Simply Alice

  She gave me a computer printout listing all the merchandise we had ordered for the Gift Shoppe within the last year.

  “We’ll be doing inventory next week,” she said. “What we need you to do is cross out any item that we’ve sold out completely.”

  I set to work on the printout sheet and was half-way through when I heard someone say, “Excuse me, but there’s no one in sheet music. Could you help me?”

  I turned around to see Charlene Verona, The Girl Who Has Everything.

  “Hey … aren’t you … Alice McKinley?” she said. “Weren’t we in sixth grade together?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re Charlene, aren’t you?”

  “Yes! Oh, it’s great seeing all my old friends! We just moved back here the first of the year, and it’s like I never left!”

  What I wanted to say was, Whoop-dee-do. What I said was, “What do you need from sheet music?”

  But she went bubbling on: “Dad was transferred to Illinois and I just hated it there. I mean, I had to start all over again and I didn’t know anyone, but now we’re back and he promises I can complete high school in Silver Spring, so here I am!”

  “Here you are!” I repeated. “What can I get you?” Why did I dislike her so much? I wondered.

  “I’m trying out for Fiddler on the Roof and I need to learn some songs. Do you have a songbook from the musical?”

  “I think so,” I said. I used my key to lock the cash register, then went over to sheet music. Both Dad and Marilyn were helping students in the instruments section, and the part-time clerk was on a rest break.

  “I just love that musical,” Charlene said as she followed me across the store. “I want to play Tevye’s daughter Hodel. She sings that gorgeous song about wherever her lover is, that’s home. Do you know it?”

  I didn’t, exactly, but I secretly hoped we were out of the music. At the same time, I made a mental note that we should order more songbooks immediately, because other kids were going to be coming in looking for them.

  I went to the file cabinet marked MUSICALS and began looking through file folders in alphabetical order. There it was, only one copy left—the songbook for Fiddler on the Roof.

  My first thought was to tell her it was already sold, then buy it myself, give it to Pamela, and urge her to learn the songs and try out. But then my mature self took over, and I knew that was Pamela’s decision to make, not mine.

  “Here you are,” I said, and rang up the sale.

  “How about you?” Charlene asked. “Aren’t you going to try out?” And then her face froze and she said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Alice. I forgot you can’t sing. Me and my big mouth.”

  She didn’t have to put it that way. Of course I can sing. I just can’t carry a tune, that’s all. It’s embarrassing enough without having to be the daughter of a man who manages a music store.

  “Eighteen dollars and ninety cents,” I told her.

  She kept trying to make it up to me. “Oh, well. You must be horribly busy here. I’ll bet it’s fun to work in a music store.”

  “Out of twenty,” I said stonily, taking the bill she handed me, and gave her the change.

  “Thanks, Alice!” she said. “See you around school! Wish me luck!” And she was off.

  “In a pig’s eye,” I muttered.

  Marilyn came hurrying over. “Thanks. We’re a little shorthanded this morning. Did the girl get what she needed?”

  “No,” I said. “What she needed was a punch in the mouth, but she got Fiddler on the Roof instead. By the way, we need to rush order lots more of those songbooks.”

  Marilyn gave me a quizzical smile. “Friend?”

  “The Girl We Love to Hate,” I said. “The girl who gets everything she sets her heart on.”

  Marilyn studied Charlene as she left the store, and then me. “Nobody gets everything they want, Alice. Trust me,” she said, and I knew she was referring to Lester.

  I told her then about the E-mail message from someone signing himself CAY. How I’d gone to the statue but no one was there, and about the follow-up apology.

  “I sure wouldn’t take it any further if I were you,” Marilyn said. “Any guy who can’t introduce himself isn’t the kind you want to get involved with.”

  “That’s about what I figured,” I told her. What I didn’t tell her, though, was how I kept looking at all the guys in my classes, wondering, Was it him? Was it him?

  3

  Heart of Gold

  I don’t wear a lot of jewelry—I like a simple look—but for my birthday last year, Aunt Sally in Chicago, Mom’s older sister, gave me a small gold heart-shaped locket that used to belong to my mother, with a lock of Mom’s hair in it. It was the same color as mine, strawberry blond.

  I’m not sure how Aunt Sally came to have it in the first place—maybe Mom left all her jewelry to her sister when she died—but Aunt Sally felt I should have it. And maybe she’d saved it for my fourteenth birthday because she felt I’d be responsible enough by then to take good care of it.

  In eighth grade I wore it a couple of times, but when I put it on over a navy blue sweater in ninth, I liked the look so much that I began to wear it often.

  “It’s nice, Alice,” Elizabeth said once. “Who gave it to you?”

  “It’s something of Mom’s,” I answered.

  That’s one thing that bothers my dad, that I don’t talk about Mom more. I don’t think he realizes how little I remember of her. I was only five or so when she died, and they say kids don’t remember much before the age of four. Combine this with the fact that Aunt Sally took care of us for a few years after Mom’s death, so a lot of my memories are confused with Aunt Sally.

  “Did you hear any more from Cay?” Pamela asked me at school one day. We started calling him—or her—Cay, because we didn’t know how else to refer to him.

  “Maybe he’s a member of the faculty and he can’t reveal himself,” said Elizabeth. “Maybe all he can do is worship you from afar, Alice, and the day you graduate from high school, he’ll profess his undying love, and you’ll find out he was your algebra teacher or something.”

  “Maybe he’s the custodian,” said Pamela, grinning.

  “Or the bus driver,” said Elizabeth.

  “The principal!” said Pamela.

  “I’m not interested,” I told them. “Somebody was obviously playing a joke to see if I’d fall for it.”

  Between fifth and sixth periods, I literally bumped into Patrick in the corridor, and we walked as far as my history class.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Busy,” I answered. “Exams in all my classes, inventory at the store, stage crew for Fiddler on the Roof … How about you?”

  “I may graduate in three years, but they’ll probably have to carry me across the stage,” he said. “This semester’s a lot worse than last.”

  “I’ll bet!” I said. “Patrick, you always were a brain.”

  He just grinned. “See you,” he said.

  I’ll admit I felt sort of down on Valentine’s Day. What I tried not to think about was what Patrick was giving Penny as a present—that he was kissing her, stroking her hair. I wore my heart locket to school—sort of a talisman, I guess, against hurt. I couldn’t help studying Penny in the cafeteria at lunchtime, trying to see if she was wearing anything Patrick might have given her. To her credit, she didn’t mention either him or Valentine’s Day. She could have rubbed my face in it, but she’s not that kind of girl. I don’t think Patrick would have fallen for her if she was.

  I found myself listening for Penny’s name over the speaker system, though. In our high school, I discovered, guys sometimes send flowers to their girls in care of the school office. Some of the teachers’ husbands do it, too. Then the school secretary calls out those persons’ names between classes, and they go down to the office and collect their bouquets.

  My face felt hot just thinking about it. It was such a public declaration of love—wonderful if it happened to you, ho
rrible if it happened to someone you envied. If Penny went around all day carrying flowers from Patrick, how could I stand it? But only a dozen or so girls got their names called, and we—The Forgotten Others—tried not to look daggers at them.

  Faith, though, got a bouquet from Ron—roses, no less—and you just had to be glad for her. You’d think it was the most wonderful moment of her life, the way she brightened, and I figured Ron couldn’t be all bad if he could make Faith that happy.

  Penny’s name was never called. At least, I didn’t hear it if it was.

  Maybe I was feeling especially low because not only did I not have a boyfriend, but I had the vague feeling that Elizabeth and Pamela and I weren’t as close as we were at the beginning of ninth grade. They’ve been my two best friends since seventh, and I think they’re still best friends with each other. Just not with me.

  It’s so subtle, though. Nothing I can put my finger on. I wouldn’t even know how to bring it up. When I say, “Are you mad?” Liz says, “Of course not!” But they don’t call me like they used to, and I think—I know—they do things together on weekends without even asking if I want to come. Of course I don’t call them as often, either, but they know how busy I am right now. And they’ve been having a ball at Tiddly Winks. On the bus to school they’re always showing the other girls what earrings they’ve got so far for being junior consultants.

  Did I just imagine it, I wondered, or did Pamela show the pair of turquoise teardrops to everyone on the bus but me? Was I being oversensitive to the fact that Elizabeth invited four girls to come to Tiddly Winks on Friday night—promised they’d all go out for pizza afterward—and then, suddenly looking in my direction, seemed to invite me as an afterthought?

  When they did talk to me, it sounded too polite, too forced—not the chummy, teasing way we used to be with each other. But how exactly do you accuse someone of being too polite? Too cold? I kept waiting for an opening—for something bigger to happen, so I could say, “What’s wrong?” But I already knew. We were starting to grow away from one another, to look around at other friends, which is what you’re supposed to do as you grow up, I guess, but all it made me want to do was cry. I’d thought we were going to be best friends forever.

  • • •

  Dad confided at dinner that he had sent a dozen roses to Sylvia Summers in Chester. Even my brother looked amazed.

  “Well, that must have set you back big bucks!” he said.

  “I won’t even tell you how much,” Dad said. “It was just something I wanted to do.”

  I stared at him over the spaghetti. Dad looked like a fuzzy teddy bear in his plaid flannel shirt and Docker pants—his scruffies, he calls them—the most comfortable clothes he can think of when he gets home from work. “You had a dozen roses flown to England?” I exclaimed.

  Dad laughed. “No, hon. I called a florist here who takes international orders. He calls a florist in Chester, and that florist delivers the flowers.”

  Sylvia called Dad about seven. She’d found the roses when she got home from school, she told him, and even though it was midnight there, she and Dad were on the phone for a long time.

  I spent the last hour before bed E-mailing some of my friends. Even though I doubted they’d answer, I told Pamela and Elizabeth about Dad sending roses to Sylvia, checked with Karen about the history assignment, and tried to find out from Jill if she’d gone to the Valentine Dance. What I really wanted to know was whether Penny and Patrick had been there, and they had. Just before I signed off, the red flag on my “You’ve Got Mail!” box went up, so I checked the incoming mail once more and found this message:

  Still watching, still admiring. Would

  you give me another chance?

  CAY

  This time I E-mailed back:

  If you really want to meet me, you’ll

  walk up and say Hi.

  There was something creepy about this, but I sure wasn’t going to tell Elizabeth or Pamela about it this time.

  When I got home from the Melody Inn on Saturday, there was a message on the answering machine.

  “Where were you?” came Elizabeth’s voice, sharp and brittle-sounding. “You could at least have let me know if you couldn’t make it!”

  I immediately dialed her number. “Liz? What are you talking about? Where was I when?”

  “Last night! At Tiddly Winks. You said you’d come, and I’d invited four other girls for pizza afterward. We didn’t know whether to wait for you or what.”

  “Oh, my gosh!” I said. “We had a meeting after school, and it dragged on, and when I got home I just heated leftovers for my dinner and stretched out on the couch. I completely forgot!”

  “If we bring in five girls at once, we get bonus points and Tiddly Winks pays for the pizza afterward. Because I only had four girls, I lost the bonus points and had to pay for their dinner myself. If I’d known you weren’t coming, I could have invited someone else.”

  “I’m really sorry! I guess I just conked out. Listen, I’ll pay for the pizza, Liz.”

  “Oh, never mind,” she said.

  “No! Really!”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  Mr. Ellis was holding tryouts for Fiddler on the Roof, and the big buzz was that Charlene Verona would get the part of Hodel. Every day after school the first two rows of the auditorium were filled with hopefuls, who were called up onstage one at a time and asked to sing a song from Fiddler. Any piece they wanted. Charlene did well with “Far from the Home I Love.”

  The stage crew attended just to be part of the general excitement. Each actor would be required to furnish his or her own costume, but we were supposed to help out and find anything that an actor couldn’t. I’ll admit, I wished I could sing. I wished I had the nerve to be up there all by myself, with Mr. Ellis and the others looking up at me, while I belted out a song un-self-consciously to the piano accompaniment.

  Dad said that my mother used to sing—that she was tall, that she liked to wear slacks a lot, was a good swimmer, and always made him a pineapple upside-down cake on his birthday. And they loved each other a lot. Maybe Dad, being musical, loved her especially because she could sing. I wondered what went wrong in me.

  I was sitting in the next to the last row in the auditorium with Faith and Molly when Charlene’s turn came to audition a second time. The kids who were most likely to get a part were called back again; the others were thanked and told they could leave. If you didn’t get a callback, you were either out, or were part of the chorus. This time Mr. Ellis had several girls go onstage together, singing different songs, saying the speaking parts, listening to the sounds of their voices and how they looked and sounded together.

  “Charlene really wants to play Hodel,” said Faith, propping one delicately booted foot on the back of the seat in front of her. “I heard she’d kill for the part.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That small girl in the tan shirt has a great voice, too.”

  “Mr. Ellis has to look at all the parts—who’s going to play Golde, who’s going to play the other two sisters—-all of that,” Molly told us. “I think Kurt Weinstein is going to get the part of Tevye. He’s got a terrific voice.”

  He did, too, After Charlene sang a second time, Kurt went up onstage. He’s a senior, a big guy—goes out for wrestling as well as choir—and as soon as we heard him, we knew he’d get the part. He not only sang, he gestured and strutted around the stage, and we clapped like crazy when he’d finished.

  “Hey!” came a whisper, and I turned to see Ron Blake in the row behind us. He reached forward and stroked Faith’s cheek and she responded by kissing his fingers.

  Down in front, though, Mr. Ellis was asking another guy, who was also auditioning for Tevye, to come up and sing. He wanted to compare the two, and so did we. It was sort of hard to concentrate with all the cheek-stroking and finger-kissing going on beside me, but Ron, I guess, can only be kind for so long. I think he resents Faith doing anything that doesn’t involve him.
/>
  “Hey, babe, let’s go,” he whispered.

  “I want to stay long enough to hear this guy sing. See if he’s as good as Kurt,” Faith whispered back.

  Ron especially doesn’t like Faith paying attention to other guys, even to the way they sing.

  “Well, I want to leave now,” he told her.

  It was all I could do to keep from saying, Well, she doesn’t, so get your big self out of here, but I didn’t.

  Faith turned around again, facing the stage, and Molly and I sort of leaned toward her, helping pin her in to strengthen her resolve. The second guy went up onstage and sang “If I Were a Rich Man.” Suddenly a big foot appeared beside my face, and I turned to see that Ron had stuck both his feet up on Faith’s shoulders and was holding her head in a vice grip with his heavy boots.

  She just gave a little laugh and went on watching the stage. When she didn’t react, he clamped his boots tighter against her face and began rocking her head from side to side. Both Molly and I turned around and glared at him.

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  His eyes narrowed, and he studied me for a long moment as though he had designs on me, too. I’d seen him look at me like that before. Was he “the watcher,” I wondered? Could he be CAY?

  “Who asked your opinion?” he said.

  “Nobody. You got it for free,” I said.

  “Oh, Alice!” Faith whispered.

  “Quit being such a bully!” put in Molly.

  Ron put his feet down and leaned forward, grabbing Faith’s shoulder. “We’re leaving,” he said.

  And to our dismay, Faith got up. “I’ve gotta go,” she said, maneuvering past Molly’s legs, and left the auditorium with Ron.

  Molly slid over beside me. “He is really bad news,” she whispered.

  “I know. What does she see in him?”

  “He gives her a lot of attention, all the wrong kind,” Molly said.

  Kurt got the lead. The names were posted on the bulletin board beside the orchestra room on Friday. Most of the cast were juniors and seniors, and Charlene lost out on Hodel but got the part of Tzeitel, the oldest daughter—a huge plus, considering she’s only a freshman. But the other two girls chosen for daughters were smaller in size than Charlene and their voices were higher, even though they were seniors, so Mr. Ellis knew what he was doing, I guess. I decided that even if Pamela had tried out, she wouldn’t have gotten a part, so maybe she was right to wait for her junior or senior year.