“A birthday present?”
“Sure thing,” I said, thinking, Just you wait. The stubble burn, the red bumps, the never-ending chore. “I wanted to tell you something.”
Her arms dropped. “What?”
I spoke carefully. “One reason your father and I believed you should move ahead a year was because you’re more mature than most girls your age. Physically, I mean.”
She avoided my eyes. “OK.”
“So even though I don’t want you to start shaving your legs so young, I’m happy that your new friends are so mature, because I think you probably feel more comfortable with them.”
“Dad told me all that.”
“He did?”
She turned toward the closet. She dressed in the red velveteen pants and a white top, and then we called for Dennis and grabbed Trisha’s gift from the dining room table and got into the car. Dennis hummed along with the radio as we drove, and Margo’s voice piped up from the backseat to join his. “Bye-bye Miss American Pie,” she sang, at first softly and then louder. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry . . .” By the time we reached the Weintraub house, Margo was singing high and strong, like someone excited about what the world had to offer.
There were boys, of course. Judy and her boyfriend took a bottle of wine into the master suite and closed the door, and the girls—eleven of them, enough for an entire soccer team—called the boys on the phone to give the all-clear. They met in an empty lot three doors down and stood shoulder to shoulder so the boys could kiss them one by one, snaking down the line. There was a boy there who was not cool, and had been invited only because he was older and had a history of sneaking the car keys from his father without being caught. This boy, Devon, had acne and bad breath and when he reached Margo in the line, Trisha pushed Margo from behind and Devon grabbed her breasts and when she twisted free the girls called her a prude and Trisha said she should never have invited her, but she’d wanted someone for Devon since he’d offered to drive the boys. After a while the boys wandered off. The girls were worried about getting into trouble if Judy found out they’d left the house, so they went back to Trisha’s bedroom. The room had a sitting area with a fluffy white area rug and a private bathroom with lavender walls and white trim. The girls changed into pajamas and laid out their sleeping bags—Margo’s was blaze-orange and thick as a mattress, a relic from our family’s early camping days—and talked about the boys. And then some of the boys were back, throwing stones at Trisha’s window. Trisha went to the window and hushed them, then whispered in another girl’s ear. The girl giggled and whispered to another girl, who whispered to another. When the whispering reached Margo, she was horrified to learn the plan: they were going to line up at the picture window in the living room and moon the boys on the count of three. She trudged out to the living room with the pack, and for the second time that night they all lined up, facing away from the window. Trisha counted to three but after Margo pulled down her pants, she looked up to discover that no other girl had gone through with it, and instead they were shrieking and pointing at her. She heard muffled male laughter, too, punctuated by catcalls and swear words. Back in the lavender bathroom, she tried to hold it together before sneaking out to call us from the telephone in the kitchen.
Margo spent Sunday in her room and refused to eat. I called Judy Weintraub, who said that she would have a long talk with her daughter about sneaking out. I was too exhausted to ask for more. I called Bette and asked her to come over. “I’ll be there in a jiff,” she said, and I said, “What would we do without you?” She brought cookies and went into Margo’s room with glasses of milk. I knew Bette would advise Margo in ways I couldn’t; she would call the girls nasty names and brainstorm pranks. Her advice would be irresponsible—retribution, humiliation, that sort of thing—but her wicked outrage would make Margo feel better, and while she talked she would wink in a way that told Margo she wasn’t completely serious. When Bette came out of Margo’s bedroom, closing the door softly behind her, we convened in the kitchen and she poured two glasses of wine. “Those little devils,” she said. “Did you do that kind of thing at her age?”
“I was too shy to do things like that.”
“I was just like this Trisha. I was horrible, and then at some point I had no friends.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
She smiled. “I would have eaten you for breakfast. You poor thing.”
I started to cry, and she put an arm around me and we drank more wine. After she left, I debated for a long time about calling the home of Beverly Jovanovich, whom Margo had mentioned during her retelling of the events and who, according to Margo, had told Trisha to lay off when it was clear she had my daughter in her sights. I decided it could hardly make things worse. “I want to thank you for standing up for Margo last night,” I said to her when she came to the phone.
“OK,” said Beverly.
“What’s it going to be like tomorrow?”
“Trisha was pretty mad she left,” Beverly said. I started to tell her what I thought about that, but held my tongue. “I think it’s kind of hard for Margo,” she said. “Sixth grade is tough.”
“I’m starting to realize that.”
“Seventh is way better,” she said. I had to believe her. There was no other option.
Monday morning Dennis hemmed and hawed about calling in sick on his first day at the new job—he’d seized on the idea of taking Margo to Stiltsville to help her feel better—but I forced him out of the house. He told Margo he loved her through her locked bedroom door. Before getting into his car he said to me, “If we did the wrong thing, why not just put her back where she belongs?”
“Because she doesn’t belong there anymore,” I told him.
After he left I stood outside Margo’s room for a long time, weighing the options. I looked at my watch and calculated that homeroom was already over. I called my supervisor at the bank and asked him to find someone to cover for me for the rest of the week. I called Sunset School and asked firmly to speak to the principal, who listened to my story and promised that he would ask sixth- and seventh-grade teachers to do their best to check this kind of bullying behavior, as he put it. I called Mr. Callahan, the school counselor, and he recommended increasing Margo’s sessions to twice a week. He also recommended, strongly, that I bring her to school right away. I called Dennis’s mother and left a message asking if we could come for dinner that week; we hadn’t seen her and Grady in a while and I thought it would be good for Margo, and for me. I knocked on Margo’s door and told her to get dressed for school. “If you can do this,” I said through the door, “you can do anything.” When she came out, her eyes were red and her face was still. She didn’t argue. In the car I handed her a tube of lip gloss and she put it on compliantly. I touched her hair before she opened the car door. “This sucks,” she said.
“No swearing,” I said. “It does suck. It sucks very badly.”
She hesitated, one foot on the ground outside. The school was imposing and inanimate, as if arrested in time. There was no one outside, no movement beyond the frosted windows. Then after a minute, a man emerged from the school office, folding a piece of paper. He walked to his car and got in. A woman crossed the courtyard toward the gym. Margo adjusted her backpack and stepped out of the car and closed the door behind her, waving quickly, then walked toward the school without looking back.