It's Not Easy Being Bad (14 page)

Margalo just nodded, because—for the first time—she was thinking about how Mikey wasn't even slowed down by the difficulties of being a kid. She just crashed on through them, to get what she wanted.

Mikey was the only person Margalo ever wished she was more like.

*    *    *

“You know what I think?” Margalo asked Mikey, at lunch the next day.

“Ask me if I care,” Mikey answered.

“You should,” Margalo answered. That was all she said.

Mikey waited, pretending not to wait. She pulled her braid around to the front, as if she was checking for split ends, as if she cared if her ends split. She tossed her braid back over her shoulder and turned her attention to the noodle casserole on her plate. This was served mounded up into a hill shape. Chunks of pale yellowy orange carrots were piled beside it, with a piece of buttered bread resting over
them. There were specks of beige somethings in the casserole, and Mikey picked one out with her fork and held it out before Margalo like some scientist with an unknown species of bug, asking his fellow scientist for an identification. “All right, all right,” Mikey said. “Why should I care? What
should
I care about? What now?”

Margalo knew a victory when she won it. “If Hadrian really
is
a genius, maybe we should be nice to him,” she said.

“No way,” Mikey explained. “All he thinks about is—he's obsessive.”

“Although he's seriously weird,” Margalo pointed out, arguing with herself about this.

“I don't mind weird,” Mikey said. “People think I'm weird,” she reminded Margalo, adding, “They're wrong, but they don't know it.
You're
the one of us who's weird,” she concluded.

“Says who?”

“You just pretend you aren't.”

Well, Margalo couldn't argue about that. A lot of her whole life was a costume she put together, and put on. She was pretty good at it, too, getting people to think they were seeing what she wanted them to see when they looked at her. “So what?” she asked.

“So what I want to hear about now is what Aurora said after I went home and you had one of your dinner table talks about California,” Mikey said.

But before Margalo could tell her the bad news, there was Hadrian Klenk, back again, another sheet of paper in his hand to show them. The lettering on it was of the old-fashioned kind that looks like it would be used for writing fairy tales, tall and stiff, with little thin echoes for the crossbars. “What do you think of this?” he asked Mikey, bending over a little to lay the paper out beside Mikey's tray.

“Give it a rest, Hadrian,” Mikey said but, “No, what do you think? I changed it, see?” he insisted.

Hadrian had reversed the design. He had put the places for signatures at the top, with the statement of what the petition was for beneath them. Beneath all of that, at the bottom center of the page, he had printed out in letters large enough to be a newspaper headline,
PETITION.

“Okay, so you changed it,” Mikey acknowledged, and went back to her lunch.

“No, it's really interesting,” Margalo said, pulling the paper over to look at it. “This way, the signatures are more important, because they come first.”

“That's what I thought,” Hadrian said.

“You're good at this,” Margalo said.

Hadrian looked hopefully back to Mikey.

“Okay, so I like it,” she said. “So what?”

“You do?” he answered.

“But we're
done
with this petition, Hadrian.”

“I know that.” He picked up his piece of paper, folded it, and jammed it into his rear pocket. “But there'll be more, you know. Before we get out of school, there's every likelihood of more petitions. Although I don't know yet what they'll be for,” he said, speaking to himself, really, as he wandered away.

Margalo picked up the second half of her sandwich, leftover turkey and mayonnaise.

“I don't have a turkey sandwich,” Mikey pointed out.

Margalo chewed. “Too bad.” She didn't think Mikey would care but she told her anyway, “I went shopping with Aurora and Esther on Saturday, at the New-to-You.”

Mikey wouldn't even fake interest. So Margalo didn't tell her about the incredible sweater she'd found, with an Italian name on its label, costing only one dollar and twenty-five cents, which was more expensive than most of the other selections at that store. Mikey would find out about the sweater soon enough.

Frannie came by, sat down beside Mikey, said hey, and declined Margalo's offer of a Fig Newton. Mikey took two. “What time are you assigned to the bake sale table?” Frannie asked.

The way the committee had divided up the assignments, the people who baked for that day didn't have to sell, and the people who were assigned to the table didn't bake.

“We're baking,” Mikey said. “We're always going to be baking.”

“Can you do that?” Frannie wondered. “Nobody else is.”

Mikey just smiled, a
Just-watch-me
smile, and Frannie laughed. “Did Hadrian show you his new design for the petition?” she asked now. “He's really good with graphics.”

*    *    *

On Friday morning, both Mikey and Margalo carried a big shopping bag into the school. Each shopping bag had three shoe boxes piled up in it. Each shoe box held two dozen chocolate chip cookies. “Which means that together we're a gross,” Mikey said to Margalo.

“Better than being plain gross,” Margalo answered as they went down the hall to the principal's office. To create a larger desire for her cookies by making it look like there weren't very many, Mikey had decided to leave one of the shopping bags in the office, with the secretary. She hadn't told Mrs. Chambers about this yet.

Knapsacks in one hand and shopping bags in the other, they stood in front of the secretary's desk. Mrs. Chambers was on the phone and tried to learn without talking to them what they wanted, so she could refuse without interrupting her call. She put a hand up to her forehead as if she was feeling for a temperature. Mikey and Margalo shook their heads. No, they weren't feverish. Mrs. Chambers pointed down her throat with two fingers, and they shook their heads. No, they weren't nauseated; or maybe no, they didn't have sore throats. Mrs. Chambers, waiting with the phone held up against one ear, seemed puzzled. She wrote
Cramps?
on her little notepad, turned it around to face them; and they shook their heads, no cramps. With all of that information gathered, all of it ne a-tive, Mrs. Chambers made her decision. With her
free hand she waved them away,
Go away, go to homeroom, the bell's about to ring.

Mikey and Margalo shook their heads, No.

Finally, Mrs. Chambers said into the phone, “We'll give the class a study hall in the library until you get here. As soon as you can,” she said, and hung up the phone. “Then
what?
” she asked Margalo.

“Will you keep this shopping bag in your office, please? It's for the bake sale table.”

“Mrs. Draper is in charge of bake sale goods,” Mrs. Chambers said.

“They'll be safer with you,” Margalo said.

Mrs. Chambers agreed about that, but said, “I can't let you. What if everybody wanted to?”

“But everybody doesn't,” Mikey said.

“I don't need added responsibilities,” Mrs. Chambers said.

“They're marked with our initials,” Mikey pointed out.

The telephone rang, Mr. Saunders called out, “Marie?” from behind the open door into his office, then Mr. Cohen entered to find out where his homeroom students who were scheduled for Mrs. Sanabria's gym class should go for first period, since she was out
sick, and another teacher entered with two eighth-grade boys who glared at one another across the width of the teacher.

Mrs. Chambers punched a button and picked up the ringing phone. “West Junior High School, good morning.”

“Thanks a lot,” Margalo said, and set her shopping bag down behind the secretary's desk. The bag was labeled ME. Each shoebox in it was labeled ME.

Out in the corridor, Mikey told Margalo, “You take my shopping bag to Mrs. Draper's room.”

“Why don't you?”

“I'll get your books and put your lunch in your locker.” Mikey reached out for Margalo's knapsack, passing over her own shopping bag.

“I want to get my own books,” Margalo protested. “I know what I need. Why don't you run your own errands?”

“Jumping Jehoshaphat, Margalo, you're supposed to be so smart about people. You know what'll happen to cookies people think I made. Just do it my way, okay? It's only for this week, until the cookies sell themselves.”

Well, there was a seventh-grade form of the grade
school cootie game, Margalo couldn't deny it. But, “Why does your way mean I have to run around doing your errands? And probably getting in trouble because probably I'll be late to homeroom,” she groused.

“You will if you don't get going,” Mikey agreed.

*    *    *

Mikey had a whole marketing strategy worked out. Her idea was to give Mrs. Draper half of the cookies—three shoe boxes—for the lunchtime bake sale table. Then, at the end of lunch, when those three boxes had sold out, Margalo would bring one more to the table. They would bring the last two boxes out for the after-school sale.

Mikey had explained it all to Margalo, at length. “My cookies will be better than anything else they have, so everybody will want them. When they run out, people will want them more. Because,” she explained, “consumers want what they think is hard to get. Like Beanie Babies, like Pokémon dolls.”

“I never wanted any of those.”

“I didn't say you, I said people.”

“I'm people,” Margalo pointed out, on principle.

“Leaping Lizards, Margalo,” Mikey argued, exasperated. “What is with you? You know I'm right.”

“I'm just helping you stay calm,” Margalo said.

“How can you help me stay calm by picking stupid fights with me?” Mikey demanded.

“By burning up your excess energy,” Margalo explained.

“This is just basic marketing, creating a need,” Mikey explained.

Mikey talked confident, but she refused to go anywhere near the bake sale table. They had stapled blue and white crepe paper streamers to hang down over the flowered sheet that Casey Wolsowski's mother had donated to the decorating committee, and Mikey said she didn't want to be anywhere near it. “What if cute is contagious?” she asked, and Margalo promised, “You're immune.” Her cookies were being grabbed up as soon as the boxes were opened, but all Mikey would say about it was, “They're jerks to sell my cookies for only ten cents. I'd charge at least fifty cents. For the bake sale. I bet I could get a dollar on the street.”

She and Margalo were pretending not to care, although both of them felt entirely victorious, especially because some time before the end of first lunch, word got out that those were Mikey Elsinger's chocolate chip cookies that were the most popular item on the table.

“I could make the committee buy my cookies,” Mikey realized.

“Are you trying to increase your unpopularity?” Margalo demanded.

“As if I care.”

“Yeah, but the petition changed—”

“The petition wasn't about getting popular. It was about tennis, only nobody knows that. Except you.”

“And besides,” Margalo returned to the point, “the cookies donated to the bake sale are to benefit the class. You
can't
charge for them.”

“I worked it out,” Mikey told her. “It costs thirteen cents a cookie—say, fifteen cents, to be on the safe side—and at fifty cents apiece, that's thirty-five cents' profit for each cookie. So selling a gross would get me about fifty dollars in profit. Actually, fifty dollars and forty cents, as I worked it out. If I charged the committee even just a quarter a cookie, I'd make money.”

“If you tried it, you'd make nothing but trouble.”

“If I made money, I could buy you a ticket to California. I looked it up on the Net; it's four hundred seven dollars. Round trip. Booked more than three weeks in advance. Nonreturnable.”

That stopped Margalo, shut her up, because if
there was any way she could pay for a plane ticket out to California, and stay with Mrs. Elsinger for free . . . but that was more hope than she could tolerate, and besides, Mr. Saunders would never let Mikey do that, and besides, the dance was only a couple of months away, minus Christmas vacation, so they didn't have enough bake sales to cover the price of a ticket, anyway.

“There's nowhere near enough time, Mikey. I thought you were so good at math.”

“You know,” Mikey snapped at her, “computers aren't the only kind of geniuses people can be.”

Margalo bit back, “Now you're a genius? I guess that explains why nobody likes you.”

“You like me,” Mikey reminded her. She proved her point. “You'd come to California with me if you could, wouldn't you?”

M
argalo knew ahead of time that Mikey was going to be absent on Monday. Mikey came down with the flu at her mother's, who returned Mikey on Saturday so she could be sick at home. On Sunday night Mikey called Margalo to tell her this. “How bad do you feel?” Margalo asked.

“You have to get my assignments,” Mikey said.

“I wanted you to bring me one of your T-shirts,” Margalo complained. “For this new sweater—”

“All of the classes. Not just the ones we're in together.”

“You
will
lend me one, won't you?”

“Don't think you can keep me off high honor roll by pretending to forget,” Mikey said.

“One of the gray ones,” Margalo said.

“I've got three of the five classic flu symptoms. No nausea. No muscle aches.”