Alice Alone Read online

  Breaking up is hard to do

  Alice is starting high school, and everything is new. But it’s the new girl, Penny, who’s making ninth grade a real challenge for Alice. Penny is tiny and perky and a real flirt, and she seems to be focusing her attention on Patrick. Even worse, Patrick seems to be enjoying it.

  Alice and Patrick have been a couple so long Alice can’t imagine life without him. Suddenly she feels lost and unattractive and scared—not quite whole. How can Alice get back her confidence in herself, when she’s not even sure who she is?

  Don’t miss any of the Alice books:

  Look inside for a complete list of the Alice books.

  SIMON PULSE

  SIMON & SCHUSTER, New York

  Cover photograph copyright © 2001 by Paul Christensen

  Cover design by Debra Sfetsios

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  0902

  Phyllis Reynolds Naylor remembers very well the things that Alice is feeling in this book. When she dated back in junior and senior high school, most of her relationships lasted a year or more. She knows how it feels to like a boy more than he likes you, and to have a boy care for you more than you care for him. But what happens to Alice in this book is … well, really hard.

  Phyllis lives with her husband in Bethesda, Maryland, and is the author of over one hundred books, including twelve other books about Alice McKinley, and the Newbery Medal-winner Shiloh.

  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

  The Mad Gasser of Bessledorf Street

  Night Cry

  Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear

  The Dark of the Tunnel

  The Agony of Alice

  The Keeper

  The Bodies in the Bessledorf Hotel

  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 and the Bessledorf Ghost

  Send No Blessings

  Reluctantly Alice

  King of the Playground

  Shiloh

  All but Alice

  Josie’s Troubles

  The Grand Escape

  Alice in April

  The Face in the Bessledorf Funeral Parlor

  Alice In-Between

  The Fear Place

  Alice the Brave

  Being Danny’s Dog

  Ice

  The Bomb in the Bessledorf Bus Depot

  Alice in Lace

  Shiloh Season

  Ducks Disappearing

  Outrageously Alice

  The Healing of Texas Jake

  I Can’t Take You Anywhere

  Saving Shiloh

  The Treasure of Bessledorf Hill

  Achingly Alice

  Danny’s Desert Rats

  Sang Spell

  Sweet Strawberries

  Alice on the Outside

  Walker’s Crossing

  Jade Green

  Peril in the Bessledorf Parachute Factory

  The Grooming of Alice

  Carlotta’s Kittens and the Club of Mysteries

  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

  Copyright © 2001 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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

  Book design by Sonia Chaghatzbanian

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

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

  Alice alone / Phyllis Reynolds Price.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Alice’s first year in high school gets off to a difficult start when her boyfriend Patrick becomes interested in someone else, but with the help of her father, older brother, and best friends, she gains a better sense of her own self-worth.

  ISBN 0-689-82634-6

  ISBN13: 978-1-4391-3229-6 (eBook)

  [1. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 2. Self-esteem—Fiction. 3. High schools—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Single-parent families—Fiction. 6. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.N24 Ah 2001

  [Fic]—dc21 00-040143

  To the memory of my former editor, Jean Karl, who helped me raise Alice, and who taught me as much about life as she taught about writing.

  Contents

  One: Homecoming

  Two: Getting Started

  Three: A Sudden Announcement

  Four: The Big Night

  Five: That Sinking Feeling

  Six: Moving On

  Seven: Panic

  Eight: Heart-to-Heart

  Nine: Pain

  Ten: Alone

  Eleven: The Hardest Part

  Twelve: Expanding My Horizons

  Thirteen: Refugees

  Fourteen: Elizabeth’s Secret

  Fifteen: The Test

  1

  Homecoming

  September has always felt more like New Year’s to me than January first. It’s such a brand-new start—new classes, new friends, new teachers, new clothes… . This September I was entering a school almost twice the size of our old one, and it was scary to think about being one of the youngest kids again instead of a seasoned eighth grader. I hated the thought that I wouldn’t be considered sophisticated anymore, and I’d probably feel as awkward as I used to.

  “Hey, no sweat!” Lester, my soon-to-be-twenty-two-year-old brother said. “You’ll get used to it in no time—the leftover infirmary food, the—”

  “What?” I said. We were sitting out on the front steps sharing a bag of microwave popcorn on the very last day of August. In fact, we’d just made a lunch of hot dogs and popcorn.

  “Didn’t you know?” he said. “The food in the high school cafeteria is leftover stuff from the prison infirmary. But it won’t kill you. Of course, there isn’t any hot water in the showers, and—”

  “What?” I bleated again.

  “And the showers, you know, are coed.”

  “Lester!” I scolded. If anything would drive my friend Elizabeth to an all-girls’ school, it was rumors like that.

  “Hey, look around you,” Lester said, taking another handful of popcorn and spilling some on the steps. “Do you realize that practically every person you meet over the age of eighteen went to high school and lived to tell about it?”

  “I know I’ll survive, Les, but when I think of all the embarrassing things I’ll probably do, all the humiliating stuff just waiting to happen …”

  “But what about all the good stuff? The great stuff? What’s the next good thing on your agenda, for example?”

  “Dad coming home this afternoon.”

  “See? What else?”

  “Patrick gets back on Saturday.”

  “There you are,” Lester said.

  He was being pretty nice to me, I decided, considering that he’d just broken up with his latest girlfriend, Eva, for which I was secretly glad, because I don’t think she was his type. She ce
rtainly wasn’t mine. She had starved herself skinny and was always finding fault with Lester. If they ever married, I figured it would be only a matter of time before she started criticizing me.

  “Are you picking Dad up?” I asked. Lester’s working on a master’s degree in philosophy at the University of Maryland. His summer school courses were finished, but he works part time.

  “Yeah. I got the afternoon off from the shoe store. I figured Dad deserves a welcoming committee. Want to come?”

  “Yes. But first I want to bake him something,” I said.

  I’d already bought the ingredients because I’d planned this cake in advance. I once found a note on a recipe card of Mom’s for pineapple upside down cake, saying it was Dad’s favorite, so I decided to make that.

  Mom died of leukemia when I was in kinder-garten, so it’s just been Dad and Lester and me ever since. Except that Dad’s going to marry my former English teacher, Sylvia Summers, who’s in England for a year on an exchange program, and Dad was just coming back from a two-week trip to see her. One of the reasons Miss Summers went to England was to give her time to decide between Dad and Jim Sorringer, the assistant principal back in my junior high school. She and Jim dated for a long time—until she met Dad. But I guess she decided she didn’t need a year to think it over after all, because when Dad went to visit her, they became engaged.

  Pineapple upside-down cake is really easy, especially if you use a cake mix. All you do is melt a stick of butter in a large baking pan, stir in a cup of brown sugar, add canned pineapple slices, and then the cake batter. I had the phone tucked under my ear and was explaining all this to Pamela, my other “best” friend, while I worked.

  “… and when you take it out of the oven, you turn the pan upside down on a big platter.” And then I added, “Why don’t you make one for your dad? Surprise him.” If ever a girl and her dad needed to learn to get along, it was Pamela and Mr. Jones. Ever since Pamela’s mom ran off with her NordicTrack instructor, Pamela’s been angry with both her parents, but she and her dad are trying hard to make it work.

  “Maybe I will,” said Pamela. “You have any pineapple I could borrow?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “We may not have enough butter.”

  “You could borrow that, too.”

  “Brown sugar?”

  “Well … maybe.”

  “Would you happen to have a cake mix?”

  “Pamela!” I said.

  “Never mind. I’ll go to the store,” she told me.

  While the cake was baking, I did a quick cleanup of the house. I dusted the tops of all the furniture, ran an electric broom over the rug, made the beds, and wiped out the sinks—sort of like counting to one hundred by fives, skipping all the numbers in between.

  Lester did the laundry and the dishes, just so the place wouldn’t smell like sour milk and dirty socks when Dad walked in. Miss Summers always has the most wonderful scent, and I could guarantee that her flat in England didn’t stink.

  Of course, what I wanted most to know was where Dad had been sleeping while he was there, but I’m old enough now that I don’t just pop those questions at him. I’ll admit I’ve imagined the two of them having sex, though. If I ever get near the topic, he says, “Al!” My full name is Alice Kathleen McKinley, but Dad and Lester call me Al.

  We had things pretty much in order by 3:45— the cake cooling on the counter, the laundry folded and put away. I decided to put on something a little more feminine than my old cutoffs, so I dressed in a purple tank top and a sheer cotton broomstick skirt. It was lavender with little purple and yellow flowers all over it, yards and yards of gauzy material that swished and swirled about my legs when I walked. I stood in front of the mirror, whirling around, and the skirt billowed out in a huge circle. Even Lester was impressed when he saw me.

  “Madame?” he said, holding out his arm, and we descended grandly down the front steps.

  Dad’s plane was landing at Dulles International, so we had to drive way over into Virginia to pick him up. I sat beside Lester, my legs crossed at the knees, feeling very alluring and grown-up. I was wearing string sandals, and my toenails were painted dusky rose.

  “It’s going to be awkward, isn’t it, after Miss Summers moves in,” I said as Lester expertly navigated the beltway.

  “I can’t eat breakfast in my boxers anymore, I’ll tell you that,” he said.

  “I guess she won’t exactly be eating breakfast in her underwear, either,” I said. “Gosh, Lester, I hardly even remember Mom. I don’t know what it’s like to have a woman around, I’m so used to being the only female in the house.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for you, feel sorry for me,” said Lester. “Imagine having two females here, taking over!”

  The plane was going to be fifty minutes late, we discovered when we got to the airport, so Lester bought us two giant-size lemonades. We sat on a high stool in a little bar while we drank them, my feet crossed at the ankles, and my four-tiered skirt cascading all the way down to the floor.

  Then we ambled around, looking in shops, until I realized that the lemonade was going right through me.

  Lester waited outside the rest room, and when I came out again, I told him I wanted to check out a little gift shop I’d seen earlier. I was already thinking of what to buy Miss Summers for Christmas, and hurried on ahead so I could look around before Dad’s plane came in. Two guys, maybe a year older than I, came up behind me and, as they passed, one of them said, “Cute butterflies.”

  What? I thought.

  An older man passed on the other side of me and smiled.

  Then, “Al,” came Lester’s voice. “Wait.”

  I glanced around and saw Lester walking rapidly up behind me.

  “Stop!” he whispered urgently, taking hold of my arm, and I felt the fingers of his other hand fumbling with the waistband of my underwear.

  “Lester!” I said, jerking away from him, but he gave a final tug, and suddenly I realized I had walked out of the rest room with the hem of my skirt caught in the waistband of my yellow butterfly bikini.

  “Oh, my gosh!” I cried, covering my face with both hands as several more people walked by us smiling.

  “Just pretend it happens every day,” Lester commanded, urging me forward again.

  “Everyone saw!” I croaked, feeling the heat of my face against my palms.

  “Al,” he said, “people are far more interested in catching a plane than they are in your underpants. The world does not revolve around you. Keep walking.”

  I uncovered my eyes. “Is this what it’s going to be like living with a philosopher?”

  He shrugged. “Would you rather go the rest of your life with your hands over your face?”

  I took a deep breath, and we made our way to the gate.

  We had to wait till Dad went through customs, of course, and then he would take a shuttle to the main terminal. But at last the passengers were coming up the ramp and through the exit, and there he was in his rumpled shirt, a wrinkled jacket thrown over his arm, a trace of beard on his face, a man without sleep. But I don’t think I’d ever seen him look so happy.

  I threw my arms around him as Les reached out for his carry-on bag.

  “Oh, Dad!” I said.

  “Home!” he sighed in my ear. “And what a welcome! Good of you to meet me, Les!” Then he and Lester hugged.

  “Bet you’re ready for some sleep,” Les said, grinning.

  “The bed will feel pretty good, all right,” said Dad. “How are you guys, anyway?”

  We chattered all the way down the escalator to the baggage claim area, and Dad and I watched for his nylon bag to come around the conveyor belt while Les went to get the car.

  “So what do you think, Al?” Dad asked, grinning at me as we retrieved his bag, then leaned against the wall by an exit, waiting for Lester. “Think you’ll get along with your new mom?”

  “Oh, Dad, it’s the most wonderful news in the world,” I said. “You do
n’t know how long I’ve wanted you and Miss Summers to get engaged. I can’t wait!”

  “Neither can we. This separation’s going to be hard, but we’ll manage,” he said.

  “Will you be getting married next June?”

  “July, maybe. We haven’t worked out all the details yet.” He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “So how did you and Lester get along without me?”

  “Okay. He broke up with Eva, you know. And Marilyn’s back in the picture. Sort of. They’re just friends, Lester says.”

  “Well, that’s good. I’ve always liked Marilyn. Is Patrick back yet?”

  “Saturday,” I told him.

  I asked him about Miss Summers’s flat in England, and he described the rooms, and what the town of Chester looked like, and then we saw Lester’s car pull up outside.

  I crawled in back and let Dad have the passenger seat. But there was so much to tell. As Lester drove, I rattled on about how Aunt Sally had flown over from Chicago to make sure Lester and I were okay, and how we got her to leave again, and how Pamela had gone to Colorado to live with her mother, then come back again to be with her dad, and how I got my string sandals at a half-price sale, and …

  “Al,” said Les.

  I stopped. “What?” Was I acting like the world revolved around me again?

  He nodded toward Dad. Dad’s head was leaning against the window, and he was sound asleep. Smiling, still.

  Elizabeth and Pamela and I sat on my couch Saturday afternoon, our bare feet propped on the

  coffee table, gluing little decals to our toenails. Elizabeth was putting roses on hers, I was gluing stars, and Pamela was gluing on signs of the zodiac.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We may just look freakish. Maybe they don’t wear toenail decorations in high school.”

  “Are you kidding?” said Pamela. “They do anything they want in high school. You see all kinds of stuff. You can be as old-fashioned or individual as you like.”

  “I thought we were individual,” I said. Pamela now had a blue streak right down the middle of her short blond hair. It made her head look sort of like a horse’s mane. Elizabeth would probably have to be tortured before she would do anything to her long dark hair.

  “So if we’re individuals, why are the three of us sitting here all gluing decals on our toenails?” Elizabeth asked.