It's Not Easy Being Bad (10 page)

Frannie shook her head. “My father does the cooking. Which committee are you going to be on? Because I think you should be on the bake sale. Everyone says Mrs. Draper had to admit you did the best baking, even if she didn't like your attitude.”

“I'm a pretty good cook,” Mikey said, and Margalo said the same thing at the same time. “She's a good cook.” Then Margalo turned to Mikey and said, “We have to be on some committee.”

“I will if you will,” Mikey said. “It'll just be baking stuff at home and bringing it in to sell. I can teach you stuff,” she pointed out.

Margalo wasn't sure she wanted to be Mikey's student.

“You'll learn how to make my mother's chocolate chip cookies,” Mikey offered.

Margalo considered that. There was no other committee she wanted to be on, so she agreed. “Okay. What about you?” she asked Frannie.

“They asked me to be on publicity. We're going to design our stuff on the school computers, and they're making that little computer whiz be on the committee, too. Hadrian.”

Margalo said, “Actually, Hadrian's young, not little. Because he skipped two grades.”

“He's still shorter than anybody else,” Frannie pointed out. “But if he skipped and he's young, why do they tease him?”

“You aren't asking that seriously, are you?” Mikey wondered, adding, “While we're on the subject of short, do you play basketball?”

B
etween the bake sale committee and the basketball petition, Margalo thought she'd prefer the committee, but she was wrong. It turned out that on the committee, Mikey tried to run things and—big surprise—nobody wanted her to.

“She's not the boss,” people protested to Margalo when Mikey told them what to bake. “Who died and made her queen of the world?” they groused when she told them to have the first bake sale in early December. “What makes her think I even care if she likes my recipe?”

Because the bake sale committee was the largest, they met in the library during assembly period. They pushed tables together to make one big table. Mrs. Draper, the home economics teacher, was their
faculty adviser. Except that every single person on the committee was female; they were a diverse group. There were a few preppies and several jockettes, as well as two girls from the arty-smarty clique. There were two Barbies, both brunettes, and about six of the not popular and unpopular girls, including Mikey and Margalo. Everybody had recipe ideas, except Margalo, and everybody wanted to have names put beside the platters to say who baked them, except Mikey, and everybody wanted a chance to sit at the bake sale table and sell, except Mikey and Margalo.

Mrs. Draper kept lists and overruled ideas. “Cookies, brownies, and bars,” she suggested.

Her committee, hands raised and waving, like baby birds in a nest squeaking for their mother to drop worms into their mouths, insisted on suggesting cakes and pies that absolutely everybody always loved.

Mrs. Draper vetoed briskly. “Too hard to serve. Too messy to eat.”

One of the Barbies had a Greek mother who knew how to make baklava, which Mrs. Draper vetoed as “too sticky,” and one of the jockettes had a recipe for penuche, which Mrs. Draper shook her head at. “Too strange.”

Mikey had been thinking. “Cupcakes,” she announced, without raising her hand. Mrs. Draper had to write that down because cupcakes were easy to serve. Mikey followed up her advantage. “Tarts.”

Mrs. Draper wrote that down, too, then said, “That's enough out of you for a while, Mikey.”

Once they had decided on what they would bake, and that the bake sales would commence on the first Friday after Thanksgiving vacation, they had to decide how much to charge.

Mikey was all for the highest possible prices. “
My
cookies are worth what you pay for those cookies at the mall, and those aren't half as good. I can promise you that.” Most of the other committee members believed that charging less would sell more and thus earn them more.

“That's only in the short run,” Mikey argued. “Because if people think they're getting more for their money, they'll pay more and they'll buy just as many.”

“I think we'd better vote on this,” Mrs. Draper suggested.

“Then charge more just for mine,” Mikey suggested.

“We'll do what the majority wants, Mikey,” Mrs. Draper decided.

Margalo admired the way Mrs. Draper could be authoritative when she needed to be, but democratic when the vote was sure to come out the way she wanted. Everybody said how fair their adviser was, and how she treated them like they were grownup. Everybody except Margalo, who didn't think it was nearly as simple as that, and Mikey, who didn't get what she wanted nearly often enough on Mrs. Draper's committee.

“All I'm going to be doing is baking, anyway, so rats on the rest of it,” Mikey announced.

“As if we care,” the committee responded.

*    *    *

Work on the petition went more placidly, probably because it was only Mikey and Margalo doing it. It went without saying that it would be a bad idea for Mikey to try to get signatures, and a disaster for Margalo to try to play basketball. So on Sunday afternoon, while Margalo entered into Mr. Elsinger's computer the petition they had composed, Mikey practiced by playing one-on-one against her father. She didn't cut him any slack.

Margalo printed out four copies of the petition and considered how to go about collecting signatures.
The way she figured it was this: A real drawback to not being popular was people don't want to agree with you. So if you're not popular and you're asking people to sign a petition, you have to do it the right way.

Unfortunately, as Margalo knew, one reason a person isn't popular is because for some mysterious reason she doesn't do things the right way. She probably doesn't know what the right way even is, and maybe doesn't even know there
is
a right way. Margalo wasn't exactly in that position, but she was close enough so that if she went about getting signatures the wrong way, she could easily turn herself from a not-particularly-popular person into a positively un-popular one,
and
not get any signatures.

Which would about shut down her social life entirely, since Mikey would be furious at her.

So Margalo would have to be smart about how she asked for signatures.

Her most interesting idea, as she thought about this problem, was: People think there's only one right way to do anything, a secret right way known only to the special people who belong to the Secret Right Way Knowing Club, but there are a lot of different right ways—and also a lot of different wrong ways.

This was interesting. Margalo was having a good time, no question. She reread the petition:

To the faculty and administration of West Junior High School: We protest your policy of excluding seventh-grade girls from the basketball team. Seventh graders would benefit from the on-court experience of games with eighth graders. Also, practices are held after school hours, and any player who couldn't keep her grades up would be dropped from the squad, so there is no good reason for the policy. We believe it isn't fair to not let us play.

Below that statement were numbered places for signatures, in two columns, fifteen in each column.

Margalo was guessing that only the principal could change policy. He was the one she was really firing her cannon at. She didn't plan to win this battle, but she did plan to do enough damage, so that their next attack—the tennis attack—would be against a weakened and wounded enemy, a Mr. Saunders who would probably just as soon have a player as good as Mikey play on the West tennis team anyway.

It could all work out, Margalo thought. She could make it all work out.

*    *    *

Margalo began Monday morning, in English, with Ronnie Caselli and the preppies. Actually, she began earlier on Monday, when she dressed for school. Her dress style for approaching the preppies was the Old Boyfriend look, which meant she had to wait until her stepbrother left for school so she could raid his closet and take out his tweed jacket, the one good jacket he owned. She put it on over her outfit (mid-calf black skirt, jewel-necked peach sweater) and folded back the sleeves. Howie wasn't that much taller than she was—well, who was?—but his shoulders were broader, so the jacket hung off her just the way it was supposed to.

She knew how to greet Ronnie, like giving the secret password signal that gets you into the clubhouse. “Hihowareyou?”

“Cool,” Ronnie answered. “Great jacket.”

Margalo told the truth. Sometimes, the truth was a better story than anything she could make up. “I borrowed it from Howie.
After
he left the house.”

“I know what you mean,” Ronnie said. “My brothers would kill me—and my mother would, too.”

“Aurora believes in nonviolence,” Margalo answered, and Ronnie laughed. “I wish
my
mother did.”

People were entering the classroom, settling into their usual seats. Margalo took out her notebook and opened it to show Ronnie the petition. “Tell me what you think of this.”

Surprised, Ronnie read it quickly, then looked around to see who might give her a second opinion. This was just what Margalo had expected, which was why she had chosen English class, where Heather McGinty wasn't. Annie Piers, Heather McGinty's henchperson and chief rival,
was
in the class, however, and Ronnie called her over.

“Hihowareyou,” Margalo greeted Annie.

“Cool,” Annie answered, and her eyes lingered on the jacket. “How about you, Ron?” she asked, and Ronnie answered, “Cool, how about you?” and Annie said coolly, “As you see.”

Then Ronnie asked her, “What do you think of this?”

While Annie bent over the desk to read, Ronnie asked Margalo just the two questions Margalo expected. First she asked, “What's gotten you interested in sports?”

Margalo could be as cool as they were, and cooler. “Take a look at the signatures.”

There were only two signatures, and number one was Mikey Elsinger.

“Is Mikey going out for basketball?” Ronnie asked.

“What do you think?” Margalo asked back.

“I can dig it,” Ronnie said.

“I don't know,” Annie Piers said, now, talking to Ronnie, ignoring Margalo. “Are you going to sign it?”

“Well, when we were in fifth grade and there was a boys' only soccer team, Mikey—”

The teacher entered, and everyone scurried to a desk. “Tell you after,” Ronnie called softly to Annie's back, and to Margalo, who was gathering up her notebook, she asked just what Margalo hoped to hear. “See you at lunch?”

Ronnie didn't mean at lunch, exactly, not lunch at her table. She meant “at lunchtime, in the hallway, by my locker.” So Margalo wasn't surprised to see Ronnie and Annie and Heather McGinty, too, with a couple of the Aceys and another Heather, all gathered together, by the seventh-grade lockers, at the start of first lunch.

“What's this petition?” Heather McGinty asked, and Margalo showed it to her. Heather read it and was about to say No Way, Nix, Nothing Doing, when Margalo spoke.

“I wanted to ask you people first,” she said, talking to Ronnie. “Because it would be so cool to get the rule changed, you know? Student power and all that. Ronnie knows about Mikey,” Margalo said, looking around at all of them, looking right into Heather McGinty's catlike face with its greeny eyes and little chin. “Mikey makes things happen. Like in fifth grade, remember?” she asked Ronnie.

“What you were telling me,” Annie said to Ronnie.

“I don't know,” Heather McGinty said, doubt in her voice. “I don't—”

Margalo pounced, pretending that Heather was about to say what she knew perfectly well Heather hadn't even thought of. “I know it's hard to believe that students can change school policy, but sometimes, if the right students go about it the right way, they can really do it. And make a big difference to all the rest of us,” Margalo said, speaking to Annie now, and the Aceys, and the other Heather.

“That's true,” Ronnie said. “We never thought Mikey'd get girls on the soccer team in fifth grade. But she did.”

“That was Mikey?” asked one of the Aceys, Casey Wolsowski. “You guys went to Washington?”

Margalo nodded.

Casey turned her beady brown eyes on Heather McGinty to ask, “What do you have against signing?”

Annie Piers sensed a leadable opposition and rushed forward. “Yeah, Heather. It sounds sort of cool to me.”

“Don't sign if you don't want to,” Margalo said now. “I'm not going to give up, we aren't, so don't worry about that. It would just—oh, you know, be easier if you people agreed with us, and everyone could see that you did—but—” She reached out to take the paper back.

Ronnie protested, “I didn't say I didn't want to sign.”

“I'll sign,” Annie said, and signed. “Casey?” Casey signed. “Ronnie? Stacey, Heather, anybody else? C'mon, Heather,” she nudged Heather McGinty with an elbow. “Everybody's forgotten your little feud with Mikey,” she reminded everyone. “So you should, too. Besides, this has nothing to do with that. This is for all of us.”

There was no way Heather McGinty could not sign, then, and everybody else followed her example, which gave Margalo seven signatures, now. “Thanks,” she said, when the last pen was put away.

“I'd love a chance to play on the school basketball
team,” Ronnie said. “I'll go to basketball practice, anyway, but it would be more fun if I had a chance to make the team. Are you playing basketball, Annie?”

“Where'd you get that jacket?” Annie Piers finally gave in and asked it, so Margalo told her, “Around the house. I've got all these older stepbrothers,” she added with a cool, careless shrug, before she went off to join Mikey for lunch.