Margalo had more important things to do than telling Mikey off. She had her own plans. Hurriedly she took off her coat.
“She got me a dress for the dance,” Mikey said. “It was our only break from packing. You’re wearing your dog’s throw-up sweater.”
“Yes.” Margalo hung her coat in the locker.
“To build confidence?”
“Because it looks good on me,” Margalo said. She picked out the books and papers she’d need for her morning classes.
“I was going to say that next.”
“I bet you were.”
“So what?” Mikey demanded.
They didn’t say anything more on that subject, and eventually Margalo, now ready to leave, asked, “What were you packing?”
“Her apartment. So she can move. After she gets married. To Dallas.” Mikey was thumping books into her locker, thumping books down onto the floor, as she spoke. “This week.”
“This week?” Surprise kept Margalo where she was.
“Thursday.”
Margalo considered this. “Married or moving Thursday?”
“Married. She’s moving over the weekend. Next weekend, when the dance is. That’s why I had to go there this one.”
“So the dress is for the wedding,” Margalo deduced.
Mikey shook her head. “Why would I want to go to the wedding where my mother marries someone besides my father? Someone old enough to be a grandfather.”
Margalo guessed, “She didn’t ask you, did she?” What was wrong with Mikey’s mother?
“So what?”
“That slime-ing stinks,” Margalo said. Not that she was surprised. “That stinks big time. Aurora should have custody of you, that’s what I think.”
“You can keep that thought to yourself,” Mikey said. “I never saw a mother I wanted, including my own. That’s not funny,” she told Margalo.
“I know,” Margalo said, but couldn’t stop grinning. “It isn’t a bit funny. But it’s really funny anyway. Listen, I’ve gotta go talk to Hadrian—about the play. He’s going to be stage manager and I have to tell him.”
“Hadrian? The stage manager? I didn’t know there was a stage manager job open.”
“It’s not anymore.” Margalo knew what Mikey was thinking, so she reminded her, “You have basketball practice Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.”
“I can skip that.”
“Sometimes you have games.”
“Almost never. I could easily be stage manager.”
“We can argue about it later,” Margalo said, holding her books close to her chest, sprinting away down the hall to talk to Hadrian before she got to work on the real business of her morning.
The real business was Shawn. If he still wanted to ask her to the dance. If he was going to, if Mikey hadn’t entirely ruined her chances. She spoke briefly to Hadrian and then went to find Shawn outside his homeroom, at the center of a mass of both girls and boys. Margalo made her way through to him, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and holding up the script of the play. “I need to talk with you,” she said to Shawn.
“Hey, Margalo, whazzup?” he asked, and smiled lazily, looking around him for confirmation of his unspoken statement: Here comes another one.
“It’s about the play.” She waved the script in front of his eyes. “It’ll only take—”
“Oh.” Did he look disappointed? Or was he acting? “OK.”
She made her way back through the group, which already didn’t have any time to waste on her, and he followed. “Don’t go far,” they said to Shawn. “Don’t take long.”
“So, what is it?” Shawn asked her. “What’s so important it can’t wait for rehearsal?”
Margalo’s plan was to have a normal conversation. Just in case, just to give him a chance to ask her. She wasn’t going to bring up the subject of the dance; but if there was only the two of them, he could ask her, if he wanted to. In normal conversation mode she told him, “I probably won’t be working with you today. To hear your lines. Or anymore, maybe.”
Now he definitely was disappointed. “Why? What’d I do?”
“Ms. Larch will be going over your lines with you. To hear how you’re doing,” she said.
For about half a minute he didn’t say anything, just stared in the direction of her face. There was no seeing taking place, however.
Margalo waited.
“OK,” he said finally. “Thanks for the warning, Margalo.”
She shrugged.
He waited, in case there was something else she wanted to say to him, and she waited, in case there was something he wanted to ask her, until he finally wondered, “You talk to Mikey since yesterday?”
“Yes,” she said. Steven said guys hate to ask someone out and get turned down, and Howie and David wouldn’t admit it, but they acted like they felt the same. Margalo tried to think of what she might say to let Shawn know that Mikey got it wrong, that she would definitely accept his invitation to the dance.
“I figured, you two talk all the time,” Shawn said.
“You were right,” she said. She was opening her mouth to add a hint (Even if Mikey wasn’t right, you were), when he looked straight into her eyes, still waiting for her to say something. To say what? What could he be expecting her to say? Margalo had no idea. But he wasn’t looking at her like someone who wanted to invite her to any dance.
She stared back into his blue eyes—guessing and ruling out guesses. It felt like a long time before he said, “So, I guess you and Mikey are pretty good friends. Like, always sticking together. That must get hard, I mean for you, I mean sometimes.”
Then Margalo had her idea: So that was what he was playing at. But why would he want to break up a friendship between two girls he couldn’t care less about? She couldn’t answer that, but she could outplay Shawn Macavity, at any game. She could outplay him with one hand tied behind her back, and blindfolded, and her left cerebral hemisphere out of commission.
“Not really,” she told him. Then she said, “I hope you learned at least the first three scenes over the weekend, like you told me you would. I told Ms. Larch you’d said you’d know it by today,” she said. And smiled at him in a friendly fashion, like someone who was on his side and wished him well, but she kept the smile on her face long after its expiration date so he would know she actually wished him the opposite and was smiling at the thought of how much trouble he was going to be in with Ms. Larch. And left him standing there.
All right. That finished Shawn. She was still angry at Mikey, but she knew part of the reason was that even if she told Mikey her guess—that Shawn wanted to see if he could get them quarreling over him—Mikey wouldn’t admit what a slime-ing, slime-ball, slime-brained person she was in lurve with.
Margalo wasn’t about to say much of anything to Mikey about this. People weren’t interested in contradictory opinions of people they were in lurve with. Besides, since Margalo in fact had a lot of sympathy for Mikey’s situation, she didn’t mind keeping quiet on the subject.
* * *
Meanwhile, Mikey was relieved when Margalo headed off to talk to Hadrian. She hadn’t seen Shawn since Friday, and she was ready to have him in her sights. She slung her book bag over her shoulder and went on along the hallway to Mrs. Brannigan’s homeroom.
Mikey went down the hall, concealed in the midst of a crowd. When she glimpsed Shawn standing near the homeroom doorway, she went on for a few paces and then turned to join the crowd of people moving in the opposite direction, to see Shawn from the other side, see him again. But Shawn had moved—had he entered the homeroom?—and for a few seconds she lost him. Then she saw him, across the hallway, and it was Margalo he was talking to. Mikey knew that dog’s throw-up sweater. She also knew what Margalo was doing: Telling Shawn yes, she would go to the dance with him. Which wasn’t fair.
But they said, All’s fair in love and war.
They might say that, but they still hold trials for war criminals, so they didn’t think it wa
s true either, and it really wasn’t fair for Margalo to do this without even telling Mikey.
The first bell rang then and she had to get to homeroom, or she would have gone right up to say something to Margalo, right then, right there. But she had to wait until they were leaving homeroom. “I saw you talking to him,” she said to Margalo as they parted at the door. “I know what you did.”
“No you don’t,” Margalo said.
“Are you going to the dance with him?”
“I’m not going to the dance with anyone, thanks to you.”
“I saw you. You were talking to him.”
“I was warning him that he’ll be rehearsing with Ms. Larch, not me. He hasn’t been learning his lines, and I can’t make him.” Margalo said that as if Mikey was an irritating idiot not to know that already.
“Oh,” Mikey said. Then, “I bet I could. I bet if I was the stage manager I could manage Shawn. I should have been stage manager,” she told Margalo.
“You know you’d be a terrible stage manager for a play that has Shawn Macavity in it,” Margalo told her, not even thinking for half a second about the possibility.
Maybe Mikey could persuade Hadrian to give up the position. In fifth grade Margalo’d said he had a crush on Mikey, and last year, too, so maybe if she asked him, he would. But even if Hadrian did give it up, Margalo would probably think of some reason for Mikey not to get to do it. In fact, there was no maybe about it, because wasn’t that what Margalo just said?
Sludge on Margalo, anyway. She was being a real grump.
But Mikey couldn’t get too worked up about Margalo, because she couldn’t deny that she had ruined Margalo’s chances of being asked to the dance by Shawn Macavity. She hadn’t meant to ruin anything, but she had. So if Margalo wanted to get even, Mikey couldn’t blame her.
“I don’t blame you,” Mikey said as they shifted books in the break between periods two and three.
“Well, that’s a big relief,” Margalo said, sarcastic.
Mikey had had about enough of Margalo’s bad mood. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Margalo said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Go ahead, don’t. It’s a free country.”
Then Margalo turned to catch up with Casey Wolsowski, to go to their A-level English class together, and be smart at English together. Tall, skinny Margalo and short, squat Casey made a funny-looking pair. They looked like an illustration from a grade-school math book: This is a square and this is a line. Margalo didn’t even wave a hand at Mikey or say See you. She just walked away.
At last, Mikey got it: Margalo was angry. She guessed maybe Margalo did want to go to the dance. But how was Mikey supposed to know that? Margalo had never said.
OK, but now that she did know, what could she do about it?
That question occupied her for the rest of the morning, and the answer she came up with pleased her: She would talk to Shawn. After all, he’d said they were friends. He meant just friends, only friends, she knew, but that was still friends, wasn’t it? Friends could ask favors of each other and talk about their problems with other friends.
At lunch Mikey moved quickly, not looking around so as not to get joined up with Margalo. She moved along the length of the cafeteria line until she saw Shawn between a couple of boys, but before she could get close enough to talk to him, somebody in line called her name—Ralph—and he reached out to grab her by the arm. “Did you decide?”
“Decide what?” she asked back, and then she remembered. “About tennis,” she told him.
“Mind like a steel trap,” he said to Ira, in line behind him.
Mikey hadn’t even thought about it, but now she decided. “Sure,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“Good,” he said. “We’ll be good. You know? We’ll make, like, the winning team.”
“If you work on your net game, we will.”
“And humble, too,” Ralph said to Ira.
“Especially the high backhands,” Mikey told him.
She got going again, heading for Shawn, but Cassie got there ahead of her. Cassie stood blocking Shawn’s way, her tray held out in front of her. They stood tray to tray.
“Tooth!” Cassie cried as if she was surprised he was there, even though with her full tray and his empty one she must have walked into him on purpose. “Put me out of my misery,” she requested.
Shawn smiled; he was cool. He glanced around at his audience before he said, “Gladly. Are you thinking of a bullet in the brain?”
“Ha,” Cassie said. “Ha, ha. Very witty, Tooth. That’s not what I was talking about, of course, but you get an A for effort.”
“So what were you talking about?” he asked.
“I meant”—she leaned forward, her spiky hair practically brushing his cheek—”you should tell us who the lucky girl is.”
Shawn leaned back and asked, “Lucky girl?” He glanced around with raised eyebrows, wordlessly asking his audience, were they as puzzled as he was?
“Who you’re taking to the dance,” Cassie said. “The world wonders.”
“Oh,” Shawn said. “That.” He smiled, teasing, mysterious—Mona Lisa except in a Hawaiian shirt, and a guy. “Well,” he said. “She could be you if I didn’t happen to know for a fact that you already have a date. With Jace,” he reminded her. “Isn’t that right, Jace?” he called into the cafeteria.
Mikey didn’t know what to think. Why was Shawn talking as if he wanted to ask Cassie to the dance?
He’d surprised Cassie into having nothing to say. She stared into his face and didn’t say one word. Then she walked slowly away, and he moved on down the line, and the audience got back to their own affairs.
Mikey decided maybe she’d wait to talk to Shawn about Margalo until after she got Margalo’s opinion about what had just happened. But Margalo wasn’t at their table. In fact, she hadn’t seen Margalo since midmorning. Frannie was seated at the table, reading, and Casey was there too. Casey just couldn’t believe what she’d heard, and wanted Mikey’s opinion, because Shawn should be really mad at Cassie for the mean and mocking and hostile way she always talked to him, didn’t Mikey agree?
Margalo never showed up for lunch, but only Mikey seemed to notice her absence. Casey talked away at Mikey about Shawn until she interrupted herself to say, “Look!” and Mikey saw that Cassie was hurrying to catch up to Shawn, who was on his way out of the cafeteria. “Do you think he will ask her?” Casey asked.
“Who?” Frannie wondered. She’d finished catching up on her reading for seminar. “Do I think who’ll ask who?” Frannie was going with a group of kids. They were having a pizza dinner first at Jason’s house, then all going on to the dance together.
“Look,” Casey said again. “There,” she pointed.
They watched Shawn listen to whatever Cassie was saying, saw him smile widely at her. He shook his head and said one short word that you didn’t have to be a skilled lip-reader to know was No. Then she said something more, and he shrugged, opening his hands carelessly out into the air, I didn’t do anything. Then Cassie said something furious furiously—if her words matched her face, they were some of Mr. Saunders’s least favorite vocabulary choices. Shawn’s face mocked shock and he wagged a forefinger at her, Tsk-tsk. Cassie flung herself out of the room.
Frannie looked at Casey and then at Mikey, and then she looked around the table they were sitting at. “What happened to Margalo?” she asked. “Where is she?”
13
ALTHOUGH SOME ARE WORSE THAN OTHERS
Margalo was in the upstairs girls’ bathroom. Sometimes she just wanted to be alone, because sometimes the sadness of the thing overwhelmed her, this hopeless lurve of hers. In the second-floor bathroom, in the end stall, with the door latched shut and its bolt slid into place, she pulled down the toilet lid and sat. She held her books in a pile on her lap. She had her brown bag lunch on top of the books. She sat there, locked in, being alone.
S
he wasn’t really crying. She was just oozing a little.
She’d be fine in time for seminar—she knew that—but she wasn’t fine yet.
She reached into her lunch bag and took out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she’d packed that morning. She must have forgotten to put a thin layer of peanut butter on the jelly side of the bread, because it was soaked purple, and limp. It looked as dismal as she felt.
Margalo oozed and chewed, hunched over the pile of books, oozed and chewed and swallowed. What kind of life was it anyway, when the only place you could be alone was the bathroom?
Then—she heard it with alarm—the heavy bathroom door opened. Margalo swallowed quickly and pulled up her feet, jamming her books uncomfortably into her chest. She wrapped her arms around her ankles and sat there, waiting for whoever it was to go away.
If anyone tried the stall door, they wouldn’t be able to open it. They’d probably think it was stuck, or broken.
The intruder was a bunch of girls, who all came in together. Margalo heard feet moving around and in her thin line of visibility glimpsed two pairs of Hush Puppies and their skirts, then a pair of Nikes at the end of a pair of jeans; she heard the clumpy sound of boots. The different dress styles didn’t surprise her. These days, in eighth grade, cliques didn’t stick so exclusively together. If your boyfriend, for example, was friends with somebody whose girlfriend was in a different clique, you and that girl could get to be friends too. These intruders entered all talking at once, mentioning no names, offering Margalo no clues.
Then she heard a sound she half recognized, and when she smelled tobacco she could name it: A lighter being flicked on.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” a voice said.
“I didn’t used to,” someone answered. Someone Margalo knew—but who? “I don’t smoke much,” this someone said.
Margalo’s sadness was being swept aside by curiosity. She sat very still and tried to identify the voice.
“But when you’ve got a high school boyfriend”—Ronnie, then; yes, Ronnie. Well, well—”it’s useful to have a cigarette sometimes. If you know what I mean,” Ronnie said.