Simply Alice Read online

  Life After Patrick

  It isn’t Alice and Patrick anymore; it’s simply Alice, and much to her surprise, Alice is finding that’s okay. In fact, working on the school play and becoming increasingly involved in the newspaper have Alice so busy she doesn’t have much time for her best friends Pamela and Elizabeth—and they resent it.

  And if Alice ever needed friends, she needs them now. She’s got a secret e-mail admirer she’s not sure how to handle. Her brother, Lester, is plunging headlong into a risky romance with a professor. And her new friend, Faith, seems unable to break free of an abusive relationship with her boyfriend. It’s not simple being simply Alice.

  * Don’t miss any of the Alice books with their bright new covers:

  Look inside for a complete list of Alice books.

  SIMON PULSE

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Cover photograph copyright © 2003 by Nick Vaccaro

  Cover design by Russell Gordon

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  1103

  PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR is the author of more than one hundred books, but the Alice books are some of her most favorite to write. She has a photographic memory of her teenage years, and knows both the heartache of breaking up with a boy and the excitement of finding herself on her own with a lot of choices before her. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband Rex, and they are the parents of two grown sons. She enjoys communicating with readers on the Alice website: http://series.simonandschuster.com/Alice.

  * * *

  Simply Alice

  Books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Witch’s Sister

  Witch Water

  The Witch Herself

  Walking Through the Dark

  How I Came to Be a Writer

  How Lazy Can You Get?

  Eddie, Incorporated

  All Because I’m Older

  Shadows on the Wall

  Faces in the Water

  Footprints at the Window

  The Boy with the Helium Head

  A String of Chances

  The Solomon System

  Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink

  Night Cry

  Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear

  The Dark of the Tunnel

  The Agony of Alice

  The Keeper

  Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies

  The Year of the Gopher

  Beetles, Lightly Toasted

  Maudie in the Middle

  One of the Third Grade Thonkers

  Alice in Rapture, Sort Of

  Keeping a Christmas Secret

  Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel

  Send No Blessings

  Reluctantly Alice

  King of the Playground

  Shiloh

  All but Alice

  Josie’s Troubles

  The Grand Escape

  Alice in April

  Bernie Magruder and the Drive-Thru Funeral

  Alice In-Between

  The Fear Place

  Alice the Brave

  Being Danny’s Dog

  Ice

  Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup

  Alice in Lace

  Shiloh Season

  Ducks Disappearing

  Outrageously Alice

  The Healing of Texas Jake

  I Can’t Take You Anywhere

  Saving Shiloh

  Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure

  Achingly Alice

  Danny’s Desert Rats

  Sang Spell

  Sweet Strawberries

  Alice on the Outside

  Walker’s Crossing

  Jade Green

  Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril

  The Grooming of Alice

  Carlotta’s Kittens and the Club of Mysteries

  Alice Alone

  Please Do Feed the Bears

  Simply Alice

  Blizzard’s Wake

  Starting with Alice

  Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry

  Patiently Alice

  Alice in Blunderland

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Simon Pulse edition November 2003

  Text copyright © 2002 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  SIMON PULSE

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster

  Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.

  Designed by Sonia Chaghatzbanian

  The text of this book was set in Berkeley Old Style.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

  Simply Alice / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st. ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In her freshman year, fourteen-year-old Alice experiences changes and challenges with friends, family, and school activities, which leave her feeling better about herself than ever before.

  ISBN 0-689-82635-4

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Theater—Fiction].

  I. Title.

  PZ7.N24 Si 2002

  [Fic]—dc21 2001035539

  ISBN 0-689-85965-1 (pbk.)

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4391-1591-6 (ebook)

  To the one and only Claudia Mills

  Contents

  Chapter One: The Second Half

  Chapter Two: Cay

  Chapter Three: Heart of Gold

  Chapter Four: Behind the Curtain

  Chapter Five: Out of the Woodwork

  Chapter Six: Spring Surprises

  Chapter Seven: Conversation

  Chapter Eight: Production

  Chapter Nine: Clearing the Air

  Chapter Ten: The Girl in White

  Chapter Eleven: The Color Purple

  Chapter Twelve: Tony and Tina

  Chapter Thirteen: The Instructor Flap

  Chapter Fourteen: Changes

  Chapter Fifteen: Sylvia

  Simply Alice

  1

  The Second Half

  The thing about the second semester of ninth grade is you’re not so scared anymore. You know how everything works—your locker, the cafeteria line, the buses, grading points—and you don’t go to school every day with your heart in your mouth, expecting to be humiliated half out of your mind.

  Which, of course, makes it all the worse when it happens. Wearing an ankle-length beige skirt with a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt, I was coming out of the cafeteria with my two best friends, Elizabeth Price and Pamela Jones, heading for P.E. on the ground floor. I’d had a hugely busy morning, starting with a meeting of the newspaper staff before school, and I still hadn’t had a chance to duck into a rest room. After the big glass of orange juice I’d drunk for breakfast, and now the can of Sprite for lunch, I was in agony.

  “Hey, guys, I’ve really, really got to go,” I said as we started toward the stairs. I could only walk in tiny, mincing steps.

  “We’ll be in the locker room in three minutes,” Elizabeth said.

  “I can’t wait three minutes,” I told her, looking around as we approached the stairs. “I thought there was a rest room on this floor, maybe jus
t beyond …”

  What happened next was like a home movie on fast-forward. We must have been closer to the top step than I thought, because I was still looking around when suddenly I felt my body plunging forward, my books flying out in front of me.

  I heard Elizabeth scream, “Oh, Alice!” and someone else shout, “Grab her!” and I could see the guys on the lower level look our way, but I was tumbling down the stairs, trying to grasp the railing as I went, and came to a stop on the second from the last step.

  “Oh, my gosh!” Pamela yelled. “Are you hurt?”

  I was pretty shaken, but within a few seconds I knew I wasn’t hurt, not seriously—just bumps and bruises. My pride, mostly. I’d cut one knee, and my cheekbone stung. What I was conscious of was that my underwear and thighs were soaked, and it just kept coming. It was like someone had pulled a plug and I couldn’t stop.

  A tall senior had one hand under my back and another under my legs, and was lifting me to a standing position. “You okay?” he kept asking.

  I wanted desperately for the earth to swallow me up, never to be seen again.

  He must have felt the dampness because I saw him look behind me, like maybe I was broken and bleeding, and then he said gently, “My, my, my! That did scare the … uh … daylights out of you, didn’t it?” He winked and walked away with the other guys, who didn’t know what he was smiling about, and by that time Pamela and Elizabeth had reached the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hide me,” I choked.

  “What? Are you all right? Are you hurt?” Elizabeth asked.

  And then Pamela turned me around. “My gosh, Alice! You …” Trust Pamela to burst out laughing.

  I backed up against the wall while kids stopped to pick up the pages of my three-ring notebook that were scattered all over the stairs. Then Pamela, walking ahead of me, and Elizabeth, walking behind, got me to the gym, and while the other girls played volleyball, I rinsed out my underwear and the back of my skirt, and held them under the blower to dry.

  “Can anything be more humiliating than that?” I asked Elizabeth when we were showering later.

  “You could have thrown up, too, while you were at it,” she said.

  At dinner that night, Dad said, “Al, what on earth happened to you?”

  The left side of my face was bruised and swollen where I’d bumped against the stair rail. My real name is Alice Kathleen McKinley, but Dad and Lester, my twenty-two-year-old brother, call me Al.

  “The most embarrassing thing that could possibly happen to a human being, that’s all,” I said, and launched into the whole dramatic story of how this handsome senior had knelt down to help me up and had felt my wet skirt. “Nothing in the world could be more awful than that,” I repeated.

  “Wrong,” said Lester, passing the lentils and sausage, which, for anyone who cares to know, looks like mud. “He could have gathered you up in his arms, clutched your body to his, gazed into your eyes, and then you wet your pants.”

  “Well, believe it or not, there are some things in life worse than humiliation,” said Dad. He, of course, means death and dying and wars and starvation, but it’s sort of hard to think about those things when you’re tumbling down a flight of stairs and losing control of your bladder at the same time.

  I guess it’s natural that my dad sees the serious side of life, because my mom died when I was in kindergarten, and I suppose you never get over something like that. But now he’s engaged to my seventh-grade English teacher, Miss Summers, and he’s the happiest I’ve ever known him to be, even though she’s on a teacher-exchange program in England.

  “So other than using the school stairs as a toilet, how was your day?” Lester asked me.

  “Well, a nice thing did happen,” I said. “Since I’m one of the freshmen roving reporters for The Edge, and I’m also part of the stage crew for our spring musical, I’m supposed to write three articles on ‘behind the scenes of a school production.’ That should be fun.”

  “That’s a great assignment,” said Dad. “What musical?”

  “Fiddler on the Roof.”

  “Oh, I like that one. Wonderful music!” Dad said.

  “So what do you do, Al? Pull the curtain?” asked Les.

  “All sorts of stuff,” I told him. “Scene changes, props, costumes—wherever I’m needed.”

  “I’m glad to see you expand yourself a little. This may turn out to be a good year for you after all,” said Dad.

  What he means, of course, is that I may not go to pieces or jump off a bridge or anything, just because Patrick and I broke up this last fall. Not that I would ever let somebody else make me so miserable that I’d do that. But it sure hadn’t been an easy fall, watching Patrick and Penny, the “new girl in town,” kissing around school and doing all the things together that Patrick and I used to do.

  But I’m trying to pay more attention to other people and not be so self-centered. So I turned to Lester and said, “How was your day?”

  “Interesting,” he said. “I had coffee with one of my philosophy instructors.”

  “The babe?” I said, knowing that one of his teachers was really attractive, or so he’d told me. “I thought faculty weren’t supposed to date students.”

  “Did I say ‘date’? I said ‘coffee,’ Al. We talked… . Besides, she’s not actually a professor, just an adjunct instructor. She’d like to be a regular member of the faculty, though, and she’s got the brains to do it.”

  “You flirted, I’ll bet,” I said.

  “That’s not a felony. It’s not even a misdemeanor.”

  “So … how old is she?” I wanted to know.

  “A year or two older than I am, I suppose.”

  “Watch it, Les,” I said, and grinned.

  Dad was smiling, too. “Well, I had a letter from Sylvia today, and we’re looking at July twenty-eighth to get married.”

  That was about the best news I’d had in two years. Two years of trying to connect the beautiful Sylvia Summers with my dad, and now they were really, truly, officially engaged, except that she didn’t have a diamond or anything. Didn’t even want one, Dad said.

  “That’s fabulous, Dad!” I said excitedly. “I hope she has ten bridesmaids and a symphony orchestra.”

  He laughed. “A simple little ceremony, Al, for family and friends. That’s just the way we want it.”

  I guess, since it’s their wedding, they can have whatever they want, but after working so hard to get them to fall in love, I thought we deserved an orchestra. A chamber quartet, anyway.

  I was about as busy as I could imagine myself being, now that they were starting auditions for Fiddler on the Roof. The stage crew met three times a week after school, and it would become every day when we got closer to production. Actually the stage crew was divided up into lots of little crews, but most of us were on more than one—lighting, sound, sets, costumes, makeup, props, publicity… .

  The real surprise was when Pamela told me she was dropping out of the drama club. I couldn’t believe it. She’s always talked about wanting to be an actress or a model, and she’d had the lead in our sixth-grade play.

  “Why?” I asked, when she told me.

  “I didn’t know it was going to be a musical, and I don’t think my voice is good enough for a leading role,” she said.

  “But you could be in the chorus, Pam! Or you could work behind the scenes. There’s always something you could do.”

  “I don’t want the chorus and I don’t want to work behind the scenes. If I try out and don’t make it, Mr. Ellis will remember that when I audition next year or the year after that. When I try out for the first time, I want to knock his socks off, and I can tell I’m not that good yet. I don’t want a second-rate part. I want a major role.”

  I couldn’t understand the feeling, never having wanted to be the center of attention that much.

  “So I’m going to take voice lessons,” Pamela finished. “Dad’s already found a teacher for me and signed me up. But, listen! Elizabeth
’s got this great idea!”

  We were on the bus going home, all squeezed together on one seat. Liz was by the window, I was in the middle, and Pam was on the end.

  Pamela and Elizabeth were smiling. “Why don’t the three of us sign up together as junior consultants for Tiddly Winks this spring!”

  “Tiddly Winks?” I said in surprise. Tiddly Winks was an inexpensive earring store that had recently expanded to include accessories of all kinds—hair stuff, hats, scarves, belts, shawls, necklaces… . I tried to imagine myself a junior consultant. “What do you do?”

  “It sounds really fun,” Elizabeth assured me. “They’re having a big promotion to advertise the new stuff in the store, and they want people to come in for a color and bone-structure analysis.”

  “We’re supposed to do that?” I said. “What do I know about bone structure?”

  “No, the professionals do that. Then they tell us what category the customer is in—like, she’s a ‘spring’ or an ‘autumn,’ and ‘angular’ or ‘round,’ and then we show them all the colors and styles in her category.”

  “The thing is,” Pamela continued, “we get points for every friend we bring in and points for every dollar each of our customers spends. When we get a certain number of points, we get free earrings or something.”

  “We’re going to do it two evenings a week and on Sunday afternoons through the end of March,” said Elizabeth. “We can all ride to the mall together.”

  I was beginning to feel squeezed in, and not just because I was sitting in the middle. “Hey, guys, I can’t!” I said. “Between the Melody Inn on Saturdays and the newspaper and the stage crew, I’m stretched about as far as I can get already!”

  “So give up the stage crew,” said Pamela.

  “What?”

  “We joined the drama club together,” she reminded me, “and now that I’m not going to try out, why don’t you do Tiddly Winks with us? It’s not as though you’ve got one of the major parts or anything. C’mon! Just tell them you don’t want to do it, and sign up with Liz and me. We’re going down tomorrow.”

  “I can’t!” I croaked. “I already said I’d do it. I’ve been assigned to sets, props, and publicity.”