Almost Alice Read online

  “And you figured I needed a heart?”

  “She just wanted you to feel loved, Lester,” said Pamela, smirking.

  “Like a secret admirer or something,” put in Liz.

  “To keep you happy so you could concentrate on your studies,” said Gwen, trying not to laugh.

  Les stared at the five of us like we had just sprouted feathers. “Are you insane?” he asked, directing the question to me. “You figured that if I thought there was a woman secretly in love with me, I’d go happily back to my thesis and forget about her? Al, if there was a hot babe watching me from the bushes, I’d be out there looking for her; I’d be prowling the sidewalks, patrolling the streets, checking out every coffee shop in a fivemile radius from the U. Are you nuts?”

  I leaned back against the cushions. “I guess I am,” I said.

  George was still reading the love messages. “Io t’amo? Yo te quiero? Je vous aime? Who wrote these?” he asked.

  “The Berlitz Phrase Book for Travelers,” said Gwen, and that made us all laugh.

  “So who’s taken Spanish?” George asked.

  “I have,” said Yolanda and Liz both.

  “And who wrote these?”

  “I did,” said Yolanda. “Well, sort of. My boyfriend did them for me.”

  “What’s Por favor, traigame otro tenedor?” George asked, and I began to get the picture. George may be Greek or whatever, but he knew his Spanish.

  “Uh … please … uh …,” Liz began.

  “Please bring me another fork,” said George. “What’s Tome izquierda despues del puente?”

  “Turn …,” Liz began again, then stopped.

  “Turn left beyond the bridge. You girls flunk. Time to go home.” He grinned.

  The phone rang just then, and Mr. Watts, down below, wanted to know why that car out front was all dressed up like a birthday cake and whether the girls had brought over anything to eat. Les told him that no, unfortunately, no one was having a party, but Paul was going to get Chinese takeout on Friday, and Mr. Watts was invited.

  Because Pamela had finally finished her tea, we put on our jackets, apologized once more to Les, and promised to take the stuff off his car before we left. He said he’d also settle for a wash job and vacuuming come spring.

  “You and your bright ideas,” Gwen said to me as we pulled the last heart off the windshield.

  “But we got to see the inside of their apartment, didn’t we?” said Pamela. And that made it all worthwhile.

  Our high school doesn’t allow students to have flowers or candy sent to the school office for pickup on Valentine’s Day. In fact, Valentine’s Day had gotten out of hand, with some of the more popular girls carrying around armloads of stuffed animals and chocolates and roses and stuff, while others—most of us, in fact—got nothing.

  So the rule was that any Valentine’s Day gifts arriving at the front office would be delivered to the nursing home down the street and that any Valentine’s Day gift given privately from one student to another had to be kept in the locker till the end of the day.

  We missed the Jack of Hearts dance, now that it was crossed off the calendar, but we had Sadie Hawkins to look forward to. And I was thinking of Scott as I walked to my locker after the last class.

  I turned the dial on my lock and opened the door. Someone must have given out my locker combination, because there on my rumpled gym clothes at the bottom lay a single white rose. And a card beside it read Patrick.

  You know how you can feel thrilled and horrified at the same time? Justified and guilty? It was almost as though I were cheating on Patrick.

  Oh no! I thought. I hadn’t given him anything! Didn’t think we were … well, a couple. Not yet, anyway. Had he found out I’d asked Scott to the dance? Is that what this was about? Or did the rose mean he really cared?

  I had a right to go with Scott. I knew that. Hey, who was it who once told me he wanted to go out with both Penny and me? Plus, Patrick had actually suggested I go to this dance with someone else. What I was keeping from him, though, was how big a crush I had on Scott.

  I stood there staring down at the flower. Who was it who wrote, A rose is a rose is a rose …? No, it wasn’t. It was a little white bundle of ambiguities, and I wondered just how this semester was going to play out.

  4

  Suggestions

  Pamela and Tim were getting to be about as close as any couple in high school, except for Jill and Justin maybe, who had been going out forever. Tim was considerate of Pamela, patient with her, and Pamela, in turn, liked to think of little ways to please him. She carried Tylenol in her bag for him when he had a headache, bought a refill for his pen, saved her dill pickle for him at lunch.… They really seemed to care for each other, and it was nice to see Pamela so happy.

  I wish she could have told her mom about him. I was just getting to the place where I could confide in Sylvia now and then, and I liked that. But Pamela and her mom still fought much of the time.

  Of the four of us—Pamela, Elizabeth, Gwen, and I—Pam was the only one right then with a bona fide boyfriend. I had two dates for two dances, but I couldn’t call either one a boyfriend. Gwen was too wrapped up in AP courses to go out much, and Liz wanted a guy, but it just wasn’t happening, and it was Liz I was thinking about.

  What do you say to a girlfriend to make her a little more flirtatious? A little more friendly? A little more sexy or fun or approachable or something?

  “It’s your smile that turns guys on,” I told her once.

  “Joke around with the guys the way you do with us,” Gwen said.

  “When a guy follows you with his eyes, Liz, flirt back!” Pamela suggested.

  We might as well have been trying to teach a cat to fly, I decided. Liz just didn’t seem to have it in her. When the four of us were together, checking out a cute guy, or when we were around guys she knew were out of our league, she could play along. And obviously, when she and Ross fell for each other at camp two summers ago, she must have been more approachable then. In fact, I would have called her enthusiastic about guys. But when it came to boys at school, guys in our classes, guys who had boy friend potential, she shriveled up, like she didn’t want to take the chance.

  I think maybe part of the problem was that Liz took her romances a little too seriously. Her first boyfriend was Tom Perona, the summer before seventh grade, but he dumped her for a new girl at his school.

  She had a crush on a teacher at the beginning of eighth, but of course that went nowhere. Then she fell for Justin Collier—before he started going out with Jill—but once he made a remark about her weight, it was over. Then there was Ross, and he was about as perfect for her as we could imagine, but the long-distance thing just didn’t work out, and she didn’t want to get hurt again.

  But now it was like she’d forgotten how to try. It made me tired sometimes. Between trying to get Liz to be more friendly, Gwen to lighten up on her studies, and Pam to try out for the spring musical, I felt that I was using a lot of energy on my friends. And it made me wonder if there were things about me they’d like to change.

  When I went to work at my Dad’s music store on Saturday—I run the little Gift Shoppe in the alcove under the stairs—David asked me if I’d had a good Valentine’s Day. David Reilly is one of Dad’s part-time employees. He’s about twenty and is thinking of becoming a priest.

  “Define ‘good,’” I said.

  He smiled. “Okay. Something from a boyfriend maybe?”

  “I don’t have a particular boyfriend,” I said. “But I did get a white rose, and I bought myself some M&M’s on the way home.”

  He laughed. “Oh, too bad. I was hoping you had a stash of chocolates somewhere.”

  A woman came in the store just then wanting to sign her child up for trumpet lessons, and David took her to meet the instructor on the upper level. When he came down, I realized I hadn’t asked him how things went in New Hampshire over Christmas. He’d told me he wanted to talk over things with his parent
s and his girlfriend—decide which he wanted more: the church or a wife. So I asked.

  David leaned against the display case where I was polishing the glass top and stared down at the trays of novelty items. He’s a really good-looking guy. Dark hair, square jaw, great clothes, great voice. He also sings in a men’s choir. “I wish I could say I came back with a clear answer,” he said. “My folks said they’d accept whatever decision I made. My girlfriend’s the only one who’s definite. She said she needed a decision by summer, that she won’t wait for me after that. She doesn’t want a half commitment.”

  I couldn’t say I blamed her. “Did you talk it over with a priest?” I asked.

  “Many times,” he said. “They don’t want a halfhearted commitment either. ‘Finish college,’ they say. ‘Then think about seminary. Take a few courses and see if you know yourself better by then.’ But that’s too long for Connie.”

  “What’s she like?” I asked as I rearranged the silver earrings and the necklaces made out of eighth notes.

  He smiled. “Pretty. An inch taller than I am, and probably smarter, too. We broke up once already. But I’m down here taking courses at Georgetown, she’s up in New Hampshire—I don’t know. I think the church is winning.”

  “How do you ever know for sure?” I asked.

  “You don’t. You don’t know anything for sure, Alice. Some of us take a leap of faith into religion, into marriage, and hope for the best. Some people embrace uncertainty and don’t have any problems with doubt. It all depends on what you can live by, what makes you a better person.”

  “I have a lot of doubts about a lot of things,” I told him.

  “So do I,” said David. “And people handle them differently, that’s all.”

  • • •

  I didn’t have a chance to thank Patrick for the rose until the following Monday, because he was at some kind of a three-day science competition in Baltimore. If ever a person had too many interests, it was Patrick, but I didn’t mind being one of his interests.

  What I wanted to know was just where I was on the list—high priority or low? How many other things were ahead of me? I wondered sometimes if Patrick had any idea how much he’d hurt me when he’d said if he had to choose between Penny and me, it would be Penny. How does a girl ever get over a comment like that? But if she holds a ninth-grade mistake against a guy all the way up through eleventh, how mature is that?

  “Elizabeth’s gone out for track this semester,” I told him after I’d mentioned the rose and we’d talked a few minutes.

  “Yeah. I saw her running a couple days ago after school. Some of the other guys on the team noticed her too,” Patrick said.

  “Well, I wish one of them would ask her out,” I said.

  “You mean Liz can’t get a guy?” asked Patrick.

  Are all males this clueless? I wondered.

  “Nobody asks her, Patrick!” I said.

  “Well, I guess she is a little scary,” he said.

  “What do you mean, scary? Elizabeth?”

  “Sort of perfectionistic. I mean, she looks so perfect that I guess if I asked her out, I’d worry that everything would have to go just right.”

  “Uh … have you ever thought of asking her out? Just curious.”

  “Maybe once or twice.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I teased.

  “Told you. I might order a hamburger and find out she’d turned vegan. I might wear sneakers and she was expecting loafers with tassels or something.”

  I laughed. “Patrick, I can’t ever imagine you worrying about details. In fact, I can’t imagine you worrying much about anything at all.”

  “You don’t know me, Alice,” he said.

  “Really? What do you worry about, other than grades?”

  “Life,” he said, and then he laughed a little too. “Sometime when you’ve got six hours, I’ll fill you in.”

  When we were laying out the next issue of The Edge, I asked Don about Christy Levin. “Someone I should know?”

  “Probably not, but you’ll like her. She’s on the girls’ basketball team. Brunette, kind of tall.… I took her to the Snow Ball.”

  “I’ll probably recognize her when I see her,” I said.

  Scott came over. “What time do you want me to pick you up on the twenty-ninth?”

  “Seven would be fine,” I told him.

  The dance committee had their work cut out for them, getting students familiar with the famous Al Capp comic strip Li’l Abner, most popular in the forties and fifties. They made postersize reproductions of some of the strips and hung them in the hallways. There was handsome Abner, who had no idea that the full-lipped Daisy Mae was pining for him; Mammy Yokum and her pipe; luscious Moonbeam McSwine, who slept with the pigs—all those crazy characters.

  It was all so dorky, so different, that it seemed to be catching on. Kids stood together in the halls, reading the strips and laughing, and some of them began imitating the characters—scratching their armpits, walking in Mammy’s bowlegged stride, adopting Abner’s clueless expression. Each day there was a new strip, and we heard girls talking about what they were going to wear.

  And of course this was just what the school wanted—an informal dance that everyone could afford to attend. It would be an all-evening event, including a Dogpatch barbecue. The ticket price covered everything, so the girls didn’t have to take the guys anywhere before the dance. No corsages. Just an evening in the high school gym.

  I was getting excited now, and with Scott doing the driving, that made it simple. Still, Scott and Don and Christy were all seniors, and I wondered how I’d fit in.

  “Directions to your place?” Scott asked.

  He lived in Kensington, so I told him to take Connecticut to University Boulevard, University to Georgia Avenue, Georgia to our street… .

  “We’re the house with the Porta-John in the front yard,” I said.

  He laughed. “You really go all out for Sadie Hawkins Day, don’t you?”

  I laughed too. “I’m serious. We’re remodeling, and the workmen are still there.”

  “Okay, I’ll find you,” he said. “If no one answers the door, I’ll try the Porta-John.”

  Why can’t real life be more like the movies? Why couldn’t the new addition be finished, the crew gone? Why couldn’t Dad invite Scott inside and lead him back to our new family room, where a fire would be crackling in our big stone fireplace and Sylvia would be sitting beside it with Annabelle in her lap?

  Now I didn’t want him to come in! The dining-room furniture was squeezed into the living room, and there was only a narrow path leading to the stairs. The first thing Scott would see when he walked in the door was our refrigerator!

  Then I thought of Molly and how she would probably give anything just to be well and going to the dance at all. The condition of her house would be the last thing on her mind.

  I don’t know exactly how she works it, but whenever Jacki Severn writes a feature article herself, she manages to make the front page. At least, her articles start there, along with her byline. We put out a paper every two weeks, and it’s only eight pages long. Except for a controversial feature article I wrote last semester, “The City at Night,” my articles have always appeared near the back. I wished that Scott would be a little more forceful.

  The thing that really got to me—and some of the others, too—was that Jacki sometimes added little spot illustrations to her stories that she picked up off the Internet: a couple dancing, a girl with a book, a dog, a boat—whatever she was writing about. And if you counted up characters per line, one little piece of clip art took up three or four lines, but those never seemed to figure in her word count. She made the rest of us cut three or four lines when we went over, though.

  When the paper came out this time, however, Jacki was steaming. As we were getting ready to distribute them to the homerooms before school on Tuesday morning, she marched over to Scott and said, “Okay, where are they?”

  “They?”
said Scott.

  “The heart motifs.”

  “We had to take them out, Jacki—we got a new ad and needed the space. They took up too much room, and besides, Valentine’s Day is over,” he said.

  “My article was about relationships!” she said.

  “We need every ad we can get,” Scott replied.

  “You didn’t even tell me!” Jacki said, her voice rising. “I am the features editor, you know!”

  And now Scott’s voice had an edge to it. Microscopic, maybe, but I could tell. “You weren’t here when we did the final layout, remember? The ad came in just before our deadline, and removing that spot seemed the best way to get the space.”

  Yay, Scott! I was thinking.

  “Well, next time I don’t want anyone tinkering with my articles,” Jacki said, and she included all of us in her sweeping glare.

  Miss Ames had come in halfway through her tirade. “The thing is, Jacki,” she said, “that clip art does take up space, and we needed to cut somewhere.”

  “I thought they added a lot to my articles! To the paper!” Jacki protested.

  Miss Ames smiled. “In a perfect world, where we could put out as big a paper as we wanted, yes. But that’s just not the case.”

  Jacki gave an indignant sigh, grabbed up her bundle of papers to distribute, and stormed out.

  “Whew!” said Don. “Has the temperature gone up a couple degrees?”

  The rest of us chuckled and picked up our bundles, and Scott and I exchanged smiles as I left for the homerooms in the west corridor.

  Liz seemed to have forgotten that she’d been upset with me when I told her I had a date for the dance with Scott, as though I’d been bragging or something. On the morning of the dance, as we were riding to school, she asked what I’d be wearing.

  “My good jeans with a big red patch on the butt,” I said. “And I sewed some patches on a peasant blouse. For a while I even thought about wearing a black bonnet with a corncob pipe in my mouth and going as Mammy Yokum.”

  “Now, that would be a hit!” Liz laughed.

  When we walked inside the building, we heard laughing and shrieking up and down the halls, and we saw that someone had scattered straw here and there in the corridors. And then we saw the chickens—a dozen hens, maybe, all clucking and squawking and skittering down the tile floors.