Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I get it,” Hadrian said as Margalo started filling names into the boxes. “You’re making one of those time/opportunity charts. Who had the opportunity to go into your wallet because they weren’t in the scene we were reading.”

  “To rule people out,” Margalo agreed. “If they were reading, or if I’m sure I didn’t see them leave the room or move around.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mikey complained. “I might as well leave.” But she didn’t move.

  Hadrian said, “You’re making it way too complicated.”

  “No she isn’t,” Mikey said.

  Margalo was more open-minded. “You’re right! I am!” She put a check beside Richard’s name and another beside Sally’s. “I’m sure I saw them, they went out of the room together, I figured to the bathroom but when they came back they were . . . You know, her cheeks were pink and—Anyway, I was pretty sure they’d been necking, gone somewhere private to neck. Or something. The way . . . You know, their eyes were all shiny and they had secret smiles they’d exchange, you know what I mean, Hadrian. Don’t you?”

  “I know too,” Mikey claimed. “I bet they did it. Don’t you think, Hadrian?”

  Hadrian pointed at various names, his finger landing here and there like a wasp working on a puddle of melted ice cream. “You should do me next,” he said.

  “Why you?” asked Mikey. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

  “If I did—”

  “But you didn’t,” Mikey told him.

  “If I did,” Hadrian repeated stolidly, “it wouldn’t be for the money, it would be for—the game of it, to see if I could get away with it. And if I’d done it for the game of it, helping in your investigation would make it an even better game.”

  “Psychologically I can see that,” Margalo said thoughtfully.

  “So can I,” Mikey said. “But it’s pretty stupid, because you didn’t do it.”

  “I could have,” Hadrian argued. “Because between this scene”—his wasp finger landed on one ice cream puddle—“and that one”—another puddle—“I don’t have any lines, so I could very easily have slipped away. You might not have noticed me, and neither would Ms. Hendriks. She was too busy monitoring other people, listening to their voices, making notes. That’s how come it’s easy for Sally and Richard to sneak out . . .” His cheeks turned pink at even thinking about necking in front of two girls. He couldn’t say any of the words for it. “So it’s easy to slip away, and it wouldn’t take more than one or two minutes, tops, to get into Margalo’s knapsack and find her wallet. Even hidden at the bottom it wouldn’t take long. I could easily have done it,” he said, pointing again. This time his finger landed on the second sheet. “Here.”

  Mikey demanded, “How did you know it was on the bottom?”

  Hadrian just smiled.

  Margalo was grinning away too. Detecting was sort of fun. If you forgot about your own stolen money, it was a lot of fun.

  “And how did you know Margalo even had any money anyway?” Mikey demanded.

  Hadrian kept on smiling.

  “Looking goofy doesn’t prove anything,” Mikey told him. She could detect as well as anybody else, whatever everybody else might think.

  “It’s probability,” Hadrian said. “I happen to know you go to the bank on Friday, but even if I didn’t, I’d guess. Margalo works, she has jobs, everybody knows that, and lots of people know she’s saving for college. She can only get to the bank late on Friday—unless her bank is open Saturday morning, I guess—but probabilities are that it’s Friday afternoon she’d do her banking. Probabilities are that she’d bring the money with her to school, since she doesn’t have a license, or a car, or enough time to get home on the late bus and get back downtown. So probably she has it with her. And Margalo’s smart, so she wouldn’t just drop her wallet in at the top of the knapsack, especially since she’d be taking things out of it all day, and putting things in, books, papers, pencils. Anybody who thought about it, and wanted to see if there was money to be stolen, would take a look in Margalo’s knapsack on Friday, if they could get in there without anyone seeing.”

  “All right then, did you?” Mikey asked. “But Hadrian, if you did, it makes no sense for you to tell us. Especially given your motive.” She thought. “Your alleged motive. So I don’t believe you.”

  Hadrian smiled again, Mr. Mysterioso.

  “And you can stop that smiling,” Mikey told him.

  He did.

  Margalo had been thinking too. She had practiced remembering everything from that afternoon. She could play it like a movie inside of her head, start to finish, first bell to last. “Ms. Hendriks had you up on the platform with her. So you would have had to be there all the time because the Stage Manager is always onstage, even when he’s off to the side just watching the action. If you’d moved off entirely, Ms. Hendriks would have noticed and said something. Even if she didn’t watch you every minute, she would have noticed right away if you weren’t where you were supposed to be.” Margalo thought about what she’d said.

  Mikey turned to Hadrian. “That’s another proof it wasn’t you.”

  Hadrian kept on trying. “Unless I did it some other time. Like during lunch.”

  Did Hadrian want them to think he was the thief? Mikey lost patience. “Since you didn’t do it, when else you might have done it if you had isn’t worth wasting our time figuring out.”

  Margalo said, “There is no other time. The knapsack was either right at my feet or hanging off my shoulder, I’m certain of that.”

  “Well then,” Hadrian said. “You’ve proved it. It wasn’t me.”

  “We already knew that!” Mikey cried.

  “So who do you want to do next?” Hadrian asked. “Because now that you’ve ruled me out, I can help. You wouldn’t want the guilty person to be the person helping you figure out who did it,” he told them.

  Even Mikey was laughing by then.

  When they met up after a hasty lunch, Margalo set her papers out on the table again, and they all studied them. She had added a third sheet, for people who had been ruled out. Only five names were on that list: Hadrian, Ms. Hendriks, Richard and Sally, and Sherry Lansing, who had been absent. But Hadrian could add a couple of names to that list. “Gilda Kulka left right away—she said a dentist appointment—and Sue and Leland left early, they weren’t in the first act.”

  “And Tracey and Bill went out with Sue and Leland, all four together, as soon as the cast list was announced. They were complaining about the parts they’d gotten,” Margalo remembered. She made the changes and they took a fresh look at the papers.

  To Mikey it looked like a kaleidoscope of names, arranged and rearranged, only much more boring than a kaleidoscope because they were using letters not colors.

  “I don’t know,” Margalo said. “I suppose I could ask everybody to tell me everything they remember about that time, and I could make a map of the information.”

  “Contradictions might show up,” Hadrian said.

  “It’s already too confusing,” Mikey objected.

  “Whoever did it would lie,” Margalo said.

  “That would create the contradictions,” Hadrian said. “Although they say that nobody is an accurate eyewitness. Everybody thinks they remember what really happened, what they really saw, but usually they don’t. But nobody sees that in themselves. Everybody thinks their own version is the right one.”

  “Mine usually is,” Mikey pointed out.

  “So we’d end up with a lot of contradictions and they probably wouldn’t be useful,” Margalo concluded.

  “If you ask me, this whole approach isn’t useful,” Mikey observed.

  “All right then, what would you do?”

  “I’d figure out who I thought had done it—which I’ve already done,” Mikey said, and she pointed at Richard’s and Sally’s names. “Then I’d accuse them.”

  “They’re ruled out. They were always together,” Hadrian reminded her.


  Margalo was willing to consider any option. “If I did accuse people, I might get lucky. Or I bet I could tell from the way they deny it who’s lying.” She thought about it and the more she thought about it, the more she liked the possibility. “Nobody would expect me to do that, and if people aren’t expecting something then you catch them off guard.”

  “And when they’re off guard they’ll spill the beans,” Mikey agreed.

  Hadrian had his doubts, but he didn’t express them in words. He expressed them in hums and little short grunts.

  “Start with Richard and Sally,” Mikey suggested. “It’s always the person you think couldn’t possibly have done it.”

  “They’re people, not a person,” Margalo pointed out. “And this isn’t some TV mystery. It’s high school.”

  “Besides, I don’t see how anybody could have gone into your knapsack without me noticing. I was onstage the whole time,” Hadrian reminded them.

  “You had lines to read,” Margalo reminded him. “Or . . . somebody could have said he was going to the bathroom and picked up my knapsack as he left the room. You could easily not have noticed that. And then brought it back into the room and dumped it back on the pile.”

  “So you think it was a guy who did it?” Mikey asked. “But girls could make good thieves, just as good as boys, maybe better because you don’t ever suspect them. I bet Sally did it.”

  “Why her?”

  “I don’t like the way she looks. Anybody who looks like that—all right, all right, but you shouldn’t rule out the girls,” she advised Margalo.

  Margalo was gathering together her papers, which she ripped in half, then ripped in half again. “I’m ruling out this approach. That’s all I’m ruling out right now.”

  For the next couple of days Margalo thought hard. She thought about what she knew about people, and she thought about how to find out what you needed to know from them, if they didn’t think they knew it, or if they didn’t want you to know it. During the February vacation week the cast of Our Town was scheduled to continue rehearsals. Only Nate Emery’s and Ann Witherspoon’s families had travel plans for that week, which was lucky for Ms. Hendriks, since after the vacation they would move into the auditorium. It was unsettling to be on a real stage, as they had all discovered in the fall, so the first days after that move they would all get worse at whatever they were trying to do. They needed every minute of classroom rehearsal they could fit in before then, to minimize that damage. Ms. Hendriks had scheduled rehearsals from Tuesday through Friday of the vacation week. People grumbled happily about this. It showed that drama was a serious activity, as serious as any sport.

  Margalo used the long Presidents’ Day weekend to plan her approach—and to work at the restaurant, and to baby-sit, and to have brunch with Tim again (this time she ordered an omelet, with cheese and spinach), and to spend most of Monday at Mikey’s house, with Mr. Elsinger and his girlfriend, Katherine, and Katherine’s two little boys, until Mr. Elsinger and Katherine took the little boys out for a movie and a pizza dinner, leaving Margalo and Mikey to amuse themselves.

  They amused themselves by making a batch of brownies and watching a few classic space movies, ET, Starman, and The Last Starfighter, interrupted only by a stir-fry dinner. Margalo talked over her plan with Mikey, who entirely approved. “It was my idea,” Mikey reminded her. “I could do it for you. Because you’re too subtle about things.”

  “What would you do? How would you do it?”

  “The only way. I’d go up to Richard and get right in his face.”

  “Why Richard?”

  “That ponytail is a giveaway.”

  Margalo put a forkful of stir-fry into her mouth, watching Mikey, not saying a word.

  “I’d look him in the eye and tell him, ‘I know you stole the money.’ Then he’d confess.” She considered what she had said, and added, “Or not.”

  “Or he’d lie,” Margalo pointed out.

  “Probably the guilty person would lie,” Mikey agreed. “So I’d need to be more subtle,” Mikey said, and saved face with a smile, I knew that all along.

  “You could come with me. You’d have to sit through rehearsal, but it might work better with you lurking behind me, like a silent threat.”

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I’m working that out.”

  “You could practice on me,” Mikey offered.

  “That’s a good idea,” Margalo said.

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised,” Mikey said, and then asked, because she couldn’t stand not knowing, “Which idea did you mean?”

  After practicing with Mikey—“Hey, if you had an extra couple of hundred dollars, what would you buy?” “Do you ever wonder how it would feel to be stealing something and worrying about getting caught? What do you think it would feel like?” “Do you think you have the nerve to steal anything?”—Margalo decided that she would start with the easy people.

  What she meant by easy was: Not strong characters, maybe shy or insecure, usually female, certainly not seniors, and if possible not juniors. What she meant was: People whom it would be easier to push off balance and get informational answers out of. She decided to start with Lisa Mikkel.

  Lisa was a junior, but one of those mousy people who in class and in the halls and at parties, too, look like they don’t want to be noticed, with her hesitating smile and hands that always held on to one another behind her back as she shifted from one foot to the other, with her way of wearing whatever everybody else was wearing—jeans, khakis, Ts, sweaters—but in muted colors, so that you could never remember just what it was Lisa Mikkel looked like. Onstage Lisa was transformed into a tomboyish person, fresh and quick and confident, but offstage she kept to herself. This made her a good person to start off with and also easy to get on her own.

  Margalo spent Tuesday observing individual people and reviewing her plan of approach, so on Wednesday she felt ready to try it. She sat quietly down beside Lisa—who was off to the side of the Drama classroom, alone, doing some French homework, her knapsack beside her and her notebook and book opened on her lap. Margalo hunkered down beside Lisa and said, quietly but clearly, “I know about it.” She kept her eyes on the platform, as if watching what was going on up there with Richard and Sally and Ms. Hendriks.

  Margalo felt Lisa freeze, and she turned her head to see. Lisa looked like a rabbit in the headlights, or a chipmunk. Then she started talking, in a whisper, never lifting her eyes from the page of French verbs. “You aren’t going to tell people, are you? Everyone knows that’s not the kind of person I am. It wasn’t me, I just—I was with a bad crowd last year. Otherwise I never would have. Because they made me, because I’m not the kind of person who—You won’t tell, will you?” she asked, and then did look at Margalo out of watery eyes.

  Half of Margalo was trying to figure out how to find out precisely what Lisa had done, and the other half was dismayed at having dug up a secret she didn’t even know was there and couldn’t see any use in knowing. From what Lisa had said, Margalo could make a good guess at what had gone on—one of the usual messes for teenagers, probably shoplifting or drugs, scary, and bad enough, but definitely not life threatening. But the secret Lisa was hiding wasn’t the secret of Margalo’s money, which was too bad, since Lisa hid her secrets so badly.

  On Thursday, Margalo sat down next to Gilda Kulka, a sophomore who had a small part as a baseball player in the second act. In these productions, there were always some male roles played by girls, since there were always more girls than boys signed up for Drama. Gilda had dark, dark hair and wore bright red lipstick; she liked vests with spangles and little bits of mirror on them; she claimed to have Russian great-great-grandparents of royal Romanov blood who had fled from that revolution to Paris first, then to America. Gilda had a loud laugh and thick, muscular legs and a giant crush on Carl Dane, proving once again that opposites attract. Although as far as Margalo could tell, Carl wasn’t attracted to Gilda’s opposition.

/>   Margalo sat down on the floor beside Gilda, whose full attention was on this rehearsal of Act III. Carl had his big scene in Act III. “I know about it,” Margalo said into Gilda’s ear with the same tone of voice that had worked so well with Lisa.

  Gilda turned and looked right at Margalo. “What? What did you say?”

  Somehow, when repeated, the line wasn’t as threatening as when she said it just once, and saying it directly into the face of the person she was accusing didn’t feel like the right approach, but Margalo saw no way to avoid this. “I know about it,” she repeated, looking right back at Gilda.

  There was a microsecond’s hesitation, and then Gilda faced back to the stage and laughed her loud laugh, as if Margalo had just made a joke.

  “People, please,” said Ms. Hendriks without turning to see just who was responsible for the disturbance.

  Gilda looked back at Margalo, no longer laughing, and said in a low voice of her own, “Look, I’ll be friends with you. It’s a good offer. I get invited to parties, so . . . There’s no point in telling people about it, you know. Nobody cares, and my parents already know. Is that what you want? For me to act like your friend? I’m cool with that.”

  Margalo just nodded her head. What could Gilda possibly be hiding?

  “So give me a call, any time. You have my number? We’re in the book. We’re the only Kulkas, so there’s no problem. So that’s that? You’re sure?”

  Margalo kept on nodding. This wasn’t working out the way she had thought it would. She decided that she must be doing it wrong, somehow.

  To work out the weakness in her approach, she walked out of Friday’s rehearsal beside Hadrian that afternoon, and as they went down the corridor to the main entrance, Margalo said casually, “You know, I do know about it.”

  “How’d you figure it out?”

  Margalo didn’t hesitate. Hesitation could blow the cover off a good bluff. “When I thought about it, it just made sense.”