Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do? by Cynthia Voigt

Author:Cynthia Voigt
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers

– 13 –

Settling Accounts

When Mikey and Margalo got to the library the next morning, Hadrian was waiting for them.

Because the library was supposed to be the symbolic center of the school, the architect who designed the building put it in the geographic center. The librarian worked behind a large, curved countertop, and spreading out around his desk, like rays of a sun in a little kid’s drawing, were the stacks of books and racks of newspapers and magazines. The library had computers, also, and a media room and—wherever they could be fit in—tables, at one of which Hadrian Klenk sat, the prisoner at the defendant’s table in a courtroom, looking nervous, just waiting, his hands folded on the table in front of him.

He didn’t look taller, older, or wise that morning. Not a bit of it. He looked like a nervous kid.

Mikey and Margalo marched up to him.

Hadrian had already waited and worried more than he could stand. He started right in talking, before they had even sat down. “I’m sorry,” he said to Mikey. “And I’m sorry to you, too, Margalo. I just made that first phone call, I don’t know why. Because sometimes I just want to go ahead and do what I want to do instead of backing off? So I called, and it was fun, so I called again—and I got better and better at it. But I didn’t mean to . . .” His voice faded off, as if he couldn’t even imagine what it was that would make them feel more kindly towards him if they knew he had never meant to do it.

Mikey and Margalo sat down facing Hadrian, and they looked at each other at the end of this little speech. Mikey spoke first.

“Don’t be a jerk. I liked talking to you.”

“You did?”

“And it was a mystery.”

“You really did?”

Margalo affirmed it. “She did. We called you her secret admirer.”

Hadrian’s cheeks turned bright pink. All he could say was, “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what this time?” asked Mikey, but Margalo cut in, “Having a secret admirer is good for someone’s ego.”

“Even Mikey?” Margalo was the person Hadrian asked about this.

“Yes,” Margalo said. “Even Mikey.”

Mikey had had enough of this subject. “I’ve been evicted from rehearsals,” she told Hadrian.

“But I’ll be fine now,” Hadrian said. “I’ll tell Ms. Hendriks. If you want to come to rehearsals, then I think you should be able to.”

“It wasn’t just disturbing you,” Margalo said. “Mikey was asking questions.”

“About your money. Did you figure out anything?”

The way Hadrian was looking at Mikey, she didn’t know what he was thinking, so she asked him outright, “Are you still my secret admirer? Because whatever Margalo says, I don’t think I want one.”

Hadrian blushed again. “I used to be, in sixth grade, and fifth, too, maybe seventh, but—you know, maybe I could be gay, because a lot of actors are.”

“That’s stupid,” Mikey responded, but Margalo could only gape across the library table at this squirty little ninth-grade wimpoid dork who had just been bold enough to say what he had just said.

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