Bad Girls in Love by Cynthia Voigt

chomping away at it.
    In his best so-there voice Louis closed the argument. “I didn’t think you did.”
    â€œI know,” Margalo continued it, with more and sweeter patience.
    Louis was losing. He didn’t know how that had happened. He looked around to the watching faces to tell them, “She’s got a crush on Shawn, can you believe it? As if he’d even look at her once.” Then he was seized by an unfortunate inspiration. “Or maybe he would. Because pretty guys like him are usually gay, aren’t they? And gay guys like—”
    Mikey had him by the throat, which limited his ability to verbalize. She was about his height, so he could see right into her eyes. The sight was not pleasant to him.
    â€œLgo!” he gurgled.
    â€œDon’t you ever—,” she was starting to say.
    Then her words, too, were cut off. Called in by one of the teachers on lunch duty, Mr. Saunders had arrived. He put one hand on Mikey’s shoulder, shoving his other arm between the two of them, standing far enough back so that Mikey had time to recognize him and abort the punch she was about tothrow at whoever was getting in the way of her choking Louis Caselli to death.
    â€œAll right, you two.” Mr. Saunders was not amused.
    Most of the onlookers, however, were . “What is wrong with Louis?” people wondered, and “What is wrong with Mikey?” People also thought, Why don’t they grow up? but nobody said that out loud.
    â€œYou know the drill,” Mr. Saunders told Mikey and Louis.
    They did. Since September there had been several opportunities for the principal’s innovative response to violent eruptions of junior-high tensions, so everybody knew the drill. For the observers the drill was enjoyable and instructive. For the participants it tended to be embarrassing and instructive.
    Instructive, and corrective, too; although this time it involved Mikey Elsinger, who never thought she was in the wrong, and Louis Caselli, who never thought. Between them, Mikey and Louis might come up with the disagreement that was the drill-breaker, and nobody wanted to miss that.
    Mr. Saunders put one hand on Mikey’s left shoulder and one hand on Louis’s right shoulder and pushed the two of them in front of him out of the cafeteria. He sent Hadrian Klenk to his office. “Get me the gloves,” he told Hadrian as he steered his two miscreants down the hall to the gym.
    After Hadrian brought the fat brown leather boxing gloves, and Mr. Saunders had laced them on Louis and Mikey, he asked the usual drill questions.
    â€œWhat’s this fight about?” he asked. “Mikey?”
    â€œAsk Louis,” Mikey said.
    â€œLouis?”
    â€œIt’s not my fault.”
    Mr. Saunders said, “You know we’re not looking to assign blame, Louis. We’re interested in the cause. We like to know what we’re fighting about.”
    â€œAbout name-calling,” Mikey said.
    â€œLouis called you a name?”
    â€œI didn’t say one thing about her.”
    â€œYou didn’t call names?”
    That, Louis couldn’t deny. But he pointed out, “It wasn’t her. So what’s her problem?”
    â€œIt wasn’t you?” Mr. Saunders asked Mikey. “Then who?”
    Mikey shook her head.
    Hoping to embarrass Mikey, Louis volunteered, “It was her boyfriend.”
    Mikey smiled a little pleased smile—Margalo could have sworn she saw that—and more than one girl’s voice called from the onlookers, “He is not.”
    â€œOK, her big crush. Shawn. Macavity. You know,” he smirked around at the watching seventh and eighth graders, several of whom groaned softly, hoping that Louis was not going to make this particular joke in front of the principal, under these circumstances, and several of whom hoped that he would. He did. “Mr. Tooth Decay.”
    Mr. Saunders considered this information before