Reluctantly Alice Read online

  I didn’t have much to say that night while Dad and Lester made dinner. Dad was fixing the salad, and Les and I were making “Pots of Gold,” which is cubes of cheese rolled up in Bisquick and boiled in tomato soup until they’re cooked. I did the mixing and rolling and Lester did the boiling.

  “Watch it, Al!” he said after a minute. “Wait until these are done before you add any more. Can’t you see the pot’s full?” Dad says that the only thing worse than Pots of Gold is SpaghettiOs, but he’s willing to eat it every six weeks or so because Les and I like it. Les and I like it because it’s about as easy to make as SpaghettiOs.

  “Something wrong, Al?” Dad asked. “Have hardly heard a peep out of you since I got home.”

  “I just feel lousy,” I told him.

  “Not coming down with the same thing Les had, are you?”

  “Not that kind of lousy,” I said, and explained what Patrick and I had done. “I mean, you can’t really change if you’re boring, can you?”

  “Not easily,” said Dad.

  “That’s why I feel so awful,” I told him. “But it’s not the kind of thing you can apologize for without embarrassing him more.”

  Dad agreed. “There are some things that are hard to put back in the bottle, aren’t there?”

  I dropped more dumplings in the tomato soup.

  “How do you know he’s sure you and Patrick did it?” Les asked.

  “It doesn’t matter!” I snapped. “He’s embarrassed, and we did it, and I feel like rotten eggs.”

  “Well, maybe you can think of something to do to make it up to him,” Dad suggested.

  “Yeah, tell him you really enjoy his bad breath and his spit,” Lester joked.

  It wasn’t funny. I sat at the table cutting each little ball of Bisquick in two with my fork, watching the melted cheese spill out. Usually this is my favorite part of the meal. But this time, it was like stabbing Mr. Hensley in the heart.

  Patrick called about seven and wanted to know if he could come over. I said yes.

  “Patrick, huh?” said Dad as we cleaned up the kitchen.

  “We’re special friends now,” I told him. Maybe that made us sound more special than what I meant, because I noticed that both Dad and Lester left us alone in the living room. Les went upstairs to watch TV, and Dad sat at the folding table in the dining room to answer some letters.

  Patrick had his book bag with him. “I’ve got an idea,” he said, and took out his notebook.

  “Whatever we do, Patrick, it’s not going to make him feel any better about that cartoon,” I said.

  “I know, but I’ve thought of something else.” He took out the photocopied paper of projects we were supposed to do for the unit on the Russian Revolution. “Have you signed up for any of these yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “Okay. Veteran’s Day is Visiting Day. Right? Parents come to class.”

  “I thought we had Visiting Day already.”

  “That was Back-to-School Night. The parents came alone. This time they visit classes while we’re there.”

  “So?”

  “So all the other teachers have been getting ready. All the other classrooms have posters and papers and charts up. Right?”

  I thought of Language Arts and how Miss Summers, with her Obsession perfume, had decorated the rim of the bulletin board all the way around with book jackets. Our family-tree diagrams covered an entire wall, and another wall had photographs of authors. Even the photographs smelled like perfume. Then I thought of Mr. Hensley’s room. Beige walls, gray blackboard, and that’s all. If you put all Mr. Hensley’s imagination in a teaspoon, it wouldn’t even cover the bottom.

  “So let’s decorate Hensley’s room for him,” Patrick said. “Let’s sign up together for project seven.”

  I studied the paper in Patrick’s hand. Project Seven: Make a linear chart, marked off in years, and indicate when and where the major developments of the Russian Revolution took place, beginning with the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and ending with the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.

  “How is this going to brighten up the room?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Ta-da!” said Patrick, and pulled out a big roll of paper from his book bag. He unrolled it and it stretched all the way from the front door to the kitchen sink. “We’ll get it all done, decorate it with pictures, and have it up on the wall above the blackboard by the eleventh.”

  “But the projects aren’t due until the twentieth!” I protested.

  “So we’ll do ours early, just for him.”

  We worked until 10:30, just making a list of what needed to be on the chart and marking the paper off into years.

  “I saw Patrick’s bike outside your house last night,” Elizabeth told me at the bus stop the next day.

  “We’re working on a World Studies project together,” I told her.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and Pamela was talking to some other girls. But finally Elizabeth asked, “Did you kiss?”

  “Last night? Patrick and me? No. Why?”

  “I don’t see how you can work side by side with someone you used to kiss and then not do it anymore.”

  Sometimes it’s hard to talk to Elizabeth.

  I really tried to pay attention in Mr. Hensley’s class the next day. There were no more cartoons sliding across the floor from Patrick’s desk to mine. Mr. Hensley hadn’t changed at all. He still droned on and on. He still sent out a shower of spittle when he said “Socialist” or “assassination.” If he suspected that Patrick and I had drawn that cartoon, he never let on. He’s too much of a gentleman to say anything that might embarrass you, even if you’ve embarrassed him.

  Patrick came over every evening that week and spent most of the weekend at our house. We really had to work hard to make the eleventh. It wasn’t easy to illustrate the Russian Revolution, but Dad said he could cut up old National Geographics if we found any pictures of the Soviet Union, and that helped. When we were done at last, Patrick held one end of it and I held the other, and Dad and Lester looked it over and said it was pretty good.

  “Very good, in fact,” said Dad, and made a couple of suggestions of things we’d left out. We found we could still squeeze them in. Lester even gave us a Russian kopeck from his coin collection to glue on the chart.

  On Monday Patrick’s dad drove us to school early. Patrick got a stepladder from the custodian, and when Hensley walked in fifteen minutes later, Patrick was up on the ladder, with half the chart taped to the wall, and I was holding the other end.

  Hensley paused in the doorway, staring at us, and then walked slowly in, that faint pink in his cheeks again. I think at first he was afraid we were putting up a long cartoon about him, but when he saw what it was, his eyes lit up. It was the first time I ever saw Mr. Hensley look remotely excited.

  “You’re more than a week early!” he said. Then, walking slowly along the front of the room, studying the chart: “I can see you’ve put a lot of work into this project.”

  “It was fun,” I told him.

  He looked at me as though he had never heard the word before. I wondered if anyone else, in all Mr. Hensley’s years of teaching, had ever said his class was “fun.”

  “You got some excellent pictures!” he said, and even his voice sounded a little excited. “Here, let me help.” He took my end of the chart, stood on his desk chair, and taped it to the wall. The chart went all the way from the windows on one side of the room to the opposite side and curved three feet around one corner.

  We had to leave when the first bell rang and go to homeroom, but when we came in later, there were already parents in the room, including my dad and Patrick’s folks, studying the chart. I saw Mr. Hensley slip a breath mint in his mouth before he went over to talk to them, pointing out certain things on the chart, and asking Patrick and me to come up and explain others.

  Maybe I only imagined it, but I swear I saw Hensley’s eyes sparkle. The high point of the peri
od, though, was when the principal came into the room briefly to see how things were going and commented on the chart. Hensley never stopped beaming for the rest of the session.

  Sometimes it’s possible to show you’re sorry when you can’t come right out and say it. It didn’t change Mr. Hensley a lot. He still wore the same brown pants he always wore; his voice still droned, and he still showered the first row with spit. But he smiled more often. We noticed that.

  “For two people who aren’t going together anymore, you and Patrick sure have been seeing a lot of each other,” Elizabeth said after school. “He was over at your house almost all weekend.”

  I just shrugged.

  “If you don’t kiss anymore, Alice, do you ever talk about kissing? How you used to do it, I mean?”

  “Why would we talk about kissing if we don’t kiss anymore?” I asked.

  “Well, I mean, how can you just pretend it never happened?”

  “We don’t pretend it never happened. We just don’t feel like kissing right now. We talk about other things.”

  “I don’t see how you can possibly talk about anything else when you used to be so close that you’d put your arms around each other and your lips together and . . .”

  “Elizabeth, there’s more to life than kissing,” I told her.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, and sighed.

  I guess if you’ve never had a real kiss, you think about it all the time. If Elizabeth ever got one, though, she’d want a full orchestra playing, moonlight, waterfalls, the works. Boy, will she be disappointed.

  11

  “BUBBLES”

  I WAS REALLY RELIEVED THAT I CLEARED things up with Mr. Hensley. I was already on bad terms with Denise and her crowd, which messed up my goal to get through seventh grade without making a single enemy, and I sure didn’t want to add a teacher to the list. What I hadn’t expected, though, was that I’d soon have one of my closest friends mad at me too. Pamela.

  It was only a short while ago that we’d promised to be friends for life. And what made Pamela mad at me was no more my fault than Denise teasing me because I didn’t have a mother. Another thing about seventh grade is that it isn’t fair. Or maybe it’s just life that’s not fair.

  At lunch one day in the cafeteria, Elizabeth handed little envelopes to Pamela and me. We opened them there at the table, and we both squealed at once. Inside were pictures. Bubble-bath pictures. Last summer, on a sleepover at Elizabeth’s, we had taken pictures of each other in the bathtub, covered with bubbles, and Elizabeth’s mother developed the film and made prints for each of us of all three.

  We promptly had a giggling fit and compared pictures, each of us covered with bubbles, only our shoulders bare. I even had bubbles on top of my head, like Martha Washington’s wig or something.

  After lunch period was over, I stuck my three pictures in my notebook and didn’t think any more about it. Thanksgiving came, and Dad and Lester and I went to the Hot Shoppe as usual for our holiday dinner, and afterward Lester went out with Marilyn, and Crystal called to wish him Happy Thanksgiving, and I lied and said I didn’t know where he was, and when Lester came home I said I’d never lie for him again so he’s better get his act together as to whether he liked Crystal or Marilyn better. By nine that night, we were all hungry again, so Lester sent out for a pizza. A typical Thanksgiving at our house.

  When I went back to school on Monday, though, I was walking down the hall between first and second periods when someone I didn’t even know said, “Hi, Bubbles.”

  “What?” I said.

  Seventh-grade boys get weird sometimes, so I didn’t think much of it, but when I was in Language Arts later, two more boys called me Bubbles. “Hey, Bubbles! How ya doin’?” they said.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  They only laughed. I began to worry that “Bubbles” was another code word like “SGSD” or something. Denise hadn’t called me “Bubbles” in class, though, and if it meant something awful, she’d be the first to do it. I couldn’t figure it out.

  When I saw Patrick going to his locker right after lunch, I told him about it and he laughed too.

  “What’s going on, Patrick?” I asked. “Do you know something I don’t?”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  I followed him down the hall to find out what it was all about, and on the inside of his locker door was the picture of me in the bubble bath, poster-size. Some boys going by whistled and grinned at me.

  I stared. “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “Pamela gave me her picture of you, so I had a poster made,” he said.

  “You’re nuts, Patrick,” I told him, but I was a little bit pleased. It was a nice, natural, silly picture of me, and I didn’t care if boys called me Bubbles. Of course, they wondered who took it and how Patrick got hold of it, but that didn’t bother me either. Everyone seemed to understand it was all a joke.

  The rest of the day, when boys looked at me and yelled, “Hey, Bubbles!” I’d just laugh. Maybe seventh grade wasn’t so bad after all. I wasn’t about to tell Aunt Sally about it ever, because she’d say no boy was supposed to see your bare shoulders till you were engaged—something like that. I told Dad, though, and he laughed. Everybody laughed. Everybody but Pamela.

  When I got to the bus stop the next morning, Elizabeth said “Hi,” but Pamela turned away.

  “Pamela?” I said.

  “Hi,” she said coldly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You should know,” she said.

  I stared at her back. “How should I know? I just got up, ate my Cheerios, walked out here, and suddenly you’re mad at me.”

  “It’s not this morning; it’s yesterday,” she said.

  “What about yesterday?”

  “The way you went around hogging attention. All that Bubbles stuff.”

  “Pamela!” I said. “That’s my fault? Who gave the picture to Patrick in the first place?”

  “I didn’t know he was going to make a poster.”

  “Well, I didn’t even know he had the picture! What are you mad at me for?”

  “Well, you certainly acted like you were enjoying it,” Pamela sniffed.

  I was really getting angry with her. “So what do you want me to do? Go rip it down?”

  “Yeah, Pamela, it’s not Alice’s fault,” Elizabeth said. “She’s just being a good sport about it.”

  Pamela stuck her hands in her pockets. “Well, if I was you, I’d ask Patrick to take it down.”

  “If I was you, I wouldn’t go around giving out pictures of friends unless I’d asked them, especially friends I’d promised to be loyal to for life,” I said.

  The bus came, Pamela and I took separate seats, and Elizabeth, not wanting to have to choose between us, sat at the back all by herself. The three girls who had promised to be friends forever were sitting three seats apart on the bus.

  “Lester,” I said after school. “I don’t understand girls.”

  “Welcome to the club. You get any insights, share them with me. Who are you having problems with? Denise again?”

  “Pamela.” I pulled out the photos of the three of us in the bathtub and showed them to Lester.

  “I’ve seen bare shoulders before,” he said.

  “That’s not the point, Lester!” I told him, and explained about Pamela being jealous.

  “That’s all the problem?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “Simple as pie. You take your photo of Pamela down to the print store, get a poster-size copy made, and give it to some boy at school to put inside his locker. Boys will start calling her Bubbles, and then she’ll be happy. I guarantee it.”

  “Do you really think this will work?”

  “No, because then Elizabeth will feel left out, so if you want to avoid trouble, get a poster-size of each of them and let nature take its course.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said, and two days later, with Pamela still not speaking much to me, I
arrived at school with two poster-size pictures rolled up in my school bag. I knew where Mark Stedmeister’s locker was, so I went there first and waited for him even though he and Pamela were forbidden to date anymore because they kissed too much. He was really glad to get the picture, and put it on the inside of his locker door just the way Patrick had done with my picture.

  The real problem was what to do with Elizabeth’s poster. I finally gave it to a boy who always stares at Elizabeth in the cafeteria, and he just kept saying, “Wow! Wow!”

  Bull’s-eye! I said to myself.

  By the end of the day, I was friends with Pamela again, but Elizabeth said she would never speak to me as long as she lived.

  What happened with Pamela’s poster was that Mark showed it to every boy who walked by, and they started calling her “Bubbles II.” Whenever guys saw us walking together, they started singing that old song, “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

  What happened with Elizabeth’s picture was that the jerk I gave it to didn’t have the sense to put it on the door of his locker. He pinned it up on the bulletin board beside the trophy case, and someone came along and drew little red dots with Magic Marker where Elizabeth’s breasts would be beneath the bubbles. Elizabeth almost fainted dead away when she found it, but that was after practically every boy in school had seen it.

  I took the poster down and tore it up, but Elizabeth bawled all the way home on the bus.

  “Elizabeth, I’m sorry,” I told her. “I figured if I had one made of Pamela but not of you, you’d be mad.”

  “Did I ask you to do that?” she sobbed.

  “No, but . . .”

  “They put dots on mine, Alice!”

  “Elizabeth, your picture wasn’t any different from ours,” Pamela tried to tell her. “Everybody knew the dots were just drawn there.”

  “But now everybody knows where my breasts are!” Elizabeth wailed.

  “They knew where they were before!” I croaked. “Breasts don’t migrate or anything.”

  “They’ll think I’m that kind of g-girl.”