It's Not Easy Being Bad Page 8

  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 though
t 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.

  Mikey wasn’t interested in anything but the question of how well she would do in her first basketball practice, and whether Margalo would take the late bus with her today, or go home early.

  “Early. I didn’t tell Aurora we’d be on the late bus, so she’d worry.”

  “Call her,” Mikey suggested, but Margalo shook her head. She wasn’t wasting any quarter of hers on a pay phone. “You’ll have to wait for hours to hear how it goes,” Mikey argued.

  “I think I can stand that.” Also, Margalo needed to get this jacket back into Howard’s closet before he arrived home from school.

  “But what about me having to stand the wait to tell you?” Mikey demanded, chomping down on a slice of pizza, not even offering Margalo a bite.

  “Where’s your petition?” Frannie asked, setting her tray down on their table, asking Margalo, “Want a slice? Their pizza’s pretty good.” So Margalo took just the triangular tip of a slice while Frannie signed the petition and offered to help get more signatures. “We can wait outside the library, one on each side of the doors, in the morning before school starts,” she suggested to Margalo, who hadn’t even hoped for something as perfect as Frannie Arenberg wanting to help out.

  * * *

  On Tuesday, Margalo wore one of her stepsister Susannah’s old polos (for which she traded a night’s dishwashing) and jeans for once; she wore her gym sneakers, because even if they weren’t regulation Reeboks or Nikes, sneakers were still athletic shoes. She sat down at Tanisha’s table at lunch—not to unpack her sandwich and eat, just to greet Tanisha and everybody else there, a long table of jockettes, “Hey, Tan, hey, everybody. Whazzup?”

  “Whazzup?” they asked her back, and she told them. They signed the petition enthusiastically.

  * * *

  Wednesday, Margalo wore black over black. She drifted into the art studio before morning homeroom. She’d left Frannie sitting at a table in the library, reading the Monitor to find current events topics for civics, with a copy of the petition beside her in case anybody wanted to come up and sign. Frannie didn’t pick out targets and talk them into it; she just sat there and the targets came humming up to her, like bees to a flower.

  Margalo preferred moving around, getting people to want to do what she wanted them to want to do.

  In the art studio, nobody noticed her entry. Students, both boys and girls, both seventh graders and eighth, drooped beside the windows in boredom and drooped over desks in anticipation of more boredom to come; three were talking intently about a painting set out on an easel. Margalo approached a group of girls. One of them—Cassie—was in her math class. All looked curiously at her. “Hey, Cassie, what’s new?” Margalo said.

  “What ever is?” Cassie answered. “You guys know Margalo?”

  They shook their heads, no, they didn’t know her, but, “Like the skirt,” one of them said.

  “We’re in the same math,” Cassie explained to her friends, and, “I’m more impressive in English,” Margalo explained to Cassie.

  “Hey, that’s not a criticism,” Cassie said. “There should always be a couple of us who just don’t get it, in every class. It lowers the teacher’s expectations.”

  “But I’m not playing dumb,” Margalo said, and Cassie laughed. “Do you guys want to sign a petition?” Margalo asked then. She had decided that it would be stupid to try to conceal or misrepresent the petition’s nature from these girls. They were the arty-smarty clique; maybe not top students, but no dummies. “Any of you? Because we’re trying to get the policy about seventh-grade girls not being allowed to play on the basketball team changed. Because it’s not at all fair and it’s maybe even discriminatory,” she explained.

  “That’s sports,” one of the girls said, but another took the bait. “Discriminatory?”

  “Yeah,” Margalo said. “You know, though, what really puzzles me? Why the boys haven’t tried to do anything about it. Oh, well. Maybe they’re too busy worrying about winning. Anyway, do any of you want to look at the petition?”

  They did, and three of them wanted to sign, and they all knew other people who would probably be interested. “So, where are copies of these things posted?” they asked.

  “I have one, and Frannie Arenberg has one. We’re usually in the library after lunch,” Margalo said.

  Cassie responded, “Frannie’s always helping out, isn’t she?” and one of the group added, “Next time you want to do a petition, or anything like that, you ought to talk to me. The layout of this really sucks.”

  * * *

  By Wednesday lunch, both Margalo and Frannie were on their third petition pages, and things had slowed down a little. In the cafeteria, Margalo saw Frannie sitting at a table with Heather James and Annie Piers, Heather McGinty and Casey Wolsowski; and she watched Louis Caselli approach them. He was wearing a green, roll-neck J.Crew sweater, trying for a preppy look. He tapped Frannie on the shoulder and said something to her. She smiled up at him, then reached down to her pile of books to take out the petition. Louis took it from her and stood there, at her shoulder, reading it.

  He read for a long time.

  He was a slow reader, Margalo thought, but not that slow.

  Frannie just went back to talking with her friends.

  Then Louis tapped her on the shoulder again, and asked her something else. Frannie shook her head and said something, at which Louis looked over to where Margalo was watching.

  He tried to argue with Frannie, but Frannie just smiled and shook her head. He gave her back the petition, without signing, and headed for Margalo.

  Margalo nudged Mikey, who was eating the pale brown hamburger as if it actually had a taste. “Look who’s here,” Margalo said. Mikey grunted.

  Louis timed the beginning of what he planned to say to match his last step toward their table. But the moment he opened his mouth to speak, Mikey chomped a big bite of her hamburger, and Margalo said, “Nice sweater.”
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br />   Louis looked confused, briefly, then muttered, “Thanks,” to Margalo. He tried to talk to Mikey. “I read—”

  Mikey held up a french fry, streaming with catsup. “Want one?”

  Louis stepped back as if she had pulled a knife on him, a limp and bloody knife. “This petition,” he said, and now he sounded angry, which was more like him.

  “What about it?” Margalo asked. “Nobody’s asking you to sign,” she added, because Louis was more fun when he was on the defensive.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I won’t. Since it’s all about girls.”

  “So it’s nothing to do with you,” Mikey said. “So what do you want, Louis?”

  “Nothing.” The word was out of his mouth before any thought had entered his brain. He turned away. Then he had to stop, and turn back around, and approach them again, strutting along, as if this was exactly what he’d planned. “If you hadn’t left us out of it, I could talk a lot of the guys into signing this.”

  “I don’t know,” Margalo said. “The boys’ program is the high profile one. If we ask for both, see, we might have less chance of getting what we want for ourselves.”

  Louis thought hard. “You’d have more signatures,” he argued.

  “I don’t know,” Margalo said again.

  “I could borrow Frannie’s copy,” Louis offered, “and ask the guys, ask around. I bet I could get you a lot of signatures, if it was for our team, too.”

  “It’s not fair to leave the boys out,” Margalo allowed. “Do you care, Mikey?”

  Louis waited.

  Mikey took her time. She rubbed at her temples with her fingers. She shrugged, and popped three fries into her mouth. She chewed. When she’d swallowed, she said to Margalo, “I guess, if he wants to.”

  Margalo was doubtful now. “Are you sure, Mikey?”

  Louis lost it. “She just said so, didn’t she? Miss Interfering Epps.”

  Margalo didn’t say anything, just stared up at him.

  “What?” Louis demanded, after a while. “What?”

  Margalo sighed, a Too boring for words sigh. “I guess you can tell Frannie we said it’s okay to change ‘girls’ to ‘students’ and ‘her’ to ‘their.’ Have you got that?” Margalo asked, going back to her bologna sandwich. “Go tell her now.”