Dangerously Alice

  “Here are the votes,” Scott read. “Monday, Pajama Day; Tuesday, Beach Day; Wednesday, Mismatched Day; Thursday, Wild Hair Day; and the teachers chose Victorian Day for Friday.”

  “Are you sure that’s not Victoria’s Secret Day?” asked Tony, and we laughed.

  “Don’t I wish,” Scott said. “Nope. Victorian England.”

  The freshman and sophomore roving reporters were already chattering about what they would wear.

  “Somehow I thought we’d be a little more original than that,” said Jacki.

  “Well, what we need are ideas for next year, and here’s where you come in, Alice,” Scott said, his blue eyes smiling at me. “Would you go around asking for suggestions so we can get people thinking about Spirit Week next year? Making it a tradition?”

  “Sure,” I said, lost in the blueness of those eyes. They were topaz blue, like the Caribbean Sea I’d seen on postcards. “I can do that.” Scott could have asked me to climb up on the school roof and recite the Gettysburg Address and I would have said, Sure! I can do that!

  Dad had let me use his car that day. He lets me have it sometimes when I’ve got something going on after school if Sylvia can drive him to work. I stopped by the CVS drugstore on the way home to buy a new steno pad and some eyeliner.

  Jill and Karen were smoking at one of the little tables outside Starbucks next door. I hesitated for a second, and then—taking a chance to see if I was really as DD as they thought—I walked over to them and asked if they had any suggestions for Spirit Week next year. When Jill saw me, she gave a sort of half smile and took another drag on her cigarette.

  We’ve never been buddy-buddy, but ever since I stopped letting Jill and Karen use my employee discount when I worked at Hecht’s last summer, I’ve felt they’ve cooled even more toward me. And after what Pamela told me, I was sure of it. Just the way they excluded me from their conversations some of the time. Once or twice I’d even had the feeling they’d turned away and whispered something to each other when they saw me. Their smiles seemed to have double meanings. The way they’d light up a cigarette, then glance my way. Just little things like that.

  I know that a couple of times I’ve fanned their smoke when they lit up, and I’ve tried not to be so obvious about it, but I hate inhaling the stuff. This time, though, I tried to ignore it.

  “Hi, Jill. Hi, Karen,” I said. “I’m doing a short piece for The Edge with suggestions for next year’s Spirit Week. Any ideas?”

  “What kind of ideas?” asked Karen. She tilted her head back and blew the smoke straight up.

  “How to dress. Hawaiian Day. Stuff like that,” I told her, and added laughingly, “Tony Osler’s already suggested Victoria’s Secret Day.”

  They laughed too. “Hey, I’d go for that one,” said Jill. “Bikini Day, maybe?”

  “All right …,” I said.

  “We could do Twins Day,” said Karen, and she looked at Jill. “You and I could team up.”

  “That’s a good one,” I said, and wrote it on the back of my hand with my ballpoint. I really needed that steno pad.

  “Or Preppie Day, and half the school would already come dressed for it,” said Jill, who dresses more like she’s going to work at Saks than going to school.

  “That makes three,” I said. “Thanks. I’m off to buy a steno pad.”

  “There she goes! Alice McKinley, Girl Reporter!” Karen sang out as I walked away.

  I know that Karen and Jill look on my little job for the newspaper with amusement, but what else is new? This semester was already a grind. I’d missed a couple days of school that first full week when we went to Tennessee for my grandfather’s funeral, and I still had a paper to write for one of those assignments. The only solution I could see was to stay up late at night till I got caught up. Bummer.

  Still … the truth was, our old group wasn’t the same. Until recently, we’d simply thought of ourselves as “the gang at Mark Stedmeister’s pool.” Now our differences seemed more important. I know that some of the kids think I take life too seriously, but … well, sometimes I do. That’s me. Also, word had gotten around that I’d chickened out over the summer when Brian was going eighty in a forty-mile zone in the new car his dad had bought him and that I’d made Brian stop and let me out. I felt that some of the kids were still talking about it.

  “So let them talk,” I told myself aloud, and headed for the cosmetic counter. This was my junior year, and I had some decisions to make about my future. Jill had already confided that her number one objective was to marry the wealthy Justin, and as for Karen, she said she either wanted to marry rich or get into fashion design.

  I’ll admit that, other than going in to talk to the school counselor about a career, my immediate goal wasn’t any more noble: I wanted to get Dad to relax his rule that I had to go six months without an accident before I could have any friends in the car with me. Finally, knowing how much I needed the car for after-school stuff, he’d said that he might—might—shorten it to five months instead of six, but I couldn’t so much as get a traffic ticket during that time. This would mean I could have friends in the car with me by Thanksgiving, not Christmas. Just the thought of Gwen and Liz and Pamela in the car, with me at the wheel driving them somewhere, was number one on my “can’t wait” list.

  • • •

  Lester came over on Sunday to rake leaves. The trees seemed to be shedding earlier this year, and he said it would make things easier if we did a first raking now.

  I was glad to see Les back in our old routine. After he and Tracy broke up last month, I was afraid he might become a recluse or something. My twenty-four-year-old brother is getting his master’s degree in philosophy next spring. I guess I always thought of philosophers as the hermit type, but that doesn’t exactly fit Lester.

  “It looks like you’re going to make it, Les,” I said as we raked, the bamboo tines of the rakes making scritch scratch sounds in the grass. “I mean, your degree and everything. I’ve still got all that ahead of me, and I haven’t even taken the PSAT yet. I’m scared silly.”

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “If I do poorly on the PSAT, I’ll probably bomb on the SAT,” I told him. “If I bomb on the SAT, I won’t get into college, and if I don’t go to college, I’ll probably end up cleaning public restrooms on the night shift.”

  Les looked over at me. “Congratulations, Al. You just beat your all-time record. You went from a potential high to a major low in four seconds.”

  “But it’s true, Lester. Life is just a series of hurdles, and no one ever tells you that. Right now everything’s riding on that PSAT. You get over one roadblock, you’ve got another staring you in the face.”

  He laughed. “Well, some people like to have ‘next steps’ to look forward to. Some people like to have challenges. Ever think of that? Think how bored you’d be if everything came easy.”

  We raked in silence for a little while. Then I asked the question I’d been wanting to ask him for the past month. “When Tracy said no—when she broke it off—was that a roadblock or a challenge?”

  “No getting around it, I was disappointed.”

  “You’d been dating since January, Les. Do you look at it as eight months wasted or what? I really want to know how you deal with it.”

  “Not wasted. I don’t look at the time I’ve spent with any girl as wasted. I feel I learned something from each one, and …” He grinned. “I certainly had a good time.”

  I ignored the good time part and concentrated on the learning. “What did you learn?”

  “About the kind of woman I’m looking for,” said Lester.

  “What kind is that? What did you learn from Loretta Jenkins?” I asked.

  “She was never my girlfriend,” Lester said. “But I was around her enough to know that I wanted a girl with her feet on the ground. Which was definitely not Loretta.”

  “Marilyn?”

  “That I wanted a girl a little more … uh … physical. Like Crystal.”
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  “Then what was wrong with Crystal?”

  “I wanted a girl more sensitive … like Marilyn.”

  I wondered if I was naming these girlfriends in the proper order. “Lauren?” I asked, remembering one of Lester’s instructors at the university.

  “Too fickle.”

  “Eva?”

  “Too sophisticated.”

  Should I go on? I asked myself, but I did. “Tracy?”

  Les sighed. “With Tracy, I thought I’d found it all. But she broke up with me, remember. For Tracy, her family came first.” And then he said, “Nobody’s perfect, Al. I could fall in love with somebody tomorrow who’s as different from me as night from day.”

  “That’s scary, Lester,” I said.

  “That’s life,” he told me.

  By staying up three nights in a row till twelve—two o’clock, one night—I finally finished the last assignment I’d missed when we went to Tennessee. I’d researched the Marshall Plan for World History and finished a list of suggestions for next year’s Spirit Week for the newspaper:

  • Victoria’s Secret Day

  • Towel Day

  • Egyptian Day

  • Twins Day

  • Preppie Day

  • Bikini Day

  • Pimp ’n’ Ho Day

  • Garage Band Day

  • Body Part Day

  • Celebrity Day

  • Crazy Hat Day

  Scott was really pleased, and he gave my shoulder a squeeze when I turned in my list before homeroom the following morning. “Nice going!” he said. “We’ll run it next time. Garage Band Day! I like that!”

  That one shoulder squeeze was enough to make my day. I would have liked a Scott Lynch Day just to be able to tag along behind him for six periods.

  I was beginning to feel, as Sylvia thought I would, that I was getting into the routine of things. That I was getting a grip. As I refreshed my lip gloss in the restroom after lunch, I came to the conclusion that I looked pretty good. Only a zit or two I couldn’t cover with foundation, and if I was lucky, as the orthodontist said, I might get my braces off by spring.

  I was putting a little blush on my cheeks when Jill and Karen came in the restroom.

  “Alice!” Karen said, and looked genuinely glad to see me. “Did you do the essay question on The Great Gatsby? You know … that comparative thing?”

  “Yes, and I was up until two in the morning finishing it,” I said.

  “I’m drowning in homework!” Karen said dramatically. “Absolutely drowning! I just couldn’t get to it. Could I see yours? Just to get some ideas? I’ll paraphrase it; I won’t copy.”

  I had spent at least three hours struggling with that essay. I had come up with what I thought were original ideas for looking at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s other works—finding trends, contradictions, repetitions. … There was nothing Karen could paraphrase that wouldn’t take my original ideas and run with them.

  “Oh, Karen, I can’t,” I said. “I worked really hard on that piece, and I want to keep the originality.”

  “Just this once?” she pleaded. “I’ll be careful.” I could see a crease deepening in her forehead.

  I shrugged helplessly. “I can’t. Sorry.”

  She turned to Jill as they left the restroom, and I heard her say, “Told you! MGT.”

  2

  MGT

  Liz, Pamela, Gwen, and I decided to make it Girls’ Night Out—to go to the Homecoming Dance together. Jeans and sweaters. We’d argued about the kind of shoes to wear, though. Pamela said she was coming in the tightest pair of jeans she could find and her silver stilettos with ankle straps. She also wanted an escape clause: If any of us got asked to go with a guy, that girl was free to back out. So much for loyalty. But it didn’t happen, so we entered Spirit Week as a team. Monday through Friday were costume days; Friday night was the football game; and Saturday night was Homecoming Dance in the gym.

  The Friday before, at our lockers, Liz said, “Mom’s going to drive us to school on Monday, seeing as how we’ll be in pajamas.” Her locker’s next to mine. They say you’re lucky if your locker’s next to a gorgeous girl’s because all the guys will stop to talk to her and you can have the leftovers.

  That was only partly true. Elizabeth was one of the most beautiful girls in school—long dark hair, thick black eyelashes—but she was also shy around people she didn’t know, and that makes some kids think she’s stuck-up, which couldn’t be further from the truth. She’s as brunette as Pamela is blond. I wear my hair shoulder length, Liz wears hers long and straight, Pamela still prefers the short layered look, and Gwen—who’s African American—changes her hairstyle every couple of weeks. We never know what she’ll try next.

  “So what are we going to wear on Pajama Day?” I asked. “I’m just going in my T-shirt and flannels.”

  “Oh, but you’ve got to wear bunny slippers or something!” Liz said. “If we’re not going to be outlandish, what’s the point?”

  The point, actually, as Scott told us, was to get the whole school doing something together to build school spirit and help the football team win one of its biggest games of the season. I couldn’t see how bunny slippers contributed to that, but I told her I’d think of something.

  “Listen,” I said. “Do you know what MGT means?”

  “Monosodium glutamate?” she guessed, stuffing some books in her bag. “Oh, that’s MSG. I don’t know. Where’d you see it?”

  “I heard Karen say it to Jill when she was walking away from me the other afternoon.”

  “Just … MGT?”

  “Yeah. And I don’t think it was complimentary.”

  Liz shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? It’s just another stupid label. Did you ever hear either of them say anything nice about anyone?”

  “Probably not,” I said, and let it go.

  It was a zoo at school on Monday. Mostly it was the cheerleaders, the class officers, the newspaper staff, the faculty, and maybe one fourth of the junior and senior classes who came to school in their pajamas. But at least a dozen showed up in animal slippers of one kind or another—big, fluffy bunny slippers like Liz’s; cow slippers that mooed; pig slippers that oinked. Pamela had on a pair of duck slippers that quacked each time she took a step.

  Jill came in tailored black satin pajamas with lace trim; Karen’s were trimmed in fake fur. Penny, however, wore the same red flannels with the trap-door seat that she’d worn the night of my coed slumber party two years ago—the night she and Patrick faked a kiss for the camera. That was probably the beginning of my breakup with Patrick. I felt that old familiar pang in the chest and was surprised that, after all this time, I wasn’t over it yet.

  The teachers were the funniest, though. Our principal came in his PJs with a pillow tied to his back like a backpack. The chemistry prof brought a teddy bear. One teacher even came in her pajamas with a pacifier on a string around her neck, and our English teacher had bedtime storybooks scattered around the room. It was a blast.

  The one person who didn’t quite get it was Amy Sheldon, or “Amy Clueless,” as some of the girls call her. We’ve never decided what makes her tick, but Amy marches to a different drummer. On Pajama Day it appeared that she had simply got out of bed that morning, put on her shoes and socks, then her coat, and came to school—hair unbrushed, one thin, wrinkled pajama leg hiked up above her knee. She thought it was a “come-as-you-are” party or something.

  “This is fun, isn’t it, Alice?” she said, laughing, when I saw her in the hall. “My mom didn’t believe we were supposed to come to school in our pajamas, but I showed her, didn’t I? Didn’t I, Alice?”

  I thought of the teasing Amy had endured since she’d moved from special ed into the regular classrooms. She was undersized for her age, her features not quite symmetrical, and when she talked, her voice seemed too loud for such a small body.

  “You sure did,” I told her.

  Probably because the cheerleaders got involved and all the class
officers, too, more kids took part in Beach Day on Tuesday. No one could wear bathing suits, but we could wear shorts. When we changed classes, the halls were filled with the squeakings and squishes of dozens of flip-flops. During P.E. the gym teacher gave us an exercise to do with beach balls, and almost every T-shirt had a slogan on it—the kind you’d see at the beach: EAT ME FOR DESSERT and LIFE IS A BITCH and GOD IS COMING, AND IS SHE PISSED!

  I cut my lunch period short to put my name on the sign-up sheet outside the guidance counselor’s door. I wanted to talk to her about majoring in counseling in college—what courses would be helpful now, what colleges have the best programs, stuff like that.

  She wasn’t in her office. There was a sign on her door that said GONE SWIMMING, but I took the clipboard off the hook and penciled in my name for the following noontime slot. As I was putting it back, Karen and Jill and another girl sauntered by the doorway in their cutoffs and halter tops.

  Karen’s sandals had sequins on them. Jill wore a huge pair of dangly earrings made of seashells.

  “Oh, Alice!” Jill said, taking in the situation with the kind of condescending smile she’s been giving me lately. “Having problems already?”

  That’s the first thing anyone thinks about when you go to a counselor. What I should have said was, Isn’t everyone? What I said was, “I just want some career information. I’m thinking about majoring in counseling in college.”

  “Counseling!” Jill said. “Spare me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “With all the glamour jobs in the world, you’d pick counseling?” Karen exclaimed. “Gee, why not grow soybeans or something. Now, there’s an idea!”

  Jill laughed. “No, I’ve got it! She could design closets.”

  They were really getting under my skin. “I like the thought of working with people. I think it would be interesting,” I said.