Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?

by Cynthia Voigt

  “I don’t think we’re abnormal at all. I think we’re what normal should be. We’re what normal is. It’s everybody else that’s getting it wrong.”

  Margalo gathered up her papers, crumpled them into a ball, dropped them into her paper bag. “Maybe. But everybody thinks it’s us that’s wrong.” She rose to her feet.

  Mikey got up too. “But what do they know? They think school is going to last all the rest of our lives. They’ll be surprised.”

  On that cheerful thought they went to the girls’ bathroom, before the afternoon classes started. Most of the stalls were empty this late into lunch. But Ronnie and a couple of friends were occupying the mirrors, applying lipstick and mascara and combs. When Mikey and Margalo emerged from their stalls, only Ronnie was left. “I wanted to say . . . ,” she started, then stopped, distracted.

  They waited. She was giving herself a final check in the mirror, and something about her mouth wasn’t right apparently. When she saw them in the mirror watching her, she smiled, I know, and said, “Uncle Eddie told my father that Louis got a C on a makeup Math test, and Louis told him—told Uncle Eddie, that’s his father—that he’d pass English, easy.”

  Margalo corrected both errors at the same time. “Not easily.”

  “Which is really great,” Ronnie said. “You really . . . you really helped me, and my whole family, too. So I was wondering”—a final lifting of hair to resettle it onto her shoulders finished the job, and she turned around to face them—“how I could repay you. So I was thinking, I might be able to—Would you like me to get you a couple of dates for the prom?”

  “The prom?”

  “Your prom?”

  “The Senior prom?”

  Ronnie smiled and nodded, the queen tendering a favor to her loyal knights.

  “That’s crazy!”

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  Ronnie’s smile faded and her nodding ceased.

  Then, “No!” Mikey cried, and, “No,” said Margalo equally emphatically, although she did add, “But thank you anyway.”

  Mikey had more to say. “That’s the worst idea you’ve had as long as I’ve known you, Ronnie Caselli, and it’s been a while. It’s been a while and it includes some real stinkers.”

  “You don’t have to start insulting—” Ronnie said. “All right,” she said, and swung away from the mirror, huffing out of the room. But she stopped with the door open to tell them, “It wasn’t going to be easy, you know.”

  Mikey and Margalo were left looking at each other in the long mirror, their expressions doubled by being reflected. Mikey looked to Margalo like someone who just got hit across the head with a ladder, in that old movie joke. Margalo looked to Mikey like someone who just drove past a bad accident and was trying not to remember what she’d seen. They looked shocked and dismayed, both of them.

  “What’s happened to her?” mirror Mikey demanded of mirror Margalo.

  But Margalo had already moved on to a more interesting idea. She looked now at her own face, now at Mikey’s. “We’re not particularly pretty, are we.”

  “You’re closer than me,” Mikey answered, which was true.

  Margalo shook her head. Mikey wasn’t getting it. “No, I mean . . . Actually I prefer to look the way I look. Don’t you? I mean, don’t you prefer the way you look? I like my face.”

  Mikey agreed. “I’d rather look at mine than hers any day.”

  “Is that weird?”

  “I don’t think there’s anything weird about liking my own face better than anyone else’s,” Mikey announced. “Including yours,” she said, picking up her knapsack. “I think that’s the way it should be. Normal.”

  Margalo had turned to look right at Mikey, who was looking right at her now. She didn’t need to say what she was thinking because Mikey was thinking pretty much exactly the same: We agree on the important things. “Shake,” Margalo said, and they did, like two people at the end of a long journey, two people who have been lost together, hungry together, sleepless, cross and embarrassed together, not to mention invigorated and excited together, exposed together to unfamiliar people and languages and food, and now they have arrived.

  As ordered, at the end of the day Mikey went to the gym and changed into tennis clothes. She did not look into the coach’s office as she went by it, but she did stop in front of the bulletin board where the tennis ladders were posted, to confirm a dark suspicion.

  She was right. She’d been dropped right back to the bottom of the girls’ ladder. Which wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right, either. She should be at least in the top four. She should be number one, since that was the position she’d earned and nobody had won it away from her.

  And she’d been about to get started working her way up the boys’ tennis ladder.

  She’d have to get this straightened out with Coach Sandy, but she thought she’d wait until the end of practice to mention it. That decided, she hefted her tennis bag over her shoulder and went out to the courts.

  The team had gathered on the bleachers, where Mr. Robredo stood waiting for everyone to arrive. He wore his usual suit and tie, but he had changed into tennis shoes, for coaching. When Mikey arrived, he broke the silence, which had been lying over everybody like a wet blanket. “All right, people,” he said.

  Then he had to stop and wait for four more players, who were running up to sit down on the bottom row of the bleachers and look around at everybody, confused, puzzled, worried.

  Mr. Robredo asked, “Is everyone here now? Mark, can you tell me?”

  Mark Jacobs stood up to count heads. “Cissie Streeter isn’t here,” he reported.

  “She’s not in school today,” Mr. Robredo answered, and then he began again. “All right, people. I’ll be running today’s practice, but as of tomorrow your new coach will be Mr. Elliot.”

  There came a deep silence as people took in that information. There were a few murmurs. “Say what?” “Isn’t he a shop teacher?” and a few “Oh no’s.” It was Mark who raised a hand to ask, “But isn’t he a track coach? Isn’t he high jump?”

  “People,” Mr. Robredo warned them, and they fell silent again.

  “All right. Now. I trust you to know how a practice should go,” Mr. Robredo said. “Don’t disappoint me,” he instructed them.

  They set up cross-court forehand and backhand drills, after which they would practice approach shots and net play, and by then they could get themselves sorted out onto the courts to play games, switching around teams and players, so that everybody would have a turn to play forehand and backhand, as well as to serve and to receive. Mikey kept a low profile. Mark Jacobs, leading them onto the courts for the first drill, had said to her, “It’s good to have you back. But . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, which was okay by her, since she could probably finish it for him.

  It wasn’t just Mark Jacobs with whom Mikey was unpopular. It turned out, as the drills and the games went on, that of the whole team Mark Jacobs disliked her least.

  “You didn’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” they said.

  “Why didn’t you just say something to us and let us take care of the calls ourselves?”

  Mikey didn’t bother responding to that.

  “I was learning a lot from Coach Sandy.”

  “What is she doing now?” Mikey asked, trying to change the subject as they changed drill setups.

  “What’s it to you?” they said.

  “I heard she’s just switching jobs with Mr. Elliot.”

  “Has the man ever played tennis in his life?”

  “And I heard that the people who don’t make the team will have to call lines. Thanks a lot, Mikey.”

  They were blaming Mikey for losing their coach and for adding to their responsibilities, and they were right. She was the one who had done it. She’d had a little help from Coach Sandy herself, but still, Mikey felt she did deserve most of the credit.

  However, she knew this wasn’t a good time to point out to people that
she should be on the top, not the bottom, of the tennis ladder. Her real problem was going to be scheduling the sets to win her way back up. But then she had an idea that cheered her up—Maybe a lot of them would just default?

  They had arranged for Steven to drive them home that Monday so that Mikey could apply for a dishwashing job. As they walked away from the school, Mikey reported, “She put me right back to the bottom of the tennis ladder,” to which Margalo responded with advice about the interview. “Angie only cares about if you’re strong enough—to do the work, to lift the pans—and if you will show up on schedule. If you’re motivated to work. He doesn’t care what you think. Not about anything, including cooking.”

  “What’s Angie got to do with it? He’s not the owner, is he?”

  “The cook runs the kitchen. I mean really runs it, runs everything to do with the kitchen. He’s the general, or more like a dictator. He yells at anybody he wants to, and I should warn you, he doesn’t care if he’s right or not. I mean, he really doesn’t care about being fair. He just wants things done the way he wants them done, so the food we serve will be as good as he wants it to be. He’ll tell you that’s what he’s paid for, the food. Not for employee satisfaction.”

  Margalo looked at Mikey, wondering if there was anything she should add. There was. “He’ll tell you that over and over. He likes telling people that.”

  “But he doesn’t have anything to do with the dishwashing part of it.”

  “I said the cook runs everything. That means he’s responsible for everything, including clean dishes. Angie can fire me anytime he wants to.”

  “Did he hire you?”

  “Him and the owner, Mr. Talle, he’s the one Ronnie’s father knows. Mr. Talle manages the front of the house.” To the expression on Mikey’s face she answered, “That’s the restaurant part of the business. I should warn you, neither one of them thinks much of teenagers.”

  They had arrived at the restaurant and through the plate-glass window saw that three tables were already occupied, ten customers, all of them older, white haired and gray haired and bald. One couple, a group of three, and a group of five had been seated in the dimly lit dining room, with water and wine already on the tables and candles lit. “We better get going,” Margalo said. “Dinner service has started, and Angie . . .” She hurried into a narrow alley and entered the brick building by a side door, beside which four outsize garbage cans rested in a rack.

  The first thing Mikey noticed was how bright the kitchen was; the second, how hot. The brightness came from overhead lighting, and the heat from the two ovens and the one pizza oven, all three along the back wall. A side wall was lined with workstations and gas burners, over which pots and pans hung within easy reach. The wall opposite that was lined with what looked like glass-doored refrigerators, and between them, down the center of the room, was a long, wide steel-topped counter with two sinks fitted into it. The room was crowded with light and the noise of many meals being prepared and the odor of meat mixed with sauces and spices.

  A big double swinging door led to the restaurant itself, and a doorless opening next to the refrigerators led who knew where. Somewhere that nobody in the kitchen wanted to see.

  In front of the ovens, standing with his back to them, stood a tall, skinny man. He wore an apron wrapped around his waist; his black t-shirt sported a Grateful Dead emblem; his dark hair was shaved short. He was cleavering away at red and green peppers like some robot. Chop-chop-chop-chop, chop-chop-chop. He scraped the slim slices of red and green off to one side with the blade of the cleaver and began again. Chop-chop-chop-chop, chop-chop-chop. Mikey moved so she could see his hands. His fingers backed nimbly away from the approaching blade, but she still expected to see the occasional fingertip fall off into the pepper pile. She couldn’t take the tension of waiting for that to happen, so she looked away.

  Two younger men worked at the gas burners and at the counter, one with a frying pan, the other with a row of plates set out in front of him, on some of which he was arranging salad greens from a large stainless steel bowl. Nobody was talking.

  This kitchen was definitely a workplace.

  The aproned man scraped the entire mound of peppers into another stainless steel bowl, looked briefly at Margalo, more briefly at Mikey, and called out, “Where are you on that five-top?” to which the man with the frying pan answered, “Three minutes for the chicken,” and the tall man said, “I’m putting the pasta in now get out of here Margalo you don’t work Mondays.” “Salads plated for the three-top,” the third man said, and the tall man added, “And take your friend with you.”

  “Behind you,” said the salad man.

  Margalo pulled Mikey up close to the counter. Behind them a refrigerator door opened, then thunked closed again.

  “It’s Mikey,” Margalo said. “Mikey, this is Angie.”

  “I said go,” he said.

  “You said to bring her by,” Margalo said.

  “Not now.” He looked up, irritated, impatient. “I didn’t say bring her by on Monday just when things are starting to get busy. In ten minutes.” He hacked off a chunk of dough, which he shaped into a rough circle. Or maybe a rough square, Mikey couldn’t tell. “Get out of my way,” he said.

  They weren’t in the way, but they got out anyway.

  Margalo took Mikey into the room behind the refrigerators. This was a much smaller space, so crowded with racks of dishes and bowls, pans, pots, stacks of metal trays, and plastic containers holding glasses, that Mikey barely noticed the two deep stainless steel sinks, each one large enough to hold a seated adult—maybe because the steel counter beside them was piled so high with pots and pans, mixing bowls, flat metal cooking trays, and deep plastic storage buckets, all waiting to be washed, rinsed, and set out on the drying racks.

  Bent over the sink was a brown-haired boy. He didn’t turn around to greet them. He might not even have heard them over the sound of water running into the sink he had his arms buried in. He might not even have been a boy—he was just someone slim and young looking, with long hair in a ponytail and wearing jeans, his apron looped over the back of his (or her) neck and tied at his (or her) waist.

  Mikey did notice a heavy machine just inside the doorway. Almost as tall as her shoulder, the machine’s one thick leg ended at a broad foot. It held out two heavy metal arms as if offering to give someone a hug. Set within the arms was a deep metal bowl. A large, thick, curved hook descended into the bowl from a cylinder that made up the robot head of the machine, where, she figured, the motor must be housed. “What is that?” she asked.

  “The Hobart,” Margalo answered in an offhand display of knowledge as irritating as Latin quotes. “Isn’t the hook beautiful?”

  “Beautiful?” Mikey took a few seconds to study it, considering the question. “No.”

  “You two—out!” Angie had come in behind them. “Now!” he specified, crowding past them to pull down a wide stainless steel bowl.

  They waited for Angie in the alley, standing away from the garbage cans, leaning against an older-model Subaru wagon, from which position they could look back into the busy kitchen. It was a mild May evening, the kind of evening that made you feel you should slow down and just enjoy being where you were, wherever that was.

  “Monday’s usually pretty quiet,” Margalo said. “Anyway, that’s what they tell me.”

  “Coach Sandy will be a terrible track coach,” Mikey said. “At least she knows how to play tennis.”

  “Maybe knowing she knew so much is what got her into trouble. Maybe thinking she was superior was her problem.”

  “Yeah, but she was superior. I never said she wasn’t a good tennis coach, because she was. And Mr. Elliot doesn’t know anything. It’ll be like not having any coach at all.”

  “You got your wish about Coach Sandy. Almost.”

  “It doesn’t feel like I won.”

  “Neither of us won,” Margalo agreed.

  They were silent for a minute, watching the three a
proned figures move in and out of their line of sight, thinking. Then they looked at each other, having almost the exact same thought at almost the exact same time. “Yeah, but we came close.”

  “What’re you two beauties cooking up?” Angie asked as he stepped out the kitchen door. He lit a cigarette.

  “You smoke?” Mikey demanded. “In a kitchen?”

  “I’m not in a kitchen,” he said, staring at her, exhaling. “You’re not one of those crusader do-gooder types, are you?”

  Mikey wanted to deny it, on principle, and she wanted to claim it, in the spirit of perversity. So she kept quiet.

  This was the response he seemed to want, maybe because it made him think he’d shut her up and won an argument. “So, you want to wash dishes.”

  “I want a job,” Mikey corrected.

  “You vouching for her?” he asked Margalo.

  “No, I just brought her here to waste your time.”

  “There speaks the queen of sarcasm,” Angie commented to Mikey. “Are you sarcastic too?”

  Mikey thought about that. Then, “No,” she said.

  “Okay, then, you’re hired,” he said.

  This Angie was definitely not like a teacher or a parent. He was a whole new kind of grown-up. “Margalo will train you Saturday. You can cover for her when she’s off doing her Steven Spielberg imitation. That’s in a couple of weekends, right? After that it’ll be summer and we’ll be busy, no time off. Do you have a Social Security number? You have to get yourself a Social Security number.”

  “Of course I have one, what do you think?”

  “I think you told me you aren’t sarcastic,” and he grinned at her, One point for me. “Did your friend tell you about August?”

  Mikey looked at Margalo, who, as far as she could see, didn’t know anything about August.

  “August is your one-month vacation. Vacation without pay,” Angie told them. “Any problem with that?”

  The opposite, Mikey thought, but did not say. She was scheduled for her three-week Texas visit with her mother and Jackson in August, and she wanted to have Margalo with her again, so August off suited her perfectly. But there was no reason to tell Angie this.