Dangerously Alice Read online

  No More Goody Two-Shoes

  Alice is tired of always being the good girl—getting good grades, staying out of trouble, not giving her father and her stepmother, Sylvia, any reason to worry. Now that she’s a junior in high school, maybe it’s time to take some chances.

  First there are the dates with Tony, a senior who’s way more experienced than Alice (but who’s more than willing to help her catch up). Then there are the fights with Sylvia over everything from the new cat to the car. But things get out of control when Alice sneaks off to a party her parents don’t know about, and a near tragedy follows. Has Alice gone too far?

  Share the ups and downs in the lives

  of Alice McKinley and her friends.

  Look inside for a complete list of the Alice books.

  SIMON PULSE

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  Cover photograph copyright © 2007 by Galvezo/Zefa/Corbis

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  0808

  Dangerously Alice

  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

  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

  Faces in the Water

  Footprints at the Window

  The Witch Books

  Witch’s Sister

  Witch Water

  The Witch Herself

  The Witch’s Eye

  Witch Weed The Witch Returns

  Picture Books

  King of the Playground

  The Boy with the Helium Head

  Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear

  Keeping a Christmas Secret

  Ducks Disappearing

  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

  Walking Through the Dark

  How I Came to Be a Writer

  Eddie, Incorporated

  The Solomon System

  The Keeper

  Beetles, Lightly Toasted

  The Fear Place

  Being Danny’s Dog

  Danny’s Desert Rats

  Walker’s Crossing

  Books for Older Readers

  A String of Chances

  Night Cry

  The Dark of the Tunnel

  The Year of the Gopher

  Send No Blessings

  Ice

  Sang Spell

  Jade Green

  Blizzard’s Wake

  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 © 2007 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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

  Book design by Ann Zeak

  The text for this book is set in Berkeley Old Style.

  First Edition

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4424-6604-3(eBook)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

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

  p. cm.

  Summary: During fall semester of her junior year of high school, Alice decides to change her good girl image, while major remodeling begins at home and some important relationships begin to change.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87094-1

  ISBN-10: 0-689-87094-9

  [1. Self-perception—Fiction. 2. Conduct of life—Fiction.

  3. High Schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction.

  5. Family Life—Maryland—Fiction. 6. Maryland—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.N24Dam 2007

  [Fic]—dc22

  2006024181

  For Becca

  Contents

  One: Labels

  Two: MGT

  Three: Annabelle

  Four: Crushed

  Five: Surprise of the Nicer Variety

  Six: Speaking of Animals …

  Seven: Lawrence of Arabia

  Eight: The Quarrel

  Nine: On Impulse

  Ten: In the Buick

  Eleven: Edgar’s

  Twelve: Taking Chances

  Thirteen: The City at Night

  Fourteen: Secrets

  Fifteen: What Happened Next

  Sixteen: Conversation

  Seventeen: Lester’s Goof

  Eighteen: Keeping Warm on Winter Nights

  Nineteen: Call from a Friend

  1

  Labels

  I had to hear it from Pamela. But then, the fact that she told me, and that she wasn’t going back, sort of put a seal on our friendship. Ours was the real McCoy. So I couldn’t figure out what was bothering me most: that Liz and I hadn’t been invited or that our old gang was breaking up.

  She told us about it on our ride to school that Monday. And to make things worse, we were riding the bus—one of the last places you want to be when you’re a junior. Seniors would walk to school in snow up to their knees before they’d be seen on a bus. But Pam and Liz and I don’t have cars of our own, and there was no one that morning to drive us. We sat close together on the back seat.

  “This is the second time they’ve done it,” Pamela went on as we listened uncomfortably. “Very hush-hush. The rule is that no one can speak. You can’t move a deck chair or make any kind of noise, but you can do … well … almost anything else in or out of the water.” She laughed.

  “And everyone’s naked?” Liz asked.

  “In the pool, yes.”

  I couldn’t help smiling a little—partly remembering the skinny-dipping we’d done at Camp Overlook two summers ago and partly thinking how Mark Stedm
eister’s parents were pretty strict about alcohol and drugs at their swimming pool, but completely oblivious to the fact that Mark and some of his friends were having midnight swims in the nude.

  It was too painful to ask Pamela outright why Liz and I hadn’t been invited, too scary to think that Pamela was being pulled away while we were being left behind. So I took the mature route and said, “Well, it sounds fun to me, Pam. Why do you say you’re not going back?”

  “For one thing, when you know you weren’t invited the first time around, you can’t help but feel that your invitation is borderline,” she said. “But afterward—when we put on our clothes and drove to the soccer field so they could smoke and drink and talk—it was nothing but a big, malicious gossip fest. Boy, Jill and Karen … Brian, too … can rip into somebody faster than a tank of piranhas. Just mention a name—any name of anyone in the whole school—and in a matter of seconds, he’s totaled. And you get the feeling everyone’s expected to take a bite.”

  “I didn’t think guys did that,” said Liz. “I always knew that Jill and Karen were into it big-time—who’s in, who’s out—but I’m surprised that the guys are interested.”

  “Hey, they’re interested in Jill—her body, anyway. And Karen, now that she’s practically Jill’s twin—hair, clothes, makeup, nails—parrots whatever Jill says. Whatever turns girls on turns guys on, you know that,” Pamela said.

  “So how did you get invited?” Liz asked. “And what did they say about us?”

  Pamela just shrugged it off as though it wasn’t important, but we weren’t letting her off that easily.

  “I’d overheard Jill and Karen talking about the ‘Silent Party,’ or ‘SP,’ as they call it,” Pamela explained. “I was nervy enough to ask what it was, so Karen described it for me—probably wanting to see if I was shocked. And when I wasn’t, she asked if I wanted to come. I said ‘Sure,’ and asked if you guys were going to be there. She made this sort of face and looked at Jill, and Jill shook her head and said ‘No.’ And then she added, ‘DD.’ And they both laughed and walked off.”

  I tried to think what DD could possibly stand for. Dried dandruff? Dead as a doornail? Liz and I looked at each other, clueless.

  “They speak in acronyms these days,” Pamela went on. “When Jill and Justin and Mark and Brian and Keeno and Karen and some of Brian’s other friends get together, they’ve got the whole student body divided up into groups, and each group has a label.”

  “Oh, every school does that,” I said. “Walk in any high school, and they’ll point out the Geeks, the Goths, the Nerds, the Brains, the Jocks, the—”

  “That’s not the kind I’m talking about,” said Pamela. “Jill and Company divide the kids into the Studs, the Players, the Sluts, the Clueless Virgins, the Christian Virgins, the Freaks, and even these are broken down into UJ (Ugly Jock), TM (Typhoid Mary—don’t touch), AG (Anything Goes) … you get the picture.”

  “And DD?” I asked.

  Pamela dismissed it with a wave of her hand.

  “Tell us!” Liz insisted.

  “Dry as Dust,” said Pamela. “But don’t you believe it. I can only imagine what they’d been saying about me before I went and what they’ll say now when I don’t go back.”

  Dry as Dust. I felt my throat drying up just to hear it. This meant that somebody—some bodies—found me boring. Uninteresting. Unexciting.

  Pamela grabbed my hand. “Who are they to decide who everyone else is?” she said. “And you know what Jill said they’d called me? Before I’d had the guts to come to their party?”

  “What?” we asked.

  “SS,” said Pamela. “Serious Slut. I was mortified, but laughed it off. Yeah, right. Ha ha.”

  “They actually told you that?” Liz asked.

  “Yeah. To see if I could take it, I guess. Boy, make one mistake, and you’re labeled for life. After New York last spring, Hugh must have done a lot of talking.”

  We digested that for a moment or two, remembering what Pam had done in a hotel bathroom with a senior. Then Liz said, “It’s hard to imagine Justin going along with all this. When I was going out with him, he seemed too nice to be so petty and malicious.”

  Pamela shrugged. “He’s in love with Jill, and love is blind. Jill just laughs off all this gossip as a hobby of hers—labeling people, that is. And at some point in the evening, I asked the others what label they’d give Jill. This was at the soccer field later. They’d been drinking, and the guys were cutting up. Brian said BB for Beautiful Bitch. Justin suggested LM for Love Machine. It was sort of like Jill had never considered what others might think of her. I couldn’t tell if she was flattered or annoyed, but I knew by the look on her face that she didn’t appreciate the question. Didn’t appreciate me. I won’t be invited back, you can bet, and if I am, I won’t go.”

  I suddenly put my arm around Pamela. “We appreciate you!” I said.

  “More than you know,” said Liz.

  This second week of my junior year, I sure didn’t need any more hassles. Every minute of my day was filled with something, but I didn’t know what I could give up. All juniors had to take the PSAT in October, ready or not, and I worked for Dad at the Melody Inn music store on Saturdays. I was the roving reporter for the junior class on our school newspaper, The Edge; I still belonged on stage crew in the Drama Club; I got up ridiculously early three mornings a week and ran a couple of miles to keep in shape; I visited Molly, my friend with leukemia, once a week; plus, homework was heavier and harder than it had been last year, and geometry was a killer.

  “I feel like I’m going under for the third time,” I told Sylvia, my stepmom, when I realized I hadn’t called Molly all week. If anyone should be complaining about life, it’s Molly.

  “I know the feeling,” said Sylvia. “I felt it every Friday for the first year I was teaching. But by Monday I’d usually recovered.”

  “So there’s hope?” I asked. “The teachers are merciless! It’s like theirs is the only subject we’ve got. ‘Make an outline.’ ‘Write a paper.’ ‘Research a topic.’ When you multiply that by five …!”

  “Well, teachers are hassled too,” said Sylvia. “If their students don’t do well, it’s the teachers who get hassled by their principals. And if test scores are down for the school, the principals get hassled by the supervisors.”

  Sometimes—more than I like to admit—Sylvia gets on my nerves. It’s like I tell her about a problem, and she’s always got a bigger one. I wasn’t interested right then in teachers’ problems. I wanted to talk about me. A little empathy here, please.

  “I’m not talking about test scores, I’m talking about assignments—about the timing of assignments,” I told her. “When teachers get together in the faculty lounge, why don’t they space their assignments so they’re not all due at the same time?” I asked.

  “Probably because we’ve got a zillion other things to think about,” she said. “My guess is that after you get in the routine of a new semester, it will seem more bearable. If nothing else, you’ll probably find at least one thing you can look forward to.”

  She was right about that. His name was Scott Lynch—a tall, lanky senior, our new editor in chief on the school newspaper. He was smart, like my old ex-boyfriend, Patrick, and knew his way around; he was thoughtful and caring, like my new ex-boyfriend, Sam, one of the photographers for our paper. When I walked in the journalism room after school for our meetings, Scott would give me this big, warm, welcoming smile that enveloped me like a hug. As though he’d been waiting just for me. But then, he did the same to the rest of the staff, including Jacki Severn, features editor.

  Jacki’s not a real blonde, like Pamela Jones, but her hair’s gorgeous, and on this day she looked even better than usual. Great top, great jeans, great makeup.

  “Idea!” she said when we’d pushed two tables together and sat down for our planning session. “If students have to read the stuff we write every two weeks, they should at least know what we look like. I think we
should have a group picture taken for the front page.”

  Now I knew why Jacki was all spiffed up. I’d washed my hair that morning because I’d been running, but I hadn’t taken time to blow-dry it.

  “Not the front page,” said Scott.

  “Well, any page,” said Jacki.

  There were four guys on the newspaper staff: Scott; two photographers, Sam and Don; and Tony Osler, sports editor. Scott, Don, and Tony are seniors, and I seemed to have a thing about seniors this year. Of my two latest boyfriends, Patrick and Sam, Patrick has traveled all around the world with his parents—his dad is a diplomat—and sometimes he acts incredibly sophisticated. But he’s a couple of months younger than I am, and he can also act incredibly juvenile. Sam’s a junior too, like me, and sweet as honey, but sometimes I felt I was out with a little boy. I’d never dated a senior, and right now I was crushing on Scott.

  None of the guys on the staff were remotely interested in having their pictures taken, and I voted with them. But all the roving reporters this year were girls, one for each class, and they voted with Jacki, along with the layout coordinator. So the vote was five to five. Miss Ames, our sponsor, broke the tie with a yes vote and went next door to get the chemistry teacher, who came over and took our picture. Jacki seated herself in the first row beside Scott, and the rest of us gathered around them.

  “A little closer,” the chemistry teacher said. “The guy on the end there—move in real tight next to the girl in green.”

  “With pleasure,” said Tony, and put one arm around me, his hand on my ribs. I could feel his breath in my hair. Almost imperceptibly, one of his fingers moved a little under my arm, not quite stroking my breast. An electric shock traveled down my spine, but I didn’t move away. And then—flash—the picture was taken and the group dissolved.

  “Okay. Back to work,” Scott said as we sat down at the tables again. “Here’s what the classes have decided for Spirit Week.”

  A lot of high schools had been doing it for years, and though we’d always had a homecoming dance usually attended by the juniors and seniors, we’d never had Spirit Week—a time for students to bond and show loyalty to the school and its football team. Each day during Spirit Week, the students—and sometimes the teachers—came to school in crazy outfits, decided on in advance. So our school had assigned the freshman class to choose the costume for Monday; sophomores got Tuesday, juniors got Wednesday, seniors Thursday, and the faculty would choose the dress for Friday.