Bad Girls in Love Read Free Page A

listen, did it for her. “I think the human race has made some good progress since the Middle Ages,” Frannie said.
    â€œYeah, but you also think Louis Caselli isn’t so bad,” Mikey pointed out.
    â€œThat’s because Louis has a giant crush on her,” Tan said.
    Frannie never minded being teased, not about her plain, Quaker style of dressing, not about her reputation as the nicest person in school, not even about Louis Caselli’s crush. She said, “I feel sorry for Louis.”
    â€œLouis has the brains of a mushroom,” Mikey agreed. “We have to forgive him. At least,” she added, “the rest of you have to. I don’t think I will.”
    â€œBesides, as we all know, Louis is no competition for . . .” Margalo lingered on the silence before she uttered the name in a breathless, sighing voice, “Gregory Peck.” Frannie’s crush on Gregory Peck had begun when they’d been shown the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird last year. She didn’t care if he was old enough to be her grandfather—or great-grandfather by now; and Margalo did agree that he was incredibly handsome.But there was old, and there was way old, and Gregory Peck was definitely in the second category.
    As soon as Margalo mentioned the one, Mikey leaned toward Tanisha to murmur the name of the other: “Tiger Woods.” In eighth grade you wanted to be half of a couple, so if they didn’t have a personal boyfriend, girls could get crushes on celebrities. The important thing was to have a name linked to yours. Almost all eighth graders were linked to someone. Not Mikey, and not Margalo, and there were a few others, too, although not many. Casey Wolsowski was one of these—unless you counted linking your name up to the hero of some book, which most people didn’t. This far into the year everybody knew about Frannie’s crush and Tanisha’s ideal man, so they got teased a lot.
    Frannie and Tan looked at each other. “Their time will come,” Tanisha promised.
    â€œIn your dreams,” Mikey answered, and Margalo let Mikey speak for her in this, as if she and Mikey were in exactly the same position, untouched, and untouchable.
    â€œAnyway, I’m not about to waste time and erasers on a notebook,” Mikey declared. Eighth-grade girls erased their boyfriends’ initials onto the fronts of their spiral notebooks. It was practically an eighth-grade art form, initialing anything you could get an eraser on. “Haven’t you seen Ronnie’s notebooks, with Doug’s name all over them? And Rhonda—it’s pitiful. She’s pitiful. She always was, but this year she’s reached new levels of pitifulness. Or Heather McGinty, theway she drools around after whoever scored highest in the last game, whoever everybody’s talking about. Acting like she’s some movie-star irresistible sex goddess, hinting about how hot she is.” Mikey concluded this R&R, “The whole thing’s—it’s really embarrassing, and Heather’s not even embarrassed.”
    Then she grinned. “I’m enjoying eighth grade.”
    Then she glared at Frannie. “What’s so funny?”
    Frannie stood up, shaking her head. “I have to get an aisle seat for the assembly,” she apologized, “because I got a part.”
    â€œWhich one?” Margalo asked, making a silent guess, The mother .
    â€œThe mother,” Frannie said.
    â€œTypecasting,” Mikey announced.
    â€œNo it isn’t,” Margalo said. “The mother isn’t—”
    Mikey held up both hands, palms out like a policeman facing traffic, Stop . “Leave me something to be surprised at, why don’t you? Who else got parts?” she asked Frannie.
    â€œI thought you wanted to be surprised. Anyway, we’re not supposed to tell,” she added, leaving.
    â€œAre you trying to get rid of the few friends you