By the end of the day, Monday, Margalo was thoroughly bored with the topic of Shawn Macavity.
Mikey was not.
“Why don’t you know anything about him? You always know about everyone. Do you think he’s Irish? Because of the name. There’s McDonald’s fast food and Macintosh computers, but those aren’t Irish, are they? They’re Scottish, so do you think he’s Scottish? But he has that black hair. Have you ever seen hair so black? I mean, and not dyed. Have you?”
Other people were not so much bored as mocking, because by the end of the day, Monday, word had spread out along the halls, oozing into classrooms and library and gym: Mikey Elsinger has a major crush on that guy in the play. Most people agreed, This is gonna be good, because You know what she’s like.
* * *
First thing Tuesday morning Louis Caselli came after Mikey like a pack of hyenas going after the wounded wildebeest on the Discovery Channel. Approaching her locker, he announced, “Mikey and Shawny, they rhyme,” and smirked.
“Get lost, why don’t you?” Margalo asked him.
Mikey was busy looking up the hall, and looking down the hall, to catch a glimpse of Shawn. She didn’t even seem to hear Louis.
“Mikey likee Shawny,” Louis said, and exclaimed, “It’s poetry!”
Beside him, his cousin Sal chuckled. Another friend, Neal, punched Louis in the arm to express how much fun this was.
Mikey didn’t react at all, as if it didn’t bother her one bit to have Louis Caselli making fun of her.
Well, it bothered Margalo. “I don’t know about you, Louis,” she said in a fake-concerned voice. “I worry about you, how you’ll survive. You’re such a perambulating nit.”
Louis tried to figure out if he’d been insulted in an important way, a way that would require him to save face. “Oh, yeah?” he asked. He chose the one-syllable option. “Whaddaya mean, nit?”
“As in nitwit,” Margalo told him, and pinched with her fingers in the air over his head. “As in baby lice.” By this time more people had gathered to enjoy the encounter, so that when Louis backed away from Margalo’s pincering fingers, the onlookers impeded his retreat. “As in pick nits. Pick”—she pincered, picking near his ear—”Pick”—she picked toward his hair. Then she just stood there, smiling down into his red face, and concluded, “I mean perambulating nit.”
Louis’s mouth worked to come up with a squashing response. “You—,” was as far as he’d gotten when the bell rang, and Sal sympathized with his lost opportunity, “Tough luck, man.”
* * *
It was odd how people resented Mikey’s having a crush on Shawn. The Barbies and preppies scorned her for ambition. “As if,” they agreed, not caring who could hear them. “As if she has a chance.” The jockettes worried that she would lose interest in the basketball team (possible, in Margalo’s opinion) or in the tennis team (unlikely): “What about our games?” The arty-smarties wouldn’t have minded if Mikey got Shawn, because that would show everybody, but they hated to see her acting like everybody else: “She can’t mean it. Do you think she’s scamming us?”
“Better him than me,” was the general opinion among the boys. “I wouldn’t want Mikey Elsinger after me. Scary.”
The only one who didn’t seem to mind—or even notice—was Shawn. Overnight, Shawn Macavity had become the most popular boy in school—more popular even than Ralph or Ira or even Jason Johnston, the leading scorer on the boys’ basketball team, single-handedly responsible for their 5-1 record. Shawn became the undisputed king of eighth grade, and he took to the role. He was even kingly in the way he ignored the nickname Louis came up with for him, which some of the other boys also adopted by the second day of Shawn’s meteoric rise to total popularity. “Mr. Tooth Decay,” Louis named him. “Get it? Cavity, get it?”
But Louis did not call Shawn this to his face. To his face Louis and the others asked Shawn, Didn’t he want to try out for the baseball team, since he’d given basketball a pass, or for the track team? Or didn’t he like sports? Had he ever played a sport? That’s right, he took gym, didn’t he, what was he, a brain? Was he, like, on the honor roll? They hadn’t thought so, but what was it, did he take art? “You’re, like, some chick magnet,” they told Shawn, and he just grinned, cool, and shrugged his shoulders, careless.
This regal good humor lasted all the way through Tuesday, but by Wednesday, Shawn Macavity expected a little respect from people. After all, he’d landed the big one. He had the starring role.
* * *
With Mikey bitten by the love bug, Margalo had no one to compare Shawn-notes with, no one to surprise by the accuracy of her predictions about how long the modesty phase would take to turn into the I’m-pretty-wonderful phase, no one to share her desire to prick him like a balloon. Although, she couldn’t deny that he was handsome; everybody was right about that. Casey Wolsowski declared, “He’s what Romeo should look like,” and Cassie said almost the same thing, “He’s like looking at art.”
“Art who?” Margalo asked and “Not funny,” was Mikey’s response, then she asked, “What art?” so she could go to the library and look at it.
The good news was: Shawn Macavity didn’t have a girlfriend. Which meant: He didn’t have a date for the dance. Until he got up on stage on Monday, nobody had particularly noticed him. He never had anything much to say, and he wasn’t on any teams. He had nothing to offer a girl, until Monday.
“I’d go to a dance with him,” Mikey said.
Margalo tried sarcasm followed by insult. “Big surprise. But would he go with you?”
Even that didn’t get Mikey back to normal. Even Louis couldn’t do it, even on Wednesday morning when—with his usual followers—he came up to Mikey’s locker and sang, “Way down upon the Shawny River . . .” Or he would have sung it, except Louis couldn’t carry a tune. “Far, far away. That’s where Mikey’s heart is going ever . . .” He cackled with laughter, unable to sing on, doubling over at the sight of Mikey’s face.
“You mean Swanee, it’s the Swanee River,” Margalo told him. “You massive fraculence.”
“How do you spell that, Margalo?” one of the boys behind Louis asked.
“Look it up,” Mikey suggested. “And I’m getting tired of you,” she said to Louis, but she didn’t even smile.
“Uh-oh,” Louis said, holding up fake trembling hands to fake protect himself. “What’re you going to do about it? You aren’t going to tell Mr. Tooth Decay on me, are you? He doesn’t even know your name.”
“Yes he does,” Mikey said.
Margalo stepped in. “If you need a more user-friendly word, how about idiot? Does that ring a bell? Synonyms: dolt, dummy, dunce, dullard.” She stopped and Louis took a breath, but before he could speak she went on. “Dud, dupe, dingbat.” She stopped again.
He opened his mouth.
Before he could say anything, she did. “Dodo.”
Louis made a strangled sound, but she cut him off. “Doofus.” She thought, then nodded her head. “And that’s just the d’s.”
By then he had turned around and was walking away. “Spanish,” she called after him, “el stupido. French—” but he was out of earshot, which was lucky because she was out of foreign languages. The bell rang and “What’s wrong with you?” she asked Mikey, then, “Why are you putting up with him?”
“What does Louis Caselli matter?” Mikey asked her.
* * *
Emboldened by success, at lunch Louis attacked again.
Mikey and Margalo were sitting side by side at their table, just beginning their lunches—Margalo’s a tuna salad on lightly toasted supermarket white bread, and Mikey’s one of the few popular cafeteria meals, two slices of cheese pizza with a side of french fries. Mikey stared across the crowded room in what Margalo had already identified as her in-the-same-room-as-Shawn-Macavity stupor. Shawn was like the magnet, and Mikey’s attention was like the iron filings that line up to point to where the magnet is, if they can’t go flying across whatever space separates them to cling right onto it. Mikey sat, and stared, and didn’t even know how obvious she was.
No, Margalo corrected herself, biting into the tuna sandwich. Mikey didn’t even care. Margalo had added a little chopped onion to her tuna salad and she would have offered Mikey a bite, so Mikey could admit that Margalo occasionally had good cooking ideas, but when Mikey was having a Shawn Macavity spasm, there was no getting through to her. She hadn’t even taken a bite of pizza, which she usually wolfed right down.
Mikey just sat. And stared. Margalo sighed, a sigh that was half a groan. She ate some sandwich, then groaned, a groan that was half sigh. She wasn’t sure how much of this she could take. At last Mikey spoke.
“Why’s he talking to Louis?”
Margalo didn’t bother asking who. She looked over to where Louis Caselli leaned down over Shawn, and Shawn twisted in his chair to talk up at him. Louis said something, Shawn asked a question, Louis jabbed with his chin in the direction of their table. Before anyone caught her staring at him, Margalo looked hard at her sandwich. Shawn was getting stuck up, just like any overnight rock star sensation, or movie star sensation, or sports star sensation, and Margalo never wanted to contribute to anyone’s sense of stuckupedness.
“What’s Louis doing?” Mikey asked.
“I thought you didn’t care about Louis,” Margalo said.
Margalo had asked her mother how long this first, stupefied, phase of Mikey’s big crush would last, but Aurora was no help. “Love takes different people different ways,” she had said, but Margalo already knew that from her own experience. She announced the obvious. “He’s coming over here.”
Margalo watched Louis Caselli strut around among the long tables, and she put down her sandwich. It was always good to have your mouth free when you encountered Louis Caselli. She knew it was going to be up to her to take full advantage of this Louis Caselli irritation op, because Mikey barely glanced at Louis before her attention—Ping! Zip! Zap!—swung back to Shawn Macavity.
Louis strutted over to stand right in front of Mikey, blocking her view. “Hey!” she protested.
“Hey yourself, Mee-shell,” Louis answered, the first time since fifth grade he’d risked calling Mikey by her detested real name.
Then she did look at him. And smiled—a bug-squashing smile.
Louis said, “I was just talking to your heartthrob.”
“Go away,” Mikey said.
“Mr. Tooth Decay,” Louis said.
“Dumb joke,” Mikey said.
“Don’t you want to know what he said to me?”
“I want you to go away.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, OK. Maybe I will. Maybe that’s just what I will do. I think it is, because I guess you don’t want to know what he said when I asked him about you.” Louis smirked, strutting in place, turning as if he was about to leave.
“Good-bye, Louis,” Margalo said. “Good riddance to—”
“Bad rubbish, ha ha,” he cut her off.
“I was going to say, soiled sullage,” Margalo answered.
“What do you do, read dictionaries for fun?” Louis demanded.
Then Mikey asked just the question Louis wanted her to. “What did he say?”
“Mikey!” Margalo protested.
“Who?” Louis asked, playing dumb now. “What did who say?”
Margalo told him. “You know who.”
“Shawn,” Mikey said. “Shawn Macavity.”
“What about him?” Louis asked, smirking.
Margalo would have liked Mikey to punch that smirk off Louis Caselli’s face. He smirked as if somebody having a big crush—a big, hopeless crush—turned that somebody into someone to make fun of. She couldn’t believe that Mikey was letting him get away with this.
Mikey gritted her teeth. “What did he say?”
“Say about what?” Smirk.
“About me.” Grit.
“Oh, yeah, that. You really want to know?”
Grit.
Smirk.
“Yes! for scum’s sake.”
“Enough to trade your lunch for the information?”
Margalo stepped in again. “How much information is there? It’s not like you were talking very long. I wouldn’t do it, Mikey.”
“But Mee-shell will. Because she’s dying to know what Mr. Tooth Decay said. When I asked him about her.”
“I’m not you,” Mikey told Margalo as she pushed her tray across the table toward Louis.
Margalo sat back, gave up, and butted out. If Mikey was going to be like this, there was nothing she could do.
The tray rested at the center of the table, with Mikey’s hands on one side and Louis’s on the other, and Louis’s smirking face hanging above it like some baboon hanging down from a branch. “He said,” Louis said, “and I will quote his words exactly, because I know you’d like to hear his exact words. He said, and I quote exactly, word for word: ‘Who’s Mikey Elsinger?’ ”
Then Louis jerked the tray, fast.
But Mikey was faster. “I don’t believe you,” she said, pulling it back.
“You made a deal!” Louis protested.
Suddenly Margalo felt much better.
Margalo wasn’t the only audience of this little scene. Many people were curious to see where this would lead, especially those people close enough to listen, and the lunch duty teachers had also taken note. Louis had lost a lot of social ground in the fall, when he decided it would make him popular to jam Hadrian Klenk into wastebaskets whenever he could. After the third jam some of the boys—led by Ira and Ralph, Sean Mitchell and Michael Stone—kept near Hadrian in the halls; and all of the girls refused to speak to Louis, even his cousin Ronnie, who usually felt she had to defend him. Frannie Arenberg, typically, did it differently. She just told Louis to his face that he should be ashamed of himself. It was Frannie’s opinion that stopped him. Louis was pretty consistent about what girl he liked (Frannie Arenberg, ever since last year), as consistent as he was about the girls he disliked.
“Cheater!” Louis told Mikey, adding a couple of choices from the list of words Mr. Saunders didn’t want to hear spoken in his school. “You traded it to me.”
Margalo answered Louis’s accusation. “Oh my goodness,” she said. “He’s right, Mikey. And he clearly needs another lunch, the poor little undernourished thing. Otherwise,” she added to Louis as Mikey, with perfect timing, let go of the tray, causing Louis to stumble backward and the plate of pizza to leap up at his chest in a mute but effective attack, “otherwise, you might not look so much like an unexpurgated slug.”
At first Louis couldn’t think of a response. Then he decided he ought to threaten, so everybody watching would know he had the upper hand. “I don’t know what you mean by that,” he snarled at Margalo.
“No,” she answered sweetly. “I didn’t think you would.”
Mikey had withdrawn from the argument now that she could see the back of Shawn Macavity’s head again. But she had taken the second half of Margalo’s sandwich and was chomping away at it.
In his best so-there voice Louis closed the argument. “I didn’t think you did.”
“I know,” Margalo continued it, with more and sweeter patience.
Louis was losing. He didn’t know how that had happened. He looked around to the watching faces to tell them, “She’s got a crush on Shawn, can you believe it? As if he’d even look at her once.” Then he was seized by an unfortunate inspiration. “Or maybe he would. Because pretty guys like him are usually gay, aren’t they? And gay guys like—”
Mikey had him by the throat, which limited his ability to verbalize. She was about his height, so he could see right into her eyes. The sight was not pleasant to him.
“Lgo!” he gurgled.
“Don’t you ever—,” she was starting to say.
Then her words, too, were cut off. Called in by one of the teachers on lunch duty, Mr. Saunders had arrived. He put one hand on Mikey’s shoulder, shoving his other arm between the two of them, standing far enough back so that Mikey had time to recognize him and abort the punch she was about to throw at whoever was getting in the way of her choking Louis Caselli to death.
“All right, you two.” Mr. Saunders was not amused.
Most of the onlookers, however, were. “What is wrong with Louis?” people wondered, and “What is wrong with Mikey?” People also thought, Why don’t they grow up? but nobody said that out loud.
“You know the drill,” Mr. Saunders told Mikey and Louis.
They did. Since September there had been several opportunities for the principal’s innovative response to violent eruptions of junior-high tensions, so everybody knew the drill. For the observers the drill was enjoyable and instructive. For the participants it tended to be embarrassing and instructive.
Instructive, and corrective, too; although this time it involved Mikey Elsinger, who never thought she was in the wrong, and Louis Caselli, who never thought. Between them, Mikey and Louis might come up with the disagreement that was the drill-breaker, and nobody wanted to miss that.
Mr. Saunders put one hand on Mikey’s left shoulder and one hand on Louis’s right shoulder and pushed the two of them in front of him out of the cafeteria. He sent Hadrian Klenk to his office. “Get me the gloves,” he told Hadrian as he steered his two miscreants down the hall to the gym.
After Hadrian brought the fat brown leather boxing gloves, and Mr. Saunders had laced them on Louis and Mikey, he asked the usual drill questions.
“What’s this fight about?” he asked. “Mikey?”
“Ask Louis,” Mikey said.
“Louis?”
“It’s not my fault.”
Mr. Saunders said, “You know we’re not looking to assign blame, Louis. We’re interested in the cause. We like to know what we’re fighting about.”
“About name-calling,” Mikey said.
“Louis called you a name?”
“I didn’t say one thing about her.”
“You didn’t call names?”
That, Louis couldn’t deny. But he pointed out, “It wasn’t her. So what’s her problem?”
“It wasn’t you?” Mr. Saunders asked Mikey. “Then who?”
Mikey shook her head.
Hoping to embarrass Mikey, Louis volunteered, “It was her boyfriend.”
Mikey smiled a little pleased smile—Margalo could have sworn she saw that—and more than one girl’s voice called from the onlookers, “He is not.”
“OK, her big crush. Shawn. Macavity. You know,” he smirked around at the watching seventh and eighth graders, several of whom groaned softly, hoping that Louis was not going to make this particular joke in front of the principal, under these circumstances, and several of whom hoped that he would. He did. “Mr. Tooth Decay.”
Mr. Saunders considered this information before he decided, “I don’t need to know just what you said. Although,” he warned Louis and everyone else, “I can guess what it might have been. Also,” he warned Mikey, “I don’t need to hear why you found this enough reason to assault a fellow student.”
“Yeah,” Louis said.
“But I want you both to take a full minute of silence—everybody silent now, you know the drill—to think about whether or not you want to go ahead with this fight.”
“I’m not scared of her.” Louis feinted a couple of times. Mikey drew her arm back and punched at his head but Louis danced back, out of reach. She assumed a boxing stance, arms raised and elbows close to her sides, her gloved fists out in front, and jabbed twice at his face.
Whispers spread the question and its answer, “What did he call Shawn? Aside from Tooth Decay.”
Mr. Saunders cleared his throat.
The whole big, hollow room grew silent. Mikey glared at her sneakers. Louis glared at Mikey, then turned to catch his cousin Sal’s eye, then glared at Mikey again.
Mr. Saunders, like an orchestra conductor, kept everybody pretty much quiet together. People were staring at Shawn Macavity; or they carefully didn’t even look at him; or they looked at him, then looked away. So everybody noticed when he leaned forward to whisper something to Heather McGinty, who was, as always, positioned right next to him—unless Rhonda Ransom got there first. If you were watching the crowd, as Margalo was, you could see the way what Shawn whispered snaked forward to the inside ring of students, as Heather McGinty whispered into Rhonda’s ear, and Rhonda told Derrie, and Derrie told Lynn, and Lynn told Ira, who told Will, who told Sal.
“Says who?” Sal demanded, too loudly.
“Says who what?” Mr. Saunders asked Sal, checking the clock to see that the minute was as good as up.
“Nothing.”
“I’m not buying that, Salvatore.”
Sal knew better than to try to avoid answering. “He”—Sal jerked his head back toward where Shawn Macavity was standing—”thinks this is stupid. Not the drill, sir. Everybody likes the drill. He means her. Her fighting about what Louis called him. Because he definitely isn’t. But even if he was, he doesn’t believe in homophobia. He thinks Louis is having homophobia.”
Mr. Saunders looked over at Shawn Macavity, whose alarm at this attention was visible. Then he looked down at Louis and Mikey, and both of their faces were pink, although Louis’s was closer to red. Mikey dropped her hands to her sides and shrugged her shoulders. “All right,” she said.
“All right?” Mr. Saunders asked, surprised.
“All right I don’t want to fight,” she told him.
Louis put both of his gloved hands over his head and shook them together, the boxer who just got the decision.
“I’m not apologizing,” Mikey told Mr. Saunders.
Mr. Saunders pretended that the topic of apology had never come up. He unlaced the boxing gloves and pulled them off her hands. Next he turned around and did the same for Louis. “That’s it, then,” he said. “All right, people, it’s time for class.”
This was how the drill had always worked out so far; and it had always been something of a disappointment as well as a relief. As if nothing much had happened—and in fact, nothing at all had happened—Mr. Saunders strode to the door, turning there to tell them all, “Let’s get going, people. You’ve got six and a half minutes.” But before he left them, he added, “Louis, I want to see you in my office at the end of the day. No”—he held up his hand—”excuses.”
This was a variation on the usual final step of the drill. Usually, both combatants were summoned to Mr. Saunders’s office at the end of the drill. “What about her?” Louis demanded.
Mr. Saunders ignored his tone of voice. “It’s you I want to see today.”
“Why not her?” Louis insisted.
Mr. Saunders did not like being insisted at. “Because she isn’t the person who also trashed another student, more than once, and more than twice, too. I mean, literally trashed.”
Louis whipped around to locate Hadrian. “You told! You geek, you squealed!”
Hadrian looked a little pale, but he didn’t try to hide. And when he spoke, his voice didn’t creak. He sounded like an actor playing George Washington in a patriotic movie, or Abraham Lincoln, somebody whose word you would never even think of doubting, Harrison Ford. Hadrian’s voice sounded deep and grown up, absolutely truthful, and wise, too.
“I wouldn’t,” Hadrian said.
“Why would I tell?” that voice continued, meaning, You’re so unimportant, why would I bother getting you in trouble?
“As if,” Louis muttered.
Mr. Saunders informed him, “It doesn’t matter how I found out, but I can assure you the information didn’t come from Hadrian. I repeat, Louis: I expect you at the end of the day. In my office. You’ll be there?”
Louis gave up. “Yeah. Is that all?”
“I hope so,” Mr. Saunders said, and then he exited the gym through the big doors, with Louis right behind him.
The rest of the students dispersed then, mostly talking about Louis Caselli, if he was a real jerk, or a real rebel, or real stupid, or real brave, or what. They left the gym the way passengers leave an aircraft, some hurrying to be ahead of everyone else, some lingering to be last, and most—absent-mindedly—crowding along together between first and last. Mikey lingered, so Margalo lingered with her. Just like last year, they had the same afternoon classes, because they were in the same seminar with the same teacher as last year. Being in the same seminar meant that Mikey and Margalo took earth science together, and the tech courses, too—home ec, industrial arts, computer. Margalo usually reviewed her science notes during those tech classes, while Mikey accused her of trying to get the better grade in science, then went on to accuse her of being overly competitive. “You have everything except math and science to be best at,” Mikey reminded her. “Except sports, too,” Margalo reminded her, and “Except sports,” Mikey agreed. “And cooking.” Mikey nodded. “And these tech courses, all of them,” Margalo reminded her, but Mikey maintained, “That doesn’t mean you can’t let me keep science. I don’t know what’s wrong with you this year. Next thing I know, you’ll be in some A-level math class,” she said, and they both laughed. Margalo and math began with the same letter, but that was as far as it went.
They had seminar to get to now and books to take from their lockers, but Mikey didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave the gym. She hung around so long that the students from the next class started to drift back into the big room in shorts and T’s. Still Mikey didn’t get herself out the door, even though this was a boys’ gym class—
And then it all made sense to Margalo. “Let’s go, Mikey,” she urged. “I’m going,” she announced.
Slowly, Mikey drifted toward the door. Her lingering paid off, because just as they were coming out Shawn was entering. “Hey, Shawn,” Mikey said. And stopped.
“Hi,” he answered, moving on into the gym.
“See you,” Mikey said to his back. She walked on a few slow steps, dragging behind Margalo like some little red wagon. Then she caught up.
“He didn’t say anything to me,” she told Margalo. “I mean, right after. But he had gym to get changed for. But he could have said something. But he did say hi. But he didn’t . . .” She was quiet, thoughtful, for a few paces before she asked, “Do you think he’ll ask me to the dance?”