Alice in Charge

  “I will tell you whatever you want to know,” said Daniel. “And I have something else to tell.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I am calling to take you big Snow Ball.”

  “What?”

  “I am hearing about another dance, a Snow Ball dance. I am inviting you to be my guest.”

  The invitation, or the statement, seemed to hang in the air in front of me, the letters dancing up and down. Was he serious? Daniel had only been in this country a few months. He had only been in our school since September. He had learned to dance only the night before. But what other answer could there be?

  “Sure,” I said.

  Was he ready for this? Was I?

  5

  THE MEANING OF EIGHT

  I didn’t call Patrick, I called Gwen.

  “What am I going to do?” I said in a panic.

  “What do you mean? You’re going to the dance with him. We taught him to dance, remember?”

  “But … what about all the other stuff? The tickets, the flowers, where we eat before the dance? He probably doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t have a car. He doesn’t drive. Gwen, he’s a refugee! He doesn’t have anything!”

  Gwen sure put me down in a hurry. “Then I guess you should have said, ‘No, Daniel. You’re a refugee. You don’t have anything.’”

  I could feel the flush in my cheeks. Gwen had never said something like that to me before.

  “You’re not being fair,” I snapped. “Who’s going to clue him in about what he should wear and what’s expected of him?”

  She was more patient now, but I still wasn’t home free. “Well, what should we expect of a refugee? Why can’t he wear whatever he likes and celebrate his originality? Does he have to come in a black-and-white penguin suit? Does he have to have big bucks in his pockets? Is there a rule that says you couldn’t drive to the dance?”

  I don’t know what it was—shame, perhaps—but she was so politically correct that I just said, “Thanks, Gwen,” and hung up. I’d never done that before either. I sat on the edge of my bed, cell phone in my lap, hugging myself.

  Just fifteen minutes ago I had been eating a bowl of chili, writing an essay for English, feeling like I had a grip on my life, and now I was going down a sinkhole.

  The phone rang again. Not Patrick! Please, not Patrick! I picked it up. It was Gwen.

  “Relax,” she said. “You can double with Austin and me. We’ll think of something.”

  The school was still in high spirits on Monday. Balloons confiscated from the dance were tied to locker doors, and streamers flew from car antennas in the parking lot. Kids were already talking about the next game and the next.

  I was heading to the staff room after school to go over the layout of the paper when Daniel caught up with me, his smile taking up the whole of his face.

  “I am pleased you will go to the Snow Ball with me,” he said.

  “Thanks for inviting me,” I said. “I think it will be loads of fun.”

  “It will be a … a number one for me. A first,” he said. “I asked my brother about it, but he doesn’t know anything about snowballs.”

  “We’ll work out the details later,” I told him. “It’s not until the first week of December, so we don’t have to do anything right now.”

  “So many customs,” Daniel said, walking along beside me. Then he stopped and pulled something out of his notebook, handing it to me, his smile a bit more bashful.

  “I find this in my locker this morning. It is … drawn by the hand? I am thinking it is maybe from you? It means a girl says thank you?”

  I studied the index card in my hand. There were no words, just a circle. And inside the circle, two figure eights, side by side.

  “It’s not from me,” I said, puzzled. “I really don’t know what it means. Maybe someone on the newspaper staff would know. Want me to take it and ask around?”

  “Okay,” said Daniel. And then, “Perhaps another girl is wanting me to take her to the dance?”

  I had to laugh at his cocky self-assuredness. “Hey, Daniel, if you change your mind, go for it,” I teased.

  “No, I did not mean that! But I don’t understand all your customs.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “But when I find out about this one, I’ll let you know.”

  In the newsroom everyone was gathered around Sam’s photos from homecoming weekend, spread out on one of our long tables. We each had our own opinion about which six photos we should use and whether to save some for the following issue.

  “Wish we got one of the streakers,” I said, grinning.

  “So does the faculty,” said Phil.

  We decided on a shot of Pam and Gwen teaching Daniel to dance, for starters. And of course we had to use an image of the float carrying the homecoming king and queen. The one of the winning touchdown … a close-up of the crowd …

  The roving reporters checked in with their quotes and left, and it was finally down to Phil, Tim, Sam, Miss Ames, and me to make the final decisions. When we’d about wrapped things up, I remembered the index card in my bag and pulled it out.

  “Hey, Phil,” I said. “Any idea what this is? Daniel Bul Dau found it in his locker this morning. He asked what it meant. I haven’t a clue.”

  Phil stared at it a minute, then at me. “You’ve never seen one of these before?”

  “No. What is it? Please don’t say it’s porn.”

  “You might call it that,” Phil murmured, and showed it to Tim. “The two eights are shorthand for the eighth letter of the alphabet, ‘H.’ Using two in a row stands for ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  “I don’t believe this!” I gasped.

  “It’s a Nazi symbol. Believe it,” said Phil.

  We sat around the conference table looking at the two eights. Nobody wanted to touch it, like maybe it should be dusted for fingerprints or something.

  “Nice welcome to our school, isn’t it?” said Sam. “Hey, I’m Jewish. Where’s mine? Who’s next?”

  Phil looked at Miss Ames. “Should I do an editorial on it?”

  Miss Ames is a thin woman with an oval face and small features, straight brown shoulder-length hair. Now she studied the card with her hands locked beneath her chin, fingers covering her mouth. Finally she said, “I think that, for now, we should just sit on it. What white supremacy groups want more than anything else is publicity. For us to come on full force, in full battle regalia, just because somebody drops this pitiful little card in a locker, would be giving them more attention than they deserve.”

  I wasn’t sure about keeping it under our hat, though. I thought of something we’d discussed at church—that the greatest wrong is not that evil exists in the world, but that good people sit by and do nothing. Something like that. Weren’t newspapers supposed to find out what was going on beneath the surface and inform the public?

  “Maybe we do more harm just by opting out,” I said. “Maybe there’s more than one person behind this.”

  “There’s that possibility too. I’ll show the card to Mr. Beck. But my guess is that this is a single act by a coward and that no acknowledgment at all would be the best response.”

  “And if there is more than one person involved, maybe they’ll do something else to get attention, and then it might be easier to flush them out,” said Phil.

  We mulled that over awhile.

  “Except that things might already be going on that we don’t know anything about,” said Sam, absently turning his Coke can around and around on the table. “Isn’t there a new club here—SSC—Student Safety Council, I think? What’s that about? Maybe they’ve got wind of stuff like this on campus.”

  “We sent one of our freshman reporters to check out the new clubs, and he visited that one last week. Said it was a small group—five or six. Talked with somebody named Butler, who said they focus on the dangers of drugs and alcohol, dealing with thugs, things like that,” Phil said. “But that could mean that one of them has been attacked or somethin
g.”

  “Curtis Butler. I met him,” I told the others. “He attended our last GSA meeting, Phil. Remember? Do you think there are gay students being harassed who never report it?”

  “The Edge serves as the eyes and ears of the school,” Miss Ames said. “Let us know of anything you find out. In the meantime, I’ll give this card to Mr. Beck.”

  I wondered if we were right in not responding to this. As far as we knew, Daniel—because of his … what? race? nationality?—was the only one to get this card. But what about the other African-American students in our school? What about Curtis, if he was gay, or Lori and Leslie? What about socially challenged students like Amy Sheldon?

  Sometimes the most difficult assignment of all is waiting to see what happens.

  I was hoping that Daniel wouldn’t ask me again about the double eights, but he asked the very next day. He absurdly stuck to his hope that it was a note of some kind from a girl. No bashfulness there.

  “I’m afraid it wasn’t,” I said, looking up at him. “I asked around at our staff meeting, and it seems it’s a Nazi symbol—just some jerk showing off his prejudice.” I’d already told Miss Ames that I would tell Daniel the truth. I saw the puzzlement on his face. “We don’t know who it’s from, Daniel—some cowardly person—but please don’t take this too seriously. I think you know that most of the students are glad to have you here.”

  You never forget the way a smile disappears.

  “They told us before we left Sudan … that there are those like that in America,” he said dispiritedly.

  “Yeah. Unfortunately. And not just in America, as you know. Miss Ames turned the card over to our principal. We’re the ones in charge, though, not the person who drew that thing.”

  “That is good to remember,” Daniel said. And his smile came back, not quite what it was before.

  I helped Sylvia with dinner that night and told her about the double eights. She teaches in middle schools, and was pondering the way they might have handled it if the card had been deposited there.

  “We probably wouldn’t do anything either if it were a single incident—a note, a scribble. You want to pick your battles and not bring too much attention to something stupid,” she said. “But it’s a shame it happened to Daniel.”

  “This is going to be the busiest semester of my life,” I told her, letting out my breath. “You solve one problem and something else pops up. I wish we had a mid-semester vacation.”

  “Patrick coming home for Thanksgiving?”

  “I’m not sure. His family’s been spending a lot of time at his uncle’s in Wisconsin, but I think he said he was coming home.” I gave Sylvia a wistful smile. “Hope so, anyway.”

  Marilyn Rawley Roberts was wearing real maternity clothes now. For the first four months of her pregnancy, she’d gotten by with denim jumpers and big shirts. Now when I went to the Melody Inn on Saturdays, I found her in the “official uniform,” as she calls it—stretch pants and smock tops. Customers smiled and asked the due date (the end of February) and whether it was a boy or girl (Marilyn and Jack wanted to be surprised).

  “Wow, Marilyn!” I said that Saturday when we were rearranging the CDs on a new rack. “I feel like I’ve known you since …”

  “Forever,” she said. “Since I was Lester’s supposedly number one girlfriend.” She laughed when she said it, without a trace of resentment or regret, which meant we could discuss it.

  “Unfortunately, that’s what several girls thought, I guess,” I said, accepting the handful of CDs she gave me and putting them in alphabetical order on the rack. “You always seemed like … like Nature Girl or something to me.”

  “Nature Girl?” Her eyes widened for a second, then crinkled in laughter.

  “In fact,” I went on, “your wedding was exactly as I’d imagined it would be—in a meadow with wildflowers. Except … you’d be barefoot and the groom would be Lester.”

  “Yeah, well, sometimes life knows what’s best for us, and I can’t imagine being married to anyone else but Jack. I love him to pieces. How is Les, by the way? Did he ever finish his thesis?”

  “Almost done. He graduates in December.”

  “Wonderful! Then what?”

  “I don’t know. He has a full-time job in the personnel department at the U. Maybe he’ll stay there awhile, which means I could see him every day if I’m accepted.”

  “You’re applying to Maryland?”

  “And a few others. They have a good program in counseling.” When she didn’t respond, I asked, “Where did you think I would go?”

  “I hadn’t thought much about it, Alice. It’s so entirely your business.”

  “Well, if you were graduating from high school this spring, and if Jack weren’t in the picture, where would you have liked to go?” I asked.

  “If money wasn’t a consideration, you mean? Oh … Berkeley … USC; University of Seattle, maybe. Love that campus. Or some little college up in Maine.”

  I felt a prick of anxiety and a weight that settled in. “You wouldn’t want to be closer to home? Friends and family?”

  “I’d expect to make new friends. But when I settled down, like I am now, I’d want to be near my folks if I could, especially if I was planning a family. But college is our chance to explore a little.”

  “I just think … I mean, with the economy the way it is … and we’re not exactly rich …”

  “The University of Maryland is an excellent school, Alice, and will save your dad a heap of money,” Marilyn said quickly. “You always were a considerate person. You’ll do fine.”

  Our new clerk came back from lunch just then. At first Dad had considered hiring two new people when David Reilly left, as Marilyn would be going on maternity leave in February. But with sales down and some of the stores around us closing, Dad settled for one more full-time employee. Kay Yen was a college student, as David had been. She’d earned her bachelor’s degree and wanted to take a year or two off and work to save some money before she started graduate school.

  She and Marilyn got along famously from the start. They were both on the short side, and both had brown eyes. Marilyn had shoulder-length brown hair, however, while Kay’s was short and black, turned under at the edges. Marilyn wore dangly gypsy-type earrings, while Kay wore tiny pearls in her earlobes. But when you heard them laughing together in the next room, you couldn’t tell them apart.

  “What did you major in?” I asked Kay, my mind still on college.

  “Chemistry,” she said as she cut open the next box and began stacking CDs on the counter. “I have a minor in music and was trained as a singer, but I’m really not good enough to do concert work, and I’m not sure I’d be happy teaching. So I guess I’ll go into chemistry, my second love.”

  “You sound like the guy you replaced,” I said. “He couldn’t decide between marrying or entering the priesthood. He chose the priesthood.”

  “Well, I’m sort of letting my profession find me,” said Kay. “My parents want me to marry and give them a grandchild. It’s hard to think about having a child when you feel so much like one yourself.”

  That sure resonated with me. Maybe it’s normal to feel so unsettled. Maybe there are more Lesters and Davids and Kays than I’d thought, and it’s the unusual person who knows from day one just what she wants to do and where to go to school. “Brothers and sisters?” I asked Kay.

  “I’m an only child. The one-child policy in China, you know,” she said.

  I thought about the card Daniel had found in his locker. “Do you feel welcome in America?” I asked her.

  “Of course!” Kay replied. “I’ve lived in this country since I was six. But then, we’ve always lived in college towns. You can get complacent in a college atmosphere and feel that everyone in America accepts you. And that’s not always the case.”

  6

  ROAD TO CHAPEL HILL

  The Gay/Straight Alliance was celebrating National Coming Out Day on October 11, a day set aside to encourage gay, le
sbian, bisexual, and transgender people to be themselves, to support them if they decide to “come out” to their friends and families. Just as quarterback defines only one part of who a student might be, Mr. Morrison likes to say, so does gay or straight represent only a part. “We are the sum of all our parts,” we say at our meetings.

  Some people call it International Awareness Day, so we had posters using both names. The GSA had been working on a huge paper rainbow, and some of us got to school early that Monday morning to attach it to the arch just inside the main entrance. We had rainbow armbands available on a little table outside the auditorium for students to wear to show support for everyone’s sexual orientation.

  Daniel Bul Dau was clearly shocked when he saw two guys greet each other at the table with a kiss.

  “In my country,” he told us, “we would be put to death. There is no such homosexuality in Sudan.”

  “Really?” asked Phil. “Then who do they put to death?”

  Daniel seemed confused. “If there is homosexuality, I have never heard one speak of it. And not with rainbows. But I will ask my brother about it.”

  A lot of kids paused to look the table over and pick up a brochure. Curtis Butler was one of them. Others stopped to ask questions, and a few accepted an armband.

  Gwen and Pam, Liz and I sat out under a tree at lunchtime along with Lori and Leslie. Leslie was telling how she came out to her mom a couple of years before, when she and Lori started hanging out a lot.

  “Mom was trying to get me interested in a guy down the street—his mom was in her book club—and I decided I just had to tell her or else she’d go on pressuring me all through high school,” she said.

  Lori listened sympathetically, though she must have heard this story a dozen times.

  “Finally, when I’d run out of excuses,” Leslie continued, “I said, ‘Mom, I really don’t want to go out with guys. I’m a lesbian.’”

  “My mom would freak out,” Pamela interrupted. “She really would. To her, that would be worse than … worse than me getting pregnant. And she’d blame herself.”