Simply Alice

  I tumbled to the floor, furious, and looked up at Ed and Devon and Richard, laughing at me and holding a rubber stamp belonging to the drama department, of the two Greek masks, comedy and tragedy, which they obviously had stamped on my butt.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I yelled, scrambling to my feet and pulling my jeans back up. My face burned from both anger and humiliation. Molly appeared on the stage, Faith behind her, holding back the curtain. Molly stopped and stared at me, then at the guys.

  “What were you doing to her?” Molly said.

  “Initiation time, that’s all!” Richard said. He was the tallest of the guys, lanky, and he didn’t laugh, he leered.

  “The Greek Tattoo!” Ed explained.

  “Yeah? When they initiated me last year, they put it on my back. So where were you guys going to put it?” Molly said.

  “We put it on her back!” Devon said innocently, and laughed.

  I was pulling up my zipper as the side door of the stage opened, and the custodian came in. “Somebody yelling in here?” he asked, looking around. “You people have business back here?”

  And when Devon said, “Yeah, we’re painting sets,” I didn’t say a word. Neither did Faith or Molly. It was supposed to be all in fun. It was supposed to be a way of making me “one of the boys.”

  “Just forget about it, Alice, that’s the way guys are,” Faith said as the boys moved to the far side of the stage and opened the paint cans.

  “It’s not the way all guys are,” I told her, thinking of Patrick. Of Eric. “And the ones that are shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. That was humiliating.”

  “They only meant it as a joke,” she said. “When I was a freshman they put mine on a breast. I just laughed it off.”

  “Why are you defending them?” I asked.

  “Well, what are you going to do? You’re not going to report them, are you?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. What I did know was that I hadn’t been a “good sport,” and I guess I figured that was embarrassment enough. It was over, and they wouldn’t try it again. On me, anyway. So I didn’t say anything.

  When I told Dad that evening, though, he was furious.

  “If that’s not molestation, I don’t know what is,” he said.

  “Stupidity,” said Les.

  “Al, had any of you talked about this before? Had the guys joked with you about getting this tattoo?”

  “No! I didn’t even know what initiation they were talking about. They just grabbed me!”

  “Well, I’m going to call the superintendent,” said Dad. “A freshman girl should not have to worry about being accosted by seniors.”

  “No! Dad, please don’t!” I pleaded in horror.

  Then he got angry at me. “You want to let something like that pass? No one reports it, and it will keep on happening to all the girls who come along after you.”

  “Al’s right, though, Dad. She should handle it, not you,” said Lester.

  “What I’d like to do is pull the pants off those three guys and throw them out the window. Let them go outside buck naked and get them,” I said.

  “Well, you know you won’t do that, so what are you going to do?” asked Dad.

  “I’ll think of something,” I told him.

  5

  Out of the Woodwork

  I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do about it when I stayed after school the next day for our weekly staff meeting for The Edge. A part of me wished I’d handled it better—even laughed when the guys stamped my bottom. It would have made me a lot more popular.

  The other part of me said that it was just this reaction—going along with the joke, no matter how humiliating—that kept this sort of hazing going. Nobody complained, nobody told, so it happened to the next batch of freshmen and the next and the next.

  I’d thought about going to Mr. Ellis himself, but with all the other problems he was having getting the production off the ground, it was the last thing he wanted to hear. He’d probably say he’d take care of it, and nothing would happen. If I went to the student council, I’d be the poor little freshman telling on those big bad juniors and seniors, and if I went to the principal or superintendent, I’d have to make a formal complaint, they’d call in all the guys, and whatever happened, I’d be persona non grata on the stage crew. So I took it to the newspaper.

  First I told Sara, our features editor, and before I’d even finished, she was rapping the table with her pen.

  “Nick? Nick?” she kept saying till she got his attention. “You said we need more good lead stories, right? An exposé we can tie in with a good editorial? How about hazing?”

  Nick looked a little pained. “Oh, come on, Sara.”

  “No, you come on!” she said. “We all know it happens, but Alice happens to know about it firsthand. Tell them, Alice.”

  So, in front of seven kids, I had to tell what happened to me behind the stage curtains the day before. A couple of the guys tried to hide a grin, but the girls were indignant. Nick, though, looked thoughtful.

  “I’m thinking about the guy last year who got a tooth broken when they tried to force his head in the toilet—football initiation,” he said. “The principal got involved, and we printed the new rules in the newspaper. That was supposed to stop the hazing, and obviously it hasn’t. But how do we know this wasn’t an isolated incident?”

  Everybody started speaking at once. Each person there seemed to know of something that had happened to a friend.

  “When I joined the girls’ soccer team, they made me wear all my clothes inside out for a week,” one of the sophomores said.

  “That’s not the kind of hazing we’re talking about,” said Sara.

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  “I know a guy in Arizona… .” The boy who started the sentence didn’t finish. We turned and looked at him.

  Tom Cordona was playing with a paper clip between his fingers. He didn’t look up. “It was some guys on the wrestling team who did it to him. The broom-handle initiation,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, good grief!” said Sara, burying her head in her hands. “See what I mean, Nick? See how disgusting and humiliating …”

  “Oh, man!” said our senior sports editor.

  “Okay, listen,” said Nick. “I think there’s a story here, a lead story, but I don’t want to go out on a limb with it if it didn’t actually happen in our school. I want you people to ask everyone you know and get the facts. It can’t just be something they’ve heard about happening to someone else. We need names and dates and we’ll promise not to print them, just report what went on, see if we can’t light a fire!”

  • • •

  What it lit, it seemed, was a forest fire. Even before we met again the following week, we were comparing notes and found out it was much bigger story than we’d thought. When kids knew we wouldn’t use their names, we began hearing things we’d thought couldn’t happen in our school. “Freshman initiation”—a group of guys circling a couple of freshmen girls in the parking lot, making them get down on their knees and unzip the boys’ flies with their teeth; a boy who had to walk around all day with his fly open; a girl who had to crawl through a lineup of guys who paddled her; a boy who had to wear girls’ underwear for a day; the girl who had to goose five guys.

  We sat around the table in the journalism room and stared at one another when we realized what we had. These weren’t just happening in Arizona or New York or Michigan or California, they were happening right here in Maryland in our school. To our students. And nobody, except the guy who had his tooth broken last year and whose dad had taken the incident to the school board, had complained. Everyone wanted to be a “good sport.” We all had sort of swept it under the rug. No more.

  “It’s sexual and it’s degrading, and I don’t like the two put together,” said Sara.

  Miss Ames, our sponsor, agreed. She gave her okay to do a story on it. Taking all of the information we’d gathered, N
ick and Sara wrote the lead article, but we used the names of the entire staff in the byline, because we’d all contributed something, and we wanted to show that we were all behind it.

  It blew the roof off the school. The superintendent called us into his office and wanted details, names, and dates, but our adviser sided with us and said we didn’t have to disclose them. It was a serious problem and had to be addressed now to stop future hazing.

  The following week there was a school assembly, and the principal announced a new set of rules. It was clear, he said, that some forms of hazing were all in fun and helped create a feeling of belonging in a group. Things like being sent out on a scavenger hunt to get weird stuff, or going around with your club’s name painted on your forehead. But no hazing of any kind, anywhere, was allowed unless it was cleared first with a coach or sponsor. Unauthorized hazing would lead to expulsion.

  We all felt great! We went to Starbucks after school and celebrated. Sam Mayer, one of the paper’s photographers, gave me a hug. “Nice going, Alice,” he said. Sara and Nick were pleased, too. I wasn’t too happy about the fact that Sara kept referring to it as “her” idea, but I guess when you’re a lowly freshman you have to pay your dues and let the big guns get the glory.

  “That’s the way to do it, kiddo! Take it to the newspaper!” Lester told me when I showed him the article in The Edge.

  “Get an extra copy for me,” said Dad. “I want to send it to Sylvia. No, get three. Let’s send one to Sally and Milt, and one to your uncles in Tennessee.”

  Patrick complimented me on the article, and so did Penny. I was feeling so super-confident of myself that I found I could even talk to her as though we’d been friends forever. I didn’t have to go around the rest of my life known as “Patrick’s ex.”

  “I’ll bet you guys on the newspaper have some interesting staff meetings,” Penny said to me. “There are probably all sorts of things that go on in school you don’t even put in the paper. Right?”

  “Well, some,” I said.

  We were at lunch, and she had broken her giant-sized cookie in two and put half on my tray. Patrick never ate with us because he didn’t have time for lunch. He grabbed a sandwich between classes. “You going to major in journalism?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “You’d be good at it,” Penny said.

  “I’ve been thinking about psychology.”

  “Really? I think I’m interested in advertising, and there’s a lot of psychology in that,” she said.

  Gwen liked my article, too. She’s the friend who’s helped me with math and algebra more times than I can count. “Way to go, girl!” she said.

  But the two people I would most like to have shared it with didn’t say much of anything. Every time our eyes met, Liz and Pam were suddenly deep in conversation with each other, and it was all so phony. They laughed and joked with the other kids, but if the spotlight fell on me, they started giggling over their own little secrets.

  I remembered a column in the Washington Post about problems that parents were having with their children, and one of the things it said was that sometimes when a child is behaving the worst, he’s most in need of love. Maybe you didn’t have to be a child. Maybe no matter how old you were, you needed love most when you were the most disagreeable, which was the way Pamela and Elizabeth had been acting toward me lately. And maybe it was up to me to make the first move.

  On Friday night, when I saw a light up in Elizabeth’s room at eight o’clock, I figured she was home for the evening, and took a chance.

  I wrote a note and went over to her house. When her dad answered the door, I asked if he’d take the note up to Liz, and I’d wait. I could tell he was glad to see me, that he’d wondered what was wrong between us.

  The note said:

  Liz, if I have done or said anything to hurt you, I’m sorry. I still like you best in the whole wide world, and really miss you. Can I come up? Alice

  It took about two minutes, but finally her dad came back down and said it was okay for me to go up. When I got to her room, she was crying. I started to cry, too, and we stood in her doorway, crying and hugging. She had three pimples on her face now, and if ever she needed to be loved, it was then. What I didn’t know was that Pamela was on her way over to spend the night with Liz, and she got there a few minutes later. I gave her the same type of note I’d given Liz, all ready to go in my pocket. She didn’t cry but she hugged me, and we sat facing one another on Elizabeth’s twin beds with the white ruffled spreads and canopies, and talked it out.

  “Pamela, do you remember back in seventh grade, how you were always telling me I wasn’t part of the ‘seventh-grade experience’ unless I joined some clubs, got active? I’m just taking your advice, that’s all. Trying to get into things more. It always seemed easier for you than for me,” I said.

  “But you’re doing so many things!” Elizabeth protested.

  “I know. But Liz, remember when you were taking ballet and tap and piano and I don’t know what all! I didn’t shut you out. I’ve been a wallflower for so long, I’m just trying to make up for lost time,” I said, wanting to make her laugh.

  “Yes, but you … you don’t have to be so stuck on yourself,” Elizabeth said.

  I was surprised. “Am I? Is that the way I seem? Because I don’t think of myself like that at all. I’m just a lowly stagehand.”

  “Yeah, but that newspaper thing,” said Pamela. “We’ve been friends a lot longer than you’ve been in ninth grade, remember. And when you say you’ll show up and you don’t, and you don’t answer E-mails …”

  I could see now how I must have appeared to them. “I know, and it’s going to get worse from here until the production’s over,” I said. “Between the newspaper and Fiddler on the Roof and the Melody Inn and my homework on weekends, I’m going down for the third time, guys. Can’t you see me through this? I really, really need you.”

  “Maybe it’s a good thing you don’t have a boyfriend this semester, Alice,” said Elizabeth. “At least we can understand.”

  “But do you?” I said. “Things are going to be really awful for the next few weeks, but we could get together over spring vacation and do something. Easter comes early this year.”

  “All right,” said Pamela. “But it’s got to be something really wild.”

  “Something we’ve never done before!” said Elizabeth bravely.

  “Right!” I said. We all laughed.

  “Oh, guys, it’s so good to be back again,” I told them. “I needed you so bad a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to call you, but I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “What happened?” they both asked together.

  If there is one thing that makes your girlfriends sympathetic, it’s something bad happening to you, I’ve decided. “I was backstage getting ready to paint one of the sets,” I said, “when some of the guys grabbed me, turned me over, and pulled down my jeans.”

  Elizabeth almost went catatonic. “They didn’t!” she gasped.

  “You mean … that story in the newspaper … about putting a rubber stamp on your bottom, was you?”

  I felt embarrassed all over again. In answer, I stood up, turned around, and pulled my jeans halfway down. The stamp mark with the two masks had faded some, but the permanent ink was still visible. When I sat down again, they were both speechless.

  “You mean …?” Pamela said finally. “You mean they actually held you down and pulled your jeans completely off?”

  “No, just down far enough to put the stamp.”

  “Exactly how far was that?” Elizabeth said. “Turn around again.”

  “Now, Liz …”

  “What were you wearing underneath?”

  “Underpants, of course!”

  “See-through?” asked Elizabeth. She has to know the details.

  “My gosh, what does it matter?” said Pamela. “The underwear went down, too! Alice, I’d be furious!”

  “Well, I was.”

  ??
?But … what if … what if you’d been having your period and were wearing a pad!” Elizabeth went on in horror. “What if you had pimples on your butt or …?”

  Leave it to Elizabeth. If you don’t provide enough details, she’ll offer some of her own.

  “Exactly,” I said. “But even if I’d been wearing French underwear and looked like a million bucks, no one had the right to embarrass me like that.”

  “What did you do?” asked Pamela.

  “Everything I could think of. I yelled and kicked and bit, but it didn’t do any good. There were three of them. Harry was the only one who didn’t take part, but he didn’t make them stop, either.” I was surprised to find my mouth sagging down at the corners. “I wanted so bad to call you guys that night… .”

  We all hugged again.

  “You know,” I said. “Being best friends means we’ve got to be there for each other when things are going good, too. It’s easy to comfort someone when they’re down, but sometimes when we’re up, we need to know we haven’t lost our best friends. Listen, Pam, you may not believe me, but your voice is every bit as good as some of the girls who tried out. Next year you might get a starring role. Wouldn’t you want Liz and me there, cheering you on?”

  “If that ever happens, sure, I would,” she said. “Listen, Alice. I’m sorry. I’ve been a toad, and I know it.”

  “Me, too,” said Elizabeth.

  “A toad?” I said, laughing. “A toad?”

  “Totally Obnoxious Anytime Dame,” Pamela explained, laughing.

  “Okay, you want to know a secret?” I said. They were all ears. “I found out who CAY is.”

  “Who?” they cried.

  “A guy in my biology class. Eric Fielding.”

  They each tried to remember.

  “Blond?” asked Pamela. I nodded.

  “He’s cute, but he stutters, doesn’t he?”

  “So?”

  “Gosh, he never says two words to anyone!” said Elizabeth. “He’s in my history class. Did you meet him at the statue or what?”

  I told them about Mom’s locket and how he had found it on the floor.