Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?

by Cynthia Voigt

  “Not fair,” was Louis’s first reaction, but then he figured out, “I might never have to go to another English class all year. That’s not bad,” and he strutted around the cafeteria and hallways as if he was the greatest thing the world had ever seen, the envy of all. Because he was on academic probation, he couldn’t play basketball, but, “Who cares?” he asked, and ignored people who said, “That’s a lucky thing for us.”

  In high school you had to get pretty good at ignoring what people were saying about you. In that regard Louis Caselli was doing very well in high school. He ignored what people said about him, and what they said to him as well, trying to give him good advice. In that regard, in fact, nobody was doing as well in ninth grade as Louis Caselli. “You’re just a bunch of wusses,” he told his friends. “They’re not going to throw me out. They can’t, not if I don’t actually do something. And then it’s only suspension, which means I’d get to stay home all day. They never hold people back. They don’t want us around any longer than they have to keep us, and besides, it looks bad on their records if people fail. I’m easy,” Louis assured them, as if that had been in doubt. “We know,” was the answer, spoken in ironic or sarcastic tones by his friends, in amusement by people who enjoyed watching Louis Caselli crash and burn, and without surprise by Mikey and Margalo. But the school made Miss Marshall go back on her threat and allow Louis back in class even though he hadn’t done the reading or answered the class’s questions. “Bummer,” Louis said, strutting off to English again.

  The most unexpected event of the week was an announcement during Lunch A on Thursday—and then again during Lunch B, also Lunch C—by the Principal himself, in his own voice. Someone had taken Mr. Radley’s grade book out of his desk, and his attendance book too. “Those records are irreplaceable,” intoned the solemn voice of the Principal.

  “Who cares?” people mumbled, not loudly enough to be identified by the faculty on lunch duty. Suggestions were made as to who might have taken the teacher’s record books, with Louis Caselli the miscreant of choice for most people. “If those records are so important, why didn’t he make copies?” people muttered. Another reaction, very low voiced, was, “If it’d been me who did it? I’d have taken it before midyear grades were handed in.”

  But you could see that the teachers took this seriously. You could see them being much more anxious about their big gray-and-blue notebooks, one filled with their own class lists and grades, the other with their homeroom’s attendance records. Teachers who carried briefcases went around looking smug; they always knew where their record books were.

  The authorities might have been upset about the theft of record books, but as far as Margalo could determine, they didn’t care about the theft of her money, and that did gripe her. As Margalo reported to Mikey at Friday lunch, “Mrs. Hendricks is ignoring me. I think she’s pretending it never happened.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “The play,” Margalo said. “For some reason, or maybe it’s just the kind of person she is? Whatever, she really wants this production to be good. It’s as if she was going after a Tony or an Emmy. It’s like . . . It’s like you and every tennis match you play.”

  “But it’s only a school play,” Mikey pointed out.

  “But those are only tennis matches.”

  “But tennis is different.”

  “Everything is different to the people who care about it. If it’s what you care about, it’s important.”

  Mikey had a sudden question. “What about you? What do you have that you think is so important?”

  “I’m looking for it,” Margalo answered so quickly that Mikey almost wondered if she’d been waiting for that particular question. Or if she’d been thinking about it to herself already. “At the moment it’s getting a college degree.”

  Mikey worked that out. “For which you are working and saving the money that was stolen from you.”

  “Exactly.”

  They ate for a few, thoughtful minutes.

  Finally, “Without Ms. Hendriks to back you up, nobody is going to do anything, are they?” Mikey asked. “Students are used to getting things stolen. Nobody ever does anything about it.”

  Margalo was having an idea. She laid it out for Mikey step by step, like a Math problem. “If I care about something being stolen from me, probably most people care too. They care, but they feel like they can’t do anything so they don’t care because why bother?”

  “You can always do something.”

  Margalo ignored the interruption. “So it’s being discouraged that makes people accept things? So probably, if I talk to the cast members, they would care.” She pictured it, telling them, all the shocked faces. She imagined the sympathetic comments: “Somebody did? That stinks! How much? That’s terrible!” Margalo didn’t much like the thought of all that sympathy. Also, she was pretty sure that person after person would respond just that way, one after another, as she told them, including the person who had stolen her money.

  But what if she talked to them all together, all at once, in a group? Then, if somebody had noticed something, as people talked about it, that person might remember what he’d seen, or she’d seen. In a group, people might just speak up. Because in a group, the guilty party would be a minority of one. She wondered if she could pick out that one person, out of the whole group.

  “I’m going to talk to them, all together,” she told Mikey.

  “She won’t let you.”

  “How can she stop me? Once I’ve started.”

  This was the kind of approach Mikey got. “Good idea.”

  “I think maybe.”

  “When will you do it?”

  “Today, when she calls everybody together for a wrap-up. Fridays she always ends with a recap of the week’s work. I think she doesn’t want people losing interest over the weekend, so she pumps them up on Friday. Teachers act like they think school is all there is going on in your life. Sometimes I wonder if they think school goes on forever.”

  “For them it has,” Mikey realized, and added, without any sympathy, “Too bad for them.”

  Margalo’s idea didn’t look so smart to her that afternoon as she sat listening to the end of Ms. Hendriks’s pep talk. “We’ve got only five weeks to get ready,” said Ms. Hendriks. The teacher was clearly on edge about this play, much more than with the December production, although A Midsummer Night’s Dream had been a much harder play to do successfully, in Margalo’s opinion.

  “As soon as we can we’re going to be rehearsing in costume and onstage so you’ll all be one hundred percent comfortable. I noticed that last time some of you didn’t really relax until the second performance,” Ms. Hendriks said. “Warn your mothers about the extra laundry and ask them to take extra care with it. Especially—Sally? Alice? Those dresses you wear, and the shawl, Alice, it’s very old, and valuable. Tell your mothers.”

  Sally, who was as usual sitting as close as she could get to Richard, didn’t respond, but Alice did. “I do my own laundry, Ms. Hendriks.”

  “Well, yes, but be careful. Maybe your mother could wash the shawl?”

  “I’ve done my own laundry since seventh grade,” Alice said. “My mother works.”

  “Yes, all right, but please, remember, it has to dry flat. It’s crocheted.”

  “Why would it get dirty, anyway?” somebody asked. “It’s a shawl, not a shirt.”

  “My mom’s not going to be happy about this,” somebody predicted.

  “If there are any problems, please, call me, or have your parents call me. I’m happy to be called at home if it’ll help the play,” Ms. Hendriks said, then, “All right, that’s everything. What is it, Margalo?”

  Margalo stood up. “Yes.” She waited for people to turn around to look at her before saying, “I have an announcement.”

  Stupid, that’s no way to begin.

  “I mean, I want to tell everybody—and ask—Last Friday, during rehearsal—”

  Ms. Hendriks sighed. “Marg
alo.”

  “I was robbed. Of two weeks’ earnings, which I was going to take to the bank and deposit in my savings account.”

  Two things stopped her from traveling on down that road to the town of Pity Me. The first was bored voices, asking, “Who cares?” And saying, “I wasn’t even here, it has nothing to do with me.” The second was her own opinion that while it was easy to get people to feel sorry for you, pity didn’t last long, or do much good. So she stuck to the facts. “The money was in my wallet at the bottom of my knapsack. Hard to get to. I want to ask the people who were here Friday if you noticed anything, if you’d tell me.”

  That said, she sat down again, quickly, before anybody felt like they had to respond right away. But nobody wanted to say anything, not anything public. There was a kind of low murmuring, people making whispered comments to the person next to them, the way people do when they hear something that makes them uncomfortable.

  But the only person who should be uncomfortable was the person who robbed her, Margalo thought, before she remembered how easy it was to feel guilty if you thought somebody might suspect you, even if you knew you were innocent. She was sort of waiting, as the room emptied, for someone to come up to her and tell her something. What they might tell her, she didn’t have any guess about, but that there was something to be told she was certain. However, not one person said anything. In fact, they pretty much avoided her.

  Margalo guessed that answered the question of who cared. Nobody cared.

  Only Hadrian approached her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope it wasn’t a lot of money, although”—and he laughed a little uneasy laugh—“everything’s relative. What are you going to do about it?”

  “I thought,” Margalo admitted, “that I had done something by making the announcement. But I didn’t find out anything.”

  “Probably they’re not interested,” Hadrian diagnosed. “It’s only stealing, and that happens all the time. Stealing’s not something that makes people outraged. Not like my collarbone, which people could feel good about getting outraged about.”

  “It should be,” Margalo said.

  “Ought does not imply Is,” announced Hadrian Klenk.

  Margalo just stared at him. What an interesting idea. And what an interesting way of expressing it.

  “So, what are you going to do?” he asked. “Because—if you didn’t mind, if you wanted—I could help.”

  – 10 –

  Detective Margalo on the Case

  By Lunch A on Monday most people had heard about Margalo’s being robbed. They hadn’t heard it on the loudspeakers but from one another, as members of Drama Club reported—in one way or another, none of them admiring—to their friends about Margalo’s making a speech about it. “Weird,” was the general opinion, whether weird and pitiful, or weird and stupid, or even weird but bold.

  “It’s lousy what some people will do,” Tim said to Margalo at lunch. “You’d think—I mean, we’re all kids, we’re all in the same high school, we should hang together.”

  Margalo quoted Hadrian. “Ought does not imply Is.”

  “I know,” Tim agreed, “but still . . . I’m sorry about this, Margalo.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “What do you expect?” asked Cassie.

  Jace explained Cassie’s mood. “She went to Peter Paul because she thought her semester grade was a mistake. But he meant to give her a C.” Jace’s mouth turned up slightly, just at the corners, and his voice had a little serves-her-right in it.

  “C minus, if we have to talk about my Art grade, Mr. I-got-an-A. He’s decided he was wrong about me having talent.”

  Tim asked Margalo, “So, has anybody said anything to you about it?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody will, you can bet on that,” Cassie announced. “I don’t know why I’m still in school.”

  Jace explained it to her. “You’re not sixteen. Your parents won’t let you drop out.”

  “They can’t stop me. Nobody can stop me from doing what I really want to do.”

  “I’m still sorry,” Tim said. “I wish there was something you could do. Maybe you should dust your wallet with fingerprint powder?”

  “Put a mousetrap in your knapsack?” Felix offered.

  “Don’t bring money to school,” Casey suggested.

  Jace had the most practical idea. “You should steal it back.”

  “From who? If I don’t know who took it.”

  “It doesn’t matter who, just get even.”

  Margalo had an entirely different kind of idea, but she was keeping it to herself. Or rather, to herself and Mikey, who she took off to the library for some quiet conversation, leaving the table before anyone else had finished their lunch.

  Or rather, to herself and Mikey and Hadrian, since he trailed along behind them into the big, well-lighted room, following them to a table tucked back among the stacks and as far as you could get from the busy computer area. “Hey,” he said, dropping his knapsack onto the ground beside a chair and looking expectantly at them, like a clever little dog, a Jack Russell or a corgi. “I’m here to help. I told you Friday I would,” he reminded Margalo.

  “Then sit down,” Margalo said, and she began. “Okay, here it is. We’re smart, we can figure this out, that’s what I think. So I plan to solve this crime, and I want your help. I’m pretty sure that if we think about it in the right way, we can figure it out. The standard detecting approach is Who, What, Where, When, and Why, right?”

  Margalo opened her ring binder and took out a sheet of paper. “We know What,” she said, “that’s the money. And we know When and Where.” She was writing down the questions and their answers as she reviewed the situation for Hadrian and Mikey. Hadrian listened patiently. Mikey did not; she humphed, and shifted restlessly in her chair. “As to Why, there are any number of reasons. Greed, for kicks, to supply a habit, some kind of initiation test for some kind of secret club or gang.”

  “I never heard of any secret clubs or gangs,” Mikey objected.

  They just gave her the beady eyes.

  Hadrian said, “Precisely Why obviously depends on precisely Who.”

  “Which makes Who the place to start,” Margalo said. “That’s the same conclusion I reached, so that’ll be our first step. I’ll make a list of everyone I can think of who was there that Friday, and you look at it. Between us we should be able to remember everyone.”

  “What about me?” Mikey asked, but the bell rang and the other two were already gathering up their knapsacks.

  “Tomorrow morning, before homeroom, here,” Margalo directed.

  “Who put you in charge?” Mikey objected, but it was too late. Nobody had time to wait around and quarrel.

  The next morning, in the twelve minutes before homeroom, they met up again in the library. Margalo set down on the table in front of them a sheet of paper that held a list of names, starting off with Ms. Hendriks and going on for—Mikey counted—twenty-four more. “I don’t know any of these people,” she announced.

  “Yes you do,” Margalo told her.

  “Other than Hadrian, I mean, but you already know I know him.”

  “You have to know Richard and Sally, they’re that couple. Seniors. She played Puck. He has a ponytail—which he’s going to have to cut for Our Town. They dress out of Gap, they’re a Gap couple. She’s taller than him, and blond, not pretty but really striking, she has terrific eyebrows.”

  Mikey didn’t know where Margalo got the interest or the energy to notice all of that about anybody. But, “Are they the ones who hold hands everywhere? They block traffic kissing in the middle of the halls?”

  “That’s them. And John Lawrence, he’s the boy cheerleader, you’ve at least heard of him.”

  Hadrian was reading down the list and nodding his head. “I think that’s everyone.”

  “Yeah, but Margalo, even if I know some of these people by sight, I don’t know them. So how will this help me help you figure out who rob
bed you? Why don’t you ask Tim? He probably knows them, being on the paper, being a sophomore and the kind of person who takes people to brunch.”

  “Tim took you to brunch?” Hadrian asked. “When?”

  “Last weekend.”

  “She has to do brunch for her dates,” Mikey added. “Because of her work hours.”

  “Is he your boyfriend?” Hadrian asked Margalo.

  Mikey answered for her. “The world wonders.”

  Margalo just smiled an irritating, mysterious smile. “We agreed, no date post mortems.” Before Mikey had time to do more than groan, Margalo went on, insisting, “We made a deal. You know you hate that kind of girly giggly talk.”

  “I never giggle.”

  “But I’ll tell you this much, I had eggs Benedict. Have you ever had eggs Benedict?”

  “Of course I have. My mother’s boyfriends used to like taking us out for brunch. I’ve had eggs Benedict lots of times,” Mikey answered, feeling a little better. She just didn’t want to be entirely left out, that was all.

  “Hollandaise is one of the trickiest sauces because of how easily it can separate,” Hadrian explained to Margalo and looked to Mikey for confirmation. “Isn’t that right?”

  “There are ways to fix it,” she told him. “You don’t cook, do you?”

  “No,” he laughed, his high seventh-grade-kid laugh. “That would about finish me off, if I did. Being a brain is barely okay, because I’m a dork, but being a cook, too . . . It’s all right for you because you’re female, and you, too, Margalo—if you want to be cooks. But I’d never get away with it.”

  “If I was a boy, I’d get away with it,” Mikey declared.

  Hadrian nodded agreement. “But you’re not like other people. Neither are you, Margalo, but nobody can miss it about you, Mikey, whereas you want them to miss it about you,” he observed to Margalo, then went back to studying the list of names.

  Margalo took out a second sheet of paper, which she had divided into sections, each with a title—Stage Manager, Joe and Doc, Howie and Doc, Howie and Mrs. Gibbs, Doc and Mrs. Gibbs. Hadrian studied this new material. Margalo studied the original list of names. Mikey studied nothing and felt left out.