Reluctantly Alice Read online

  Seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don’t mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she’s okay. She’s neat.”

  ALICE COMES HOME FROM SCHOOL ON THE first day of junior high with a list of seven things about seventh grade that stink. Just about the only good thing she can think of is that she’s friends with everyone. Maybe that’s how to survive seventh grade—make it through the entire year with everyone liking her.

  That turns out to be easier said than done, when Alice gets on the wrong side of the school bully, Denise “Mack Truck” Whitlock. But Alice’s problems with Denise pale before the romantic entanglements of both her father and her older brother, Lester. And when Alice decides to help them out, life gets even more complicated.

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  COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN

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

  “Alice and her friends seem sooooo real!!! They go through all the problems life throws you!! I’m not saying that I like seeing people go though problems, it’s just that it’s great to see you can get over these problems and have a great life too.”—dragnfly

  “I feel like Alice is my next door neighbor and Elizabeth lives across the street from me. Pamela is in most of my classes at school and Patrick is my childhood best friend. Sometimes I wish soooooo badly Alice and everyone in these books were real.”—Leslie

  “I think that what I love most about your Alice books is that they are so real. The things that take place in the books are things that have happened to me. . . . It was so amazing to read your books and think, gee, that happened to me.”—a fan

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

  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.

  Reluctantly Alice

  BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR

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  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 © 1991 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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  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

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

  p. cm.

  Summary: Alice experiences the joys and embarrassments of seventh grade while advising her father and brother on their love lives
.

  ISBN 978-0-689-31681-4 (hc)

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Single-parent family—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N24Re 1991 [Fic]—dc20

  90037956

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2361-9 (pbk)

  978-1-4424-2361-9 (print)

  978-1-4424-6578-7 (eBook)

  To Catherine Wood, my college speech teacher, who generously considered my writings entertaining, and to Marion Tucker, an early editor, who helped make them better

  Contents

  One: The Seventh Thing

  Two: Helping Lester

  Three: Sleeping Over

  Four: Saving Dad

  Five: Celebrity

  Six: SGSD

  Seven: Bodies

  Eight: The Frog Stand

  Nine: Mother Alice

  Ten: The Trouble with Hensley

  Eleven: “Bubbles”

  Twelve: Taking Chances

  Thirteen: Questions and Answers

  Fourteen: Hallelujah

  1

  THE SEVENTH THING

  IN SEVENTH GRADE, YOU GROW BACKWARD. In sixth, I kept a list of all the things I learned that showed I was growing up, and another of all the stupid, embarrassing things I did that proved I wasn’t. Most of the time they were about even. If I still kept a record of all I’ve done, my “backward” list would run right off the page. In a single day—the first day of seventh grade—I accidentally squirted a teacher at the drinking fountain, tripped on the stairs to the second floor, and sat on a doughnut in the cafeteria.

  “Who put a doughnut on this seat?” I asked the girl next to me.

  “It’s for Kim,” she said.

  Now what kind of an answer was that? But even Patrick laughed when it happened.

  “Well, how are you liking junior high, Al?” Dad asked that night while we were fixing dinner. My name is Alice, but he and Lester call me “Al.”

  “Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me next week.”

  “That bad, huh?” said Lester. Lester’s almost twenty and catches on quick.

  “I can think of at least seven things about seventh grade that stink,” I told him. “The boys are shorter than the girls, the math is too hard, Mr. Hensley has bad breath, there isn’t any toilet paper in the johns, we’re going to cook liver in home ec., and half the drinking fountains don’t work.”

  “That’s only six,” said Dad.

  “The cafeteria serves garbage.”

  “You could always transfer back to sixth,” Lester suggested, tackling his salad.

  “Ha-ha,” I said. “And don’t take all the Bacon Bits. We live here too.”

  I’d been thinking about sixth grade, though—my sixth-grade teacher, anyway, Mrs. Plotkin. Sometimes when I get upset—really upset—I sort of tell myself what I figure she’d say if she were there. Stuff like, “Well, Alice, there aren’t many perfect days, but it’s hard to find a day that doesn’t have a little something nice about it if you look.” It helped, somehow—just saying words like that aloud and pretending it was her voice, not mine.

  Dad and Mrs. Plotkin must be on the same wavelength, because just then he said, “Think of at least one good thing about seventh grade. Surely there’s one.”

  “We get out at two thirty instead of three.”

  “So there you are,” said Dad.

  I guess the main problem is that seventh grade’s so different from elementary that it takes some getting used to. Pamela Jones likes it. All Pamela talks about is what she’s going to wear to the eighth-grade dances, and seventh’s one step closer than sixth. When you’ve got blond hair so long you can sit on it, I guess you can expect to get asked to a lot of dances.

  Elizabeth Price hates junior high, though—the way people swarm at you in the halls. She was going to switch to the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Mary Middle School but found out they don’t have curtains on their shower stalls, so she reconsidered.

  “I’ll probably get used to it after a while,” I said as I passed the macaroni and stopped Lester from taking all the cheese on top. “I remember I had a hard time in kindergarten too, but I got over it.”

  “You did, Al?” asked Dad.

  I couldn’t help smiling. “There was this boy who made faces at me from behind an easel—he was painting on one side and I was on the other. Every day he’d make faces and I’d cry. Then Mom told me that next time he poked his face around the easel, I should paint a stripe on it, so I did.”

  Lester laughed, but Dad went on chewing. “That must have been Aunt Sally who told you that, Al, because your mother died just before you started kindergarten.”

  I always manage to do this—confuse Mom with Aunt Sally, and it freaks Dad out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Anyway, it worked. The next time the boy made a face at me, I painted a black stripe on his forehead. He stuck out his tongue, so I painted that too. He never bothered me again.”

  “Good old Aunt Sally,” said Les.

  What’s really worst about being in seventh grade is that you just got out of sixth. In sixth grade, you’re a safety patrol. You get to go on overnight field trips with your teachers, help out in the office, and rule the playground. If two people form a couple, then everyone pairs off, and the fourth and fifth graders are green with envy.

  But when you start seventh grade, you’re at the bottom of the ladder again. You look weird. You feel weird. The boys and girls who were couples back in sixth grade pretend they don’t know each other anymore. I mean, when Patrick and I kissed last summer, it was a quick kiss with his hands on my shoulders, and then we edged over to our own sides of the glider again.

  When couples kiss in eighth and ninth grades, I discovered, they touch their lips together lightly two or three times first, and then it’s so embarrassing you have to look away. If their bodies were any closer, they’d be a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Almost everything that Pamela told us about seventh grade, that her cousin in New Jersey told her, was wrong. So far, anyway. You don’t have to have a boyfriend or a leather skirt, either one. What you worry about, instead, is whether you can remember your coat locker and P.E. locker combinations both, whether you can get from one end of the building to the other before the bell, whether you’ll drop your tray in the cafeteria and everyone will clap, and whether, when you go in the restroom, there will be any latches on the stalls.

  It didn’t help, either, that I had started junior high with an allergy. Dad says that happens sometimes when you move from one part of the country to another. I’d been doing a lot of sneezing the last couple of years, but the fall of seventh grade was absolutely the worst. I had to have Kleenex with me all the time at school, and the large girl who sat in front of me in Language Arts was always looking over her shoulder whenever I blew my nose.

  I don’t know what it was, though—maybe the Sara Lee brownies we had for dessert—but after telling Dad the one good thing I could think of about seventh grade, I felt better, and realized that at this particular time in my life, I was friends with everybody. I’ll admit that seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don’t mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she’s okay. She’s neat.”

  Alice the Likable, that would be me. So there were at least two good things now about seventh grade: We got out earlier, and I was starting a brand-new school, friends with everyone so far, even Patrick.

  By Wednesday of the first week, the count of good things about seventh grade had gone up to three: no recess in junior high. I didn’t realize how much I hated recess until there wasn’t any. You didn’t have to put on your coat and go stand out in the cold. You didn’t have to play tag ball whether you wanted to or not. You didn’t have a teacher blowing a whistle at you every fifteen seconds or have third-grade boys trying to hit you with volleyballs. There was P.E., of course, but wh
at you got instead of recess was an extra-long lunch hour, and you could do anything you wanted.

  By Thursday morning, I had numbers four and five: In seventh grade, you’re only in class with a certain teacher for forty minutes, so if it turns out to be someone awful, you don’t have to stand it all day. The other thing is that the school has its own newspaper—the students write it themselves—and it’s a lot more interesting than the newsletter we put out in sixth grade.

  The sixth good thing about seventh grade—absolutely astounding—I discovered Thursday afternoon in P.E. It was the first day we had actually undressed and put on our gym shorts and T-shirts. The class was made up of some seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade girls together, and though the shower stalls had curtains on them and each of us had a towel to wrap up in when we stepped out, some of the older girls didn’t wrap.

  Seventh-grade girls used their towels like aluminum foil, encircling their bodies and sealing the seams, but some of the older girls stepped out of the showers, their towels around their hair instead, with their entire bodies on view for the rest of us, the seventh graders in particular.

  For the first time in my whole twelve years, I saw naked breasts—big breasts—in person. I couldn’t help staring, they were just so amazing. They came in all shapes and sizes and some were huge. I mean, compared to the breasts I saw in P.E., Pamela, Elizabeth, and I hadn’t even sprouted yet. We were still buds on a tree, moths in a cocoon, tadpoles in a pond, mosquitos in eggs.

  I talked about it at dinner that night, and for once I had Lester’s full attention. When I’d finished my revelations about the wonders of the female breast, Dad gave me a little smile and said, “Your mother did nurse you, you know. You’re not quite as deprived as you think.”

  “A lot of good that did me. I was too young to remember.”

  “And you never saw your aunt Sally’s breasts?” Dad asked.

  I stared. “Are you kidding? Aunt Sally wears vinyl siding for a bathrobe!” (She doesn’t, of course. The times we’ve visited her in Chicago, she’s worn a chenille robe, but she clutches it closed with two hands.)

  “What about Carol?” Lester asked. Carol is Aunt Sally’s daughter, and she’s a couple years older than Les. “You never saw her in the nude?”