Bad Girls in Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

She likes Ralph. You remember Ralph.”
    Mikey did. “Ralph was an OK fighter.” She thought. “I’d have won if Mr. Saunders hadn’t stopped it,” she maintained.
    That was last year’s fight over last year’s issues and not current news. Margalo stuck to the current. “Last weekend he asked Heather to go to the dance with him,” she reported.
    â€œWhy do you even want to know these things?” Mikey demanded.
    While they held their low-voiced conversation, Rhonda and Heather Thomas ascended the steps together, one big and blonde, the other just as blonde but shorter, slimmer, overall smaller. They moved in unison without looking at each other, like two coaches, each one of whom thinks he isthe best coach of the most important sport. They walked together like two girls, each one of whom thinks she is the one everybody is looking at and wants to date, but doesn’t want to hurt her friend’s feelings by saying so. They crossed the stage together, to stand together by Louis and Hadrian. They bowed minimally, just a little nod of their heads; they were too important to offer the audience more than that.
    â€œIra Pliotes and Jason Summerton,” Ms. Larch called out, two names that met with general approval, including Mikey’s and Margalo’s. Ira, who had been in their class since fifth grade, was a pretty well-liked boy, pretty smart, a pretty good athlete; he got along with pretty much everyone. People clapped for Ira, and for Jason, too, since Jason was one of the coolest of the cool and did glamorous things like summer camp in Canada and winter holidays in the Bahamas. Jason was stuck up, no question, and Ira was about the opposite; what they were doing paired up like this was a puzzle. They pushed against each other as they went up the steps and didn’t stop the jostling when they stood side by side on the stage. They had to be the quarreling brothers in the play, Margalo thought.
    â€œFrannie—” Ms. Larch didn’t finish the name before the applause began as Frannie walked up onto the stage in a stately manner. “—Arenberg.”
    Of course they all knew that Frannie was their age, fourteen, and an ordinary eighth-grade girl, except for being nice and really meaning it. They were used to the plain way she dressed, because Quakers are plain people in their dress aswell as their beliefs, and the styleless style in which she wore her wavy brown hair, parted at the side and held off her face with a barrette, never longer than her chin or shorter than her ears. They all knew Frannie Arenberg, and they knew she was good at math and English, science and seminar, and sports, in the same including way she was popular with both girls and boys, coaches and teachers. They all knew her and counted her a friend, but seeing her onstage was different. She looked like somebody’s mother or a vice principal.
    â€œThis is like . . . it’s like some time warp,” Margalo said. “I feel as if I’m seeing into the future. What if this is some science fiction experiment, where going up on this stage shows people as they really, really are? Or who they will be? I wonder what we’d look like up there.”
    â€œWho cares?” Mikey asked. Then she gave herself away by saying, “Louis looks totally sketchy.”
    â€œIf Louis ends up an alcoholic, would you be surprised?” Margalo asked.
    â€œJust as long as he doesn’t end up living next door to me,” Mikey said.
    â€œAnd Rhonda—it’s like we’re seeing who she’ll be when she’s thirty. She’s like her mother, isn’t she? She’s all . . .” Margalo tried to think of the words.
    â€œI know the right way to act,” Mikey supplied. “You had all better behave.”
    Margalo finished it. “Or I’ll get you in trouble, because I know important people.”
    â€œHadrian, at least,