Dangerously Alice

  The next day I came home from school to find stacks of lumber and a load of cement blocks in our side yard. The day after that a truck delivered the Porta-John. The third day a cement truck was making deep ruts in the yard as it backed up over the curb. Men were pushing a huge wheelbarrow back and forth, and there was constant hammering from the back of the house.

  REMODELING BY ACE ARCHITECTS, read a sign.

  “Welcome to the madhouse,” I said to Les when he came by later to see what was going on.

  “They’re really going through with it, huh?” he said.

  “Yep. The new addition will be a family room off the kitchen and a study off the dining room, with a powder room in between. And a screened-in porch off the family room. Upstairs it will be a master bedroom suite with a bath, two walk-in closets, and a laundry/linen closet.”

  “Wow!” said Les. “Now that I’ve moved out and you’ll be going to college in a couple of years, they must be expecting a lot of grandchildren.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Get busy.”

  I walked to homeroom on Friday hugging my books to my chest. I hate dragging a backpack from class to class. I was thinking how utterly, completely, totally ordinary life was. Really. I was an ordinary girl with ordinary hair and ordinary clothes, making ordinary grades, and I wouldn’t even have an ordinary home to remember after I left. It would be changed forever. I was trying to figure out how I felt about that.

  On one level I didn’t want it to change. I wanted the same old thing I loved to come back to. If anything was going to change for the better, let it be me, I thought. My life. My personality. My grades. My future. Anything. Let me be remembered as anything except Miss Goody Two-shoes—the nice, dull, sweet, obedient, ordinary, dry-as-dust Alice McKinley.

  “Alice, Alice, Alice!” Amy Sheldon yelled at me from half a hallway down. “Do you know how many girls in our school have a name beginning with ‘A’?”

  I hate it when she yells to me like that. I shook my head.

  “I don’t either. I just thought maybe you knew,” she said as she got closer. “But we’re two of them. That’s one way we’re alike!”

  I ducked through the doorway of my classroom, glad I didn’t have any classes with Amy, and sat down in the middle row, third seat from the back, as always. Mr. Hertzel makes us sit in the same seats each morning to make taking attendance easier. He goes over the announcements, reminders—all the housekeeping details of our school life—and then we listen while the office plays the national anthem and we say the Pledge of Allegiance.

  I was only half listening to Mr. Hertzel talk about what was and was not appropriate use of our lockers—decorating with balloons on birthdays was appropriate; painting our lockers was not—when Tony Osler suddenly walked into the room and stopped at the teacher’s desk. He was wearing a dark blue pullover with his jeans, an orange-striped shirt collar sticking out the top. Surprisingly cute.

  Mr. Hertzel stopped talking and turned to look at Tony.

  “Could I speak to Alice McKinley for a moment?” Tony asked, bold as brass.

  I stared. Wha …?

  Mr. Hertzel frowned. “This can’t wait till after the bell?”

  “Not really,” said Tony.

  I thought maybe I was supposed to get up and go out in the hall, but Hertzel gave a disgruntled nod and Tony came right down the row, stepping over backpacks, till he got to my desk.

  “Alice,” he said, leaning down and lowering his voice a little. “Would you go to the Snow Ball with me?”

  My God! I couldn’t believe it! A senior walking into a junior’s homeroom and asking me to the Snow Ball, in front of everyone! A junior who still wore braces! I was dumbfounded! Amazed! Excited! Thrilled!

  “Okay,” I said, my face heating up.

  He smiled at me, turned around, and stepping over the backpacks on the floor again while everyone grinned and looked at me, he left the room.

  A couple of kids clapped, and even Mr. Hertzel smiled a little.

  Karen is in my homeroom, and she looked the most astonished. When our eyes met briefly, however, she quickly looked bored, but I knew that I wouldn’t have to tell a single person who I was going to the Snow Ball with. By noon everyone would have heard the news: Miss Goody Two-shoes was going to the Snow Ball with a senior who was definitely not an imitation of Patrick Long or Sam Mayer. He wasn’t like Scott Lynch, either, I realized with a pang, and now that I’d committed myself to go with Tony, I couldn’t go with Scott even if he asked.

  You only live once, I told myself. And I knew Pamela or Gwen would say, You go, girl!

  “Is it true?” Pamela asked when she saw me in the cafeteria. “Karen said Tony walked in the room, interrupting the teacher, and asked you to the dance in front of everybody!”

  I smiled happily as we walked our trays to a table. “That’s the way he did it.”

  “You’re really going with Tony?” Liz exclaimed. “Gosh, Alice!”

  “What?” I said.

  She grimaced a little. “Isn’t he sort of … you know … fast?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out,” I said flippantly.

  “Wow!” said Pamela.

  Gwen just gave me a benign smile and went on eating her salad. “Every so often a girl has to go a little wild,” she said.

  “You approve?” asked Liz.

  “She didn’t ask me,” said Gwen. “What do I know?”

  Strange how that incident in homeroom made a difference, though. I felt more attractive. Older. More sophisticated. It was just so weird, the way Tony interrupted the class. Just took over. Whatever I thought of Tony Osler before, I was as excited as anything now. He always had been sort of flirty with me. Curious about me, maybe.

  I saw him in the hall on the way to Spanish that afternoon. He playfully grabbed my arm and pulled me close to him.

  “Didn’t embarrass you, did I?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Not really. I think you shook up Hertzel, though.”

  “Just wanted to get my bid in before you were asked by someone else,” he said. “See you.” And he was off.

  I wondered what that meant. Had he heard that someone else was interested? Somebody else might ask? I felt a little sick to my stomach. What if that someone was Scott?

  But by the end of the day I learned that Scott Lynch was taking a girl from Holton-Arms, the exclusive girls’ school in Bethesda. It would undoubtedly be someone who wasn’t stupid enough to tell the world she wanted to be a bubble dancer, blowing her one good chance to let guys know she had given her future some thought. I told myself I didn’t care. If private school girls were Scott’s taste, then I’d never make the grade. And besides, I insisted, Tony would be more fun.

  Dad was watching the news that evening when I told him.

  “I got asked to the Snow Ball today,” I said, curling up on the end of the couch. Dad says that as soon as we build the family room, the TV goes in there.

  “Oh?” he said, then listened to the commentator another fifteen seconds and switched the set to mute when a commercial came on. “Who you going with? Patrick?”

  “Patrick!” I stared. Was Dad living in a time warp or what? “Dad, I haven’t gone out with Patrick for the last two years!”

  “I knew that,” said Dad, grinning. “But since you’re not going out with Sam any longer, I figured maybe Patrick was back in the picture.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m going with a senior. Tony Osler.”

  “A senior, huh?” Now I had his full attention. “He the same fellow who drove you to that Halloween party last year?”

  “Yes. He drove a bunch of us. It wasn’t a date or anything.”

  “How well do you know this Osler boy?” he asked, and kept the mute on even though the commentator was back again.

  “Well, this is my third year on The Edge, and he’s been on the staff the whole time. I guess you could say I know him pretty well.”

  “Safe driver?” asked Dad.

  ??
?We’ve had this conversation before,” I reminded him.

  “Anyone else going with you?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll probably double with somebody,” I said.

  “Well, make sure to get all the details. If I know where you’ll be all evening, I won’t volunteer for parent chaperone,” he said, and laughed when he saw the horrified look on my face. “Don’t worry. Just like to shake you up a little.”

  I decided to be the very best daughter I could—until the end of the month, anyway, when I’d have earned the privilege of having friends in the car with me. I took a load of laundry from the dryer and carried it upstairs to iron the collars of some of my shirts. I’m not fond of the “slept-in” look, where the front edges of a shirt are curled and wrinkled.

  We leave the ironing board up in Lester’s old room, so I called downstairs, “Sylvia, I’m going to touch up a few things. Anything you want ironed?”

  “Oh, would you, Alice?” she called back. “There are two shirts of Ben’s hanging on a closet doorknob and a blouse of mine on a chair. Those and a few of Ben’s handkerchiefs. That would be great.”

  We couldn’t see out the back windows of Dad and Sylvia’s bedroom anymore because the workmen had stretched a heavy sheet of plastic on the other side of that wall to seal out noise and dust until it was time to take the wall itself down.

  Dad and Sylvia really did need more space, I realized. There were two big closets in their bedroom, but one had shelves instead of clothes racks, and we used it to store extra blankets and pillows. Suitcases took up the lower half. The other closet was crammed with Dad’s clothes on one side, Sylvia’s on the other. I could smell the scent of Sylvia’s perfume as I pressed her blouse and put it back in the closet. I wondered what kind of clothes my mom had worn. Whether she would have had so many nice things—the silky dresses, the sling-back pumps, the beautiful sweaters with the gorgeous colored yarns. Les said she usually wore slacks. Was Sylvia sexier? Would Dad remember my mother’s scent?

  Then I remembered our visit to Grandpa McKinley just before he died—how he mistook me for Mom. “Marie,” he kept calling me, and I was glad, for him, to be her.

  Well, I told myself as I ironed the clean handkerchiefs, I’m not her, and I can’t be her, and I can’t be a replica of Sylvia, either. All I can be is me, whoever that is.

  When I took my own shirts back to my room, I found Annabelle asleep on my bed.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” I told her. “When their new bedroom is finished, off you go.”

  6

  Speaking of Animals …

  I was taking Speech as my elective, and was almost as nervous about that as I was about geometry. The problem was that Gwen helps me whenever I don’t understand something in Geometry, but no one can take your place in speech. You’re so alone up there. At least in geometry, when you have to go up to the board to prove a theorem, all you need to do is get it right. But if you have to memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Dragonfly” and recite it in front of the class, you not only have to get the words right, you have to think about expression and volume and voice quality and the fact that your armpits are wet and your knees are knocking.

  I knew I needed it, though. If my career was going to involve people, it was important to know how to speak distinctly and be comfortable in front of groups. But Mrs. Cary took off two points for each “I mean” or “Y’know” or “like” and it’s hard not to include those when you’re talking extemporaneously.

  In the ten weeks since the semester began, we’d recited poetry so that every word was articulated; we’d memorized lines from a play and presented them with great drama. We’d described the workings of a machine; given instructions for making pizza; and practiced introductions. But last Friday, Mrs. Cary had given us a new assignment:

  “Choose a controversial subject, something you feel strongly about, and give a three-minute talk defending your position,” she said. “Don’t memorize it and don’t use notes. You’ll be graded primarily on your passion and your persuasiveness—how successful you are in getting us to agree with, or at least understand, your point of view.”

  I was thinking about that as I walked to second period on Monday morning. I felt strongly about injustice and prejudice and torture and rape and animal cruelty, but these weren’t exactly controversial issues, Annabelle notwithstanding. I was pretty strongly against hunting and trapping. But someone could argue that if I wore a suede jacket or leather shoes or a fur-trimmed cap, my heart wasn’t really in it.

  Then I remembered an article I’d read about a woman who worked in a medical research lab, but she was really a spy for an organization that watches for cruel treatment of laboratory animals and then publicizes it. I still remembered the photo of the cat that was trying to walk again after they’d broken its spinal cord.

  When I took my seat in World History, Patrick said, “Ah! The girl with the furrowed brow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m trying to think of a controversial subject to present in speech class.”

  “Socialized medicine, the Palestinian cause, capital punishment, statehood for Puerto Rico …,” said Patrick.

  I looked at him long and hard. “You know what?” I said. “Your brain is so full of stuff from your accelerated program that it’s just spilling over.”

  He laughed. “Is that a problem?”

  I wondered if he was still seeing Marcie, the girl he’d taken to the Jack of Hearts dance last February. “Don’t you ever think of anything fun?” I asked.

  “All the time,” he said. “Whenever I can squeeze it in.”

  “Yeah? I didn’t see you at the Homecoming Dance. Are you going to the Snow Ball?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “See what I mean? Why not?”

  “Because I’m visiting colleges that weekend. A friend invited me to Bennington,” said Patrick.

  I wanted to ask whether the friend was male or female, but this was undoubtedly to check out schools, knowing Patrick.

  “You going to the dance?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh? Who with?” he wanted to know.

  “A guy from The Edge.”

  “Sam?”

  “No,” I said. “A senior. Tony Osler.”

  Patrick blinked. “Tony? You’re going with him?”

  “What part of ‘Tony Osler’ don’t you understand?” I joked.

  “All of him,” said Patrick.

  “Why? What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. He just doesn’t seem your type, that’s all,” Patrick said.

  The teacher was looking around now, checking his attendance book.

  “So what is my type?” I asked. If he said sweet or nice, I was going to go out and get a tattoo.

  “Hmmm,” said Patrick. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  All that said to me was that I was so unremarkable, so plain, so vague, so vanilla, that I couldn’t even be typed. I reached for my history book and buried my face in the pages.

  Neither Elizabeth nor Gwen got asked to the Snow Ball, strangely enough. Liz couldn’t get up the nerve to ask a guy herself, so she wasn’t going. Gwen said she didn’t want to ask someone because she didn’t want to buy another dress. I was sure I could get a date for Liz in a minute if she’d let me, but she hates that and made us promise we wouldn’t. She can’t stand the thought of somebody having to be prodded to ask her out.

  Pamela, though, got asked by Tim Moss, a guy in her English class, and Tony had said they could go with us. He’d be driving his dad’s Buick LeSabre for the night, not his little Toyota.

  “So what are you going to wear?” Liz asked me. She didn’t seem to mind talking about the dance, even though she wasn’t going. But that’s Liz. I don’t think there’s a jealous bone in her body.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hate spending money on a dress I’ll probably only wear once or twice. But my other dresses don’t fit so well.”

  “What about
Sylvia? Won’t she help out?” Liz asked.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t feel like asking her. I don’t want to be … indebted to her, you know?”

  “What are you talking about? She’s your stepmom!” Liz said.

  “I know. But we’ve got … issues,” I said.

  “Doesn’t every mom and daughter? Listen, just for kicks,” Liz said, “let’s go to that consignment shop that sells prom dresses.”

  “Used dresses, you mean?” I said.

  “Yeah, but who cares? They’re clean, and they look like new. If you don’t like anything, we’ll leave,” she said.

  We went after school on Tuesday without telling anyone. I’d made sure I had on my strapless bra and decent pants. A little bell tinkled as we entered the store.

  A girl and her mom were the only customers present.

  “May I help?” asked the clerk. “What size are you looking for?”

  “About an eight,” I guessed.

  She led me to a rack against the wall. There were a dozen dresses in my size, their hems almost touching the floor. “Look through these, and tell me if you want to try anything on,” she said, and went back to the counter.

  Liz started sliding the hangers backward, pausing at every dress for my reaction.

  “Too frilly,” I said of a pink ruffled organza.

  “Too severe,” I said of a midnight blue dress with a collar.

  It was easier to reject than to like a dress. We were down to the last three—a red dress with a back cut so low, I’d probably have to leave off my underwear; a gold sparkly dress that looked as though it had belonged to Barbie; and a slim black dress with a halter top and knee-high slits on both sides.

  We lingered over the black one.

  “It’s simple,” said Liz. “Non-fussy.”

  I looked at the price tag. “The price is right!” I said. “I like the top.”

  “Try it on,” said Liz.

  We dumped our backpacks in one corner of the open dressing room. There were no cubicles, no doors to close, just a couple of mirrors on the wall. I slipped out of my jeans and top and slid the black dress down over my head and arms.