It's Not Easy Being Bad (12 page)

“Predators,” Margalo supplied. “Like me and my sandwich.”

“Your sandwich doesn't care if you eat it,” Tan said.

“Really? Have you ever asked a sandwich how it feels, sitting there in its paper bag, alone in the dark, in the locker, with the door clanged shut, knowing that the hour of execution is coming closer?”

“Yeah.” Tan grinned. “I asked. It didn't answer. So I ate it.”

“I have an appointment with Mr. Saunders tomorrow,” Mikey said.

“What do you think our chances are?” Tan asked.

Mikey shrugged. “They're worse since this teacher uprising cropped up. He almost wouldn't make any appointment with me. Or, I should say, the secretary tried to refuse to.”

Frannie supplied the name. “Mrs. Chambers. She
likes to have everything go her way, but really she's nice.”

“She's all right, she's just Hitler reincarnated,” Mikey echoed Frannie's earnest voice.

Frannie laughed, but maintained, “They had a hard time figuring out what credits I should get, and Mrs. Chambers was really helpful.”

“Yeah, but everybody helps you,” Mikey maintained. “So that doesn't count.”

“You have the appointment, don't you?” Tan pointed out. “I'll tell people about it. I've always wanted to be a mouthpiece,” she said, rising.

Margalo was half-hoping to be able to say to people, later, when they were grown up and Tan was on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
, “She was in my class in school.” So now Margalo joked, “I thought you always wanted to be an athlete.”

“Yeah, we thought you always wanted to be Vanessa Williams,” Mikey added.

Tan corrected her. “That's Venus.”

“I know that.” Mikey smiled her
Gotcha
smile. “It was a joke. You didn't get it.”

“Or Serena,” Tan deadpanned and returned to her own table.

Mikey got back to her own interests. “So you need
to have all of your arguments all ready to present to Mr. Saunders,” she told Margalo.

*    *    *

The next day, they filed into the principal's office, Frannie first, Mikey in the middle, and then Margalo. Mikey carried the petition, all six pages. Mr. Saunders stood up behind his desk, to welcome them. “Frances,” he said, sounding a little surprised, as if he wouldn't expect to see Frannie in his office. Or, maybe, in this company? “Michelle,” he said, sounding unsurprised.

“Mikey,” she reminded him.

“Yes, Mikey. And—?”

“Margalo Epps,” Margalo told him, and he nodded, his suspicions confirmed.

Then he sat down behind his big desk. They stood in a line facing him.

“So you're not getting enough competition in your lives,” he joked at them, before he switched over to seriousness. “We've only got a few minutes, so let me look at this petition.” He shared a friendly, indulgent smile out equally between the three of them, playing no favorites. Mikey did not smile back.

Margalo didn't know what he saw to make him smile like that, except three very different seventh-grade
girls, Frannie with her pleasant expression, dressed in a simple khaki skirt and a pale blue blouse; Mikey in her usual cargoes and gray T-shirt; Margalo in a long black skirt with a wide-collared, rose-colored blouse. Frannie looked like somebody left over from the fifties, Mikey like somebody left over from fifth grade, and Margalo—she hoped—like some actress left behind when the theater company left town, some French actress. She tucked her hair behind her ears and watched Mr. Saunders read the petition.

He read the paragraph at the top, slowly. Then he ran his eyes over the columns of signatures, thirty per page, in two neat columns of fifteen each. He read each signature on each of the six pages.

Margalo had time to look around and notice that the office of the principal of a junior high was larger than the office of an elementary school principal. Mr. Saunders had room for a big desk and a set of four upholstered chairs set around a square table. He had a rug on his floor and photographs on his walls. Trophies and books divided the bookcase space about equally between them.

There was a thermos jug and a tray of mugs set out on a side table, with a bowl of sugar packets, a jar of
creamer, and wooden stirrers in a Styrofoam cup. Margalo wondered if he was about to have a party, and they were interrupting. Then Mr. Saunders cleared his throat, and gathered the sheets of paper together into a pile.

The first thing he said was, “I don't see any eighth-grade names here.” Before they could respond to that criticism, he went on. “Thank you for bringing this to me. Is there anything else?”

Margalo almost applauded. Machiavelli would have been impressed. Mr. Saunders was really good at being principal. But Machiavelli would have been impressed by Margalo, too, when she just stood there, visibly expecting the principal to say more.

“Well?” he finally said, looking at them over his handful of petitions, visibly expecting that they would have left by now.

She almost hated to disappoint him, but she answered, “We were pretty sure you'd want to hear our reasons.”

“Oh. Well, yes.” He looked at his watch. “Of course.”

“Because we know you want to be fair,” Margalo told him.

“Well, yes. Of course I do.”

“And hear both sides,” Margalo added, “before you make up your mind.”

She could almost see Mr. Saunders un-making-up his mind, taking it apart like a Tinker toy windmill, as he sat back to hear them out.

They had agreed that after Margalo's introduction, Mikey should go first. So Mikey did. “It's not fair,” she said, “when people who are as good as other people don't get to play on a team just because they aren't eighth graders. Also,” Mikey said, “the teams aren't as good as they would be if you picked from all the best players, not just the eighth grade's best. So it would be good for school spirit, too,” she concluded.

Mr. Saunders waited several seconds before responding. “I hear what you're saying, Mikey. You're a good athlete, aren't you?”

“That's not the point,” Mikey argued.

“Isn't it?” he asked, and since it was Mikey, she had to answer, “It's not the
only
point.”

“But I didn't know you played basketball,” Mr. Saunders said. “Will we also see you playing baseball in the spring?”

“Tennis,” Mikey said, brief and furious. “I play in the county league.”

“Really?” he said. “Then you're familiar with age restrictions in sports.”

“That doesn't make it fair to keep seventh graders off school teams,” Mikey maintained.

“It does, however, make it common practice,” the principal argued.

Margalo's role was the good cop. (They hadn't planned any role for Frannie; they just took her along because when Frannie was along, things went better.) So Margalo didn't hesitate to take over from Mikey. “Sometimes, it's a good time to change common practice. Like”—she had looked this up, after her stepfather suggested the comparison last night at supper—“when they decided Jackie Robinson could play for the Red Sox. There had never been an African-American in the major leagues before.”

“I know baseball history,” Mr. Saunders said. “But you aren't trying to claim—”

“No, sir,” Margalo answered, throwing in a “sir” so he wouldn't notice that she'd interrupted. “I was just thinking about the effect on the team, and the whole game of baseball, when that change happened. I don't know who the person was who made that decision?”

Mr. Saunders didn't know, either. “Owners and
manager together, is my guess. That's an interesting question.”

“If you let seventh graders play on the basketball teams, everybody would feel that good about you.”

“Not the eighth graders,” Mr. Saunders pointed out.

“Not
this
year's eighth graders, maybe,” Margalo pointed out.

“Another interesting point you've made . . . Margalo, is it?” Mr. Saunders said. “I'll certainly think about this, girls. Although in all fairness, I'll also ask the eighth grade what their feeling about the situation is.”

“Of course,” Frannie agreed. “It would be selfish of us not to find out what they want.”

“I
know
what they want,” Mikey protested.

“And I know what
you
want,” Mr. Saunders told her. He stood up again, hinting again that they should leave. Also, they could hear loud voices beyond the closed office door. “I assure you, I'll give thought to your proposal, and consult some people, and let you know ASAP what I decide. I should warn you, however”—he smiled—“not to get your hopes up.”

“I know,” Frannie agreed, with her own sympathetic smile. “It's hard getting people to change, isn't it?”

They filed out, almost swept back into the office by a group of four teachers, one of them Mr. Cohen, who burst into the room to let Mr. Saunders know that, “Enough is enough,” and that, “We've talked to parents,” as if the three seventh-grade girls were not even there, and that, “You're looking down the barrel of a strike, sir.”

*    *    *

It was during an all-school assembly, held first period the next Wednesday, which was the Wednesday of Thanksgiving vacation, that Mr. Saunders announced his decision. It was almost a week since they had taken the petition to him.

He held the pages up as he reached the conclusion of his brief remarks. “So have a good holiday, boys and girls, relax, recharge your batteries, and I'll see you again next Monday. But before you break for your committee assignments and drama rehearsals,” he told the assembled seventh and eighth graders, “I'm sorry to tell you that I have had to decide against allowing seventh graders to play on the West basketball teams.”

He didn't sound sorry, but nobody raised a hand to tell him that. A few eighth-grade boys clapped.

Mr. Saunders said, “I thought long and hard about
this proposal, which has some real merit, but I am not convinced it would be good for West Junior High to make that change.” He looked over his audience. “On a happier topic, I want to tell you that I'm pleased to hear how well things are moving forward, on both the dramatic and the dance fronts. And I for one am looking forward to the first bake sale. When will that be? Mrs. Draper?”

The home ec teacher stood up among her homeroom to announce that the bake sales were scheduled to start on the first Friday in December. “So bring good appetites and your spare change,” she urged everybody. She looked around at all of the unresponsive faces, and all the bored ones, and all of the half-asleep ones, as well as Mikey's unsurprised, cross one and Margalo's self-congratulatory one, and came to rest on Frannie's smiling one. Mrs. Draper couldn't help but smile back at Frannie. “We're looking forward to our bake sale,” Mrs. Draper announced.

*    *    *

The seventh graders were very disappointed. Apparently, as Mikey and Margalo discovered, people had expected Mr. Saunders to grant them their petition. “Too bad, Mikey,” Ronnie commiserated, and so did Derry, except that like everything Derry
said, it sounded like a question. “I thought he'd sign it, I really did?” Two of the jockettes came up to offer sympathy, “You tried.”

“S'okay,” Mikey mumbled in response. Of course they had never expected to be given permission to play basketball, but she had to pretend. If Margalo was right—and Margalo had been right so far!—Mikey could hope that this basketball
no
would lead to a tennis
yes.
So Mikey was having a little trouble remembering to look disappointed.

“After all your hard work,” many girls said to Margalo. Some of them she knew, and some she didn't, except for their names.

“Bad timing,” she said, accepting disappointment with visible maturity. Invisibly, she was not one whit disappointed. She had been one hundred percent right about the outcome. Mr. Saunders had turned them down, and many more seventh graders knew who she was. Things had worked out just the way she'd thought they would.

At lunch in the cafeteria—Spanish rice and sausage patties, the one suspiciously orange and the other dismally brown—more people came up to offer sympathy. Even some of the preppies came by, although not Heather McGinty, to address words to one another
over Mikey's and Margalo's heads, but still in their general direction. “It's not fair. Not fair at all.”

Mikey and Margalo mumbled and nodded, not unhappy to have everybody on their side, for about the first time in living memory.

“We can try again next year,” Frannie said to them just as Louis Caselli, who just happened to be there at the same time as Frannie, said, “You blew it, Meeshelle.” Then he turned to Frannie to ask, “Why did we try to get seventh graders on the team when next year we'll be the eighth graders and that would mean some of us would have been cut?”

She explained it patiently. “Because it's the right thing to do. Don't you want to make things righter in the world, Louis?” she asked him.

He didn't want to say yes, because it was wimpy and do-goody and uncool; but he wanted to say yes to Frannie Arenberg so that she would like him and admire him. So all he could say was, “As if.”

“We just have to keep on trying,” Frannie smiled at him.

Louis looked around, in hope that nobody was watching, but he couldn't help smiling back.

“Because don't you think the worst thing is giving up?” Frannie asked.

Louis nodded his head. He didn't dare look into her face for very long.

Margalo was enjoying this. “Would you have made a seventh and eighth grade team, Louis?” She was pretty sure he wouldn't have.

He had no trouble looking right at Margalo, glaring hard. “Just because I'm not a wimp, like you.”