Bad Girls in Love (6 page)

“Uh-oh,” Louis said, holding up fake trembling hands to fake protect himself. “What're you going to do about it? You
aren't going to tell Mr. Tooth Decay on me, are you? He doesn't even know your name.”

“Yes he does,” Mikey said.

Margalo stepped in. “If you need a more user-friendly word, how about idiot? Does that ring a bell? Synonyms: dolt, dummy, dunce, dullard.” She stopped and Louis took a breath, but before he could speak she went on. “Dud, dupe, dingbat.” She stopped again.

He opened his mouth.

Before he could say anything, she did. “Dodo.”

Louis made a strangled sound, but she cut him off. “Doofus.” She thought, then nodded her head. “And that's just the d's.”

By then he had turned around and was walking away. “Spanish,” she called after him,
“el stupido
. French—” but he was out of earshot, which was lucky because she was out of foreign languages. The bell rang and “What's wrong with you?” she asked Mikey, then, “Why are you putting up with him?”

“What does Louis Caselli matter?” Mikey asked her.

*    *    *

Emboldened by success, at lunch Louis attacked again.

Mikey and Margalo were sitting side by side at their table, just beginning their lunches—Margalo's a tuna salad on lightly toasted supermarket white bread, and Mikey's one of the few popular cafeteria meals, two slices of cheese pizza with a side of french fries. Mikey stared across the crowded
room in what Margalo had already identified as her in-the-same-room-as-Shawn-Macavity stupor. Shawn was like the magnet, and Mikey's attention was like the iron filings that line up to point to where the magnet is, if they can't go flying across whatever space separates them to cling right onto it. Mikey sat, and stared, and didn't even know how obvious she was.

No, Margalo corrected herself, biting into the tuna sandwich. Mikey didn't even
care
. Margalo had added a little chopped onion to her tuna salad and she would have offered Mikey a bite, so Mikey could admit that Margalo occasionally had good cooking ideas, but when Mikey was having a Shawn Macavity spasm, there was no getting through to her. She hadn't even taken a bite of pizza, which she usually wolfed right down.

Mikey just sat. And stared. Margalo sighed, a sigh that was half a groan. She ate some sandwich, then groaned, a groan that was half sigh. She wasn't sure how much of this she could take. At last Mikey spoke.

“Why's he talking to Louis?”

Margalo didn't bother asking who. She looked over to where Louis Caselli leaned down over Shawn, and Shawn twisted in his chair to talk up at him. Louis said something, Shawn asked a question, Louis jabbed with his chin in the direction of their table. Before anyone caught her staring at him, Margalo looked hard at her sandwich. Shawn was getting stuck up, just like any overnight rock star sensation, or movie
star sensation, or sports star sensation, and Margalo never wanted to contribute to anyone's sense of stuckupedness.

“What's Louis doing?” Mikey asked.

“I thought you didn't care about Louis,” Margalo said.

Margalo had asked her mother how long this first, stupefied, phase of Mikey's big crush would last, but Aurora was no help. “Love takes different people different ways,” she had said, but Margalo already knew that from her own experience. She announced the obvious. “He's coming over here.”

Margalo watched Louis Caselli strut around among the long tables, and she put down her sandwich. It was always good to have your mouth free when you encountered Louis Caselli. She knew it was going to be up to her to take full advantage of this Louis Caselli irritation op, because Mikey barely glanced at Louis before her attention—
Ping! Zip! Zap!
—swung back to Shawn Macavity.

Louis strutted over to stand right in front of Mikey, blocking her view. “Hey!” she protested.

“Hey yourself, Mee-shell,” Louis answered, the first time since fifth grade he'd risked calling Mikey by her detested real name.

Then she did look at him. And smiled—a bug-squashing smile.

Louis said, “I was just talking to your heartthrob.”

“Go away,” Mikey said.

“Mr. Tooth Decay,” Louis said.

“Dumb joke,” Mikey said.

“Don't you want to know what he said to me?”

“I
want
you to go away.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, OK. Maybe I will. Maybe that's just what I will do. I think it is, because I guess you don't want to know what he said when I asked him about you.” Louis smirked, strutting in place, turning as if he was about to leave.

“Good-bye, Louis,” Margalo said. “Good riddance to—”

“Bad rubbish, ha ha,” he cut her off.

“I was going to say, soiled sullage,” Margalo answered.

“What do you do, read dictionaries for fun?” Louis demanded.

Then Mikey asked just the question Louis wanted her to. “What
did
he say?”

“Mikey!” Margalo protested.

“Who?” Louis asked, playing dumb now. “What did who say?”

Margalo told him. “You know who.”

“Shawn,” Mikey said. “Shawn Macavity.”

“What about him?” Louis asked, smirking.

Margalo would have liked Mikey to punch that smirk off Louis Caselli's face. He smirked as if somebody having a big crush—a big, hopeless crush—turned that somebody into someone to make fun of. She couldn't believe that Mikey was letting him get away with this.

Mikey gritted her teeth. “What did he say?”

“Say about what?” Smirk.

“About me.” Grit.

“Oh, yeah, that. You really want to know?”

Grit.

Smirk.

“Yes! for scum's sake.”

“Enough to trade your lunch for the information?”

Margalo stepped in again. “How much information is there? It's not like you were talking very long. I wouldn't do it, Mikey.”

“But Mee-shell will. Because she's dying to know what Mr. Tooth Decay said. When I asked him about her.”

“I'm not you,” Mikey told Margalo as she pushed her tray across the table toward Louis.

Margalo sat back, gave up, and butted out. If Mikey was going to be like this, there was nothing she could do.

The tray rested at the center of the table, with Mikey's hands on one side and Louis's on the other, and Louis's smirking face hanging above it like some baboon hanging down from a branch. “He said,” Louis said, “and I will quote his words exactly, because I know you'd like to hear his exact words. He said, and I quote exactly, word for word: ‘Who's Mikey Elsinger?' ”

Then Louis jerked the tray, fast.

But Mikey was faster. “I don't believe you,” she said, pulling it back.

“You made a deal!” Louis protested.

Suddenly Margalo felt much better.

Margalo wasn't the only audience of this little scene. Many
people were curious to see where this would lead, especially those people close enough to listen, and the lunch duty teachers had also taken note. Louis had lost a lot of social ground in the fall, when he decided it would make him popular to jam Hadrian Klenk into wastebaskets whenever he could. After the third jam some of the boys—led by Ira and Ralph, Sean Mitchell and Michael Stone—kept near Hadrian in the halls; and all of the girls refused to speak to Louis, even his cousin Ronnie, who usually felt she had to defend him. Frannie Arenberg, typically, did it differently. She just told Louis to his face that he should be ashamed of himself. It was Frannie's opinion that stopped him. Louis was pretty consistent about what girl he liked (Frannie Arenberg, ever since last year), as consistent as he was about the girls he disliked.

“Cheater!” Louis told Mikey, adding a couple of choices from the list of words Mr. Saunders didn't want to hear spoken in his school. “You traded it to me.”

Margalo answered Louis's accusation. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “He's right, Mikey. And he clearly
needs
another lunch, the poor little undernourished thing. Otherwise,” she added to Louis as Mikey, with perfect timing, let go of the tray, causing Louis to stumble backward and the plate of pizza to leap up at his chest in a mute but effective attack, “otherwise, you might not look so much like an unexpurgated slug.”

At first Louis couldn't think of a response. Then he decided he ought to threaten, so everybody watching would know he
had the upper hand. “I don't know what you mean by that,” he snarled at Margalo.

“No,” she answered sweetly. “I didn't think you would.”

Mikey had withdrawn from the argument now that she could see the back of Shawn Macavity's head again. But she
had
taken the second half of Margalo's sandwich and was chomping away at it.

In his best
so-there
voice Louis closed the argument. “I didn't think you did.”

“I know,” Margalo continued it, with more and sweeter patience.

Louis was losing. He didn't know how that had happened. He looked around to the watching faces to tell them, “She's got a crush on Shawn, can you believe it? As if he'd even look at her once.” Then he was seized by an unfortunate inspiration. “Or maybe he would. Because pretty guys like him are usually gay, aren't they? And gay guys like—”

Mikey had him by the throat, which limited his ability to verbalize. She was about his height, so he could see right into her eyes. The sight was not pleasant to him.

“Lgo!” he gurgled.

“Don't you ever—,” she was starting to say.

Then her words, too, were cut off. Called in by one of the teachers on lunch duty, Mr. Saunders had arrived. He put one hand on Mikey's shoulder, shoving his other arm between the two of them, standing far enough back so that Mikey had time to recognize him and abort the punch she was about to
throw at whoever was getting in the way of her choking Louis Caselli to death.

“All right, you two.” Mr. Saunders was not amused.

Most of the onlookers, however,
were
. “What is
wrong
with Louis?” people wondered, and “What is
wrong
with Mikey?” People also thought,
Why don't they grow up?
but nobody said that out loud.

“You know the drill,” Mr. Saunders told Mikey and Louis.

They did. Since September there had been several opportunities for the principal's innovative response to violent eruptions of junior-high tensions, so everybody knew the drill. For the observers the drill was enjoyable and instructive. For the participants it tended to be embarrassing and instructive.

Instructive, and corrective, too; although this time it involved Mikey Elsinger, who never thought she was in the wrong, and Louis Caselli, who never thought. Between them, Mikey and Louis might come up with the disagreement that was the drill-breaker, and nobody wanted to miss that.

Mr. Saunders put one hand on Mikey's left shoulder and one hand on Louis's right shoulder and pushed the two of them in front of him out of the cafeteria. He sent Hadrian Klenk to his office. “Get me the gloves,” he told Hadrian as he steered his two miscreants down the hall to the gym.

After Hadrian brought the fat brown leather boxing gloves, and Mr. Saunders had laced them on Louis and Mikey, he asked the usual drill questions.

“What's this fight about?” he asked. “Mikey?”

“Ask Louis,” Mikey said.

“Louis?”

“It's not my fault.”

Mr. Saunders said, “You know we're not looking to assign blame, Louis. We're interested in the cause. We like to know what we're fighting about.”

“About name-calling,” Mikey said.

“Louis called you a name?”

“I didn't say
one thing
about her.”

“You didn't call names?”

That, Louis couldn't deny. But he pointed out, “It wasn't her. So what's her problem?”

“It wasn't you?” Mr. Saunders asked Mikey. “Then who?”

Mikey shook her head.

Hoping to embarrass Mikey, Louis volunteered, “It was her boyfriend.”

Mikey smiled a little pleased smile—Margalo could have sworn she saw that—and more than one girl's voice called from the onlookers, “He is not.”

“OK, her big crush. Shawn. Macavity. You know,” he smirked around at the watching seventh and eighth graders, several of whom groaned softly, hoping that Louis was not going to make this particular joke in front of the principal, under these circumstances, and several of whom hoped that he would. He did. “Mr. Tooth Decay.”

Mr. Saunders considered this information before he decided,
“I don't need to know just what you said. Although,” he warned Louis and everyone else, “I can guess what it might have been. Also,” he warned Mikey, “I don't need to hear why you found this enough reason to assault a fellow student.”

“Yeah,” Louis said.

“But I want you both to take a full minute of silence—everybody silent now, you know the drill—to think about whether or not you want to go ahead with this fight.”

“I'm not scared of her.” Louis feinted a couple of times. Mikey drew her arm back and punched at his head but Louis danced back, out of reach. She assumed a boxing stance, arms raised and elbows close to her sides, her gloved fists out in front, and jabbed twice at his face.

Whispers spread the question and its answer, “What
did
he call Shawn? Aside from Tooth Decay.”

Mr. Saunders cleared his throat.

The whole big, hollow room grew silent. Mikey glared at her sneakers. Louis glared at Mikey, then turned to catch his cousin Sal's eye, then glared at Mikey again.

Mr. Saunders, like an orchestra conductor, kept everybody pretty much quiet together. People were staring at Shawn Macavity; or they carefully didn't even look at him; or they looked at him, then looked away. So everybody noticed when he leaned forward to whisper something to Heather McGinty, who was, as always, positioned right next to him—unless Rhonda Ransom got there first. If you were watching the crowd, as Margalo was, you could see the way what
Shawn whispered snaked forward to the inside ring of students, as Heather McGinty whispered into Rhonda's ear, and Rhonda told Derrie, and Derrie told Lynn, and Lynn told Ira, who told Will, who told Sal.