Alice in April

  Miss Summers drove me home. She stayed awhile, then Dad came and she left. They said all the right things—how no one knew just how bad things were going for Denise; how sometimes you can tell when someone’s thinking about suicide and sometimes you can’t; how nice it was that I had befriended her, and the fact that she’d given me some favorite things showed how much that friendship meant.

  But it hadn’t meant enough to save her. If I’d known Denise better, I might have known what her giving me that stuff really meant. I might have talked her out of it. All the time we were eating pineapple upside-down cake the night of the party, Denise had probably known what she was going to do come Monday.

  “The … the thing is,” I said to Dad, “she … wasn’t really a friend. Not a close one, I mean. In a lot of ways I didn’t even like her. I was just nice to her.”

  “You can’t make yourself like someone, Al.”

  “Why did she do it? There were people she could have talked to about it. Someone would have helped her. Once she … once she decided to kill herself, she didn’t have any choices left.”

  “I don’t know why, Al. None of us really knows what it was like to be Denise.”

  Things were real quiet around school that week. Kids didn’t do a lot of laughing, especially the day of the funeral. A lot of us stopped in on our way home from school Wednesday to sign the register. The coffin was closed. I couldn’t tell from the various relatives who the parents were. Some of them were crying; some weren’t. A rumor went around that social workers placed some of the Whitlock kids in foster homes, but I don’t know if it was true or not.

  Pamela, Elizabeth, and I got together every evening and talked. At Pamela’s, her mother made chocolate chunk cookies the size of saucers, as though cookies would help pull us through. If only they would have helped Denise. If it were just that simple.

  It helped to have friends to share feelings with, though. No matter what our parents said, no matter how logical their arguments, we kept asking, “What if …?” No matter how we tried not to think about it, our thoughts returned again and again to those railroad tracks, and what Denise must have been feeling when she headed there instead of school on Monday. And then … the thought of the train coming … of Denise just standing there … the engineer blowing the whistle … Denise just standing.…

  I couldn’t seem to stop shivering.

  “We’ve got to promise,” Elizabeth said tearfully, “that if any of us ever, ever thinks about doing something like that, she’ll tell the others.”

  “What if she can’t?” asked Pamela. “What if all she knows is she’s depressed, and she doesn’t think about killing herself till five seconds before she decides to do it?”

  “There are signs,” I said. “Like if one of us cries all the time.…”

  “We all cry all the time!” said Elizabeth. “I’ve cried more since I got to seventh grade than I ever did in my life.”

  “Okay, scratch crying,” I said. “If one of us starts giving away her stuff, then we worry.”

  Pamela thoughtfully chewed her lip. “What about those earrings you gave me last month, Alice? You said you didn’t want them anymore.”

  “One pair doesn’t count,” I said. “Two pairs, a warning sign. Three mean business.”

  “And if one of us talks a lot about dying, that would be a sign,” Elizabeth said.

  “It doesn’t count, though, if someone says, ‘I’ll just die!’” I told them. “Elizabeth says that once a day.”

  “Okay, it’s serious if one of us really makes plans,” Pamela decided.

  We were lying side by side on Pamela’s bed, picking cookie crumbs off the comforter, and finally Pamela turned over and said, “You know what? When you come right down to it, all we can do is just try to be the best friends to each other that we can and hope it’s enough.”

  Elizabeth sniffled a little. I think I was sniffling too.

  “You’re right,” I said, my nose all clogged. “Our parents have been alive a lot longer than we have and they don’t have all the answers either.”

  Maybe that was it. You just try to be the best twelve you can be or the best thirty or the best seventy—whatever age you are—and then, whatever you have, you run with it.

  “I feel like I want to do something for Denise, though,” I told them. “We talked about it in Hensley’s class today. Somebody said we should put the newspaper article about her death in the time capsule, and maybe a poem about her or something; give her a little immortality, but Hensley said no.”

  “That’s what he told our class too,” said Elizabeth. “He said we had to think about what kind of a signal we were sending if we give Denise all the fame and attention in death that she missed in life.”

  And so, when the time capsule was buried on Friday, with all our letters in it, our school pictures, and the ten objects we’d voted on in class, there was no newspaper story of Denise’s death. But Mr. Hensley let me, by special request, place Denise’s bracelet from Hawaii in the capsule so that when we opened it when we were sixty, I’d find a private memento, from Denise to me, of a girl I hardly knew.

  20

  A LETTER TO MYSELF

  ON SUNDAY, DAD AND MISS SUMMERS went up in the hot air balloon.

  We’d all got up at four in the morning, and Lester and I drove them to a field in Virginia where the balloons were launched. Dad had brought a bottle of champagne to take with them, Miss Summers packed a lunch, and she was more giggly than I’d ever seen her before. I think maybe she was a little nervous. Maybe even a little scared. It’s weird to think about your teacher being scared. This time she was wearing jeans and a cotton sweater.

  No one knew exactly where the balloon would land, so a chase car always followed them from below. Once the balloon came down, the driver brought them to a parking lot about fifteen miles away, where we were going to wait for them. But they were twenty feet up in the air when Lester realized that Dad had his car keys. After Dad had taken Miss Summers’s lunch out of the trunk, he’d forgotten to give the keys back.

  We were both yelling and jumping up and down. “Dad!” Lester bellowed. “The keys! My car keys!”

  Dad’s face froze for a moment, and then he jerked his hand in his pocket and threw the keys over the side of the balloon. Lester went scrambling through the grass after them, and the last I saw of Miss Summers, her head was tilted back in laughter and her hair was blowing in the wind. Just like in the shampoo commercials.

  We walked back to the car, Les and I. It was an almost perfectly quiet morning. Mist was still rising up over the fields, and even though the wind was chilly, the sun was warm—the kind of day you just know can only get better.

  “And so they lived happily ever after,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Dad and Miss Summers. Do you think they’ll marry, Lester?”

  “Who knows? But nobody lives happily ever after, Al. A lot of the time, maybe, but not all the time. Not even Language Arts teachers.”

  We got in the car, and Lester started the engine.

  I guess I was having trouble giving up being Woman of the House, because I heard myself asking, “Did you ever make up with Marilyn or Crystal?”

  “Make up as in ‘happily ever after’?” Lester asked.

  “No, as in talking on the phone now and then,” I told him.

  Lester nodded. “It’s Joy who’s upset. She said I spent the whole evening making eyes at old girlfriends while she got stuck with Loretta.”

  “So now Joy’s mad at you?”

  “Not anymore. I sent her a rose.”

  I groaned, but Lester had turned on the radio, and didn’t notice. I knew if I said anymore, I’d have to shout, so I stretched out my legs and prepared to enjoy the ride.

  As I thrust my hands in my pockets, my fingers touched a piece of paper. I pulled it out, unfolded it, and found the draft of the letter I had turned in to Hensley to go in our time capsule:

  Letter to Myself

&nbs
p; Dear Alice:

  I can’t believe that when you read this you’ll be sixty years old. Right now that seems ancient to me—older than Dad, even. I wonder if you feel ancient inside or if you still feel like you always did.

  Dad will be gone, of course, by the time you get this letter. Maybe Lester too, and it’s hard for me to even write about that. But maybe you’ll be married and have children and grandchildren, and when you do, I guess that makes up for the people you lose. Does it? A little, even?

  What I want to know is how your life has been so far, and what you decided to be. Did you ever get breasts as big as tennis balls, and was it still important to you when you did? Do you still have any red in your hair, or is it all gray? Are you fat? Do you wear orthopedic shoes? Can you still wear shorts in the summertime?

  Is your favorite food still fried onion rings? Is your favorite color still green? Does the name “North Carolina” ring any bells? Do you ever hear from Elizabeth or Pamela? Whatever happened to Patrick?

  Maybe what I really want to know is, did you ever reach an age where you could forget all the stupid, ridiculous things you’ve done and said, or do you still wake up in the middle of the night and remember each one exactly, embarrassing you all over again?

  Maybe you’re a famous chef by now. Or maybe you stay home and feed your cats. But whatever you are, I hope you never forget me, the girl I am now.

  Love,

  Alice

  Find out what happens next for Alice in

  ON THE ROAD TO RAVING BEAUTY

  AUNT SALLY SAID IT HAPPENED TO HER, and to my cousin Carol. Dad said it happened to Mom.

  “The summer between seventh and eighth grades,” he told me, “was when she really blossomed into a beauty. You can tell by her photos.”

  I was eating crackers and cheese at the kitchen table, and decided I couldn’t wait for blossoms (leaves, petals, anything at all) to unfold. I wanted to be a beauty now. Not that I hadn’t been developing all along, but there wasn’t any name for what I was at the moment. I certainly wasn’t a child, but I wasn’t a shapely teenager, either. Aunt Sally said that, sometime after your thirteenth birthday, you look in the mirror and see a woman. Which was nice, because my birthday was less than a week away I wondered if there was any resemblance to Mom in me.

  “Lester,” I said, going into the living room, where my twenty-year-old brother was sprawled on the couch. “Look at my face and tell me what you see.”

  Lester opened one eye. “Cheez Whiz on your chin,” he said.

  I rubbed one hand across my mouth. “Take a really good look, Lester! Study my whole face. Who do I remind you of most?” I sucked in my cheeks slightly to make my cheekbones more prominent.

  “Daffy Duck?” said Lester.

  One of the problems of growing up without a mother is that there’s no one around who has any idea what it’s like to be a girl. For me, anyway, because I don’t even have sisters. Mom died when I was five, and ever since, I’ve had to pick up all my information about being female from my aunt and cousin and friends at school.

  Dad was writing checks in the dining room that night at the folding table he uses for a desk. And suddenly he said, “May ninth already? Your birthday’s this Saturday, Al!” My name is Alice McKinley, but he and Les call me Al, which is what happens when there are only men in your family.

  “You remembered,” I said.

  “Of course I remembered! Thirteen is pretty special, isn’t it? Do you want a party?”

  A few weeks before, I might have said yes, but I was thinking about the birthday party we’d just given Dad to celebrate his fiftieth, and I decided that one disaster was enough. “Just Pamela and Elizabeth,” I said, naming my two closest friends at school.

  “You got it,” said Dad. “We’ll order in some KFC or something.”

  Pamela’d already had her thirteenth birthday, and Elizabeth wouldn’t be thirteen till fall, but somehow I had the idea that by the time eighth grade began in September, we’d all be raving beauties. When I told Lester, he said, “Raving, anyway.”

  The day before my birthday, I wondered if Miss Summers would say anything to me about it at school. Sylvia Summers is my Language Arts teacher, who’s been dating my dad since December, only they’re not having sexual intercourse, because I already asked Dad about it. At least they weren’t when I asked, but Dad said I couldn’t ask again, which means anything at all could happen. Except, knowing my dad, nothing’s happening. Dad believes in long, slow courtships, and I worry sometimes that he’ll let her get away.

  Miss Summers has light brown hair and blue eyes, and on that day she was wearing an orange-and-white-print dress with a wide orange belt, which made her waist look really tiny. If Dad had told her my birthday was coming up, though, she didn’t say anything, and I guessed that maybe Dad wanted to keep the celebration private—just between us and Lester and my two best girlfriends, which was okay with me.

  “We’ll be on our poetry unit until the end of the semester,” Miss Summers told the class, “and I’d like each of you, in the weeks ahead, to memorize a favorite poem and recite it to the class—a poem that has special significance for you. I want you to recite it in a way that we can see your enjoyment of it. Take your time, and let it be a poem that really speaks to you personally.”

  My first thought was that maybe I’d do something funny, like “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” but then I looked at the empty seat in front of mine and thought, No.

  Ever since Denise Whitlock stepped in front of an Amtrak train, the whole school has been on “suicide watch.” Nobody came right out and said it, but we heard that the faculty had been told to watch for students who were preoccupied with thoughts of death, or seemed sad or withdrawn, or were going through a crisis at home. I decided that any poem with cremation in the title might get me on the list.

  “Suicide watch!” I would say to Pamela when she came to school dressed all in black. (Pamela does that; sometimes I look at her and think she looks sixteen. Seventeen, even.)

  Or the day Elizabeth had cramps so bad she was crying. “Suicide watch!” we told her. You kid around because you don’t know what else to say. About Denise Whitlock and what she did, I mean. Sometimes it really hurts to think about all the kind things you could have said or done for her, but didn’t.

  When we got on the bus to go home that afternoon, Elizabeth was just about to sit down beside me when Patrick, who is sort of a special friend, slid onto the seat first. Elizabeth had to sit with Pamela, who had the second button of her shirt undone, and Elizabeth has told her a hundred times that she won’t be seen in public with her if she leaves that second button undone.

  “Happy birthday,” said Patrick, and handed me a little box.

  I stared. “It’s not till tomorrow.”

  “I know, but go ahead. Open it!” he said.

  I remembered the Whitman’s chocolates he’d given me on Valentine’s Day, and the Milky Way bar in sixth grade, and the chocolate-covered cherries. I figured it had to be something chocolate, but I was wrong.

  Pamela and Elizabeth were watching from across the aisle when I took off the paper and found a small, rectangular box in gray velvet. It didn’t look new, though. In fact, it looked sort of dusty. When I opened it, I found a gold bracelet with dark red stones in it.

  “Patrick!” I said, surprised and shocked.

  He smiled. “Do you like it?”

  “Well, I … of course! It’s beautiful, but …”

  It looked very expensive. I don’t know how I’d know, because I’ve never had any jewelry that cost more than $19.95. It looked like the kind of jewelry Miss Summers might wear, I guess. But it was really weird to be riding home from school on the bus and opening a velvet box with a gold bracelet in it from a guy who used to be my boyfriend.

  I also noticed that there weren’t any tags on it.

  “Don’t worry, it didn’t cost me anything,” said Patrick. And when I raised my eyebrows, he said, “It’s Mom’s, but
she never wears it.”

  “Patrick!” I said again.

  “It’s okay!” he insisted. “She doesn’t even like it.”

  I wondered if Patrick would ever look back on all the stupid things he’s done and feel embarrassed the way I do when I remember mine. Or do boys worry about things like that? The only people who do dumber things than seventh-grade girls, I decided, are seventh-grade boys.

  “You gave me your mother’s bracelet, and she doesn’t even know?” I squeaked.

  “If she ever misses it, I’ll tell her,” said Patrick.

  “No, you’ve got to tell her first. Patrick, if she ever sees me wearing it, she’ll think I stole it!”

  I could tell by his face he’d never even considered that possibility. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell her.”

  I wasn’t in the house five minutes before the phone rang.

  “Is this Alice?” came a woman’s voice. “This is Patrick’s mother, and I’m afraid he’s made a terrible mistake.”

  “I know,” I said. “You can have the bracelet back. I didn’t wear it or anything.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to have it, dear, and I’m sure Patrick is very fond of you, but that bracelet belonged to my mother. And even though I don’t care to wear it anywhere, I do feel it should stay in the family, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Patrick is on his way over there now. I’m so sorry, Alice, but boys sometimes do things without thinking.”

  I had barely hung up when Patrick rang the doorbell. I had the gray velvet box all ready to go.

  “Here,” I said, but when I gave it to Patrick, he handed me another present. This was getting ridiculous.

  “What’s this?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Happy birthday,” said Patrick again.