Lovingly Alice Read online

  I rocked back and forth on the glider and studied the card. “The Agony of Saint Agnes,” it said at the top with lilies all around it. There was a drawing of a very beautiful girl with long dark hair like Elizabeth’s. She had a lamb in one arm and a palm branch in the other, and she was looking up to heaven.

  Underneath the picture was her story. It said that Agnes was only twelve years old at the time of her glorious death. Her beauty excited the young noblemen of Rome, and one even promised to save her if she would marry him and renounce her faith, but she would not and was cruelly whipped. Even the pagans wept to see her tortured so. At last she was put to death and is looked upon in the Church as a special patroness of bodily purity.

  I don’t know what there was about Saint Agnes, but I liked her. I figured I might need her more than Elizabeth Price, so I took the picture upstairs and hid it under my mattress. If Elizabeth was ever in difficulty, though, I’d take it over.

  When you walk into Elizabeth’s house, the first thing you see is this big photograph over the sofa of Elizabeth on her First Communion day. She has on this white dress with lace around the collar and these white gloves with lace around the wrists and a white veil. Her long dark hair is all shiny around her shoulders, and she’s looking down at a bunch of flowers. She even looks like a saint. I asked Elizabeth once what you had to do to be a saint, and she said you had to die first, so then I stopped thinking about it so much. But I still kept Saint Agnes under my mattress just in case.

  It was Elizabeth Price who watched us move in. She was sitting on a wicker couch on her front porch with her mother, and they were reading a magazine together except that they never turned the pages. That’s how I knew they were watching us. It’s really creepy, you know, when someone watches you move in. I had on my oldest clothes and my socks didn’t match, and even from across the street I could tell that Elizabeth Price had on brand-new sneakers.

  It took us all day to get things inside. The movers took the furniture, but Dad and Lester and I took the really important things in our car. Dad had the lampshades and I had my bowl of guppies and Lester had his beer can collection, which reached from the floor to the ceiling all along one wall of his room. He sold it just before he started junior college this year and got two hundred and sixty-eight dollars.

  It was a gorgeous day in July, and it could have been the marvelous very first day of the rest of my life, like the posters tell you. I was feeling especially good because Dad had promised to take us to Shakey’s for pizza after the movers left, so I was being as helpful as I possibly could. I helped Lester set up his beer cans and put lampshades on all the lamps and fed the guppies and dusted the closets, thinking all the time about pepperoni or sausage and a king-size mug of 7UP.

  But just as the moving van pulled away, someone knocked, and I knew even before I opened the door that it was going to be that girl across the street and her mother.

  They were standing there in matching skirts holding a cardboard box, and I didn’t even have to look inside to know that it was supper. My heart fell.

  “Welcome to the neighborhood,” said the girl, smiling at me, and she didn’t have braces, either. She had beautiful hair and beautiful long eyelashes and no braces.

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  “We’re the Prices, and this is Elizabeth,” her mother said. “We know how difficult it is on moving day, so we brought you some dinner.” She held out the box for me to see. There was a meatloaf, which I hate, some baked potatoes, a salad, and a plate of flat-looking brownies, which I bet Elizabeth made herself.

  “I made those myself,” said Elizabeth, pointing.

  I didn’t know what to say. The dinner was hot and ready to be eaten, and I thought maybe they could give it to someone else.

  “Thanks a lot,” I told them, “but we’re going out to dinner.”

  “Alice!” my dad said behind me, and came right over. “This was so nice of you,” he told them, taking the box. “Thank you very much. I’m sure we’ll enjoy it. I’m Ben McKinley and this is Alice.”

  “If you need anything,” said Elizabeth’s mother, “we’re just across the street.”

  We ate off a trunk in the living room. Dad and Lester kept forking the food down like it was the best thing they had eaten in years, but I could hardly swallow.

  “This tastes like dead birds,” I said.

  Dad frowned at me. “That was a very rude thing you told them, after all their work… .”

  “But you promised!” I protested. “The dinner was still hot, and I figured they could give it to the needy or something… .”

  “They didn’t make it for the needy, they made it for us,” Dad told me. “We can go to Shakey’s some other time.”

  “Yeah, Al,” said Lester. “You really blew it.”

  I got up and went to brush my teeth, only we hadn’t unpacked the toothbrushes so I had to use my finger. That was when I noticed the dirt smudges on my face and the mustard on my shirt from lunch. I guess I’d forgotten to brush my hair that morning too, and it hung all dirty-yellow and stringy around my shoulders. I could imagine what Elizabeth Price was thinking about me.

  Life is like a Dumpster. As soon as you get rid of one embarrassment, you pick up another. I knew that this was going to go on forever unless I found someone to set an example for me, and by the time I got the mustard off my shirt, I’d made up my mind: I’d adopt a mother, and she wouldn’t even know.

  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.

  COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY JULIA DENOS

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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 © 2004 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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  Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition

  Book design by Mike Rosamilia

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

  This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition September 2012

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

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.

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

  p. cm.

  Summary: Fifth grade is tumultuous for Alice as she tries to help others through the many changes occurring at home and in school, including learning about sex when Rosalind gets her period and shares a book that explains what is happening.

  ISBN 978-0-689-84399-0 (hardcover)

  [1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Single-parent families—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Menstruation—Fiction. 6. Sex—Fiction. 7. Maryland—Fiction.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.N24Lo 2004 [Fic]—dc22

  2003023504

  ISBN 978-1-4424-4641-0 (paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3225-8 (eBook)