Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? (43 page)

“I promised,” lied Margalo, wide-eyed with fake sincerity. “I can't tell anyone but you, Louis.” And at that little victory for his coolness Louis shrugged, pinched the end of his cigarette to put it out, and then put it into his t-shirt pocket for later consumption.

“A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do,” he said, and followed Margalo off to where Mikey awaited.

They took him into the library, where none of his friends were liable to see him, and sat him down at one of the small tables behind the stacks. Louis leaned back in his chair. “So. Who's the chick?”

“Get real,” Margalo advised him. And this was the best advice anyone could offer Louis, if he could just figure out how to take it. But that wasn't her present problem. The present problem—the thing they
could
do something about and were going to do something about—was English for her and Math for Mikey.

“You mean you were lying?” Louis glared and crossed his arms over his chest. “Were you in on it?” he asked Mikey.

“Probably,” Mikey said.

“Yeah, well, I knew all along,” Louis assured them. “You didn't fool me for one minute. So, what do you really want? I thought—Now Ronnie's going to the prom with Chet, did she tell you?—I thought everything was fixed.”

“
You're
not fixed. Our bet is still on,” Mikey reminded him.

“And we can't risk Chet figuring out that he was scammed,” Margalo added.

“Oh. Okay, but . . . I thought I didn't have to do anything until Friday. Today's Wednesday, in case you forgot. You
said
Friday.”

“We changed our minds,” announced Margalo. She added a one-page essay to his assignments, at which he grumbled, “As if I didn't have anything better to do.” Then, “Mikey? Your turn,” she said.

“Isn't one subject enough?”

“No,” Mikey answered. “The plan for Math is you review the basic operations, then take the unit tests, one after the other. Mr. Radley said he'd take the unit tests into consideration as makeup work—if you pass them—but they have to be taken under his supervision—”

“He
wants
to flunk me.”

Mikey didn't blame the teacher if he did. She'd want to flunk Louis too, a student who never did his homework, never tried to learn, cracked disruptive jokes in class and generally seemed to like being a buffoon.

Buffoon, that was Louis exactly. She started to write it down for Margalo so Margalo could enjoy it too.
B-u-f
—two
fs
or one? She'd never been much of a speller. One, she decided—
o-o-n.

“Precisely,” Margalo murmured, adding a second F.

“I'm pretty sure you can't pass,” Mikey told Louis. “But
I've got a bet to win here and I want to win fair and square.”

“Maybe I don't care,” Louis asked. “What's in it for me?”

“Summer school,” Margalo told him.

“I'm going to kill Ronnie.”

“That's a good idea,” Mikey said. “You'll like jail.”

“Didn't you tell your father you were going to pass?” Margalo asked him, a guess, but a confident one. “At least enough to be able to do summer school for the remaining credits?”

“How'd you know that? Did Ronnie tell you?”

Margalo nodded. This would count as a white lie, wouldn't it?

“How else was I going to get him off my back?” Louis demanded, but then he realized, “All right. All right, you don't have to be such a pair of nags.”

“Tomorrow, here, same time,” Margalo told him.

“With the work completely done,” Mikey said.

“Yeah, yeah,” Louis grumbled, getting up and—after carefully looking to be sure no one was observing him—stepping from behind the stacks. He strutted out into the hallway.

Mikey remembered then, and she ran after him, ignoring the way he was trying to ignore her. “Louis? Wait up.”

“Bug off!”

“No, I wanted to ask, will you call lines again on Friday?” Mikey was talking at the round back of his head, but her question stopped him. He wheeled around to tell her, publicly and loudly, “Look, I'm in enough trouble already without
you trying to add to it.” He looked around to be sure everybody noticed this, him shoving Mikey Elsinger off his back. “So count me out. O-u-t, out. And stop trying to get me thrown out of school.”

They found Ronnie in the girls' bathroom, talking shopping with a couple of upperclassmen. “I looked there,” Ronnie was saying, “but—you know—it's only a prom. It's not, like, it's not a wedding or something. Those dresses were ex
-pen-sive.
And they didn't look any better on.”

“Yeah,” one of the seniors answered, “but you could wear a paper bag and look good.”

“No, seriously,” Ronnie said. She sounded like she was apologizing for her looks, and maybe she was. “I found mine at T.J. Maxx. They had a great selection. You can probably wear deep colors like burgundy or forest green or—have you ever tried on gold? Hey, hi, Margalo. Hi, Mikey. What do you want?”

The upperclassmen picked up their books and left, continuing to talk about prom dresses. Ronnie smiled in the mirror at Mikey and Margalo. “Aren't you pleased?” she asked.

Happiness always looked good on Ronnie. Mikey glanced briefly at Ronnie's reflected face, then her own, and then Margalo's. Mikey was round faced, and her nose was sort of stubby, and her eyes were sort of small, and her eyebrows—which she privately liked—were sort of too straight and thick. The kind of prettiness Ronnie had was in her bones. Margalo
had strong bones shaping her face, but her face was more square than oval, her mouth more wide than full, her eyes not so dark or deep and all those small differences made a big difference in the total effect.

“Pleased about what?” Margalo asked. She met Mikey's eyes in the mirror and crossed hers, which Ronnie, studying her lipstick, didn't notice.

“It's thanks to you I'm going to the prom. And don't think I'll forget that.”

“Actually, it was Chet I was hoping would never forget it,” Margalo remarked.

“Can you call lines on Friday?” Mikey asked.

“But I thought . . .” Ronnie turned away from the mirror to remind Mikey, “Mr. Robredo said not to do it anymore.”

“I know. But . . . I'm going to do it anyway.” At Ronnie's doubtful expression Mikey added, “You just said you wouldn't forget.”

“But Mikey”—Ronnie turned to Margalo, who was someone who would understand—“I have an appointment right after school on Friday to try an updo.” She lifted her heavy, dark hair up off the back of her neck to show them. “To see how it will look with my dress, and if I like it, that's the way we'll have it done Prom Saturday. Because that's in only three and a half weeks,” she told them, her eyes in their pleased excitement shining as darkly as her hair. “Less than that, really.”

“What's in less than three and a half weeks?” asked Tan,
who had burst into the bathroom, but before Ronnie could answer she said to Mikey and Margalo, “I want to talk to you two.”

In the mirror the warm dark brown of Tanisha's skin, together with her height, her long neck and short, curly hair, her strong features—full lips, square chin, large black eyes—made her just as satisfying to look at as Ronnie. Mikey wished they would
both
go away so she could talk with Margalo about this, about what made people attractive to look at. She knew, for instance, that she had thick, heavy hair, and that was good; but what about her face?

“I'm leaving,” Ronnie said, not offended. “Guess who's going to be Chet Parker's date for the prom, Tan.”

Tan couldn't be made jealous about this achievement, nor was she any more interested than to say, “Funny. I heard you were taking him to court.”

“That was all a misunderstanding.” Ronnie gave a conspiratorial smile in the mirror to Margalo first, then Mikey, before she said, turning and exiting, “Sorry about the line calling, Mikey.”

“What about line calling?” Tan asked when they were alone.

Margalo was disappointed. She'd hoped Tan wanted to talk to them about something more interesting than the line calling.

“I'm going to keep on doing it,” Mikey answered. “Will you help?”

“Maybe,” Tan said. Then, “I'm going to Oslo!” she announced, and waited for their reactions.

“Norway?” Mikey asked.

“You aren't running away, are you?” Margalo asked.

“The whole family is going, this summer, because William will be there—”

“I remember,” both Mikey and Margalo said.

“And that means I'll see him,” Tan concluded.

“Yeah, but what difference will that make?” Mikey asked.

“It's just going to make you feel worse,” Margalo predicted.

“That doesn't matter if I can see him,” Tan told them. “I can't wait!”

Mikey knew what was really important. “So will you call lines? It'll make the time pass more quickly.”

The next day, Thursday, Louis had almost made it into the cafeteria when they grabbed him. “We're going to the library,” Margalo said, on one side of him, and from the other side Mikey told him, “You better have that work done.”

“Hey!” Louis protested.

Margalo could see the gears working: Did he want to push them away and make it a rejection scene? That would mean he'd flunk ninth grade for sure. But did he want to be seen going off with Mikey Elsinger and Margalo Epps? Definitely not cool. Did he have a chance of its not being noticed? Only if he kept his mouth shut, which would mean running a brief risk of looking un-cool, but maybe he could get away with
that. “Hey,” he protested again, but he walked a little faster and a little ahead of them. After all, who could blame him if Mikey Elsinger and Margalo Epps were walking along the hallway in the same direction he happened to be walking in?

Louis didn't say anything until they had entered the library, where nobody who mattered would see who he was with and talking to. Margalo led him to a table and sat him down. They had their plan ready. Margalo would go first, trying to explain to Louis how to take notes on a short story. While Margalo did that, Mikey would look over the problems Louis had done, drilling the four most basic math operations. In the next two weeks Mikey intended for Louis to have taken—and passed—all the unit tests of the first semester.

But as soon as they were seated, with Louis in the middle, and Margalo had taken out her notebook, Louis started to make difficulties. “What about my lunch?”

“You don't need it,” Mikey answered.

“You're one to talk,” Louis said. He watched her circling errors on his Math paper and protested, “I worked hard on that!”

“You can get something after,” Margalo said. “They leave it set up for second lunch.”

“But everything good will be gone,” Louis complained.

“Too bad,” Mikey said.

“And besides, see?” Louis indicated the paper Mikey was marking on, and the paper in front of him covered with
scratched-out words and sentences. “I couldn't write that essay,” he told Margalo. “And I didn't even want to.” He leaned back, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared.

Margalo took a breath and looked at Mikey. “Okay,” she said to Mikey, and, “Okay,” again to herself. “Take out a sheet of clean paper, Louis, and write down first the tide and author.”

“You already know that,” Louis groused.

“After that write ‘I won't complain' a hundred times,” Mikey muttered.

“Next make a list of all of the characters,” Margalo continued. “With the most important ones first, then”—she held up a hand to stop him from speaking—“a list of all the different places where the story happens, in order. I have to go to the bathroom. Come on, Mikey,” she said.

Louis smirked. “What is it with girls never going to the bathroom by themselves?” At the look on Mikey's face he added, “Everybody says that.”