain, to help Mikey understand. “People might think—”

“I doubt it,” Mikey said.

Ronnie, generous in her romantic victory over practically every other girl in the school, was determined to be kind. She warned Mikey, “People will think you're self-centered. Stuck up.”

Mikey answered with a
Who-cares?
smile.

“It's your funeral.” Her good intentions rejected, Ronnie moved on.

Mikey turned to Margalo. “I got you one too.”

Margalo played for time. “You mean a shirt? Really? You got me a present? A shirt like that one?”

“Except yours is black. With white letters, and . . . and originally I got it for Shawn. I'm not talking about him,” she reminded Margalo.

“OK,” Margalo said, perfectly agreeable. “OK to the shirt, too, but I'm not wearing it to school.”

“That's up to you,” Mikey said. “It's a free country. If you're chicken.”

“Blotch,” Margalo said. “But that's good style, with the contrast.”

“It's not a style,” Mikey answered. “It's what I wanted to wear.”

They went on to homeroom, where between Mikey's shirt and Mrs. Brannigan's husband, people didn't have much time to debate whether Louis and Sal Caselli had really—as they claimed—brought a six-pack to the dance and hidden it in the tank of one of the toilets in the boys' bathroom. “Didn't want to lose the chill, dude.” They didn't have time to wonder what it meant that Ralph had brought Heather Thomas to the dance but never—not once—danced a slow dance with her. “Although, neither one of them danced slow with anyone else.” Nobody had time to replay the big drama of the evening either, more than to ask one another, “Is that Casey girl in school today?” or “Did anyone talk to Casey yesterday? Margalo, did you?”

*    *    *

“Why me?” Mikey demanded.

She shoveled the chicken-and-rice casserole into her mouth as quickly as she could because there were four girls standing there telling her she had to, so she was probably going to have her lunch cut short. But she kept on trying to get out of it. “Why not Margalo? She's actually a friend of Casey's, aren't you, Margalo?”

“It has to be you because you're in the same boat with her,” a girl named Alice told Mikey. Alice, who had fine, straight carroty red hair and big glasses, was Casey's best friend. They had spent seventh grade together on the outskirts of the preppy clique. But this group standing in front of Mikey and Margalo's cafeteria table had Annaliese in it too, and Derrie, and even Aimi, from Margalo's play. This was a mixed group.

“Same boat because of Shawn,” Aimi explained.

“I don't want to talk about him,” Mikey said.

“Neither do we,” they said.

“So, will you?” Alice asked. “Because she can't just stay home from school for the rest of her life, and she wouldn't talk to me.”

“What makes you think she'll talk to me?” Mikey demanded, still eating away. Actually, she liked being asked. Ordinarily they'd have chosen Margalo, but today, of the two, they chose Mikey.

“Couldn't you just try?” Alice asked. “She was really upset. At the dance.”

“I was there,” Mikey reminded them.

“Her mother's really upset too,” Alice added.

“I don't want to hear any more about it,” Mikey said.

“I don't think she's eaten anything since Saturday,” Alice said.

“All
right,”
Mikey said to call a halt to this list of pitiful-nesses.

“And I'm really worried,” Alice said. “Really, really worried,” she said, looking at Mikey out of pale blue eyes, like a desperate rabbit. “What if she does something . . . to herself?” she asked, unable to say this above a whisper, unable to give it its real name.