On the bus to school Monday morning Margalo became aware that over the weekend something had happened.
As in, Something Had Happened.
It was impossible to overhear any of the whispered conversations that occupied many of the eighth graders. They talked by twos and threes, heads close together, one person reporting, the others amazed. Margalo spent the ride in mounting curiosity, trying to think of how to find out what was up, who would know and tell. But when she glimpsed Mikey, that curiosity was driven from her mind.
Because Mikey wasn’t wearing the cargo pants she had worn to school every day for the last year and a half. She was wearing normal jeans. CKs was Margalo’s guess, and if not absolutely normal (they were black, not blue), more normal than usual for Mikey, for whom not at all normal was the norm. And she was wearing black tie shoes—could they be Mephistos?—not sneakers. And who knew what she had on under her jacket after a weekend with her love-struck mother.
If Ms. Barcley could be love-struck, which—in Margalo’s opinion—was about as likely as a teacher admitting ignorance. Although, Mrs. Brannigan was one teacher who seemed OK about not already knowing every right answer. But she’d had her husband taken from her by a younger and prettier gym teacher, so she had a good grip on reality. Mr. Schramm, too, seemed pretty much free of the usual teacher vanities and authority needs. Then Margalo remembered their fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Chemsky, and grinned.
“What’s so funny?” Mikey demanded. They were standing by the bus, letting the cold wind blow at their backs. She clutched a Chez ME bag, a brown lunch bag with the name of their cookie business stamped on it in bright white letters.
“Fifth grade was,” Margalo answered, wondering about the bag. They couldn’t reopen the business until after the seventh-grade bake sales were over, after the dance, so why the bag?
“Fifth grade wasn’t funny,” Mikey told her.
“What do you have? Cookies?”
“They’re not for you,” Mikey said, and started off toward the entrance. “Although,” she added, “fifth grade was fun. Do you think little kids have more fun?”
Margalo stopped. She gathered her eyebrows together and then lowered them toward her pursed mouth, squeezing her features tight in concentration. She dropped her book bag on the ground, bent her head forward, made a fist out of her right hand and leaned her forehead against it. For a minute she held that pose—the famous statue, visibly thinking.
Mikey sighed loudly, and waited.
At last Margalo raised her head, lowered her fist, unsqueezed her face. “No,” she said. And moved on into the school building, with Mikey beside her.
“Ha ha,” Mikey said. Then, as they walked past the policeman watching over the entrance, she started in on how if you want to keep kids from shooting one another in school, you’re going to have to get guns out of the hands of grownups. “Kids aren’t the problem,” Mikey said. “Grown-ups are the problem.”
“Politicians are the problem,” Margalo contributed.
“This is a democracy,” Mikey reminded her. “Politicians are elected to office.” She got the last word. “By grown-ups.”
It was always refreshing to start the day with a little R&R. It put Margalo’s brain on alert. At their lockers she demanded, “Show. Show me what you’re wearing.”
Mikey offered her a cookie instead. “Try this.” Then, without unzipping her jacket, she unpacked weekend homework books and papers into her locker, reserving those she would need for the first two periods.
Margalo persisted. “I’ve noticed the jeans, and that you’re wearing shoes.”
“I always wear shoes,” Mikey pointed out.
Margalo wondered what exactly Mikey had hidden under the jacket. “I mean, you’re not wearing sneakers.”
“It’s a recipe I made up,” Mikey said. “Actually, it’s my adaptation of a standard recipe.”
Margalo took a bite and watched Mikey, waiting for the jacket to be unzipped. She chewed, swallowed, taste-tested. “Good.”
“I brought some for Shawn,” Mikey told her, that gleam in her eye again. She had some plan of attack, Margalo thought. The cookies were part of it and whatever was under her jacket was part of it, and there was probably more. Sometimes, Margalo didn’t care how tunnel-visioned and self-involved Mikey was; she just admired her for reaching out with both hands to try to grab what she wanted. Mikey didn’t play things safe. She didn’t worry about what people might think, or say, she didn’t get embarrassed about her own feelings, she just went after what she wanted—in this case, Shawn Macavity.
Margalo took another bite. She chewed, swallowed, and watched Mikey, waiting to see what there was to see.
* * *
Mikey couldn’t delay it any longer, but she kept her back to Margalo while she took off her jacket and folded it into her locker. Then she whipped around to get whatever Margalo was going to say over with. But Margalo didn’t say anything. She just looked. Then, after a good long stare, Margalo raised her hand and twirled it in the air, the forefinger raised.
Mikey wanted to pretend that she didn’t understand, but she turned in a stupid circle.
Her mother had called it cute—almost enough to make Mikey refuse to own the thing, despite its broad vertical stripes (“So slimming,” chirruped the saleslady) in rusty brown and browny orange colors that Mikey happened to like. “She has lovely skin,” the saleslady had murmured to Mikey’s mother. “From her father’s side? She’ll make a nice-looking woman when she grows up.”
Mikey’s mother had answered without lowering her voice, or as if Mikey wasn’t there, or couldn’t hear, or something. “I have no idea what she’s going to make, except things hard on herself,” she’d said, while Mikey stood there, furious because she actually wanted the thing.
Mikey rotated twice for Margalo, and still Margalo didn’t say anything. So she told her about that shopping scene. “My mother said that, even after I was her perfect shopping companion, all day. Muck and mire, Margalo, I went along with everything. I don’t know what she wants.”
“Money,” Margalo said, still absorbed in staring. “Your mother wants the things money can buy, like status and envy and fancy vacations in fancy vacation destinations. Although I have to admit, she has good taste. That’s a great top.”
Mikey staggered, backwards—two staggering steps—until she crashed into the wall of lockers. She patted frantically at her heart with one hand. “A compliment,” she gasped. “A clothing compliment.”
“Well it is,” Margalo insisted. “Coming?”
Mikey shook her head. If Margalo thought the top was great, probably it was, which was just what Mikey hoped for. And now she had cookies to deliver. Last Friday, after lunch, she’d given Shawn a chocolate chip cookie when he was on his way to change for gym. “Unh, thanks. It looks good,” he had said and “It is,” she had promised him, then hung around for a few seconds to be sure he didn’t have anything else to say. Today she had six oatmeal raisin macadamia-nut cookies for him, and she hadn’t set her eyes on him since Friday afternoon when she watched him step up into his bus. A weekend was about as long as she could stand without seeing Shawn Macavity’s face, but she didn’t say this to Margalo. To Margalo she just said, “You go ahead.”
Margalo’s loose-leaf notebook was crammed with papers, probably some special extra-credit science work she asked Mr. Schramm for so she could get a perfect 100 in science. She said, “You look good, Mikey.”
“Who cares?” Mikey asked, before she remembered that to look good was why she was wearing these clothes and realized what a dumb thing she’d just said. But by then Margalo had moved off and Mikey’s full attention returned to Shawn. She didn’t have a single class with him but he was in Mrs. Brannigan’s homeroom; she had found that out.
“Whoa, whazzis?” somebody—Cassie—asked from behind her. “Mikey? Is that you?”
“Who’d you think it was?”
“Somebody who cared about how she looked.” Cassie fell into step beside her. “Which is not you. That El Dente really is a miracle worker if he can change you.”
Mikey shook her head, denying it.
Cassie just put on a You-might-deny-it-but-I-know-better kind of smile that—before she realized how stupid fighting was—used to make Mikey want to pop the smiler a good one. “Why should I want to change?” she demanded.
“For Shawn.”
“For who?” Mikey didn’t want to talk about Shawn to Cassie, who was not—as in not one bit, not at all, not in the slightest—a fan of his. In fact, Cassie was getting a reputation for how little she thought of Shawn Macavity.
“Shawn. Him with the one little brain rattling around in his pretty head. El Dente—the tooth. You know exactly who I mean and the way he’s got you playing dumb is just another of his wonderful transformations of the entire female population of West Junior High into babbling idiots. Into babblinger idiots than usual, I mean.”
“What do you have against him?” Mikey asked.
Cassie shrugged. “He thinks he’s so great,” she explained. “Just because—” She didn’t finish that sentence. “I’m sick of him already and it isn’t even homeroom. Gotta go. Did you two hear about Heather’s party?” she asked over her shoulder. “Wait’ll you hear,” and she had joined up with Jace.
Mikey had someplace to get to anyway, and no time to waste. In fact, she had just wasted all the spare time she had and now she would be late to homeroom. Too bad, she decided, and jogged down the hall.
People got in her way from both directions as she ran. Sometimes someone noticed her, but mostly not. “Looking good,” Tan said and “Where’d you get the top?” Derrie wondered. Heather McGinty took time off from her intense conversation with Rhonda Ransom to comment, “Very hot,” in her pruniest voice.
Mikey didn’t care about any of them, although she did notice that Rhonda looked angry, and weepy around the eyes, limp in the hair. Heather, by contrast, looked bright and shiny.
“It was a mis-take” Heather said to Rhonda, who didn’t seem to believe her.
“I don’t care,” Rhonda—a bad liar—lied.
“An honest mistake,” Heather said. She was a better liar than Rhonda, but not a better actress, and the little twitching of smile, a smirky smile that was dying to get out, gave her away.
“I just want to be told,” Rhonda whined.
Then somebody whistled and Mikey wheeled around—but saw nobody who looked whistly—and maybe the person wasn’t whistling at her, or maybe it was sarcastic whistling, and she wasn’t about to care. Being whistled at made her want to go home and put on a blanket.
But not before Shawn Macavity had seen her in this new outfit.
She found Shawn at the center of a group of boys and girls, all eighth graders, standing outside his homeroom door. Mikey’s plan was to think of a question she could go into the room and ask Mrs. Brannigan about; then, on her way out of the room, she would stop by Shawn’s desk to give him the cookies. That was her plan, and it was a fine plan, except that as soon as she saw Shawn her brain froze. Stopped. Stopped working and just—
She had forgotten his smile. Forgotten his long legs in their black jeans. She slowed down, even though her plan was to go right on into the homeroom.
Shawn was saying no to something Ralph was asking him; he shook his head, no, and smiled, while their audience watched them.
Mikey went slowly by—he was wearing a blue V-necked sweater over a black T-shirt; and she had remembered correctly, he did have blue, blue eyes—to enter the bright, square homeroom and head up to the teacher’s desk. But Mrs. Brannigan was accepting a note from a student, and reading it; so Mikey waited by the chalkboard behind the teacher’s desk. Picking up a piece of yellow chalk, she wrote Shawn’s initials, SM, in tiny letters at the bottom of the green board. In front of them she wrote ME, and then she put a plus sign in between. It felt good to join their initials. She imagined Shawn seeing it, the mini parade of initials, his and hers.
By then the two voices behind her had finished their conversation. Mikey turned back to the teacher, who was seated at a big desk with her blue attendance book open in front of her.
Here was a surprise. On Friday, in seminar, Mrs. Brannigan’s hair had been turning gray, and now it wasn’t. On Friday the short brown curls had had splotches of gray, giving Mrs. Brannigan’s head a mottled effect, like a camouflage cap or moldy chocolate pudding. Now her whole head was brown, with red highlights. But Mrs. Brannigan was definitely not the makeover type.
What was going on with everybody? She’d better read up on sunspots, Mikey thought, and then burst out, “Mrs. Brannigan, do you think that America is like the Roman Empire? Or that the former Soviet Union was, because of the way it broke up into different countries?” This could be considered a reasonable question because in seminar they had been talking about the fall of the Roman Empire.
“What?” Mrs. Brannigan looked up. “Mikey?”
“It’s not urgent,” Mikey said. “Never mind.”
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Brannigan asked.
The bell rang then and Mikey asked, “Can you give me a yellow slip for homeroom?”
Without even thinking—as if her mind was entirely elsewhere—the teacher pulled a pad of yellow slips out of her drawer, filled one in, signed it, and gave it to Mikey.
“Good,” Mikey said, and turned to leave.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Brannigan asked.
“Nothing,” Mikey said.
When she turned to face the room, Shawn Macavity had seated himself. She had her plan, and arriving at his desk, “Hi, Shawn,” she said.
He looked up, looked right at her. When their eyes met, her heart jumped.
This was the strangest feeling she had ever had. In her whole life. The way her heart twitched in her chest. And her ribs closed around her lungs, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. Wordlessly, she passed Shawn the Chez ME bag. Wordlessly, he took it.
But she hadn’t turned entirely into a bowl of mush. Seeing a paper sticking out of his science book she asked, “Is that your earth science homework?”
She focused her attention on what she could see of the penciled words, the letters nothing special, pretty scrawly, a normal boy’s handwriting. She would know that handwriting anywhere now.
“Yeah,” Shawn answered her. “Schramm always gives big weekend assignments. I only do what I feel like.”
“Me, too,” Mikey said.
He waited. When she didn’t leave, he asked, “Are these more cookies?”
Mikey nodded.
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s Mikey, isn’t it?”
Mikey nodded.
Then Shawn leaned behind her, across the aisle to say something to Jason about, “I’ve got rehearsals after school three days a week, can you believe it?” as if Mikey had already left.
So she left.
* * *
What with the disproportionate time required by classes, all that time when you couldn’t talk, it took Margalo most of the morning to collect information on the weekend’s major developments. She learned that Ronnie’s boyfriend, Doug, had been her date for Rhonda’s party on Friday and brought along a couple of his high school friends. Cassie had been flirting with one of these, which made Jace jealous enough to dance with Melissa Martinez too many times—that is, enough times to look like there might be a breakup in the offing. Aimi Hearn had gone for a long walk with the other one—a talk-walk, she said, but people suspected there was more to it. Not that anyone thought she’d done anything, just . . . people had heard him saying he’d call her, but didn’t she already have one boyfriend somewhere? Was she going to try having two? And the lead in the play? Some people had noticed that Ronnie didn’t seem overly friendly to Doug at Rhonda’s, and she looked like she was having a better time at Heather’s on Saturday, without him. That was what Margalo was told, that was the rumor on Monday morning. But everybody’d had more fun at Heather’s, she heard. Everybody’d said it was the best party of the year—until they found out.
Margalo spent all of her free time that morning gathering and sifting gossip, so that by the time she and Mikey entered the cafeteria for lunch, Margalo knew not only about Heather McGinty’s trick—the really big story of the weekend—but also about a lot of minor eruptions of excitement, like the way Cassie did a flamenco dance whenever Shawn came near her, calling out, “Ole! It’s El Dente!” and how Casey tried to make her stop but, of course, couldn’t, and how Frannie—when she found out that Heather’s parents weren’t staying home to chaperone the party—called her father to come get her, which only Frannie could do without being a social outcast forever.
When they were seated at their usual table, and Mikey had picked up her limp grilled cheese sandwich, Margalo asked, “Did you hear about Heather’s party?”
A headshake. Mikey’s attention was on where Shawn Macavity stood in the lunch line.
“About what Heather did?”
Another headshake. Mikey didn’t care what Heather McGinty did.
“You didn’t hear about Shawn and Heather?”
“What?” Mikey demanded, turning to glare at Margalo. “What happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Margalo took a bite of bologna sandwich, with cheese and lettuce and tomato added for flavor and nutrition. She chewed and smiled, enjoying her moment, dragging it out.
But Tan ruined it. She set her tray down on the table, sank into a chair, and asked Mikey, “So how do you feel about Heather and Shawn?”
“Heather and Shawn? What happened?” Mikey suggested the worst thing she could think of: “He hasn’t asked her to the dance, has he?” Then she thought of something worse than worst: “She’s his girlfriend? Oh, sludge,” she said. “I knew I should have stayed home and crashed the party.”
“You mean you haven’t heard?” Tan asked. “Margalo hasn’t told you?”
“Somebody better tell me,” Mikey warned them.
Margalo let Tan do it. “Heather says it was a mistake,” Tan reported, “but I don’t know one single soul who believes her. Everybody knows that Heather told Shawn—when she invited him to her party—that it was going to be over a half hour later than she told everybody else. So he wasn’t picked up until half an hour after everyone else.”
“He was alone with her for half an hour?” Mikey asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s not fair,” Mikey protested.
“Her parents weren’t there either,” Margalo reported.
“That’s cheating,” Mikey protested.
“Heather’s not as dumb as we thought,” Margalo said.
“And they kissed,” Tan said. “A lot.”
“How do you know that?” Mikey demanded.
“She told everyone. She thinks—” Tan grinned and shook her head at the idiocy of some people. “I don’t know what-all she thinks. Rhonda’s furious, and jealous. Well, everybody’s jealous, but—at Rhonda’s party the night before—on Friday?—there wasn’t anybody special he danced with. He danced with at least half of the girls, all the popular ones, Aimi and Rhonda, Melissa, Heather Thomas . . . all of them. Except Ronnie, of course. Slow dances, too, never the same girl twice, so everybody thought he didn’t have a girlfriend. Then today, Heather’s talking as if he’s hers. But”—and Tan leaned forward to tell Mikey the best bad news of all, before she started in on her lunch—”I happen to know he didn’t ask her to the dance.”
“Never mind the dance,” Margalo said. “What does Shawn say? Has anybody asked him?”
“Yeah,” Mikey echoed. “Did he say why he kissed her?”
Margalo set Mikey straight. “Shawn’s a guy,” she explained. “They’ll kiss anyone who shoves her mouth into their faces.”
“Will they?” Mikey asked.
Margalo said, “I wouldn’t worry about the kissing, Mikey.”
“I’m not worried,” Mikey said. “I’m just jealous.”
“Shawn says he got out of the house as soon as he could. He says he waited out front for his father to come pick him up,” Tan reported.
“Yes!” Mikey crowed, punching the air with her fist.
Margalo wondered, “Do you believe him? But then, when he can have practically any girl he wants, why would he want Heather McGinty?”
“Yeah,” Mikey agreed.
“I gather you’ve all heard the news.” Cassie approached the table and pulled out a chair. “I, for one, am mightily shocked,” she said, sitting down. “Ha-ha,” she said. “Joke,” she explained. She leaned her chair back on two legs and grinned at them with lips painted so dark a red they looked black.
Margalo grinned right back, noncommittal; they were two cool dudes eye-balling each other. “What I want is a firsthand report on your scene with Shawn.”
“But you hate him, why would you even talk to him?” Mikey asked Cassie.
“I just wound him up a little, is all,” Cassie assured Mikey.
“Where was this? When?” Mikey demanded. She leaned forward.
Cassie leaned her chair back even farther. “At Heather’s. Saturday. It wasn’t anything, it was”—she grinned more broadly—”fun. Actually. Poor little El Dente. He was telling someone—one of his groupies, or six of them actually, or maybe it was a dozen—he was telling them about how he’s going to be an actor. You know—all the world’s a stage, that whole crock? How could I pass up that opening?” Cassie asked. “I told him he looked more like a model than an actor. So he tried to figure out if that was an insult or a compliment.” She rotated a forefinger on either side of her head, “Whirra-whirra-whirra. It took a while. Right? So I told him, I meant like those models you see when you go for a haircut, in the beauty shop photo books. And he got insulted. I guess he’s the sen-sitive type.”
Margalo could pretty much picture it, the dim lighting, the loud music, people heading out the back door for privacy, in the rooms people coming and going and dancing, devouring chips and cookies and sodas. Shawn and Cassie would have been practically yelling at each other. “So I guess he decided to get even.” Now Cassie lowered her chair, leaning toward Mikey and the rest of her audience. “So here’s his idea of an insult. I guess you weren’t going in for a makeover. Yuk-yuk, right? So I said, What? I can’t hear you, and he tried again, If you were in for a makeover, you were robbed. So I said, What? What takeover? Is there a war? He just waved his hands and gave up. Poor guy, he just doesn’t know. So I tried to give him some advice. Tooth, I said, don’t even try to keep up with me. And that was that. End of scene. Except that later he tried to get me to dance with him. A slow dance. I ask you,” Cassie told them. She rolled her eyes, grinned, shook her head at the hopelessness of it.
Mikey got right to the point. “Did you?”
Cassie’s grin widened, and she ran her fingers through her short hair, then shrugged. “I felt sorry for the guy.”
This was not the answer Mikey wanted to hear. But she persisted, “What was it like?”
“What’s it ever like, slow dancing with a guy?” Cassie asked, pretending to try to remember this occasion, or—as Margalo guessed, with sudden insight—pretending to pretend, so that she could remember it all again.
“I don’t know,” Mikey pointed out. “That’s why I’m asking.”
Ronnie came to join them and say, “Asking what, Mikey? What about? The parties, right? Because of you know who. They were pretty good parties, I can tell you that—especially Heather’s, well, except. I don’t know what Heather was thinking.” Ronnie was too shocked and nice to say more.
“What does Heather Mac ever think of?” Cassie asked, and answered her own question, “Boys. And how she looks.”
Margalo was wondering why all of a sudden popular Ronnie was coming to sit at their table during lunch. They’d always gotten along OK with Ronnie, but not lunch-at-the-same-table OK.
Frannie and Heather Thomas sat down with them, and Doucelle, too, whom they’d known since sixth grade, with Casey tagging behind Frannie. Heather and Frannie had a question about play rehearsals. Doucelle pulled out a chair beside Tan. The rehearsal question—”Where are they held?”—and Doucelle’s quiet “Wanna ask you something” to Tan did not alter the main direction of the conversation. They were girls; they could talk about seven things simultaneously, or at least three.
“It’s always about looks, with boys,” Cassie said.
“Ralph doesn’t care that much about them,” Heather Thomas announced.
“What makes you so sure?” Cassie demanded.
“Because I’m not so pretty,” she told them.
They didn’t agree: “You’re kidding.” “Who told you that?” “You’ve got nice hair, a good figure, your nose is . . . a great nose.” “Yes, you are.”
“I’m not,” Heather insisted.
“You know?” Tan said. “My mother’s boyfriend is always making these cracks—like he tells her if looks mattered he wouldn’t be hanging around her.”
“Your mother’s great looking,” Mikey said.
“Gets him in hot water, every time,” Tan said. “She tells him, he’s no prize. But they’ve been together for two years now. More than two years, since the summer before sixth grade, remember?”
“So there’s hope for us? Just, we have to wait until we’re grown up? Or until they are?” Doucelle said, laughing.
“Except for Ronnie,” Margalo said. She hadn’t been enjoying the look on Ronnie’s face. It was the kind of look that made her want to scrub it off with a Brillo pad.
Ronnie made a bid for their sympathy. “It’s not all pure fun, I can tell you. You all think I have it so easy, but it’s not—I mean, I have my doubts about Doug sometimes.” She looked around at them, trusting them, deciding to confide. “I mean—doubts”
This was news, much more interesting than what Heather McGinty had gotten up to, and it was more current, a fast-breaking story.
“What do you mean, Ronnie?”
“What’s he done?”
“He hasn’t done anything wrong exactly, it’s just that he’s—” Ronnie made herself say it. “He’s kind of jealous. I mean, why shouldn’t I go to a party, even if I can’t go with him?” she asked them. “It’s not as if he didn’t know I’m in eighth grade,” she told them, pointing out a further unreasonableness. “He knew my parents won’t let me go out with anyone more than once a weekend. I told him,” she told them. “He knew all along. But now”—she leaned forward and lowered her voice—”he doesn’t want me to dance with anyone but him.”
“Is he that good a dancer?” Margalo asked, to keep things sane; but she was overruled.
“Uh-oh,” Cassie said forebodingly.
“Possessive,” Tan agreed.
“Are you going to break up with him?” Heather asked.
“He’s not that great a kisser,” Ronnie admitted.
They took this in, silent.
Mikey said, “I thought you really liked him. You said you did,” she reminded Ronnie.
“I know what I said.”
“But it’s only been a month,” Mikey pointed out.
“Longer—since Christmas. I don’t expect you to understand,” Ronnie told Mikey sadly. “Or sympathize.”
“I don’t,” Mikey said, and left the table.
They watched her charge off, and Ronnie remarked, “I don’t know why she should be so angry about me and Doug.”
In Margalo’s opinion, Mikey wasn’t angry. She just had something else she wanted to do. Given Mikey’s tunnelvision way of life, Margalo could guess who the something else probably had to do with.
Ronnie leaned forward to speak in a low voice. “I didn’t want to say this while Mikey was here, because we all know how she is.” They nodded; they all knew. “But the one Doug’s mostly jealous of is Shawn. And he doesn’t even know him. Doug’s got a brother in seventh grade, so he heard about the play and the assembly. All the attention Shawn’s been getting. He’s so suspicious—I mean Doug is. He doesn’t trust me. I trust him,” Ronnie pointed out. “I never worry about him with all those high school sophisticated girls. I even asked him, because he was doing nothing but arguing with everything I said, did he want to see other people? And the first thing he did was accuse me of wanting to date Shawn.” That was the end of her case, and she waited—worried but hopeful—for their reactions.
“Was he always jealous?”
“I used to like it,” Ronnie admitted.
“You know, jealousy can be dangerous,” Tan said.
“That’s just on TV,” Cassie told them.
“That’s not true,” Casey said. They were all a little surprised to hear Casey disagree, and their surprise gave her time to express her thought before they went back to ignoring her. “In Rebecca,” she argued. “And in Othello,” she added. “People can die because other people are jealous.”
Tan agreed. “Although, in real life they mostly get beat up. Like those women who have restraining orders to protect them from rejected boyfriends but still get beat up. Or shot. I saw it on 20/20.”
“My point exactly,” Cassie said.
“Do you think Doug will beat Shawn up?” Ronnie asked, alarmed.
“More likely, he’d beat up on you,” Cassie consoled her.
“You all think he’s a bad boyfriend, don’t you? You’re not saying so, and I appreciate that, but—Thanks for the good advice, guys. Doug’s going to be in trouble with me when he comes over this evening.”
“On a school night?”
She explained, “He comes over Mondays, after practice. Wish me luck?”
“Luck,” they said.
“He’s going to be surprised,” Ronnie promised them. “He thinks because he’s older and has a car, he rules. But I’m not about to be ruled.”
“You go, girl,” they urged her. “Go get him.”
“She’s already got him,” Margalo pointed out. “I thought that was the problem.” But only Frannie thought that was funny.