Alice Alone Read online

  “Good question,” I said.

  She leaned back and stared at her feet. “I’m scared,” she told us. “I’m afraid I’ll get lost in high school and be late to class or I’ll wander into some part of the school reserved for seniors or I’ll start my period and the rest room will be out of Kotex, or—”

  “Elizabeth, shut up,” said Pamela. “If you’re going to begin high school no different than you were when you started junior high, then what’s the point?”

  I gave Pamela a look, because Elizabeth went through a sort of anorexic period over the summer, and we think she’s beginning to pull out of it, but we’re not sure. I didn’t want Pamela to say anything that would set her off again.

  “What she means is you’ve got too many big things going for you to worry about all the small stuff,” I told Elizabeth. “Lester says if you just look around, you’ll realize that almost everybody over the age of eighteen …” I stopped right then, because my eye caught something moving outside the window, and when I looked out, I saw Patrick riding up on the lawn on his bike.

  “It’s Patrick!” I cried, thinking he wasn’t due back till evening. I grabbed my can of Sprite and sloshed some around in my mouth before I got up and went out on the porch to meet him.

  He looked as though he’d grown another inch—taller, somehow, in his white Polo shirt and khaki shorts. Patrick has red hair, so he doesn’t really tan, but his skin looked a deeper red. “Hi,” he said, smiling at me.

  “Hi,” I said, feeling shy all of a sudden.

  “You wanted me to bring you the perfect shell,” he said, handing me a little box.

  “Is it? Really?” I lifted the lid.

  It was a beautiful shell, curved at one end, a beige color with little white spots all over it, and ivory on the inside.

  “It’s not perfect,” he said, pointing out a small chip on the edge, “but it was the best I could find.” Then he pulled me toward him. “How about the perfect kiss?”

  I loved the feel of his arms around me. It was broad daylight there on the porch, but I didn’t care. I put my arms around his neck and turned my face up to his. He pressed his lips against mine—softly at first, then hard and firm, and his fingers spread out across my back. It was a long, slow, beautiful, kiss.

  He let me go long enough to breathe, and asked, “Well, how was it?”

  “It’ll do,” I said, and we kissed again.

  “Ahhhhhhhhh!” came a long, loud sigh from the window. We jerked around in time to see two heads disappearing, one brunette, one blond, followed by the rapid thud of footsteps going upstairs.

  2

  Getting Started

  For my first day of ninth grade, I wore a necklace that Dad and Miss Summers had picked out together. It was a black velvet ribbon that hooked in back, worn snugly around the neck, covered with antique lace and tiny dewdrop pearls sewn here and there. It was just right to go with the scoop-neck black jersey top I’d chosen to wear my first day with a great pair of jeans. I thought I looked stunning.

  “Don’t I look ravishing, Lester?” I asked, standing in his doorway.

  Lester lifted one eyebrow as he sorted through his shirts. “How come the top half of you looks like it’s going to a party and the bottom half looks like you’re going fishing?” he asked.

  “It’s the style, Lester!” I said. “I’d look like a geek if everything matched.”

  “Is that why one ear’s lower than the other?” he said.

  “What?” I asked, walking over to his mirror.

  “And one eye’s crooked?”

  “Lester!”

  “Hey, relax. It’s only high school, not boot camp. Dad never told you he got you on sale, huh? Fifty percent off.”

  I gave him a look and went down to breakfast. Dad was eating a bowl of Wheat Chex.

  “You look great, Al,” he told me. “Black’s a good color on you. Sylvia said it would be.”

  “Were you and Sylvia shopping together?” I asked. “For a ring, perhaps?”

  “As a matter of fact, we were,” he said, and smiled over his toast.

  “Describe it,” I said eagerly.

  “Well, it’s round, of course.”

  “The diamond,” I said. “Is it one large stone, or … ?”

  “It isn’t a diamond at all, Al. We chose matching gold bands, sort of a woven look.”

  I stopped chewing. “You didn’t buy Sylvia a diamond?”

  “No. She said she didn’t want to feel responsible for it. She said she’d be continually checking to see if it was still there, and it would catch on things—”

  “But … but diamonds are forever!” I squeaked. “Enduring love!”

  “What’s this, a singing commercial?” Lester asked, coming into the kitchen.

  “She’s upset because I didn’t buy Sylvia a diamond,” Dad told him. “When you get married, Al, you can have diamonds on your toes, for all I care. You can even have a diamond in your navel. But Sylvia and I wanted matching gold bands.”

  “So she doesn’t have any kind of an engagement ring?” I asked.

  “No. Just a wedding band, after we’re married.”

  I took another bite of cereal and thought it over.

  “Well, at least you’ll both be wearing them. I’m suspicious of any man who wants his wife to wear a ring but won’t wear one himself. Now maybe Janice Sherman will understand that you are really, truly taken.” Janice Sherman is assistant manager at the Melody Inn, where Dad’s manager, and she’s had a crush on him ever since we moved to Silver Spring.

  Dad merely grunted, and turned to the editorial page. “Watch the clock, Al,” he said. “You have to catch the bus ten minutes earlier, remember.”

  I’d already been through orientation at high school. All the new ninth graders had gone to school for a half day to find our classrooms and try our lockers and get a floor plan of the whole school. But we weren’t nervous about locks and floor plans; we were nervous about the sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and today they’d be out in force.

  Elizabeth was already waiting when I got outside. The new bus stop was three blocks away, so we’d be walking together. She was wearing her long dark hair pulled back away from her face, with a few curls hanging down at the temples, and the rest scooped up with a scrunchie in back. Elizabeth’s got the most gorgeous skin and eyelashes and, except for shoulders and knees that still look too bony, she’s beautiful, only she’d never believe it.

  “You look great,” I told her, eyeing her royal blue shirt and off-white jeans.

  But she was looking at my collar necklace. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Dad and Sylvia gave it to me. She chose it, I’ll bet. They were shopping for wedding bands.”

  “Then it’s official,” Elizabeth said. “Gosh, Alice, aren’t you excited?”

  “It’s still a long way off,” I told her. “Right now I’m excited about ninth grade!”

  “Well, I’m nervous!” Elizabeth said.

  Except for algebra and possibly Spanish, I didn’t think there would be any subject I couldn’t handle this year, but Elizabeth is pretty wired about grades. She’s always made good ones, of course—better than either Pamela’s or mine. But from ninth grade on, we’d heard, your grades appear on your transcript when you apply to college, and Elizabeth kept saying she had “too much on her plate,” which was an interesting way of putting it.

  “I’ve made up my mind,” she said as we crossed the first street. “I’m giving up ballet and taking modern dance instead. It’s much less rigid, and it will be enough to keep me exercising without having to audition for The Nutcracker every year.” She’d already given up gymnastics last spring, and tap the year before.

  “If it’s what you really want to do,” I told her.

  “But I also want to drop piano, and that upsets my folks. I just don’t like that practice hanging over me every day. Mom wants me to start with a new teacher. She says I’ve outgrown Mrs. Ralston, and I’m probably just b
ored, so she’s signed me up with Mr. Hedges, who’s supposed to be the best in Silver Spring.”

  “Well it’s up to you,” I said again.

  “I told Mom I’d take a couple of lessons just to see, but I already know how I feel about it. They just act so … so disappointed in me …”

  It’s not easy being Elizabeth, I know. She’d been an only child for thirteen years of her life—until Nathan Paul was born last year—so she’d had her parents’ whole attention—adoration, really—all to herself. At the same time, they expect a lot of her, or maybe she just demands a lot of herself in order to please them—but she’s had about every kind of lesson there is and wants to be good at everything. And perhaps she’s just beginning to realize how impossible that is.

  At the bus stop there were some older kids we didn’t know, but when the bus came, a lot of our crowd was already on, and they were laughing.

  “There’s Alice,” I heard someone say. I wondered what the big deal was and looked around for Patrick, and then I saw him in the third row, with a short, curly-haired girl sitting in his lap. Patrick was laughing, too, and his face was red.

  I stared. It was Penny, the new girl who had worked at Baskin-Robbins over the summer, the place we went for ice cream, the dimpled girl the guys liked to tease.

  “Oh, Patrick, you’re in for it now!” Brian hollered.

  Penny looked around, then bounced off Patrick’s lap, her eyes dancing. “Oops!” she said apologetically to me. “Sorry, but I was pushed.”

  “Mark pushed her,” called out Jill.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just laughed, too, and sat down beside Patrick.

  “She sort of fell on me,” he explained.

  The tenth, eleventh, and twelfth graders were watching us with bored amusement, like we were a playpen full of toddlers. I gave Patrick a quick kiss. “Were you able to change your lunch to fourth period?” I asked.

  “No. I couldn’t swing it.”

  “Oh, Patrick! We won’t be eating together!” I said.

  “I know, but with the accelerated program, I’ll have to grab a sandwich when I can.”

  Patrick had mentioned the possibility of an accelerated program before, but in such an offhand way, it hadn’t really sunk in. “You’re actually going to do it? Four years of high school in three?”

  “If I can hack it.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can get a jump on things. Go to college one year earlier, get out one year earlier, get a job, make a start—”

  “What’s the hurry?” I asked.

  “Life,” said Patrick.

  “But this is life, too! What about all the fun stuff in high school? What about the senior prom? You won’t even be here!” What I was really asking was, What about me?

  “So I’ll come back for the prom,” Patrick said, smiling. “Wherever I am, I’ll come back and take you to the prom. Okay?”

  That was a commitment if ever I heard one. I slipped my fingers through his, and he caressed my thumb the way I like, and I was very happy to see that Penny noticed and looked the other way.

  I’m not very good at math and science. Dad’s not either, actually. Lester’s probably better at both than we are, but one of the reasons I’d been dreading high school was algebra. I’d put off taking it as long as I could, but anyone expecting to go to college had to pass it: algebra, geometry, physics. I got stomachaches just thinking about it. Patrick said he’d help, though. Patrick, the whiz-at-everything guy.

  Biology I could handle, though. It made pictures in my mind that algebra didn’t. U.S. history I could handle. English. Even Spanish, I discovered. Then there was P.E. and health, and, for my extracurricular stuff, I signed up to be one of the freshmen roving reporters for the school newspaper, The Edge. I’d even be able to take photos sometimes. Pamela signed up for the drama club, and so did I. Except she wanted a leading role, and I wanted to be part of the stage crew.

  I sailed through most of the day, all right. The only class I had with Pamela was history, and the only ones I had with Elizabeth were health and P.E. None with Patrick. It was the lunch hour that I missed him most, though. A lot of our old gang was there, so we grabbed a table for ourselves, but I felt odd man out without Patrick.

  “Hey, listen!” Karen called from her end of the table. “How about a coed sleepover, my place, Saturday night.”

  “Coed?” I asked.

  “Yes. Everybody! Bring a sleeping bag and we’ll take over the living room.”

  “Cool!” said Brian. “Your mom going to be there?”

  “Of course!”

  “Darn!” said Brian, and we laughed.

  “She won’t mind,” said Karen. Her folks are divorced, and she spends every other weekend at her father’s. I figured her mom was just trying to make the weekends Karen spent with her extra special.

  But Elizabeth was still staring at Karen. “Everyone on the floor together?” she asked.

  “Well, I suppose the girls could lie on top of the guys, if you’d prefer,” Pamela joked. Everybody laughed. Sometimes I wish Pamela wouldn’t do that—embarrass Elizabeth in front of everyone.

  “We had a coed sleepover at our church once,” Karen explained. “Our youth group had this project—we were going to scrub down all the pews in the sanctuary and repolish them—so we had an overnight first, and then the minister and his wife made breakfast for us the next morning and we cleaned the pews.”

  “Hey, the library had a sleepover when I was in sixth grade,” Brian told us. “They called it a Read-all-Night-athon, and about fifty kids showed up. There were sleeping bags over the whole floor. They turned out the lights at one in the morning, though.”

  I liked the idea of sleeping on the floor next to Patrick. Sleeping anywhere next to Patrick, actually. I told him about it after school.

  “Ummm,” he said, putting his arm around me and kissing my hair.

  Everyone seemed to be in a good mood at dinner that evening. Dad had been on cloud nine since he got back from England, and Lester came home from the university to say that he got a real “babe” for a professor in his Schopenhauer course. I was in a good mood because Dad had bought Chinese takeout for dinner, and the whole kitchen smelled of shrimp in garlic sauce.

  “Have you told Janice Sherman about your engagement yet?” I asked Dad.

  He chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “Guess I haven’t. I did mention it to Marilyn because she more or less asked. What she asked was if Sylvia and I were still an ‘item,’ which is a strange way of putting it, I think, so naturally I told her we were engaged.”

  I studied my father. There are times he seems to be living on a different planet entirely. “Dad, Janice Sherman has been your assistant manager for … what? Seven years? Marilyn has been a part-time employee for maybe one, and you told Marilyn before you told Janice. Why?”

  “Self-preservation,” Lester murmured, looking amused.

  Dad seemed perplexed. “Because Janice didn’t ask,” he said. “She asked what it was like in Chester, so I described the countryside. I thought that’s what she wanted to know.”

  I flung back my head and screeched at the ceiling. “Dad, you are so dense! Janice Sherman doesn’t care about Chester, she cares about you! She doesn’t want to know what you and Sylvia did in the countryside, she really wants to know what you did under the covers.”

  “Al!” Dad said. “Now that’s just—!”

  “It’s true! She only asked about the countryside because she thought maybe she could learn how serious the relationship is.”

  “Well, now, how am I supposed to know that?” Dad shot back. “If a woman asks me if there are as many sheep in England as the postcards make them out to be, how am I supposed to know she’s really asking about Sylvia?”

  Lester laughed. “Because the woman’s had a major crush on you since day one,” he said.

  “Major, major!” I added. “Dad, if you ever asked Janice Sherman to marry you, she’d be in a bridal gown
by six that evening.”

  “You two are exaggerating,” Dad said. “Janice may have had a mild interest in me at one time, but she’s dated a number of men over the years.”

  “Mostly music instructors there at the Melody Inn just to make you jealous,” I told him.

  “Nonsense,” said Dad. “Anyway, Marilyn seemed quite happy about it.” He smiled. “What she said was, ‘It’ll be nice to have someone sharing your pillow again, Mr. M., won’t it?’ Now in my day I wouldn’t have dared say something like that to my boss.”

  “That’s Marilyn!” said Lester, and all three of us laughed.

  And then I did the stupidest thing. With all this talk of sharing pillows, I brought up the coed sleepover. “Well, guess what I’m going to do on Saturday? I’m going to a coed sleepover,” I said, my brain on vacation.

  And without missing a beat, Dad said, “Over my dead body.”

  “Everyone’s going to be there—the whole gang.”

  “Everyone but you. I don’t care if the Pope and all his cardinals will be there. You are not going to a coed sleepover. I never heard of such a dumb idea,” Dad said.

  “Al, I never went to a coed sleepover,” Lester said, siding with Dad.

  I couldn’t believe that things could go downhill so fast. One minute we’d all been eating fried rice and talking about Dad’s engagement, and the next minute the bottom had dropped out of my world.

  I had promised myself that when I started high school I was going to act more mature. When Dad and I disagreed about something, I was going to discuss it with him calmly. No more breaking into tears and running upstairs to slam my door. So what did I do? Break into tears. All I could think of was that everyone would be there—Patrick would be there, probably—and I wouldn’t.

  “I can’t believe you!” I sobbed. “Y-you don’t know anything about it, either of you. You just have these knee-jerk reactions, and think that just because a bunch of kids are in sleeping bags, something’s going to happen.”

  My outburst took us all by surprise, I guess. We’d all been feeling mellow, and now this. But if I wasn’t sleeping on the floor next to Patrick, who would be?