It's Not Easy Being Bad (2 page)

“A club of two?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean to mean,” Margalo allowed. “And I don't agree with you.”

“So what else is new?” Mikey said, to win the argument.

“
Zut!
” Margalo muttered, short for
zut, alors!
, which was French. Before school started, Mikey had decided that one thing they shouldn't do was swear, “because everybody will expect us to be really foul-mouthed.” Margalo agreed, except, “You have to say
something, sometimes, or people will think you're a wimp.” So they were developing their own cuss vocabulary. Mikey's grandmother in California, who dyed her hair red, used to say
zut, alors!
whenever Mikey captured one of her chess pieces. Mikey and Margalo put that first on their list of cuss words, followed by
rats!
(stolen from Snoopy), and
mice!
(derived from
rats!)
, and then (by natural progression)
rodents!
Margalo was thinking of
bunnies!
She was waiting for the chance to try
oh, bunnies!
out on Mikey.

“Then we should be a clique,” Mikey suggested.

“Cliques have to be something people want to be in.”

“Why shouldn't I be popular?” Mikey asked.

Margalo just shook her head. In Margalo's opinion, the words “Mikey” and “popular” didn't even belong in the same dictionary, much less the same sentence. Typical, normal kids were what worked in junior high, as far as Margalo could see, but she didn't bother pointing that out to Mikey.

“Is it the way I dress?” Mikey asked.

“We never talked about clothes before seventh grade,” Margalo pointed out. “That's another difference.”

Mikey stuck to her point. “
You
don't dress like anybody else, either. Although you always look—like
some model in
Elle?
Not like
Seventeen.
Like some exchange student. Or someone from another planet,” she added. “I think it's because you're so tall, and skinny. You look better dressed than other people, even if you do get all your clothes at thrift stores.”

“And the New-to-You,” Margalo added, ignoring the reminder that she was one of the tallest people in the seventh grade, boys included. Actually, she thought it was lucky she couldn't afford to dress according to fads. Because of that, she dressed according to her own sense of style, wearing calf-length skirts as often as jeans, wearing blouses not T-shirts as a rule, and never cute little tees over cute little minis, even though those, like everything else, looked good on her. Mikey was short and round and already a C cup; she wore wide-legged cargo jeans and gray T-shirts, the same thing every day, her going-to-school uniform.

“Even if we dressed like them, we wouldn't fit in,” Margalo said now. “But you could try, if you cared what you look like.”

“How do you know I don't care?”

“Because if you did, you'd do something about it.”

“What makes you think you know all about me?” Mikey demanded. “But even if I dressed like one of
the jockettes,” she said, “or, better, like a Barbie—it still—”

That picture caused Margalo to practically choke laughing. The Barbies were what they had named the girls who wore big heads of curled hair, or some other designer hairdo, like beads, any hairstyle that took hours to create. High-maintenance hair was a hallmark of the Barbies. Also, they dressed in full skirts with wide, tight belts, shoes with spindly heels. And they wore full-face makeup, every day. Mikey didn't even
own
a pair of dress shoes, or a lipstick.

“It's not that funny,” Mikey said, and hoped the time was right to ask, “Want to trade your banana for this chocolate pudding?”

Margalo didn't.

Mikey didn't ask again. Instead, she explained human nature right back at Margalo. “It's much easier for boys to be popular, because they're almost all jocks. Even if they're good at school, they're still jocks first. But with girls—it's more complicated. There are all these specialized groups, jockettes, punkers, arty-smarty types, as well as the Barbies, and let us not overlook the preppies.” Mikey stopped to think about what she had said, before concluding, “Then there's us.”

“What about us?” Margalo asked.

“We're some subcategory of normal,” Mikey decided. “Not regular normal. But whatever kind of normal we are—sub-, or ab-, or even super-—mostly we're
not.”

“I am,” Margalo maintained.

Mikey snorted sarcastically.

“Closer to it than you, anyway,” Margalo claimed, and then admitted, “I
look
closer, and how you look is what counts in seventh grade.”

Mikey went right on with her own idea. “But practically every one of us not-normals has maybe one friend. So maybe each pair of us
is
a clique after all. I don't see why we can't be. You could be wrong about something, Margalo. And I
could
get popular.”

“I'll
share
the banana with you,” offered Margalo, who'd had a sudden glimpse of how things would be if Mikey wasn't around to eat lunch with. “How would you go about getting popular?” she asked.

And then Mikey surprised her. “I'm going to give it more time,” said Mikey the impatient. “Think about it, Margalo, it's taken us almost two weeks just to find our way around the building, and in sixth grade some people ended up liking us, didn't they?”

“Everything's different in seventh grade. Everybody. School's different.”

“How much could people who were all in grade school last June have changed, in just four months?” Mikey demanded. “They can't scare me.”

At that moment, when Margalo's mouth was jammed full with banana, a bunch of girls streamed by their table, including Derry and Annaliese, in J.Crew sweaters over jeans. Margalo watched them, keeping her mouth closed. The little installment of preppies went on by without a word, but Frannie Arenberg hesitated, and stopped. “Hey, Mikey.” She smiled down, including Margalo in her brown-eyed cheerfulness.

“Hey,” Mikey mumbled through her own mouthful of banana.

“Frannie?” Frannie's friends called back to her. “You coming?”

“Hey, Margalo,” Frannie said.

Margalo nodded a little nod, smiled a little smile, and waited. Then Frannie hurried off to catch up with the others, and Mikey muttered, “A real Little Miss Merry Sunshine, isn't she? It's like having a cocker spaniel around.”

“More like a golden retriever,” Margalo suggested.

“What's
with
her?” Mikey demanded.

“Maybe she doesn't know any better? Or maybe
she's friendly. Maybe she's a nice person,” Margalo suggested.

“Yeah, yeah,” Mikey said. She gathered her trash onto the tray. “What my grandmother calls a good egg.”

“Which is another name for somebody who is no fun at all.”

“You
would
say that. You're a bad egg.”

“Well, so are you.” Margalo stuffed crumpled wax paper and the banana skin into her brown bag, getting up, picking up her notebook and texts.

“Being a bad egg doesn't mean I can't get popular,” Mikey said. “Or, at least, more popular than you.”

“Not a chance.”

A challenge was just what Mikey liked. It gave her something to do, and something to win. “Oh, yeah?”

“Not that being more popular than me would make you particularly popular,” Margalo pointed out.

“I bet I can,” Mikey warned, promising.

“But you don't care if people like you,” Margalo reminded her.

“Neither do you.”

“Yeah, but I'm a better liar.” Then Margalo added, “You know, it's not really being popular I want. I just want not to be
un
popular.”

That was it, exactly, which Mikey hadn't known until Margalo said it. “Me, too,” she said, but didn't say what else she was thinking: about how if she didn't have Margalo for a friend, her school days would be about a zillion times more boring. Instead of that, what Mikey said was, “How can you tell if you're popular? Otherwise,” she explained to Margalo's surprised face, “how will I know when I am?”

“H
ere's the plan,” Mikey announced, about two weeks later.

“Plan for what?” It was raining, a cold, early October rain, so they had gone to the library after lunch. The big room was crowded, and noisier than the librarian usually allowed. The doors to the tutoring rooms all stood open, and people had gathered there, too, horsing around, talking, watching one another.

Mikey and Margalo wandered along the stacks, as if they were looking for something to read, which they weren't, since Mikey almost never looked for anything to read and Margalo used the town library to keep the pile of books beside her bed tall enough. “Plan for me getting popular,” Mikey said. “Frannie already likes me.”

Margalo didn't say anything.

So Mikey went on, “But Frannie likes everybody, so she doesn't count. It's sort of depressing how nice she is. D'you think it's because she's a Quaker? D'you think I ought to be nice? D'you think I ought to be a Quaker?”

“I don't think you
can
be nice,” Margalo said, and Mikey reached up to hit her on the top of the head with the flat side of her big loose-leaf notebook.

“Do you want to hear the plan or not?” Mikey demanded.

“Go ahead, shoot. No, don't shoot. Please don't shoot—tell.” It always cheered Margalo up to get on Mikey's nerves.

“I'm going to have a party. A Halloween party.”

“Leaping lizards, Mikey,” Margalo said, to buy some time. “Holy cow.” Nobody would want to go to any party Mikey gave, especially on Halloween. This was a bomb of a plan. It was doomed to total failure. Margalo tried to think of how to convince Mikey not to do it, and when she realized that would be impossible, she tried to think of ways to distract her. She asked, “How old do you think is too old to go trick-or-treating? Esther wants to go, and Aurora says I
have to take her, but I think she's too old. I know
I
am. Are you?”

“A dinner party.”

Margalo tried again. “What do you think the chances are that parents will complain about the religious paintings in seminar? Nobody did about the Greek statues and they were nudes, but some people might about religious pictures.”

“I'm a good cook. I'm the star of home ec.”

“People do get excited about religion,” Margalo went on, speaking slowly, and thoughtfully. “Of course, they get excited about sex, too.”

Mikey realized: “But if you take Esther around you won't come to my dinner party!”

“Maybe they think
nude
and
sex
are synonyms,” Margalo said.

“A dinner party will make them like me,” Mikey told Margalo, with a smirk of victory.

Margalo gave up, and pointed out, “You can't make people like you.”

Mikey ignored that. “How about Mom's lasagne?”

“It's great.”

“No, beanbrain, I mean what if I serve that at my party?”

That Mikey wouldn't listen if you didn't agree with her was a given, as they say in math. Margalo had never been able to talk Mikey out of anything. All she could do was hope that Mikey would get bored with the idea, and drop it.

Besides, if Mikey insisted on giving a party, that wasn't Margalo's problem, and maybe it wasn't even any of her business. Besides also, Margalo had other things to think about right now. She was building herself a reputation at West Junior High School. First it became commonplace for her to arrive at school and be commented on. “Looking good,” or, “Where'd you get those socks?” She kept her style simple and—of necessity—kept it cheap. “Really retro,” they said, and Margalo smiled to herself because if they knew where she shopped they'd know she was weirder than they might already think she was, and pitiful, too—two surefire roads to deepest unpopularity.

Lately, some people had started asking her opinion, about a haircut, an accessory, a neckline, or a color choice, and when they did, she gave one. Mostly, Margalo would say what people wanted to hear, but she'd also stick in a little advice, the raisin in a bite of cinnamon sweet roll. “How about a funky
pin?” she'd suggest, because pins got noticed, and add, “Your skin looks great with yellow, doesn't it?” She never criticized directly. Who wanted to hear, “Cripes, that green makes you look like you just escaped from a mortuary”?

Not any seventh-grade girl, that was for sure.

Unless, maybe, Mikey, because then she could get angry at how opinionated Margalo was, and how Margalo didn't know everything even if they were going to vote her Miss
Mademoiselle
Magazine of the Year. Mikey would be just as likely to explain why she
wanted
to look like a mortuary reject, and how if Margalo had two brains to rub together, she'd have already figured that out, but she thought she was so smart, didn't she. Just because she always looked good.

Just thinking about what Mikey might say made Margalo grin.

The real difference between her and Mikey was that Margalo couldn't afford to be as different out loud as she was silently, to herself. She was going to need scholarships for college, if she wanted to go to college—and she did because that was a requirement to get a good job. She knew that for scholarships you needed lots of activities, clubs and publications and
community services, which meant getting along with people. Getting along with people meant them thinking you were no different from them.

Just because you weren't normal didn't mean you had to flaunt it. Even if she thought Leonardo Di-Caprio was prettier than Claire Danes, she wouldn't say that to anyone; well, no one but Mikey. Even if she thought Mrs. Brannigan, their humanities seminar leader, was the best-informed teacher she had, Margalo wouldn't say that to the girls who made fun of the way the teacher dressed. The girls liked to exclaim about how Mrs. Brannigan had been dumped by her husband for the girls' basketball coach last summer. “Just, how embarrassing! I'd die! I'd never come back to teach here,” a Lindsey would say, and a Heather would answer, “But she doesn't even notice. That's probably why it happened; she doesn't notice anything. Look at the way she dresses; she doesn't even notice what a total dog she is.”