It's Not Easy Being Bad

by Cynthia Voigt

  Mikey was groaning softly. “Bo-ring,” she chanted. “Bo-ring, -ring, -ring,” and Margalo didn’t argue. She looked at Mikey and grinned. They chanted softly in unison, “Bo-ring, -ring, -ring.”

  Louis continued explaining his idea as Mr. Saunders, carrying the microphone in one hand, its cord trailing behind like a giant, skinny possum tail, or a giant, skinny umbilical cord, came down to ground level. “See, we could charge an entry fee, for each team to play. All the guys would like it.”

  “What about the girls?” a girl demanded.

  “Girls could have baking contests. Or sewing contests.” Mr. Saunders didn’t stop him and Louis was feeling smart, feeling important. “Or, girls could sell kisses.”

  Groans mingled with “All-rights,” while clumps of girls made flurrying flattered noises.

  “I’m never going to make it through two years,” Mikey moaned.

  “High school won’t be any better,” Margalo warned her.

  “We’ll be older,” Mikey said, without enthusiasm. “We can get jobs, and work,” she pointed out. Then she got very quiet.

  This was not because Mr. Saunders was coming up the aisle toward them, spreading silence out behind him like a supertanker spreading its huge wake. The approach of Mr. Saunders was why Margalo got quiet, but not Mikey. Mikey had her own reasons.

  Before he came to the end of the filled rows, Mr. Saunders stopped, facing them.

  Margalo pretended to be riveted to something that was going on, onstage. She raised her hand and waved it frantically in the air, Call on me, please, call on me.

  Satisfied, Mr. Saunders turned around.

  But Mikey had gotten quiet because her brain had gone into gear. It shifted into first and then sped right up to fifth, and the words burst out of her. “What if—”

  “Shhsh,” Margalo whispered and waved her hand in the direction of Mr. Saunders’s back.

  The principal turned around again, but Mikey still hadn’t noticed him.

  “No, it’s a great idea—what if I’m a millionaire before I’m twenty?”

  Margalo pretended she was deaf, and interested only in the handout on her lap, and totally alone in the row, sitting next to someone she’d never seen before.

  Mr. Saunders came to stand right beside Mikey. He didn’t say a word.

  Mikey looked up at him and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. “Tell you later,” she said to Margalo, who was pretending to be invisible. Then Mikey looked up at Mr. Saunders, who loomed above her, the microphone in his hand, and stage whispered, “Zut, alors!”

  8

  What If—?

  “I’m not going to let them get away with this,” Mikey told Margalo. “I have a plan.”

  “I know,” Margalo said, not particularly interested in being ranted at.

  They were jouncing along home on the school bus. Mikey sat by the window, but she wasn’t looking out of it. Nobody paid any attention to them, and they didn’t pay attention to anybody else; at least, Mikey didn’t.

  “Okay, Miss I Already Know Everything, what is my plan?” Mikey asked.

  “To make a million dollars,” Margalo said, then she remembered, “unless it’s to make high honor roll.”

  “Wrong twice,” Mikey answered, then she corrected herself, “wrong once, because I am going to get on the high honor roll. But this is the real plan: I’m going to play on the West tennis team in the spring.”

  Sometimes, Margalo thought Mikey must spend her waking hours figuring out ways to make herself even more unpopular.

  Mikey explained, “They’ll keep me off the team just because I’m not in eighth grade and that stinks. I mean, it really stinks.”

  “You’ll be in eighth grade next year. You’ll get your turn.”

  “Also, it’s hypocritical,” Mikey said. “Because they assign us to classes by ability. Like, the seminars are only for the best students, and the way they do the sectioning for college prep classes. And like even having college prep classes in seventh grade.”

  “They won’t change the policy,” Margalo predicted.

  “You don’t get it. I’m right. They’re wrong. It’s going to be easy.”

  “I don’t think so,” Margalo said. “Although . . .” She was having the beginning of an idea, herself.

  “Besides, it’ll give me something to do,” Mikey argued. “Look at our lives, Margalo. We sit in class, we learn what they tell us to, we go home and do homework. I ask you,” she told Margalo.

  “School’s not all that simple for me,” Margalo pointed out. She had to figure out which teachers preferred you to repeat back their own opinions and which wanted you to contradict them; which wanted you to ask questions and which preferred sponges for students. She needed to learn to predict the kinds of questions she was going to get on tests and what kinds of answers would get her the best grades. Not to mention tracking the interests and opinions of the other students, itself a full-time job. “I’m not bored at school,” she said.

  “You should be,” Mikey announced. “Besides, you know it’s not fair if I can’t play on the team just because I’m a seventh grader.”

  Even if she agreed, Margalo didn’t want to hear any more about this. In fact, she didn’t care much about it. In fact, if somebody asked her about what was boring, she would probably answer: getting bent out of shape because seventh graders couldn’t play on school teams.

  That, however, she didn’t tell Mikey. Instead, she asked, “What dumb committee do we want to be on for the dumb dance?”

  “None,” Mikey said.

  “Yeah. But every seventh grader has to.”

  “And that’s not fair, either,” Mikey said.

  * * *

  Sometimes, Margalo thought, Mikey was more trouble than she was worth.

  “I’m going to make an appointment with Mr. Saunders,” was how Mikey greeted her the next morning. Not, “Good luck on the math quiz,” but only her own hot news.

  Even if Margalo had been thinking about this team situation, she still wanted a best friend who didn’t think exclusively about herself. So Margalo was grumpy, and Mikey decided, “I guess you’re going to start your period. About time. Do you have extra zits this week?”

  Maybe that was Mikey’s idea of best friendship. Sometimes it wasn’t Margalo’s, so she was glad to spend most of that morning not in Mikey’s company. Although the idea of starting her period—because it was about time—cheered her up.

  On a whim, the cheered-up Margalo stopped by Ronnie Caselli’s desk before English class started and said, “Hey.” She could see that Ronnie was glad she did.

  That told Margalo that Ronnie was sorry for the way she’d treated Mikey, about the dinner party and afterward, too. Ronnie would probably never say it—she was a Caselli, after all, and Mikey was Mikey—but she wouldn’t do it again, either.

  “Hihowareyou?” Ronnie smiled, a big smile. “You’re looking good—but you always do.”

  Margalo kept the compliments even. “I like those barrettes.” Ronnie held her hair back from her face with three barrettes, two on one side, one on the other, all of them looking like tiny glass daisies in pale tones of pink and blue and purple.

  “I got them this weekend, at the mall.”

  “Expensive?” Margalo asked, as if she could even think of buying herself fancy hair barrettes.

  “Not too bad. I’ve been doing a lot of baby-sitting.”

  “I wish I could baby-sit for money.” Margalo meant it, but she also meant to flatter. Who doesn’t like to be told she’s more fortunate than you?

  A few girls entered the class. “Hey, Ronnie,” they said and, seeing Margalo, “Hey, Margalo.” “Hey,” and “Hihowareyou,” Margalo and Ronnie answered.

  “You know what I wish?” Ronnie said then, looking up at Margalo, who was still loitering near her desk. “No, really, I really do. I wish Mikey wasn’t so immature. Don’t you? Because she’s okay, in lots of ways, except—she’s so immature,” Ronnie repeated. And sudde
nly Margalo didn’t care very much at all if Mikey was so self-centered. “She gets everybody angry,” Ronnie said. “I can’t tell—do you think she does it on purpose? She’s really lucky you stick with her, isn’t she?”

  Later, Margalo wished she had said something instead of mouthing vague sounds, “ummble, bluughgle,” to avoid saying anything. But she hadn’t, and the real reason she hadn’t was because she didn’t want Ronnie to know she disagreed; and she knew that about herself, even while she was ummble-bluughgleing away. She knew it and she didn’t much like it.

  One of the things Margalo liked best about Mikey, she decided, was the way Mikey never kept her mouth shut when she had an opinion.

  So that by the time they sat down together in the cafeteria, Margalo was glad to have Mikey for a best friend, and ready to talk about the school team question. “Going to Mr. Saunders isn’t the first thing to do,” she told Mikey.

  “Who asked you?” Mikey was looking at her plate: chicken à la king served over an ice-cream scoop of rice, with a serving of limp, skinny green beans lying on their sides. “Where’s Heather when I really need her?” Mikey groused, then asked, “Can green beans have anorexia?”

  Margalo explained, “They’re french cut.”

  “That was a joke, Dumby.”

  “That was a joke?” Margalo asked. “Dumby?”

  A reluctant laugh escaped from Mikey’s control.

  Margalo unwrapped her sandwich, packaged boiled ham on supermarket rye bread, with mustard and a slice of American cheese.

  “So instead of going straight to Mr. Saunders, you think I’d be smarter to start with Miss Sanabria?” Mikey asked. Miss Sanabria was one of the four girls’ gym teachers; she also coached the seventh-grade basketball players and was assistant coach to the eighth-grade girls’ team. When Margalo nodded, a slow Maybe nod, Mikey said, “That’s good thinking.” Which was about as close to “thank you” as Mikey ever got.

  “Actually,” Margalo said, “I think that you should reconsider the whole plan.”

  And Mikey interrupted. “You always try to fix up my ideas.”

  “You always go in swinging,” Margalo pointed out.

  They were quiet for a minute. Margalo waited to be asked how she would do it. Mikey wasn’t about to ask her anything.

  “The thing is,” Mikey said, “you always make things so complicated.”

  “Things are complicated.”

  “Not always. And I might go in swinging, but at least I connect.” Then Mikey added, to be honest, “Most of the time.”

  “Okay,” Margalo admitted. “But here you’re talking about asking the principal to change school policy. You’re talking about teachers, adults. Things are always more complicated when adults get involved.”

  “Still—” Mikey started to say.

  Margalo cut her off, passing over one of the two sugared chocolate doughnuts she’d put in that morning, even though personally she didn’t like to have so much sugar so close to her teeth.

  Mikey stopped talking to chomp down on the doughnut, which gave Margalo time to suggest, “You should talk to some of the seventh graders first, maybe get them to sign a petition. Then you could have a groundswell of popular opinion behind you when you go to ask Mr. Saunders about it. That would put you in a stronger negotiating position.”

  By the time Mikey swallowed, and washed the doughnut down with milk, she had seen Margalo’s point. “I’ve got until spring, so there’s time. How many signatures would make a good petition? Would coaches sign, do you think? Would you ask them? And teachers?”

  “Actually, I was thinking,” Margalo suggested, “what if you went out for basketball?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because winter is basketball season,” Margalo explained. “So instead of waiting for the spring tennis season, you could go out for basketball. You could agitate to get seventh graders on the girls’ basketball team. Because, here’s what I think,” she said, but instead of speaking she reached into her brown bag and took out an orange. She made the first break in its skin with her teeth, then started peeling it with her fingers, carefully putting all the peels in a pile she could move back into her brown paper bag.

  Mikey watched this, waiting, for about two seconds. “I’ll agitate you,” she muttered. “Spit it out, Margalo. I know you’ve got some whole plan worked out.”

  “Okay.” Margalo took a breath. “I think you should make a big fuss about seventh graders being on the basketball team, and get people to sign a petition for that, and then give in gracefully when Mr. Saunders says no. Then, when you come back to ask about playing on the tennis team, he’ll say yes.”

  Mikey didn’t see it. “If he won’t in January, why would he in March?”

  “Because they want to say yes to students, but they never like to make exceptions. They want to be popular, well-liked—stern and well-liked, that’s a teacher’s dream. But they’re afraid of looking weak. They’ll take the easiest way, which is usually the way of no-change. But if it’s just you, and just tennis—which is played one-on-one—”

  “Doubles isn’t.”

  “You know what I mean. Tennis isn’t like a team sport; there aren’t a lot of players involved. I think if you’ve already softened them up over basketball, then I bet they’ll let you play tennis. If you really are good enough,” Margalo concluded, deliberately provoking.

  “I’m good enough,” Mikey said. “More than good enough.”

  “Anyway, that’s my plan.”

  “I’m a natural athlete.” Mikey returned to the chicken à la king, which she had stirred into the rice. “I’ll probably even be a pretty good basketball player. Dad and I watch it a lot on TV, so I know the game. Getting good enough will give me something to do, so that’s another advantage. You can go around talking to people about how unfair it is, and getting them to sign a petition. We don’t have much time, Margalo,” she said urgently.

  “Much time for what?” Frannie Arenberg asked, sitting down beside Margalo. “What are those red things in the stew, Mikey?” she asked. “Are you going to eat them?”

  “Time for getting a petition signed, to let seventh-grade girls play on the basketball team,” Margalo said, but Mikey answered, “Pimentos. They’re supposed to add flavor. Haven’t you ever had creamed chicken?”

  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?”

  9

  Can Unpopular People Have a Popular Opinion?

  Between 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, Mi
key 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.