Alice in the Know

  Answer the following questions to predict what your future love life will be like. You may be surprised and delighted to discover the sensual side of yourself. Your analysis will appear at the end and will depend entirely on your honesty, so answer truthfully.

  I scrolled down to the first question:

  1. How many times have you had sex?

  Define sex, I thought. They sure got to the point in a hurry. Was fooling around under a boy’s jacket at night on a bus from New York considered sex? I studied the choices given:

  a. Never

  b. Once

  c. Two or three times

  d. More than five

  I clicked on Never.

  2. Have you ever undressed for a guy?

  a. No

  b. Partially

  c. All the way

  No, I clicked.

  3. Have you ever given a guy head?

  a. No

  b. Once

  c. More than once

  d. More than one guy

  It occurred to me that all these questions were directed to girls. There was probably a separate set for guys, I decided. I wondered how the computer knew. I clicked No.

  4. Have you ever been intimately touched by a guy?

  a. No

  b. Yes

  c. More than once

  d. More than one guy

  I chose c. Sam.

  5. How many times a week do you masturbate?

  My God, this was so personal! Lie, I thought. But I looked at the top of that screen where it said I had to be honest to get the right analysis, so I studied the choices:

  a. None

  b. One

  c. Two or three

  d. Every day

  Blushing, I clicked on Two or three.

  6. Which sexual activity would you be willing to try?

  a. Group sex

  b. Anal sex

  c. Oral sex

  d. Intercourse with a dog

  A dog? The only one I was curious about was c.

  7. Do you ever dream about having sex with guys you know?

  a. Yes

  b. No

  c. Sometimes

  Sometimes, I responded.

  Your answers are being analyzed, the screen read. Click SUBMIT, then NEXT. I obeyed.

  Instantly, the screen lit up like a neon sign with lightbulbs blinking around a theater marquee. In big orange letters I read:

  THE JOKE’S ON YOU! YOUR ANSWERS HAVE BEEN FORWARDED TO BRIAN BREWSTER.

  I gave a little scream, and my face grew as hot as the letters. Here’s what you wrote, it read on the screen, and there were my answers, along with my name, for all the world to see.

  I scooted away from the computer, gasping for breath, and heard Sylvia answer the door downstairs.

  “Alice?” she called. “Rosalind’s on her way up.”

  I covered my mouth and stared wildly at the screen as Rosalind’s footsteps sounded on the stairs. Then my round, funny friend was standing in my doorway in her tank top and shorts, giving me her puzzled grin.

  It disappeared as soon as she saw my face. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  I pressed my hands to my burning cheeks. “Brian!” I cried. “I hate him!”

  “Who? What is it?” she asked, walking over.

  I threw myself over the screen so she wouldn’t see it, my face hotter still.

  “What the heck … ?” said Rosalind.

  And then … I started to cry. Brian and Mark and Keeno and Justin and—oh God! maybe even Patrick—and who knows who else were going to know the most personal, intimate things about me! What did it matter if Rosalind saw them? I crumpled into a fetal position, head in my lap. I could sense that Roz was reading the screen.

  “Oh, man,” she said. “I’ve heard about this one.”

  I reared up. “What?”

  “This trick, this Web site, ‘The Joke’s on You!’ You can send any kind of thing to somebody and make them think it came from some anonymous place that doesn’t even know you. But your reply goes back to your so-called friend.”

  “Everyone will see it!” I wept. “He’ll send it out to everyone!” I was practically spitting out the words. I felt like my hair was on fire, I was so furious. “I could kill him, Rosalind!”

  “No need for that,” said Roz. “Exit and get back on this Web site again.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it! Trust me!”

  I rolled my chair up to the computer, closed the page, then went to my “Old Mail” folder and accessed the e-mail titled Your future love life predicted here. Clicking on Start took me to the quiz again.

  “Now what?” I cried. “There’s no way I can delete what I already sent.”

  “Scroll back down to the questions.”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to send him second and third and fourth replies, like you’re having the time of your life.”

  “Are you nuts?”

  “No. Go ahead. We have to make it look like you sent one right after the other. Answer the first one: ‘How many times have you had sex?’ Click on ‘More than five.’”

  “Rosalind … !”

  “Just do it,” she said, so I did.

  “‘Have you ever undressed for a guy?’ Click … Oh, let’s click ‘Partially.’ We’re going to get Brian, whoever he is, so mixed up, he won’t know if he’s coming or going.”

  I began to get the drift. “He’ll always know that the first one was the real one,” I sniffled, my cheeks still wet.

  “Not necessarily,” said Rosalind.

  By the time we got down to how many times a week I masturbated, Rosalind made me select Every day.

  I clicked on the SUBMIT button and started all over again. We sent him one in which I denied doing anything—I’d never been touched, never had sexy dreams—and one in which I went overboard on every question. By the time we’d sent off number five, I felt drained and logged off the computer.

  “I still hate him,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “What if he comes up to me in front of everyone and says, ‘So you’re ready to try oral sex, huh?’ What will I say?”

  “Say, ‘No, Brian! I said I wanted to do it with a dog, don’t you remember?’”

  I smiled a little. “I should take you around with me for the next month or so. I never think up the right answer till it’s too late. He’s such a creep. And I’m an idiot for falling for it.”

  “Don’t ever spill your secrets online,” Rosalind told me. “They’re always going to get out. Now, you ready for that walk in the park?”

  I put on my sneakers and we went outside. I couldn’t believe it. At that exact same moment, guess who was riding by on his way to his job at the pizza place? Just like in the movies, there was Brian’s car, his arm resting on the open window.

  “That’s him—Brian!” I gasped, poking Rosalind.

  She must have taken over my psyche, because suddenly I heard myself yelling, “Hey, Brian! I just sent you some e-mail!”

  The car slowed, and he gave me a cautious smile. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, that trick’s a month old, at least,” Roz called out.

  “Just wanted to liven up your day!” I said pleasantly as we climbed in Rosalind’s car.

  And you know what? Brian’s face got red, and he speeded up and turned the comer. We burst out laughing. “Next best thing to catching him with his pants down,” said Rosalind.

  What I liked most about my friend right then was that she never asked me a thing about my answers to those questions. Never commented. It was like she knew she had come upon private stuff that was meant to be kept private and that my secrets were safe with her. Always before, it seemed, when Rosalind came over to play back in grade school, I ended up getting in trouble. This time she saved my butt.

  “You’re the best,” I told her.

  She grinned. “I know it,” she said.

  I was too embarrassed about my stupidity to tell Sylvia
about it. I did warn Pamela, Liz, and Gwen, luckily, because Liz had found the same thing on her computer.

  But after Dad and Sylvia went out that evening, I was still hating life—Brian, in particular—when Aunt Sally called from Chicago.

  “So what’s going on out there in Silver Spring, sweetheart?” she asked, and I told her about the shoplifting incident at work. I could hear her rapid “Oh my! Oh my!” And then, “Just think! You’ll get your picture in the paper and everything. No, don’t let them put your picture in the paper, Alice, or your name, either. You don’t want those shoplifters looking you up when they get out of prison.”

  I laughed a little. “Don’t worry, Aunt Sally. The store’s taking all the credit for catching those guys. I don’t get so much as a doughnut for my coffee break.”

  Having said that, why did I want to confide in Aunt Sally about the e-mail Brian had sent me? I guess I just wanted to vent until every bit of hate had spilled out, because it was like poison, eating away at my gut.

  “Listen,” I said. “You know what was even worse than that? Some guy I know found out some very personal stuff about me, and I know he’s going to tell all his friends.”

  “Well, that’s awful!” said Aunt Sally. “Did he go through your purse or what?”

  “No … it’s something I said in an e-mail,” I told her.

  “An e-mail? Over the Internet?” Aunt Sally cried. “Oh, Alice, the Internet’s worse than shoplifters! Why, a girl in Indiana was driven off in a panel truck by a man she wrote to on e-mail, and she was never seen again. A widow in South Carolina sold her house to marry a man who proposed to her on the Internet, and it turned out he was married with eleven children.”

  “Don’t worry, I learned my lesson,” I said. “But I’ll never get over the humiliation.”

  “Well, let me tell you what happened to me back in eighth grade,” said Aunt Sally. “I was having my period and kept an extra pad in my pocketbook. That’s a purse, you know. In my day we didn’t have backpacks. In homeroom, if the teacher hadn’t come in yet, the boys had a habit of standing just inside the door and teasing us girls as we came in. One morning they’d try to grab our caps or gloves; another day, they’d try to kiss some of us. They’d trip us or something.”

  “Sounds more like fourth grade,” I told her.

  “Well, we weren’t exactly mature back then,” she said. “On this particular day, though, they were trying to grab our pocketbooks. And as I came in, they grabbed mine. First they threw it around the room like a football, from one boy to another, as I tried to get it back. Then some guy took it over in the corner and started taking stuff out.”

  I knew what was coming.

  “He found my lipstick,” Aunt Sally went on, “and put some on his face. Then he found my pad, and when he realized what it was, he yelled, ‘Hey, Tom! Catch!’ And he threw it to the next guy. As soon as it hit Tom’s chest, he was embarrassed too and threw it to someone else, trying to get rid of it fast. My sanitary pad was getting battered from boy to boy, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew what it was and that it was mine.”

  “Omigod!” I said.

  “I wanted to die, Alice,” said Aunt Sally. “If the floor had opened just then and swallowed me, I would have been glad. But then the pad started to come apart just as the teacher walked in. He was late and feeling crabby and yelled, ‘What is this stuff?’ Somebody said, ‘It’s Sally’s,’ so he said to me, ‘Pick it up.’”

  Listening to Aunt Sally, I could feel my face burning—for her. “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I just sat there, my face getting redder and redder. I couldn’t get out a single word. The teacher was busy, sorting stuff on his desk, and I had to go around the room picking up the remains of that pad while the boys smirked and the girls sat like statues, dying with me.”

  We were both quiet for a moment, each reliving our most embarrassing moments. I was thinking how there is about a forty-year age difference between Aunt Sally and me, yet her humiliation back then was just as intense as mine now.

  “It’s hard for me to realize I used to be so shy,” she said at last. “Today I wouldn’t have stood for that for a moment. I would have gone to that teacher and told him it was something personal that the boys had stolen from my purse. But … I didn’t.” Then she added, “Boys can be really stupid sometimes. I think it has something to do with their trousers.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I think that boys and men go around their whole lives being uncomfortable,” she said. “Just think about it, Alice—all they’ve got between their legs.”

  Had she really said that? I wondered, but she barreled right on. “If anyone should wear a skirt for comfort, it’s a man. But instead, he’s got this seam in his trousers down there, always pulling at him, and I think this has something to do with his brain, I really do. Now, some cultures got it right. Look at the Africans and their loincloths! Look at the Egyptians and their robes! Look at the Scots and their kilts! Why, when your uncle gets irritable and grumpy, Alice, I say, ‘Milt, go take a nice hot soak in the tub and put on your bathrobe.’ And you know, that just calms him right down. I say it’s the trousers binding them down there that makes them do these ridiculous things. That and neckties. Get rid of trousers and neckties, I always say, and we’ll have a more peaceful world.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. “I can’t wait to point that out to Dad and Lester, Aunt Sally,” I said. “I’m so glad you called.”

  9

  Talk

  Pamela called and said her dad really was taking her to the ocean the third weekend in August—it would be a four-day weekend, actually, and he’d said she could invite two friends. She was inviting Liz and me. That was at least one nice thing I had to look forward to over the summer.

  “Great! Sounds good!” I said. “Remember when my dad took us to the ocean?” I was thinking of the summer between sixth and seventh grades, when Patrick had become my boyfriend. “You and Liz and me? It’ll be like old times.”

  I could hear her chuckle over the phone. “And Lester surprised us by showing up later with Patrick?”

  “And you tried to crawl in bed with Patrick to make him think it was me and got Lester instead?” I reminded her, and we both laughed at the memory.

  “I’d sure like to crawl in bed with Les now,” Pamela said. “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to crawl out again, let me tell you.”

  I almost told her that Lester was getting himself engaged, but I stopped myself in time.

  “You working tomorrow?” Pamela asked me.

  “Yeah, ten to six, and then I’m going to drive over to see Molly. Sylvia’s letting me have her car for the day,” I said.

  “I’m on the noon to nine shift, so I can’t go with you,” Pamela told me. “I’ll concentrate on Rehoboth Beach. We’ll have a blast.”

  The next morning I dressed for work and went downstairs for the car keys.

  “Thanks, Sylvia,” I said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be at Molly’s. They invited me for dinner, too, so it might be a while.”

  “Stay as long as you like,” she said. She was standing on a step stool in shorts and a T-shirt, cleaning out cupboard shelves up near the ceiling. “You know, these are so high, they’re almost useless. I’m thinking of taking out this whole back wall when we remodel and adding a family room. What do you think?”

  “I think that whatever you and Dad decide, you’re going to do anyway, so what I say won’t have much effect,” I said breezily.

  I could tell by the look on her face that this hadn’t come out quite right.

  “Alice, your opinion definitely counts,” she said. “We want you to be in on the planning too.”

  “Sure!” I said. “Let me see the floor plan the way you want it, and I’ll put in my two cents. I like the idea of a family room as part of the kitchen.”

  “Do you?” She was pleased. “I’ll work up something and show it to you.” As I picked up the car keys, she said, ??
?I think Ben and I will go out for dinner since you’re eating at Molly’s. If Les comes by, he’s out of luck.”

  “It won’t hurt him to cook for himself a little more,” I said, and went on out to the car.

  It irked me sometimes that Sylvia just seemed to be barreling ahead with plans for renovating the house, and whatever she wanted was fine with Dad. I couldn’t believe he’d give in as easily as he had. If she decided one day that she wanted a study with a stone fireplace up to the ceiling, that was fine with him. What if she decided to put in a bowling alley? Was he just going to lie down and roll over?

  But, of course, I didn’t say anything either. Whatever Sylvia wanted was seemingly fine with me too. We were still so polite with each other. Sometimes I thought that what Sylvia and I needed was a real out-and-out argument. Yelling and everything. And when it was over, if we were still friends, maybe then I’d truly believe we were family. When you live with your birth mother, she sort of has to love you, no matter what. But if it’s your stepmom, how do you ever know for sure?

  Juanita was wearing a new summer outfit when I got to work, a coral linen skirt and top that accentuated her dark hair.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I told her, and her face crinkled in pleasure.

  “I got a few clothes on sale,” she said. “We’re going to Puerto Rico in September—two whole weeks. Are you going to get away at all?”

  “I’m going to the ocean with a friend!” I said. “It would be more fun if her dad wasn’t along, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

  We were busy all day, and Juanita said it would be like this for the rest of the month; we had all the summer stock to get rid of all the final mark-downs, while new fall stuff was coming in every day. If I wasn’t moving racks of clothes around, I was marking down price tags, rearranging new shipments, constantly removing garments from fitting rooms and getting them back on the sale racks. I’d had only a thirty-minute break for lunch and was in no mood to see Amy Sheldon coming toward me halfway through the afternoon.