Alice the Brave Read online

  What was I afraid would happen to me if I tried a simple jump? I wondered.… Getting a lung full of water. Passing out. Being hauled out by Mark Stedmeister’s father and taken to the morgue.

  ALICE SHOULD BE USED TO BEING IN OVER her head by now, but really, she’s terrified of deep water. She’s managed to keep this a secret from even her best friends, Pamela and Elizabeth. But it will be beyond embarrassing if everyone finds out she’s afraid to come out of the shallow end. It’s sink or swim time—but maybe the bravery it takes to face her fears might splash over into the rest of Alice’s life.

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  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.

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  This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition August 2011

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

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

  Alice the brave / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Jean Karl book.”

  Summary: The summer before eighth grade, Alice tries to confront her fears, not the least of which is a fear of deep water.

  ISBN 978-0-689-80095-5 (hc)

  [1. Fears—Fiction. 2. Swimming—Fiction. 3. Single-parent families—Fiction.

  4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.N24Alf 1995

  [Fic]—dc20

  94-32340

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2851-5 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-4424-6582-4 (ebook)

  ISBN: 978-1-4424-2851-5 (print)

  For Corie Hinton,

  with love

  Contents

  Chapter One: Hang-ups

  Chapter Two: Abyssinian Sobbings and Other St
uff

  Chapter Three: Waiting it Out

  Chapter Four: Armpits

  Chapter Five: Spies

  Chapter Six: Tent Talk

  Chapter Seven: Letters

  Chapter Eight: Spectacle

  Chapter Nine: A Matter of Trust

  Chapter Ten: Luck

  Chapter Eleven: Changes

  Chapter Twelve: Conversation

  1

  HANG-UPS

  A MONTH BEFORE I STARTED EIGHTH grade, I knew I was going to have to face something I’d been afraid of for a long time.

  Everybody’s afraid of something, I suppose—elevators, dogs, planes, spiders.… Up to this point, though, I’d steered around it. Made excuses. But when Pamela and Elizabeth, my two best friends, said we were going to spend the rest of the summer practically living in Mark Stedmeister’s swimming pool, I knew I had to face my terror of deep water.

  “I am going to tan like you wouldn’t believe!” said Pamela.

  “I’m going to perfect my backstroke,” said Elizabeth.

  Not even Dad and Lester, my brother, knew how frightened I was at the thought of water up over my head. When we went to the ocean, I never went out in water more than waist deep. Hardly anyone else did either, of course, so that was okay. And up until now, whenever the kids gathered at the Stedmeisters’ pool, one of Mark’s folks was always at poolside as lifeguard. I’d sit on the edge of the shallow end and laugh at the guys kidding around over by the diving board, and no one bothered me.

  But now I guess they figured that since we were going into eighth grade, and Mark is bigger than his father, even, the boys could take care of any emergency. Mrs. Stedmeister looked out of the window a lot, I noticed, but she didn’t sit out on the deck the way she used to, so we didn’t have to wait for her to come out, or for Mark’s dad to come home at night before we could swim. We had the pool to ourselves, and that’s what made it so scary. That, and the fact that Patrick, my boyfriend, was up in Canada and wouldn’t be home till the end of August.

  The more time we spent at the pool, the bolder the guys got, and last time, after a lot of whispering, they’d all descended on Pamela. They’d picked her up in her pink bikini and tossed her into the deep end. Pamela did just the right amount of shrieking and flailing before she swam gracefully over to the edge and climbed out.

  Of course, there are problems being Pamela, too. She used to have blond hair so long she could sit on it. When she was in the swimming pool on her back, her hair would spread out around her so that she looked like a goddess on a lily pad.

  Then last spring, Brian put gum in her hair, and the only way she could get it out was to cut her hair. Now she has a short feather cut, and looks even older and more sophisticated than ever.

  She doesn’t always feel that way, though.

  “I just feel so naked,” Pamela said forlornly as we were coming back from the pool one afternoon.

  Elizabeth glanced over at the bikini that barely covered Pamela’s bosom. “Well, look at you!” she said.

  Elizabeth wears a sort of halter-top suit that comes up high at the neck and is low cut in back. I guess she figures if she’s modest in front she can afford to let go a little behind. She only worries about the part she can see.

  “My head, I mean,” Pamela said. “Sometimes I can still feel my hair, you know?”

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s as though it’s been amputated,” Pamela explained. “Like a man who’s lost a leg and can still feel pain in it.”

  “Pamela, that’s spooky,” I told her.

  We were all feeling a little spooked, if you ask me. We had hardly finished congratulating ourselves on having survived seventh grade, and here we were, about to be eighth graders. We had spent the last year envious of all those gorgeous, sophisticated eighth-grade girls we’d seen in the halls at junior high, and suddenly we were the eighth graders!

  Except that we didn’t feel gorgeous or sophisticated, either one. I was feeling scared about Mark’s swimming pool, Pamela was feeling amputated, and Elizabeth was as nutty as ever about bodily functions. We were as ready for eighth grade as we were for an earthquake.

  Maybe, out of the three of us, Elizabeth was the most frightened of going back to school in the fall. She’d been shocked at the way the eighth-grade girls leaned against their lockers sometimes and kissed their boyfriends—a long series of little glancing kisses on the lips—and she must have thought she was going to be required to do a certain amount of it before she graduated; I’m not sure. But I did notice that as July turned to August, she’d begun using the word “sex” instead of “mating,” and that was a step up. When she mentioned the subject at all, that is.

  Everything was changing, not just us. Lester was going to be twenty-one in September, and Dad just got back from a music conference in Michigan, where he’d gone with my English teacher, Miss Summers.

  I had a million questions to ask him as soon as he got in the house.

  “Have a good time?” Lester wanted to know.

  “Did Miss Summers have a good time?” I asked, getting right to the point. I want so much for Dad to marry her that I even practiced writing my name Alice Kathleen Summers before I realized that if she married Dad, she’d be a McKinley too.

  “We both enjoyed ourselves,” said Dad.

  “How were the beds?” I asked.

  Dad raised one eyebrow as he sat down on the couch and began taking things out of his briefcase.

  “My bed, on the men’s floor, was fine, Al,” he said. (He and Lester call me Al.) “I don’t know how Sylvia’s bed was. I didn’t ask.”

  Even though Dad says I can’t ask him intimate questions about him and my English teacher, I manage to find out what I want to know.

  “I wonder if she packed that black sexy slip with the slit up the side that I saw her buying at Macy’s,” I said to no one in particular.

  “I didn’t ask her that either,” said Dad. He frowned at me and smiled at the same time. “Watch it, Al.”

  “May I ask just one personal question?”

  “No.”

  “That means you did!” I said, clapping my hands.

  Dad was beginning to look exasperated. “That means nothing of the kind! Now see here, Alice …!”

  “The question was, ‘Did you hold hands?’” I said, grinning. I know how to get Dad’s goat.

  “We did on occasion hold hands, Al. Satisfied?”

  “Then may I ask just one more personal question?”

  “No!”

  I clapped my hands again. “Then you did, you did!”

  “Al!”

  “Let’s just say they made sweet music together,” said Lester, and Dad said he’d go along with that.

  Everyone is musical in my family except me. Dad said that when Mom was alive (she died when I was five), she used to sing a lot. Dad plays the piano and flute, and he’s manager of the Melody Inn, one of a chain of music stores. Lester sings and plays the guitar, and my English teacher sang alto in the Messiah Sing-Along. That’s where Dad met her. Even Lester’s girlfriends sing.

  I can’t carry a tune, so I don’t sing at all except to myself, and only when I’m running the vacuum cleaner. Maybe I have a genetic defect or something. Dad says I have other fine qualities, though, and Patrick, who plays the drums, says I have a good sense of rhythm, so I’m not a total loss.

  After that little conversation with Dad, I was pretty quiet because I was thinking how the next five weeks were going to be absolutely awful. The one thing I would not do is tell Lester about my deep-water fear, because he would probably follow me to the pool and throw me in to make me swim.

  “Anything wrong, Al?” Dad asked at dinner. I realized I’d got halfway through my chicken salad without saying a word.

  I shook my head. I tried to think of something interesting to tell him and Lester to make them stop looking at me, but my brain went on hold. I could tell right away that Dad thought I was feeling left out because he wouldn
’t answer my personal questions about his weekend with Miss Summers, so he proceeded to tell me all the impersonal things they had done.

  “It was sort of fun living in a dorm,” he said. “Made me feel like a college man again.”

  “What’d you do? Streak across the campus naked?” asked Lester. Lester has a thin mustache above his upper lip, making him look a lot older than he is—old enough to have done any daring thing there is to do at college.

  “No, we all went to the cafeteria each morning, then Sylvia and I got in a mile walk before the seminars began,” said Dad. “In the afternoon we practiced with the group of our choice and performed for each other in the evening. It was just plain fun! Sylvia even took a class in flamenco dancing.”

  I imagined my English teacher doing a Spanish dance with a rose between her teeth. I imagined us both together, she and I, dressed in Spanish costumes doing the flamenco together, beside a pool or something with everybody clapping. In my mind’s eye, however, I danced a little too close to the edge and fell in, never to be seen again. I sucked in my breath.

  Dad stopped talking and looked at me strangely.

  “Hiccups,” I said.

  “Well, here’s a little item that might interest you, Al,” Dad told me. “Guess what you and I are going to do?”

  “The flamenco?” I said warily.

  “We’re going to go shopping one of these days. I’ve decided it’s time to get some new furniture.”

  “We already got a new couch,” I told him.

  “Not just a couch. Now that you’re going into eighth grade, I think it’s time you had a real bedroom set—dresser, chest of drawers, the works. Whatever you want.”

  “Dad!” I yelped, and leaned across the table to hug him. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what kind of furniture I wanted. Not canopies and ruffles, like Elizabeth has, or the Coca-Cola logo in Pamela’s room. Something that would reflect the real me.

  “We need some new dining room furniture, too,” Dad went on, and he and Lester began discussing whether we needed a table that would seat eight or ten. Something told me that Dad wasn’t just doing this for me or Lester or even himself. He was doing it because he wanted a house Miss Summers would like to live in.