Bad Girls in Love (12 page)

“How do you know that?” Mikey demanded.

“She told everyone. She thinks—” Tan grinned and shook her head at the idiocy of some people. “I don't know what-all she thinks. Rhonda's furious, and jealous. Well, everybody's jealous, but—at Rhonda's party the night before—on Friday?—there wasn't anybody special he danced with. He danced with at least half of the girls, all the popular ones, Aimi and Rhonda, Melissa, Heather Thomas . . . all of them. Except Ronnie, of course. Slow dances, too, never the same girl twice, so everybody thought he didn't have a girlfriend.
Then today, Heather's talking as if he's hers. But”—and Tan leaned forward to tell Mikey the best bad news of all, before she started in on her lunch—”I happen to know he didn't ask her to the dance.”

“Never mind the dance,” Margalo said. “What does Shawn say? Has anybody asked him?”

“Yeah,” Mikey echoed. “Did he say why he kissed her?”

Margalo set Mikey straight. “Shawn's a guy,” she explained. “They'll kiss anyone who shoves her mouth into their faces.”

“Will they?” Mikey asked.

Margalo said, “I wouldn't worry about the kissing, Mikey.”

“I'm not worried,” Mikey said. “I'm just jealous.”

“Shawn says he got out of the house as soon as he could. He says he waited out front for his father to come pick him up,” Tan reported.

“Yes!”
Mikey crowed, punching the air with her fist.

Margalo wondered, “Do you believe him? But then, when he can have practically any girl he wants, why would he want Heather McGinty?”

“Yeah,” Mikey agreed.

“I gather you've all heard the news.” Cassie approached the table and pulled out a chair. “I, for one, am mightily shocked,” she said, sitting down. “Ha-ha,” she said. “Joke,” she explained. She leaned her chair back on two legs and grinned at them with lips painted so dark a red they looked black.

Margalo grinned right back, noncommittal; they were two cool dudes eye-balling each other. “What
I
want is a firsthand report on
your
scene with Shawn.”

“But you hate him, why would you even talk to him?” Mikey asked Cassie.

“I just wound him up a little, is all,” Cassie assured Mikey.

“Where was this? When?” Mikey demanded. She leaned forward.

Cassie leaned her chair back even farther. “At Heather's. Saturday. It wasn't anything, it was”—she grinned more broadly—”fun. Actually. Poor little El Dente. He was telling someone—one of his groupies, or six of them actually, or maybe it was a dozen—he was telling them about how he's going to be an actor. You know—all the world's a stage, that whole crock? How could I pass up that opening?” Cassie asked. “I told him he looked more like a model than an actor. So he tried to figure out if that was an insult or a compliment.” She rotated a forefinger on either side of her head, “Whirra-whirra-whirra. It took a while. Right? So I told him, I meant like those models you see when you go for a haircut, in the beauty shop photo books. And he got insulted. I guess he's the
sen
-sitive type.”

Margalo could pretty much picture it, the dim lighting, the loud music, people heading out the back door for privacy, in the rooms people coming and going and dancing, devouring chips and cookies and sodas. Shawn and Cassie would have been practically yelling at each other. “So I guess he decided to get even.” Now Cassie lowered
her chair, leaning toward Mikey and the rest of her audience. “So here's his idea of an insult.
I guess you weren't going in for a makeover
. Yuk-yuk, right? So I said,
What? I can't hear you
, and he tried again,
If you were in for a makeover, you were robbed
. So I said,
What? What takeover? Is there a war?
He just waved his hands and gave up. Poor guy, he just doesn't know. So I tried to give him some advice.
Tooth
, I said,
don't even try to keep up with me
. And that was that. End of scene. Except that later he tried to get me to dance with him. A slow dance. I ask you,” Cassie told them. She rolled her eyes, grinned, shook her head at the hopelessness of it.

Mikey got right to the point. “Did you?”

Cassie's grin widened, and she ran her fingers through her short hair, then shrugged. “I felt sorry for the guy.”

This was not the answer Mikey wanted to hear. But she persisted, “What was it like?”

“What's it ever like, slow dancing with a guy?” Cassie asked, pretending to try to remember this occasion, or—as Margalo guessed, with sudden insight—pretending to pretend, so that she could remember it all again.

“I don't know,” Mikey pointed out. “That's why I'm asking.”

Ronnie came to join them and say, “Asking what, Mikey? What about? The parties, right? Because of you know who. They were pretty good parties, I can tell you that—especially Heather's, well, except. I don't know what Heather was thinking.” Ronnie was too shocked and nice to say more.

“What does Heather Mac
ever
think of?” Cassie asked, and answered her own question, “Boys. And how she looks.”

Margalo was wondering why all of a sudden popular Ronnie was coming to sit at their table during lunch. They'd always gotten along OK with Ronnie, but not lunch-at-the-same-table OK.

Frannie and Heather Thomas sat down with them, and Doucelle, too, whom they'd known since sixth grade, with Casey tagging behind Frannie. Heather and Frannie had a question about play rehearsals. Doucelle pulled out a chair beside Tan. The rehearsal question—”Where are they held?”—and Doucelle's quiet “Wanna ask you something” to Tan did not alter the main direction of the conversation. They were girls; they could talk about seven things simultaneously, or at least three.

“It's always about looks, with boys,” Cassie said.

“Ralph doesn't care that much about them,” Heather Thomas announced.

“What makes you so sure?” Cassie demanded.

“Because I'm not so pretty,” she told them.

They didn't agree: “You're kidding.” “Who told you that?” “You've got nice hair, a good figure, your nose is . . . a great nose.” “Yes, you are.”

“I'm
not
,” Heather insisted.

“You know?” Tan said. “My mother's boyfriend is always making these cracks—like he tells her if looks mattered he wouldn't be hanging around her.”

“Your mother's
great
looking,” Mikey said.

“Gets him in hot water, every time,” Tan said. “She tells him, he's no prize. But they've been together for two years now. More than two years, since the summer before sixth grade, remember?”

“So there's hope for us? Just, we have to wait until we're grown up? Or until they are?” Doucelle said, laughing.

“Except for Ronnie,” Margalo said. She hadn't been enjoying the look on Ronnie's face. It was the kind of look that made her want to scrub it off with a Brillo pad.

Ronnie made a bid for their sympathy. “It's not all pure fun, I can tell you. You all think I have it so easy, but it's not—I mean, I have my doubts about Doug sometimes.” She looked around at them, trusting them, deciding to confide. “I mean—
doubts”

This was news, much more interesting than what Heather McGinty had gotten up to, and it was more current, a fast-breaking story.

“What do you mean, Ronnie?”

“What's he done?”

“He hasn't done anything wrong exactly, it's just that he's—” Ronnie made herself say it. “He's kind of jealous. I mean, why shouldn't I go to a party, even if I can't go with him?” she asked them. “It's not as if he didn't know I'm in eighth grade,” she told them, pointing out a further unreasonableness. “He knew my parents won't let me go out with anyone more than once a weekend. I
told
him,” she told them. “He knew all
along. But now”—she leaned forward and lowered her voice—”he doesn't want me to dance with anyone but him.”

“Is he that good a dancer?” Margalo asked, to keep things sane; but she was overruled.

“Uh-oh,” Cassie said forebodingly.

“Possessive,” Tan agreed.

“Are you going to break up with him?” Heather asked.

“He's not that great a kisser,” Ronnie admitted.

They took this in, silent.

Mikey said, “I thought you really liked him. You said you did,” she reminded Ronnie.

“I know what I said.”

“But it's only been a month,” Mikey pointed out.

“Longer—since Christmas. I don't expect you to understand,” Ronnie told Mikey sadly. “Or sympathize.”

“I don't,” Mikey said, and left the table.

They watched her charge off, and Ronnie remarked, “I don't know why she should be so angry about me and Doug.”

In Margalo's opinion, Mikey wasn't angry. She just had something else she wanted to do. Given Mikey's tunnelvision way of life, Margalo could guess who the something else probably had to do with.

Ronnie leaned forward to speak in a low voice. “I didn't want to say this while Mikey was here, because we all know how she is.” They nodded; they all knew. “But the one Doug's mostly jealous of is Shawn. And he doesn't even know him. Doug's got a brother in seventh grade, so he heard about the
play and the assembly. All the attention Shawn's been getting. He's so suspicious—I mean Doug is. He doesn't trust me. I trust
him,”
Ronnie pointed out. “I never worry about him with all those high school sophisticated girls. I even asked him, because he was doing nothing but arguing with everything I said, did he want to see other people? And the first thing he did was accuse me of wanting to date Shawn.” That was the end of her case, and she waited—worried but hopeful—for their reactions.

“Was he always jealous?”

“I used to like it,” Ronnie admitted.

“You know, jealousy can be dangerous,” Tan said.

“That's just on TV,” Cassie told them.

“That's not true,” Casey said. They were all a little surprised to hear Casey disagree, and their surprise gave her time to express her thought before they went back to ignoring her. “In
Rebecca,”
she argued. “And in
Othello,”
she added. “People can die because other people are jealous.”

Tan agreed. “Although, in real life they mostly get beat up. Like those women who have restraining orders to protect them from rejected boyfriends but still get beat up. Or shot. I saw it on
20/20
.”

“My point exactly,” Cassie said.

“Do you think Doug will beat Shawn up?” Ronnie asked, alarmed.

“More likely, he'd beat up on you,” Cassie consoled her.

“You all think he's a bad boyfriend, don't you? You're not
saying so, and I appreciate that, but—Thanks for the good advice, guys. Doug's going to be in trouble with me when he comes over this evening.”

“On a school night?”

She explained, “He comes over Mondays, after practice. Wish me luck?”

“Luck,” they said.

“He's going to be surprised,” Ronnie promised them. “He thinks because he's older and has a car, he rules. But I'm not about to
be
ruled.”

“You go, girl,” they urged her. “Go get him.”

“She's already got him,” Margalo pointed out. “I thought that was the problem.” But only Frannie thought that was funny.

W
hat does it mean?” they asked Ronnie on Tuesday when she had gathered them in the bathroom, five of them, plus Ronnie, clustering together between the line of sinks and the line of stalls.

“Just what it looks like,” Ronnie said. She leaned back against a sink, in jeans and the too-large team jacket she had worn to school. She radiated happiness and popularity, fiddling with the zipper.

Junior high didn't have team jackets. Junior-high boys weren't so tall that if they'd had team jackets, and given them to their girlfriends, the jackets would have hung almost down to the girls' knees.

“Are you engaged or something?” Tan asked.

Ronnie giggled at that suggestion. “My parents would never let me get engaged, at my age.”

“So what
does
it mean?” Tan persisted.

“It means we're a couple,” Ronnie told them. “I'm so
happy,”
she confided. “I've never
been
so happy.”

“But I thought you already were, a couple?” Derrie said.

“This means we've agreed not to see other people. Like, on dates.”

“But your parents only let you go out on one date a weekend,” Margalo reminded Ronnie.

“So that'll always be with Doug,” Ronnie explained.