Bad Girls in Love Read Free

Mikey told them.
    â€œYou know that today in assembly they’re announcing who got parts in the play?” Tan asked.
    Margalo nodded.
    â€œSautéed, with onions and red wine,” Mikey said.
    â€œI know who’s going to be Jennet Jourdemayne. Sorry, but it’s not you.”
    â€œHah!” Mikey crowed. All victories welcome, that was her motto.
    â€œHunnh,” said Margalo. She was cool, nothing surprised her, nothing got her excited, nothing could upset her or disappoint her.
    â€œI told you so,” Mikey said.
    â€œMikey,” Tan protested.
    â€œWell I did,” Mikey maintained.
    Tan grinned. “You’re so bad, you’re perfect.”
    Mikey smiled right back at her, a So-what? smile.
    â€œHow’d you find out?” Margalo wanted to know.
    â€œThe way they’re announcing it, they’re calling the people up onto the stage. I guess they think that’ll make it more exciting for everyone, like the Oscars or something. Aimi told me. She’s going to be Jennet. Ms. Larch told her yesterday so she’d be ready to be called up on stage, and Aimi was too excited not to tell someone.” Tan continued, “I thought you were just as good as Aimi in tryouts. You’re a good liar, so it makes sense that you’d be a good actress.”
    â€œAimi must have been better,” Mikey pointed out. “Otherwise, why would she get the part?”
    â€œShe’s black.” Tan made a point of not adding dummy , made such a big point that she might as well have said it out loud, which was exactly her point. “Except for that, Aimi and Margalo are built a lot alike, tall and slim, and they’re both pretty enough. The only real difference I can see is Aimi’s not white. So, I figure, Ms. Larch wanted someone who looked different from everybody else for Jennet, because . . . People in those days would single her out and believe she might be awitch because she looked different—when they were looking for someone to blame, for a scapegoat when things went wrong.”
    â€œThat’s smart casting,” Margalo agreed.
    â€œDid she tell Aimi all that?” Mikey asked.
    Tan just looked at her, eye sarcasm.
    â€œYeah, but then how do you know?” Mikey insisted. Then she said, “Wait. OK. I do get it.” In case they didn’t believe her, she explained. “The play’s set in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages are a lot like junior high. The Middle Ages are the junior high of history. In both places, if you look different, or act different, people are nervous, scared of you. Get people scared of you and they’ll start doing things to make themselves feel un-scared, like—burning you at the stake. It’s as simple as math: Different is scary, new is scary, change is scary—burn, burn, burn.” Each time she said burn , Mikey pointed at Margalo or Tan, as if she was sentencing somebody to be tied to a stake and roasted alive. “I’ll tell you what scares me,” she said, as if either Margalo or Tanisha had asked. “People.”
    â€œThe Salem witch trials weren’t during the Middle Ages,” Margalo pointed out.
    Mikey ignored her. “By ‘they’ I mean mostly men,” she said. “Because women couldn’t do much of anything back then. Well, they could, and some of them did. Joan of Arc, for example, and look what happened to her because she acted different from other people, and looked different, especiallydressed different. Things haven’t really changed at all since then, have they?”
    Margalo considered deflating this R&R, which was what her mother called it when Mikey got going on some topic, because it was the opposite of Rest and Recreation. With Mikey, Aurora maintained, R&R stood for Rant and Rave. Margalo was about to advise Mikey to put a lid on it, when Frannie Arenberg, who’d stopped on her way out of the cafeteria to