“Doesn’t he work?” Margalo asked.
“Yes, but at home. He does people’s taxes. The schools were so bad in the last place we lived, we’d have been put ahead, and my parents didn’t want us to be the youngest in our classes.”
“Like Hadrian Klenk,” Margalo said.
“Hadrian doesn’t have much fun at school,” Frannie agreed.
She and Margalo talked away easily, and Mikey ate.
“What does your mom do?” Margalo asked.
“She gets businesses back on their feet, when they’re in trouble. They hire her to tell them what’s going wrong, and why, and how to get things going right.”
Mikey spoke. “A management consultant?”
Frannie nodded.
“I thought you were Quakers,” Mikey objected.
“Friends have always been successful business-people,” Frannie said. “Because of being so practical.”
“Friends?” Margalo asked.
“That’s what Quakers call themselves, the Society of Friends.”
“Did you like home schooling?” Margalo asked. “Or did you miss being with other kids?”
“I had my three sisters, and I saw other kids at the weekly meeting. My dad’s a good teacher. He knows just about everything. So I liked it. The only problem is, I didn’t take any of the standardized tests regular schools give in sixth grade.”
“That’s why you’re not in a seminar,” Margalo guessed.
“You could have taken the tests at the public schools when they were being given there,” Mikey pointed out.
“I’m not complaining,” Frannie said.
“Okay,” Mikey said. “You’re not. So what do you want from us?”
“Zut, Mikey, alors!” Margalo protested.
But Frannie didn’t take offense. “You’re both in Mrs. Brannigan’s seminar, and that’s the one I want to sit in on. The school is giving me a two-week trial period, to see if I’m a good enough student to take seminar. Can you believe it took all this time for my parents to persuade Mr. Saunders just to let me try? And that’s after we finally got an appointment, so we could argue our own case.”
“Why us?” Mikey asked.
“I want to know what you think of her.”
“But why us?” Mikey repeated.
“Because you think for yourselves,” Frannie explained. “Everybody else gossips about her, but if you two like her, she’s probably a good teacher. Do you like her seminar?”
“It’s okay,” Mikey said. “For school.” Her attention returned to the chasing of kernels, which skidded around the plate trying to escape her Terminator fork. “We’re about to start the Renaissance.”
“I know. I wish I’d been there for Greece. Did you read the myths?”
“Literature’s not until next year,” Margalo said. “But we heard about Schliemann’s excavations. Even Mikey liked Schliemann. You can admit that, just to us, Mikey.”
“Everybody told him he was wrong,” Mikey explained, “and he wasn’t.”
Frannie went along with this conversation as if they were friends, the three of them, and knew each other. “So, can I go to class with you for the trial period? What are you reading, or are you doing art now?”
“Art this week,” Margalo said. “Next week we’re talking about The Prince.”
“Machiavelli,” Mikey announced. “I’m looking forward to Machiavelli.”
Frannie shook her head. She’d never heard of him. “I just don’t want to go in alone. I know it wouldn’t bother you, Mikey, but it does me. It’s okay, isn’t it, Margalo? If I stick with you two?”
“As long as you don’t stick too close,” Mikey answered, and that set Frannie off again. “You laugh a lot,” Mikey observed.
“People are pretty funny,” Frannie explained.
“You mean they’re ridiculous,” Mikey corrected.
“Yeah, sometimes that’s what I mean,” Frannie agreed.
3
One (bad) Egg, Scrambled
The Monday morning after Halloween, Margalo waited outside for Mikey’s bus, so she could hear about the party, who talked to who about what, how they liked the food, and if—against all probabilities—Mikey had been transformed into a popular person. The day was sunny and crisp, a clear blue sky over the flat roof of the school, people standing around in their down vests and Polartec vests, or their heavy knit sweaters and hooded sweatshirts. Margalo waited for Mikey, and a few people greeted her as they got off buses, “Great sweater.”
It was an old Irish knit, an Aran sweater someone had discarded because of a couple of big holes. Margalo had paid fifty cents for it and sewed up the holes; now she looked like someone out of a PBS special about Ireland. Or Scotland, maybe, somewhere overseas where people were exotic and more interesting.
Finally, Mikey came down the steps of the bus, in her cargo jeans and a green and white jacket, looking a lot like a brussels sprout.
A brussels sprout having a serious attack of bad temper, Margalo realized. Mikey emanated a force field of fury so strong that everybody was giving her a lot of room, and looking back at her over their shoulders. Mikey smiled a Don’t-even-think-of-it smile, more warning than friendliness, more threat than warning.
Margalo considered going somewhere else, maybe the library, maybe the cafeteria, to join up with other people for the rest of the day.
Or maybe the rest of her life.
But instead she sidled up next to Mikey. “Hey,” she greeted her.
Mikey didn’t respond, not even to the extent of looking at Margalo. Margalo didn’t have to be a mind reader to get the message: Get lost, why don’t you?
With all of the step-siblings and half siblings Margalo dealt with, she knew lots of ways to start a conversation with somebody in a funk. You could ask, “What’s wrong?” with just the right amount of sympathy in your voice, or you could remark, “You look cheesed off,” which avoided bad language but still sounded lively. You could be direct: “Want to talk?” Or indirect: “I’ve got a problem I hope you can help me with; is this a good time for you?” You could blatantly ignore the person’s mood, and get points for understanding that someone didn’t want to talk about it, by saying, “The Titanic sank because of faulty rivets; did you know that? It’s true, I read it in the paper.” You could even try a bad joke, like, “How many teachers does it take to change a lightbulb?”
Usually, Margalo was pretty skilled at handling people, but Mikey, well—Mikey wasn’t people. Mikey was Mikey. And Mikey was looking at the West Junior High School students as if she were an alien from another universe, whose eyes could kill off any carbon-based life-forms that happened to be in range. Whose smile was a death ray.
Her glance fell on Margalo. “What’s so funny?” she demanded, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “They’re not going to get me,” Mikey promised Margalo. “There’s only sixteen hundred and fifty days left until we graduate from high school,” Mikey said grimly. “Not counting snow days. I can make it for sixteen hundred and fifty more days.”
Margalo would never question Mikey’s math. She walked along beside her friend, walking fast.
It had to be the party, of course. Something had gone wrong at Mikey’s party.
“Everybody thinks because they’re on top, they can get away with anything,” Mikey said. “But I’m not about to go along with that. No way, no where. For example, have you realized that they keep seventh graders off school sports teams? Even if they’re better than the eighth graders? Like me in soccer, if West had a girl’s soccer team. Or Tan in basketball.”
Margalo had longer legs than Mikey, but when Mikey got going, Margalo had to scurry to keep up. She didn’t remind Mikey that whatever the school policy might be, Mikey took tennis clinics on weekends, and was already a serious contender at the county level, so she wasn’t exactly competition deprived. Besides, Mikey wasn’t talking about sports, anyway; Margalo was pretty sure of that. Margalo was pretty sure this fury was about the party.
>
“They don’t know who they’re up against,” Mikey announced.
That, Margalo would never argue with. When they got to their lockers, she reached into her lunch bag and brought out a peanut butter cup. “For you from Esther,” she said.
Margalo knew that peanut butter cups were Mikey’s favorites and she thought that however much Mikey groused about it, she liked Esther’s acting as if Mikey was some Michael Jordan-Xena combination. So when Mikey looked like she was about to refuse Esther’s gift, in order to keep feeling totally bad, Margalo said, “Or I’ll eat it.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Mikey answered grimly as she took the candy and unwrapped it, and devoured it in three swift bites.
* * *
It was a simple enough question, but by lunchtime Margalo still had not figured out how to get it asked. She could wonder, “Exactly how bad was it, Mikey?” Or, “So, how did the party go?” Or she could try an indirect inquiry—“Y’wanna hear about my Halloween?”—which would naturally lead into an exchange of Halloween reports.
Margalo stood behind Mikey in the cafeteria line, watching her tray fill up with a wide bowl of vegetable soup, and a sandwich of grilled cheese so skinny, it resembled some cartoon coyote a ten-ton weight had fallen on, a container of milk, and a little bowl of quivering red Jell-O. All around them people were talking, but Mikey just glared down at her lunch as if she planned to torture it first, and then kill it. Following Mikey to their usual table at the for end of the cafeteria, Margalo decided that she was just going to have to ask point-blank, like firing a gun: “What went wrong with your party?”
But it turned out she didn’t have to. They were about to climb over the bench to sit in their usual seats, facing out, backs to the wall, when Heather McGinty, head preppie, her little short skirt swishing—swish, swish—her loyal followers close behind her, walked in front of their table. And stopped.
The followers mostly wore little short skirts like Heather’s, or loose trousers that tied at the waist; they all wore little short T-shirts under little short misty gray or misty blue or misty green cardigan sweaters. They liked socks with designs on them and clunky shoes, although none of them went as far as Doc Martens. All of them had shiny clean hair and pinky-brown lipstick, and they waited, bright-eyed and eager as a herd of chipmunks, waiting for Heather to exercise leadership.
Heather looked at Mikey with an Oh! it’s you! What a surprise! expression on her face. A big, fake Oh! it’s you! What a surprise! expression.
Mikey had one foot on the bench and held her tray out in front of her. Her expression was furious.
Nobody even noticed Margalo, who was sort of impressed that Heather hadn’t backed off when Mikey first glared an If-you-knew-how-much-you-wouldn’t-be-standing-there-you’d-be-running smile.
“Hey,” Heather said, drawing it out. “Mikey,” she said, the way you say the name of someone you’ve just been thinking—or talking—about.
Mikey didn’t say a word.
Heather had pulled her hair back with a band, so that when she turned her head to look back at her preppies-in-waiting, you could admire her profile, with the little straight nose and the little round chin. Her preppettes answered with excited giggles or smirks, each according to her own character and taste.
They knew something was coming, Margalo could see that. They knew something was coming and they knew what it was. This was the way people worked in cliques; everybody knew, so that they could look forward to it, beforehand, and really enjoy it, during, and talk it over, after.
“You probably don’t know Mikey Elsinger,” Heather said to her friends. The friends watched Heather, not Mikey. “Mikey’s the one I was telling you about, who sent out those really funny invitations, as if she was giving a formal dinner party, as if she was really inviting me—me and Heather James, and you, too, Annie, you got one, didn’t you? and—oh, you know, everyone. That was a cool joke, Mikey.”
Beside Margalo, her foot balanced on the bench, her tray balanced in her hands, Mikey waited. Without saying a thing.
A fake concerned expression floated over Heather McGinty’s face and settled there, a hen settling down on its eggs. “It was a joke, wasn’t it?” she asked, so sincere that everybody had to know she was faking.
There was half a minute or so of silence. Then the girls around Heather started to laugh, and people at nearby tables turned around to see what was going on.
Even though she didn’t want to, Margalo couldn’t help feeling embarrassed, and ashamed to be Mikey’s friend. And that made her angry, too, and ashamed—again! double ashamed!—to chicken out on Mikey, and furious at Heather McGinty, too, for making her feel this way.
Things were easier for Mikey.
She took her foot down, off the bench.
She shifted her grip on the tray.
She flipped the tray, sending her whole lunch flying up, spraying chunky soup and skinny sandwich, and milk, and Jell-O, out across the table, so it could rain down over Heather McGinty.
And all the time Mikey was smiling furiously.
The preppettes twitched back, chipmunks in retreat.
Heather stood there with her own tray in her hands, dripping vegetables off her little round chin, a couple of red Jell-O chunks sliding down the front of her little short tee, which used to be misty gray. Her pinky-brown mouth was open in protest, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say.
“Joke,” Mikey said, her teeth bared in a smile. “Get it?”
Then she strode down the aisle and across the cafeteria and out through the wide doors. Margalo followed.
Out in the hallway, Mikey slowed down to a walk. “You’ll have to share your lunch with me.”
“We’re not allowed to eat—”
“We’ll be by our lockers. Nobody’ll even notice. I can’t get through the afternoon without something in my stomach.” Then Mikey laughed. “I feel so much better—she looked like she got sick all over herself, didn’t she? If I were her, I’d make me sick.”
“Mikey, what happened?” Margalo demanded as they went down the hallway to their lockers.
“You were there,” Mikey explained. “I threw my lunch at her.”
“Rats on it, Mikey, I mean yesterday. I mean your party.” Margalo took her sandwich out of her bag, packaged ham with mayonnaise and lettuce, on supermarket white. She gave half to Mikey, who chomped down on it, and chewed, swallowed.
“Bad ham,” Mikey said. “Lousy bread. Yellow mustard. Can’t you do anything with Aurora? Nothing happened,” she concluded.
“What do you mean, nothing?”
Mikey went into sarcastic mode. “Let’s see. What does nothing mean?” She tugged at her braid as if trying to pull the answer out of her head. “I guess it means zero. Zip. The big goose egg. It means, not one thing. Happened,” Mikey said, her fury building up again. “Not one person. Came. I cooked, you cleaned, we set the table, Dad was out in the kitchen ready to be my sous-chef, serve up the plates . . . and after a while we realized that nobody was going to show up.”
Margalo didn’t know what to say.
“And,” Mikey added, “I missed the Sunday tennis clinic.” She continued adding to the pile of wrongs done to her. “Which means I also missed two hours of playing time, after.”
Margalo held her chewed bit of sandwich in her mouth.
“Dad felt pretty bad,” Mikey reported. She finished her sandwich half and held out her hand for the paper bag. Margalo passed it to her. Mikey said, “Probably the worst moment of my life. So far. The most humiliating, probably. Is it okay if I take the apple?”
Margalo nodded.
“I figure,” Mikey said, crunching on the apple, “they did it on purpose. They got together and didn’t come. But they didn’t even call to say so. I said on the invitation, Regrets Only.”
“There was another party yesterday, at Rhonda’s. And one of the Heathers had a party, too,” Margalo told her.
Mikey took in that information.
“You didn’t tell me.”
“Would it have made any difference if I had?”
“We’ll never know, now, will we?” Mikey asked. “But you wouldn’t just totally blow off an invitation, would you?”
Margalo was shaking her head, no, and no, she would never.
“See? And you haven’t even got anybody to teach you good manners,” Mikey told her. “I wrote it on the invitation, Regrets Only, and my phone number.” She finished the apple and looked into the bag again, pulled out a packet of Oreos, and asked, “You don’t want any of these, do you?”
Margalo shook her head.
“Well, they’ve had their chance,” Mikey announced. “They’ve had their one and only chance with me. At least, now that’s settled, I can stop trying to be popular. I can just concentrate on getting through the next six years any way I can.”
“You really think you’ve been trying to get people to like you?”
Mikey wasn’t listening. “You weren’t invited to Rhonda’s, were you?” she demanded.
“I’m the last person Rhonda would invite.”
“No, you’re not. I am. You’re second to last. Second best, second to me. I win again.”
That was when they saw the principal coming down the hall toward them. Mr. Saunders was a big, broad man, part African-American, part Native American, with large hands and no gray in his curly hair. The story about him was that he’d been scouted by the Celtics but had gone into the army for the college loan program. He used to be a coach, before he became an administrator, and he always wore a bright blue and white warm-up jacket over his button-down shirt, never a suit jacket. Now, he bore slowly down upon the two girls. Margalo quickly took her lunch bag and jammed it into the locker. Mr. Saunders had told them at the first assembly that nothing got by him and nobody could fool with him, because he’d been a coach. He made a point of telling them that, he said, “So you boys will know where I’m coming from.”
Margalo slammed the locker door shut just as she was figuring out that by acting guilty she would make Mr. Saunders suspect that she had something to hide, like drugs, or liquor, which she would never be so stupid about, but how would he know that? She thought about opening her locker up again so he could see they’d only been eating lunch illegally, but by then he loomed over them.