Starting With Alice Read online

  Everyone was shouting and laughing. They sounded like a cage of screaming monkeys at the zoo.

  “Kiss her, Cory! Kiss her!” the boys bellowed.

  I didn’t know where to go. I ran as fast as I could, around the building, all the boys running after me, Cory in the lead, and everyone bellowing, “Kiss her, Cory! Kiss her!”

  Not again! This couldn’t be happening! Was this what third grade was all about? All this stupid kissing? I hardly even knew Cory Schwartz! I didn’t even know he liked me. He probably didn’t! Maybe he was doing it on a dare, and if he caught me and kissed me, I’ll bet he’d tell everyone my breath smelled like rotten eggs.

  The boys were getting closer and closer, and I didn’t know where to go. I remembered a side door near the parking lot and wondered if I could get in the school there, so I turned the corner, and… POW!

  I collided with something a lot bigger than me, and the next thing I knew, we both went sprawling. It was the huge patrol girl, who already hated my guts.

  “You stupid jerk!” she yelled. “What do you think you’re doing?” She winced and grabbed the palm of her left hand, which had been scraped on the gravel.

  Here came the boys, but here came a teacher, too, who had seen the collision, and suddenly all the boys skidded to a stop.

  “What happened?” asked the fifth-grade teacher, coming over.

  “She just plowed right into me. Didn’t even look where she was going,” the patrol girl said, glaring at me as she got to her feet. Her shoulders were so broad, I’ll bet she could have been a football player if she’d wanted.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I told the teacher.

  She pointed to the side door. “Why don’t you go in there and check in at the office. Let the school nurse look you over,” she said.

  I didn’t go to the office because I was afraid the patrol girl would come in next to have her hand bandaged, so I hid in the girls’ restroom till the bell, and then I was the first one in our classroom before the other kids came in. The boys were still laughing and giggling, and Cory was looking at me and grinning. Even Donald Sheavers was smiling. I tried to stare straight ahead.

  “What are you going to do, Alice?” Rosalind whispered as she passed me.

  “Move to Alaska,” I told her.

  It was like all the joy had gone out of my life. I would never be able to come to school early because Cory would be waiting for me there on the playground. I would have to sit as far away from him in the lunchroom as I could so that I’d be able to see him coming if he tried to kiss me. At recess I’d have to stay near the teacher all the time.

  “You could always just bop him on the nose,” Sara suggested.

  “We’ll be your bodyguards, Alice,” said Rosalind.

  That made me feel a little better, but they couldn’t be bodyguards forever. If Cory had been dared to kiss me, he wouldn’t stop trying. And sometime, when I didn’t expect it, it would happen. Just the thought was so embarrassing I had to close my eyes to get rid of it.

  At least he went one direction when school was out and I went another. That helped a little. But then I remembered the patrol girl at the entrance to the school driveway.

  “Hey, you!” she yelled when she saw me, and I noticed she had a large Band-Aid on the palm of her hand. “Do you know you made me tear a hole in my jacket?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

  “I’ve got my eye on you!” she told me.

  I hardly ate any dinner that evening.

  “You’re not sick again, are you?” asked Dad.

  “If you’re going to barf, baby, don’t do it on the table,” said Lester.

  I stuck my fork in the top of my mashed potatoes and left it there. “I’m sick of life,” I said.

  “Really?” said Dad. “You’ve only been on this planet for eight years, and you’re sick of it already?”

  “I’m sick of third grade and I’m sick of Valentine’s parties and I’m sick of boys and I’m especially sick of kissing,” I said.

  “Aha!” said Lester. “Why do I get the feeling that this must have been some Valentine’s Day at school!”

  “It was awful!” I said, my eyes beginning to fill with tears. “Cory Schwartz tried to kiss me because the other boys dared him to, and I was trying to get away, and I knocked over the biggest, meanest patrol girl in the whole school. Now she’s got her eye on me, and Cory’s waiting to kiss me, and the Terrible Triplets gave Russell Stover chocolates to each other and nobody gave chocolates to me!” I threw back my head and bellowed at the ceiling: “I hate third grade!”

  “This, too, shall pass,” said Dad.

  “And I’m sick of hearing you say that!” I yelled. It seems that whenever Lester and I complain about something, Dad says, “This, too, shall pass.” Sure, when I’m ninety years old or something.

  “Alice, you’re just an eight-year-old girl! You’ve got a lot of living yet to do,” said Dad.

  “I’m not just an eight-year-old girl, Daddy! Cory’s out to get me! The patrol girl’s out to get me! I’m like a… a hunted rabbit! A sitting duck! A cornered mouse!” I bleated.

  “You sound more like a sheep to me,” said Lester.

  I went to my room after dinner and lay on my bed, holding a pillow to my tummy.

  When Lester came out of the bathroom later, he looked in on me and said, “Are you really worried about this, Al?”

  “Yes! I am really, really worried!” I said. “I can’t stand thinking that Cory’s going to jump out at me sometime and kiss me in front of everybody.”

  Lester came in and sat down on the edge of my bed. “Okay, I’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “There’s only one thing to do, really. To Cory, anyway.”

  “Sock him?” I said.

  “Nope. Kiss him first.”

  “What?” I sat up so fast, I knocked the pillow to the floor.

  “Yep. Only way to stop it. Make Cory afraid of you. Hide behind the coats in the hallway or something, and when he comes by, just grab him and say, ‘You want it? You got it.’ Then kiss him.”

  “I can’t!” I said. “I don’t even like him. I don’t even know him!”

  “Well, you can’t not like him if you don’t even know him,” said Lester. “You either kiss him first, or you go the rest of third grade looking over your shoulder and feeling like a hunted rabbit, a sitting duck, a… what was the other thing?”

  “A cornered mouse,” I said. I reached for the pillow and held it against my stomach again as Lester went down to the basement to do his homework.

  I woke up early the next morning thinking about it. I gulped down a handful of dry Cheerios and a piece of banana. Then I brushed my teeth twice, gargled with Scope, and set off for school.

  All the kids were gathered over by the school steps, waiting for the bell. When Donald Sheavers saw me coming, he nudged Cory Schwartz, and all the boys turned to look at me.

  I didn’t stop. I forced my feet to keep going—left, right, left, right—my heart keeping time with my feet. Everyone turned and stared. I didn’t take my eyes off Cory Schwartz, and I don’t know if I imagined it or not, but I think he took a step backward.

  But when I was about two feet in front of him, I stopped, put my hands on my hips, and said, “Okay, Cory Schwartz, you wanted to kiss me. Go ahead and get it over with.”

  The boys whooped and hollered. The girls just stared. Cory Schwartz grew as red in the face as the punch at our Valentine’s Day party. Somebody pushed him forward, and his mouth slid past my cheek and missed my ear. Then it was Cory Schwartz who was running away, around the building, with all the kids after him, shrieking and laughing. It would be Cory Schwartz hiding out in the boys’ restroom from me, Cory Schwartz avoiding me on the playground, sitting as far away from me in the school lunchroom as he could possibly get.

  I felt as though I were ten feet tall.

  “Good for you, Alice!” said Sara.

  “You did it!”
said Rosalind.

  “I did, didn’t I?” I said.

  15

  LITTLE GIRL LOST

  AT SCHOOL JODY, DAWN, AND MEGAN were still snubbing us and we were snubbing them. It was getting a little boring, to tell the truth. The weird part was, I couldn’t remember exactly how it had all begun. Had they started it or had we?

  “You know what?” I said to Rosalind one day at lunch. “If we have to go the rest of the year like this, it’s almost as bad as trying to hide from Cory Schwartz. If we go on being rude to them, they’ll always want to get even.”

  “They’ll never get even with us, because however rude they are to us, we’ll think of something worse,” said Rosalind.

  “That’s what I mean,” I said.

  When spring vacation came, Lester complained because Dad said he had to either stay home with me or take me with him wherever he went.

  “Dad, this isn’t fair!” Lester bellowed. “She’s not my right leg or anything! No one else has to drag a sister around with him!”

  “I know it’s not fair, Lester, but until I can figure out how to work things here, that’s the way it has to be. I don’t want Alice home alone, and I won’t ask Mrs. Sheavers to let her stay over there all the time. Things are a little rough right now, but we’re doing the best we can.”

  “Well, I don’t think we are,” said Lester. “I’ve got a life to live too, you know.”

  He finally decided that the only place he’d be willing to take me with him was the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. But since I wanted to see mummies and things, he said we could spend the morning at the National Museum of Natural History and the afternoon at Air and Space. Dad dropped us off at the metro that morning, and Lester bought fare cards for both of us.

  As we left Silver Spring and sped along underground, Lester said, “When we get to Metro Center, we have to change to another line, and I want you to stick close to me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because we could get separated in the crowd. I might get off and you’d stay on,” he said.

  I tried to imagine me with my nose pressed up against the window glass, watching my brother race along the platform, calling my name. I’d probably get off at the next stop, thinking Lester would come after me, but what if he didn’t? What if I was the only one who got off and this evil-looking woman kidnapped me and locked me in her house and made me do all her work and only gave me bread and bones to eat? What if she chained me up at night and there wasn’t any telephone and I couldn’t see out because all the windows were painted black and…

  “Lester,” I said, “if I was ever missing, would you put my face on a milk carton?”

  Lester looked over at me. “What?”

  “You know… if I was a missing child or something.”

  “Well, let me think,” said Lester. “A milk carton, huh? Quart size or half gallon?”

  “Lester.”

  “Chocolate or two percent?”

  “Lester!”

  “Frontal view or side view?” asked Lester.

  I just folded my arms over my chest and scowled.

  Lester smiled and gave me a nudge. “Sure,” he said.

  I hung on to his jacket when we changed trains, and then we rode to the Smithsonian stop. You come right out on what’s known as the Mall when you go up the escalator. Not a shopping mall, but the long grassy park that stretches between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. The Smithsonian museums are along both sides.

  Lester was very patient with me as I looked at the blue whale and the mummies and stuff. We saw the caveman exhibits and the hunters and gatherers and early man, and we were halfway through the next exhibit when I had to go to the bathroom.

  “Lester, I need the restroom,” I said. “I know where it is.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you right here,” he said.

  I walked back through the exhibits to the hallway and turned left. I thought I’d seen the women’s room right out there, but it wasn’t. It was as though someone had moved it! I went on down the corridor till I came to the exhibit on Pacific cultures, and then I realized that we had come down the escalator and that the rest room was on the floor above us. I took the escalator up and turned left, but it still wasn’t there, so I turned left again, and then I saw it. I went in there, but when I came out and tried to find Lester again, I was so mixed up, I didn’t know where I was.

  I knew I had to get back down to the first floor and found an escalator going down, but it must not have been the right one. The Pacific cultures exhibit wasn’t where I thought it would be, and I wasn’t even sure what we’d been looking at when he’d said, “I’ll meet you right here.” Was it the early musical instruments or the ancient medicine pots? Was it the moccasins made out of reindeer hide or the human skulls? Or was that on the second floor?

  Why hadn’t I paid attention? First there was that awful empty feeling inside where my heart was thumping like a drum, and then came the dryness that crept up into my throat. Finally my chin began to wobble.

  I started blindly down a hall looking for early man, but then I decided I might really get lost and had better go back up the escalator and start over, but now I couldn’t even find the restroom when I got up there. There were too many people.

  A whole class of kids passed by me, all wearing orange T-shirts with SHERWOOD SCHOOL on them. They were laughing and kidding around with each other. Why can’t I be with a bunch of friends, I thought pitifully, instead of lost here in the Museum of Natural History with a brother who is probably still looking at medicine pots? If I had a mother, she never would have let me come downtown with Lester. It would be Mama and me in the Museum of Natural History, and Lester in Air and Space.

  I felt tears welling up in my eyes and noticed that the kids from Sherwood School were staring at me and giggling. I whirled around and walked away from them as fast as I could and promptly ran into a group of kindergarten kids in green T-shirts, all holding on to a clothesline, a teacher at the front and the rear.

  That’s what I needed—a rope! I was a hopeless, helpless Little Girl Lost, who needed a rope to hold on to my life. It was humiliating. Now tears were running down my cheeks.

  I saw a security guard over by a drinking fountain, and I walked up to him. “I—I’m l-lost,” I said. “Somehow I got s-separated from my brother.”

  The guard asked my name and then called it into his walkie-talkie. He took me to an escalator, where another guard met me, and this one took me down to a room near the information desk, where two little kids about three or four years old were sitting and crying, snot running down their faces. It was so embarrassing!

  It was almost a half hour later when Lester walked in. He didn’t see me at first, and his face was pale. But when the guard nodded in my direction and Lester saw me, I couldn’t tell if he was more angry or relieved. He walked over and thumped me on the head.

  “Knucklehead!” he growled as we went back out into the lobby. “Where were you?”

  “I got lost, Lester!” I whispered. “I thought it was right outside in the hall, but it wasn’t. And then I realized it was up on the next floor, but when I got there, I—”

  “Alice, do you know what I had to do?” he said. “I waited and waited, and finally I went to the first restroom I could find and asked a girl to go in there and look for you. She said she checked all the stalls, but nobody fit your description. I was afraid I’d have to try every restroom in the whole museum!”

  “I’m sorry, Lester! It was scary!” I whimpered.

  He grabbed my hand and gave it a jerk. “Well, I was scared too,” he said, and jerked it again. At least I knew he loved me.

  When we got to the Air and Space Museum, I stuck to Lester like Velcro. When he went to the restroom, he made me stand right outside the door, like a dog waiting for his master. I felt like a dog.

  Lester came out and said, “Well, I’m glad to see you’re
still here.”

  “Arf!” I said.

  16

  PANCAKES AND SYRUP

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT WAS REALLY Lester’s fault. He’s supposed to get home from school before I do, so I’ll never be there by myself. The Wednesday after spring break, some of the kids said they were coming back to the playground after school to watch the skateboarders. I decided to go back too, so I asked Lester if I could go, and he said it was okay with him. But only a couple of kids showed up, and I didn’t even know them. Rosalind didn’t come at all, and the sky grew dark. I must have waited fifteen minutes, but when it started to rain, I gave up and went home.

  The door was locked, though, and when I rang the bell, nobody came. I pounded on the door, but still Lester didn’t come, and I realized he must have gone out. We don’t have a porch on our house, and I was really getting wet, so I ran across the yard to the Sheaverses’. They don’t have a porch either, and their car was gone.

  Boy, Lester, are you ever going to get it! I thought as the rain ran down my back. There wasn’t even a toolshed I could hide in! I looked up and down the street. Most of the other cars were gone too, and the few that were left belonged to people I didn’t know.

  Suddenly I knew what I was going to do. Wrapping my arms around my body and keeping my head down so the rain wouldn’t get in my eyes, I went two blocks down the street in the other direction to Megan’s house. I went right up the steps and rang the doorbell before I could lose my nerve.

  Her little sister answered.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is Megan here?”

  “Yes,” said the little girl in the blue overalls, still staring at me. Her eyes looked like two copper pennies.

  I heard Megan yell, “Who is it?”

  “I don’t know. Somebody for you, and she’s really wet!” her sister said.

  Megan’s mouth dropped when she saw me.

  “Hi,” I said, shivering. “Can I come in?”

  She opened the door wider. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “What’s wrong,” I wanted to say, “is that we started out on the wrong foot with each other. What’s wrong is that we seem to be working really hard at being enemies, and I don’t think we’d have to work half as hard to be friends.”