Alice in the Know

  I was all ready to tell her she couldn’t come by anymore when I saw tears streaming down her face. Her bottom lip trembled.

  “Amy?” I said.

  “Brian did something awful,” she said, a little too loudly, and several customers turned and stared.

  I looked around for Juanita. “Could I take my break?” I asked. “This is sort of an emergency.”

  She saw Amy trailing behind me. “Fifteen minutes, Alice, tops.”

  “I’ll be back,” I said, and led Amy over to the women’s room. I’d already guessed what she had to tell me. We sat down on a little couch at one side. “What happened?” I asked.

  “He sent me this thing on my e-mail, and I didn’t know it was him!” she wept.

  I nodded sympathetically. “Oh, that,” I said. “He tricked me, too.”

  She stared. “He did? Did you tell him all that body stuff? It said it would predict my love life! I just wanted to know.”

  “So did I. He’s a jerk, Amy.”

  “But he’s telling everyone. I’m getting e-mails from boys I don’t even know. They want me to do dirty things with them. My dad asked me about the notes—about what I’ve been doing.” Her eyes were streaming tears again and her nose was running.

  Of all the girls at school, Amy Sheldon was probably the least able to defend herself. I just reached out and hugged her. She sobbed. If I could have grabbed Brian by the balls right then and squeezed, I would have.

  “We’re going to get even some way, Amy,” I told her.

  “I’d slap him, but he’d slap me back,” she said.

  “You don’t have to slap him. I’ll think of something,” I said. I got her a tissue and sat with her until she stopped crying. Then I walked her to an exit and hugged her again.

  When six o’clock finally came, I was ready for the day to be over, in more ways than one. Just when I thought I wouldn’t have to waste one more minute obsessing over Brian’s stupid sex quiz, it was beating big-time in my head. I went out to the car and sank down in the driver’s seat, exhaling in one long, continuous breath.

  Then I turned the key in the ignition and nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. The engine was totally, utterly, completely dead.

  I threw back my head and howled: “Arrrggghhh.” That didn’t help.

  I took the key out, inserted it again, and turned. Nothing. It was as though someone had broken in while I was at work and stolen the engine. What did I do now?

  I looked hopefully around. People were hurrying in and out of the mall, either trying to get home in time for dinner or squeezing a little shopping in over the dinner hour. No one even glanced my way.

  Taking my cell phone from my bag, I quickly dialed home, hoping I could catch Dad or Sylvia before they went out, but it was too late. Only the answering machine. “Hello, this is Sylvia McKinley. Neither Ben nor Alice nor I can come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back.” Beep.

  I punched END on the cell phone, my pulse beginning to race. I thought about going back in the store to find someone who could help, but our department was a madhouse. The whole store was, in fact, with our big two-day sale. Did we have AAA? Dad did, I think. Did that include Sylvia or me? I didn’t know.

  So I did the only thing left to do. I called Lester.

  George Palamas, one of his housemates, answered. “Alice?” he said. “Les is grilling some steaks outside. Hold on and I’ll take the phone out there.”

  There were the sounds of footsteps, the slam of a door, outside noises, and then Lester’s voice: “This better be important,” he said. “I’ve got one medium, one rare, and one medium rare, and we paid plenty for these, so I’ve got a short attention span at the moment. What do you want?”

  “I just got off work, and Sylvia’s car won’t start,” I said.

  I could hear him exhale. I could almost feel his breath. “Al, do you have a sixth sense or what? How do you manage to call at the most inopportune times? I need three hands here.”

  “I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do!” I said meekly.

  “Do any lights come on? Anything on the dashboard to tell you what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing! It doesn’t even make a sound. I think maybe someone stole the engine while I was at work,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “I don’t hear anything at all, Lester. Not a clunk or a clink.”

  “Just a minute, Al. I’ve got to turn one of these steaks.”

  “What should I do? I wailed softly.

  “So look under the hood and see if there’s an engine!” he said in exasperation. “Give me a minute here before I burn something… .”

  I laid my cell phone on the seat, sprang the hood latch, and got out. I went around to the front of the car and opened the hood. Everything was still there, I guessed. At least, I didn’t see any empty spaces or disconnected cables.

  I slid back in the car and picked up my cell phone. “The engine’s still there,” I told him.

  He gasped. “You mean you checked?”

  “You said!”

  “God almighty.”

  “So what should I do?”

  “Put the key in the ignition again.”

  I did. “Okay,” I told him.

  “Turn it.”

  I turned. “Nothing,” I said. “I told you!”

  “Is the gearshift in park?”

  I looked. “It’s on ‘D,’” I said. Then I knew. D was for drive. I moved the gearshift to P. I turned the key again. The engine caught.

  “I hear an engine,” said Les. “Al, wasn’t that one of the first things we taught you? Whenever the car won’t start, your first thought should be to check if it’s in park, not to check for a stolen engine.”

  “I’m sorry, Lester!” I mewed, embarrassed. “Go back to your steaks. Go back to your friends. Go back to your life and—”

  “Stuff it, Al,” he said. “Just remember: ‘P’ is for ‘park.’”

  Molly looked as though she’d been crying when I came in. I could tell by her quick, artificial smile that I’d caught her off guard. Maybe she hadn’t heard her mom answer the door. She was lying across her bed when I got upstairs.

  “Maybe you haven’t had such a good day,” I said cautiously, sitting down in a chair by her window.

  Her voice wavered a little. “No day is a good day anymore,” she said. “But I’m not going to lay that on you.”

  “Why not? I’d rather hear how you really feel than what you think I want to hear,” I told her.

  I was surprised then to see tears gathering in her eyes, the way her mouth sagged at the corners, her chin trembling as she tried not to cry. “It’s just so … so … how I don’t want it to be,” she wept, grabbing a tissue and sitting up to blow her nose. “I’m sorry, Alice. I had chemo this morning, and I always feel sick afterward.”

  “Don’t be sorry, be mad! I feel good that you can tell me.”

  “What can I say?” Molly said brokenly. “I can’t say, ‘Why me?’ because other people get cancer too. But I … just feel … as though my body’s turned against me. And when you can’t even trust yourself …”

  I nodded.

  “I had big plans for this summer! I was going to work at the stables on Beach Drive. They have a program for teaching handicapped kids to ride, and I so wanted to do that. And I’d signed up to be a tutor for anyone needing help in science over the summer. Now look at me! I get tired out just going up and down stairs.”

  “Will you get some energy back as the treatment goes along?” I asked.

  “No, less. Especially when I’m nauseated. That’s almost worse than anything. Well, that and my hair.”

  “I’d hate that too,” I said. Her hair didn’t look bad to me, but I did notice some on her pillow.

  She wiped her eyes. “I’m jumping ahead, I know. Maybe if I don’t feel any worse than I do now, it won’t be too bad.” She managed a little smile, so I smiled back.

  “Y
ou’re a fighter, Molly! You’re going to give those cancer cells everything you’ve got.” I was remembering the way she had charged at Faith’s boyfriend last April when he pounded Faith’s face against the hood of his car. “If you go at them like you went at Ron, they don’t have a chance.”

  We both laughed then.

  “I’m glad you came over, Alice,” she said, her blue eyes clear again. “It’s like my life has been divided between before I got leukemia and after. Everyone says that, I know. And yet … when I go to the clinic, I see kids who seem a whole lot sicker than me. And then I wonder if that will be me someday. Bald and pale and string-bean skinny.”

  “What does the doctor say?” I asked.

  “He’s optimistic. He says there’s a lot in my favor—something about hyperdiploidy and other stuff I can’t pronounce. He’s all smiles when he sees me, and I tell myself he wouldn’t be so cheerful if I was going to die.”

  “No, I doubt it,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure.

  “Girls,” called her mom. “We’re going to eat out on the porch tonight. There’s a breeze, and I thought you might enjoy that.”

  “Sure,” said Molly, getting up, and we went downstairs.

  Mr. Brennan was a large man who had an Irish look about him—the opposite of his wife, who was small and dark. He beamed at me as he passed the turkey salad and sliced tomatoes. “Never eat hot food on a screened porch,” he said. “Cancels out the breeze.” I smiled. “You got a big family, Alice?”

  “Just Dad and Lester and me, and our stepmother.”

  “You mean your dad got by with only one daughter?” Mr. Brennan cast his eyes upward in mock despair. “Lord, what did I do to deserve five?”

  I looked questioningly at Molly, and her mother said, “Molly has four older sisters. Two are here in the area, and Avis and Joan are out on the West Coast—California and Oregon.”

  “Avis is coming to see me next week,” said Molly. “And Joan’s coming for the whole month of September.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I always wanted a sister.” And I smiled to myself as I thought of Tracy.

  I told them about the shoplifting incident at work and about how I hadn’t been able to start the car before I came over that day, but I didn’t tell them about Amy. I’d stick to good news, and it was good to see Molly laugh. She’d eaten only a few bites of her dinner, though, and then, near the end, a few bites more. Her mom had made a pineapple custard for dessert, and Molly managed to eat most of that. But after we went back to her room, she excused herself and threw up in the toilet.

  When she came back to her room, she said, “You don’t ever have to worry about me being bulimic, Alice,” she said. “Next to being dizzy, throwing up is my least favorite thing to do.”

  I invited Gwen, Liz, and Pamela over for the night on Sunday. Liz had a henna painting kit, and she and Pamela were making intricate designs on their hands.

  “She just looked miserable,” I said, after telling them about my evening at Molly’s. “I’m so used to seeing her energetic and enthusiastic about everything. Now she just drags up the stairs.”

  “So why did God pick on Molly?” asked Pamela. “She probably doesn’t have an enemy in the whole school, unless it’s Ron. Good grades, great personality …”

  “It’s not like God wants her to suffer. It just might be that some greater good will come out of her having leukemia,” offered Liz.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Molly has to get sick to help God—who is all-powerful—to accomplish something?”

  We thought about that a minute.

  “I think leukemia just happens,” said Gwen. “It’s like an earthquake, a tsunami, a tornado. Nature doesn’t think about humans who get in the way. Storms just happen. Cells in bodies just start multiplying. It’s not something that somebody plans.”

  “Molly feels as though her body’s turned against her,” I said.

  “Cancers are just doing what cancers do,” said Gwen.

  “Then why doesn’t God cure her?” asked Pamela.

  “Maybe he will,” said Liz. “I’m certainly praying for her, and I’m going to ask Father Ryan to say a novena for her too.”

  I wondered if I went to church more if I’d know more about the power of prayer, but I said, “What I don’t understand is that if God knows everything, doesn’t he already know about Molly being sick? Doesn’t he care for her as much as we do?”

  “Of course he does,” said Elizabeth.

  “Then why do we have to beg him to help her? Why wouldn’t he just do it? It’s like we’re trying to get him to change his mind or remind him of what he should be doing.”

  “I could get in trouble hanging around you, Alice,” Liz joked. “You’re always asking why.”

  “I think it’s good to ask questions,” said Gwen. “Of course, I’d never do it around my grandmother. If I asked her a question like that, she’d pinch my arm black and blue.”

  We laughed. “Did you ever test her?”

  “Just once,” Gwen said ruefully. “She was reading us a Bible story about Joshua and his army marching seven times around Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down. The story said they had to destroy the city because it stood in their way to the Promised Land. And I said to my grandmother, ‘If they could go around it in the first place, why did they have to destroy it? Why didn’t they just go around?’ She called me ‘Miss Smarty-Mouth’ and pinched my arm, and my daddy told me later that if I had any more questions about the Bible, I should come to him.”

  “So did you ask him about Joshua and Jericho?” Liz asked.

  “He didn’t know either,” said Gwen. “He said that the way men fight today doesn’t make any more sense than the way they did back then.”

  “Smart man,” I said. “But right now I’m down on guys.” I’d already told them about Brian sending the quiz to Amy. “All I can think about is how to get even with Brian. Amy’s been getting e-mails from guys, and so have I. Some guy who was in my Algebra II class last year e-mailed me and said, ‘I heard you want to try oral. I’m up for it, if you know what I mean.’ I want revenge.”

  “Problem is, if you gave Brian a quiz like that, he’d love for you to publicize his answers,” Gwen said. “If he had sex with seventeen girls, he’d want everyone to know it.” She was idly turning the pages of the newspaper, her bare feet curled around her can of 7UP on our coffee table.

  “What would embarrass Brian would be to say he wasn’t getting any sex,” said Pamela.

  “And how would we prove that?” I asked.

  We went on talking about a punishment to fit his crime, and nothing seemed bad enough for Brian Brewster.

  Suddenly Gwen stopped turning pages. “Hey!” she said.

  We stopped talking and looked her way. “Look!” she said, and turned the paper around to show us a quarter-page ad for air conditioners.

  I didn’t get it. There was a picture of a heavy man hunched over a computer. He wasn’t very attractive. His belly hung out over his belt, sweat poured down his face, and he was staring—leering, actually—at a picture of an iceberg in a cold blue ocean on his screen.

  The ad read: Some people settle for fantasy. And at the bottom of the ad it read, Why wait? All air conditioners half price, and gave the details.

  “Yeah?” said Pamela.

  “We cut off the words at the bottom,” said Gwen. “We blank out the picture of the iceberg on his screen and substitute the word ‘sex’ in big letters. And we print ‘Brian Brewster’ on the man’s T-shirt.”

  I began to get the picture. “So under the title ‘Some people settle for fantasy,’ we have a cartoon of Brian getting his kicks by computer instead of the real thing,” I said. “Gwen, you are a total genius!”

  “Pure luck,” said Gwen.

  “The minute he sees it, he’ll tear it up,” said Liz.

  “Not if we scan it into the computer and send it out as an attachment to every single e-mail address we know,” said Gwen
. “Someone started circulating that list of e-mail addresses around just before school let out, remember? In the cafeteria? That’s probably how Brian got Amy’s address; she added hers to the list.”

  Gwen was the only one of us with a scanner, I had Dad’s car for the evening, and you never saw four girls abandon a house as fast as we did, newspaper in hand, heading for Gwen’s. We cut and pasted and printed and adjusted. The man in the advertisement even looked a little like Brian. We darkened his hair a little and made his eyebrows a little heavier. And when the cartoon came on the screen, we screamed with delight. Perfect. The absolute perfect revenge.

  There was a leering Brian Brewster, his eyes bugging out with pleasure, sweat pouring down his face, staring at the word SEX on his computer screen. Some people settle for fantasy, it read. We sent it to every address on the list—friends at school and even friends of friends.

  Gwen heard back from at least seven girls who said they had received Brian’s quiz, three of whom had fallen for it. But we didn’t hear from Brian. Keeno told us later that he asked him if he’d gotten the cartoon. Brian said he didn’t know what Keeno was talking about, but his ears turned two shades of pink and he’d changed the subject.

  10

  Families

  I was off work on Monday and had spent the morning going through old magazines to clear off some of the shelves in my room—all those supposedly hip magazines for teen girls that I’d bought or that friends had given me, with articles earmarked that I just had to read: “See If Guys Find Your Style Fab or Freaky”; “Make Him Wanna Do the Tongue Tango with You”; “What’s Your Holiday Groove?” I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one in the state of Maryland who feels that all this stuff was meant for somebody else.

  Who writes these articles, anyway? Who says things like, If your ’rents are having a party at their crib and you’re stuck there, wear duds your folks will dig but that are still hot and hip or Does your hunk meet your cutie requirements, or is he barf bait who will diss you when he gets a chance? I mean, who talks like that? None of my friends, that’s for sure. These writers may be thirty-year-old women trying. to sound thirteen, but they sound more like what you’d hear if you pressed a button on a Barbie doll.