Alice In-Between Read online

  I wasn’t a little kid anymore, but I wasn’t a young woman, either. The more I thought about it, the more I decided I had those “in-between blues.”

  “I’ve got the in-between blues,” I said to Lester that afternoon as I sat on the porch with a book. “They’ll pass,” said Lester.

  THIRTEEN! IT’S FINALLY HAPPENING. Alice McKinley is an actual, official teenager. The problem is, she still sort of feels like a kid. Wasn’t being a teenager supposed to feel different? Turning thirteen happens overnight, but the teenager stuff takes time—and a little more patience than Alice has at the moment!

  Still, being thirteen does have its advantages. Alice is allowed to do more exciting things, like take a trip to Chicago with her two best friends. And when she takes a good look at all the relationship problems her older brother has, she realizes that in-between can sometimes be the perfect place to be.

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  COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN

  COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK

  AGES 10–14 • 0511

  PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR includes many of her own life experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults, and is the author of more than one hundred and thirty-five books, including the Alice series, which Entertainment Weekly has called “tender” and “wonderful.” In 1992 her novel Shiloh won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.

  Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*

  “i think the reason my friends and i like your books the way we do is because we have, at one time or another, found ourselves in similar situations and feel the same way as Alice in your books. it’s as though she’s actually a real person! reading an Alice book is like a really fun day; as soon as you begin, you just know that it’ll be really exciting, and when it ends, you kinda feel disappointed, but look forward to more.”

  “I sometimes get sad wishing alice were real. I feel like she’s my sister, i know so much about her.”

  “I am so glad that Alice isn’t perfect. She actually has problems like real people…. There’s something in Alice that can relate to us all.”

  *Taken from actual postings on the Alice website. To read more, visit AliceMcKinley.com.

  Alice In-Between

  BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR

  Shiloh Books

  Shiloh

  Shiloh Season

  Saving Shiloh

  The Alice Books

  Starting with Alice

  Alice in Blunderland

  Lovingly Alice

  The Agony of Alice

  Alice in Rapture, Sort Of

  Reluctantly Alice

  All But Alice

  Alice in April

  Alice In-Between

  Alice the Brave

  Alice in Lace

  Outrageously Alice

  Achingly Alice

  Alice on the Outside

  The Grooming of Alice

  Alice Alone

  Simply Alice

  Patiently Alice

  Including Alice

  Alice on Her Way

  Alice in the Know

  Dangerously Alice

  Almost Alice

  Intensely Alice

  Alice in Charge

  Incredibly Alice

  Alice Collections

  I Like Him, He Likes Her

  It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way

  Please Don’t Be True

  The Bernie Magruder Books

  Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink

  Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies

  Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel

  Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor

  Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup

  Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure

  Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril

  Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry

  The Cat Pack Books

  The Grand Escape

  The Healing of Texas Jake

  Carlotta’s Kittens

  Polo’s Mother

  The York Trilogy

  Shadows on the Wall

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  Footprints at the Window

  The Witch Books

  Witch’s Sister

  Witch Water

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  The Witch’s Eye

  Witch Weed

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  Picture Books

  King of the Playground

  The Boy with the Helium Head

  Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear

  Keeping a Christmas Secret

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  I Can’t Take You Anywhere

  Sweet Strawberries

  Please DO Feed the Bears

  Books for Young Readers

  Josie’s Troubles

  How Lazy Can You Get?

  All Because I’m Older

  Maudie in the Middle

  One of the Third-Grade Thonkers

  Roxie and the Hooligans

  Books for Middle Readers

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  How I Came to Be a Writer

  Eddie, Incorporated

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  The Fear Place

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  A String of Chances

  Night Cry

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  The Year of the Gopher

  Send No Blessings

  Ice

  Sang Spell

  Jade Green

  Blizzard’s Wake

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  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  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 products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon &

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  Book design by Mike Rosamilia

  The text for this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.

  0311 OFF

  This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition May 2011

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

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

  Alice in-between / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Jean Karl book.”

  Summary: When motherless Alice turns thirteen she feels in-between, no longer a child but not yet a woman, and discovers that growing up
can be both frustrating and wonderful.

  ISBN 978-0-689-31890-0 (hc)

  [1. Single-parent family—Fiction. 2. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N24Ak 1994 [Fic]—dc20

  93008167

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2758-7 (pbk)

  To my sister Norma, who knows why,

  and to Colby Rodowsky,

  one of my favorite authors

  Contents

  One: On the Road to Raving Beauty

  Two: In the Fast Lane with Lester

  Three: Rekindling the Flame

  Four: The Pencil Test

  Five: Rescue

  Six: Of Heaven and Hell

  Seven: A Voice from the Past

  Eight: Poem

  Nine: Train to Chicago

  Ten: Pamela’s Room

  Eleven: Saving Pamela

  Twelve: Intimate Conversations

  Thirteen: A Present for Patrick

  Fourteen: Hospital Visit

  Fifteen: Holding the Fort

  1

  ON THE ROAD TO RAVING BEAUTY

  AUNT SALLY SAID IT HAPPENED TO HER, and to my cousin Carol. Dad said it happened to Mom.

  “The summer between seventh and eighth grades,” he told me, “was when she really blossomed into a beauty. You can tell by her photos.”

  I was eating crackers and cheese at the kitchen table, and decided I couldn’t wait for blossoms (leaves, petals, anything at all) to unfold. I wanted to be a beauty now. Not that I hadn’t been developing all along, but there wasn’t any name for what I was at the moment. I certainly wasn’t a child, but I wasn’t a shapely teenager, either. Aunt Sally said that, sometime after your thirteenth birthday, you look in the mirror and see a woman. Which was nice, because my birthday was less than a week away I wondered if there was any resemblance to Mom in me.

  “Lester,” I said, going into the living room, where my twenty-year-old brother was sprawled on the couch. “Look at my face and tell me what you see.”

  Lester opened one eye. “Cheez Whiz on your chin,” he said.

  I rubbed one hand across my mouth. “Take a really good look, Lester! Study my whole face. Who do I remind you of most?” I sucked in my cheeks slightly to make my cheekbones more prominent.

  “Daffy Duck?” said Lester.

  One of the problems of growing up without a mother is that there’s no one around who has any idea what it’s like to be a girl. For me, anyway, because I don’t even have sisters. Mom died when I was five, and ever since, I’ve had to pick up all my information about being female from my aunt and cousin and friends at school.

  Dad was writing checks in the dining room that night at the folding table he uses for a desk. And suddenly he said, “May ninth already? Your birthday’s this Saturday, Al!” My name is Alice McKinley, but he and Les call me Al, which is what happens when there are only men in your family.

  “You remembered,” I said.

  “Of course I remembered! Thirteen is pretty special, isn’t it? Do you want a party?”

  A few weeks before, I might have said yes, but I was thinking about the birthday party we’d just given Dad to celebrate his fiftieth, and I decided that one disaster was enough. “Just Pamela and Elizabeth,” I said, naming my two closest friends at school.

  “You got it,” said Dad. “We’ll order in some KFC or something.”

  Pamela’d already had her thirteenth birthday, and Elizabeth wouldn’t be thirteen till fall, but somehow I had the idea that by the time eighth grade began in September, we’d all be raving beauties. When I told Lester, he said, “Raving, anyway.”

  The day before my birthday, I wondered if Miss Summers would say anything to me about it at school. Sylvia Summers is my Language Arts teacher, who’s been dating my dad since December, only they’re not having sexual intercourse, because I already asked Dad about it. At least they weren’t when I asked, but Dad said I couldn’t ask again, which means anything at all could happen. Except, knowing my dad, nothing’s happening. Dad believes in long, slow courtships, and I worry sometimes that he’ll let her get away.

  Miss Summers has light brown hair and blue eyes, and on that day she was wearing an orange-and-white-print dress with a wide orange belt, which made her waist look really tiny. If Dad had told her my birthday was coming up, though, she didn’t say anything, and I guessed that maybe Dad wanted to keep the celebration private—just between us and Lester and my two best girlfriends, which was okay with me.

  “We’ll be on our poetry unit until the end of the semester,” Miss Summers told the class, “and I’d like each of you, in the weeks ahead, to memorize a favorite poem and recite it to the class—a poem that has special significance for you. I want you to recite it in a way that we can see your enjoyment of it. Take your time, and let it be a poem that really speaks to you personally.”

  My first thought was that maybe I’d do something funny, like “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” but then I looked at the empty seat in front of mine and thought, No.

  Ever since Denise Whitlock stepped in front of an Amtrak train, the whole school has been on “suicide watch.” Nobody came right out and said it, but we heard that the faculty had been told to watch for students who were preoccupied with thoughts of death, or seemed sad or withdrawn, or were going through a crisis at home. I decided that any poem with cremation in the title might get me on the list.

  “Suicide watch!” I would say to Pamela when she came to school dressed all in black. (Pamela does that; sometimes I look at her and think she looks sixteen. Seventeen, even.)

  Or the day Elizabeth had cramps so bad she was crying. “Suicide watch!” we told her. You kid around because you don’t know what else to say. About Denise Whitlock and what she did, I mean. Sometimes it really hurts to think about all the kind things you could have said or done for her, but didn’t.

  When we got on the bus to go home that afternoon, Elizabeth was just about to sit down beside me when Patrick, who is sort of a special friend, slid onto the seat first. Elizabeth had to sit with Pamela, who had the second button of her shirt undone, and Elizabeth has told her a hundred times that she won’t be seen in public with her if she leaves that second button undone.

  “Happy birthday,” said Patrick, and handed me a little box.

  I stared. “It’s not till tomorrow.”

  “I know, but go ahead. Open it!” he said.

  I remembered the Whitman’s chocolates he’d given me on Valentine’s Day, and the Milky Way bar in sixth grade, and the chocolate-covered cherries. I figured it had to be something chocolate, but I was wrong.

  Pamela and Elizabeth were watching from across the aisle when I took off the paper and found a small, rectangular box in gray velvet. It didn’t look new, though. In fact, it looked sort of dusty. When I opened it, I found a gold bracelet with dark red stones in it.

  “Patrick!” I said, surprised and shocked.

  He smiled. “Do you like it?”

  “Well, I … of course! It’s beautiful, but …”

  It looked very expensive. I don’t know how I’d know, because I’ve never had any jewelry that cost more than $19.95. It looked like the kind of jewelry Miss Summers might wear, I guess. But it was really weird to be riding home from school on the bus and opening a velvet box with a gold bracelet in it from a guy who used to be my boyfriend.

  I also noticed that there weren’t any tags on it.

  “Don’t worry, it didn’t cost me anything,” said Patrick. And when I raised my eyebrows, he said, “It’s Mom’s, but she never wears it.”

  “Patrick!” I said again.

  “It’s okay!” he insisted. “She doesn’t even like it.”

  I wondered if Patrick would ever look back on all the stupid things he’s done and feel embarrassed the way I do when I remember mine. Or do boys worry about things like that? The only people who do dumber things than seventh-grade girls, I decided, are seventh-grade boys.

  “You gave me your mother’s bracelet, and she
doesn’t even know?” I squeaked.

  “If she ever misses it, I’ll tell her,” said Patrick.

  “No, you’ve got to tell her first. Patrick, if she ever sees me wearing it, she’ll think I stole it!”

  I could tell by his face he’d never even considered that possibility. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell her.”

  I wasn’t in the house five minutes before the phone rang.

  “Is this Alice?” came a woman’s voice. “This is Patrick’s mother, and I’m afraid he’s made a terrible mistake.”

  “I know,” I said. “You can have the bracelet back. I didn’t wear it or anything.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to have it, dear, and I’m sure Patrick is very fond of you, but that bracelet belonged to my mother. And even though I don’t care to wear it anywhere, I do feel it should stay in the family, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Patrick is on his way over there now. I’m so sorry, Alice, but boys sometimes do things without thinking.”

  I had barely hung up when Patrick rang the doorbell. I had the gray velvet box all ready to go.

  “Here,” I said, but when I gave it to Patrick, he handed me another present. This was getting ridiculous.

  “What’s this?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Happy birthday,” said Patrick again.

  I opened the package to find a can of lavender talcum powder, about the same time I noticed that the wrapping paper had Happy Mother’s Day in pink in the background.

  “Patrick?” I said.

  “It was going to be for Mom, but I gave her something else instead,” he explained.

  “Well, thanks a lot. It smells really nice,” I told him, and sprinkled some on each wrist. I think you’re supposed to put talcum powder on your feet and armpits, but I figured Patrick wouldn’t know the difference.

  When Pamela and Elizabeth came for dinner on Saturday, bringing me a shirt and matching socks from the Gap, Pamela sniffed and said, “What are you wearing, Alice? You smell like my grandmother.”

  It was a good dinner. Dad brought home some fried chicken and a chocolate layer cake from a bakery, with mint chocolate chip ice cream to go with it, and a gift certificate from Macy’s. I opened a card from Aunt Sally and Uncle Milt, which was an invitation for me and my two best friends to spend a week in Chicago that summer.