There was a pause, and then the girl said, “Is Les there?”
“I’m sorry, but Mr. McKinley is out. May I take a message?” I said.
“Who is this?” asked the girl.
“This is the secretary for the Naked Nomads,” I told her.
“The what?” she said.
And I said, “Hey… baby! Hey… baby! Hey… baby, wha’cha doin’ tonight?”
“You don’t even know who I am,” said the girl.
“Wanna bet?” I said. “And you don’t even know that the Naked Nomads have tattoos on their butts.” Then I hung up and laughed and laughed.
At school the next day I told Sara and Rosalind and Megan what I’d said to Mickey, and this time Sara laughed so hard that she had milk coming out of her nose.
I went to Donald Sheavers’s after school, but later, when I got home, Lester was waiting for me. “Alice!” he growled. “What did you tell Lisa?”
“Who?” I said.
“Lisa! The girl who called yesterday while I was at the library.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure Dad hadn’t heard. About leaving me here by myself, I mean.
I swallowed. “That wasn’t Mickey?”
“No, that wasn’t Mickey! That was a girl in my history class, and we’re supposed to work on a biography together.”
I felt my lips beginning to separate as my jaw dropped.
“Why did you tell her you were my secretary?” Lester demanded.
“I… I…”
“And then she said you recited a poem or something. Al, what did you say? Tell me exactly what you said to Lisa.”
My lips felt dry and I swallowed again. “Hey… baby! Hey… baby! Hey… baby, wha’cha doin’ tonight?” I said in a voice so soft he could hardly hear me.
Lester stared at me. “Are you completely out of your mind?” he said. “She was calling to see if I got the book we needed for our biography. You made it sound like we’re a family of idiots!”
He sat down on the couch, elbows on his knees. “Al,” he said finally, “did you say anything else to her? Think! Any thing?”
I couldn’t lie to my brother, no matter how many times Lester’s fibbed to me.
“I told her that you… and the Naked Nomads… had tattoos on your butts,” I whispered.
Lester buried his face in his hands. He wouldn’t even speak to me till after dinner. I went down in the basement and told him I was sorry, but he said that not only was my real name Alicia Katerina de Balencia Blunderbuss Makinoli, but that I didn’t even belong in our family. He said that somehow I got shipped to this country in a load of Russian potatoes, and no one knew what to do with me, so Dad took me in.
This time I knew Lester was kidding, but I’ll bet he wished I weren’t part of our family. I don’t think he was kidding about that at all.
3
IN CASE OF FIRE
I DON’T LIKE HAVING TO GO TO THE Sheaverses’ after school, but it’s sort of a trade. Mrs. Sheavers looks after me till Dad gets home, and in return Donald gets free trumpet lessons at the Melody Inn. That’s the music store where my dad works.
“Do you like to play the trumpet?” I asked Donald.
“I don’t know,” said Donald.
“Would you rather play something else?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“Baseball,” said Donald.
The thing about Mrs. Sheavers is that she never lets us alone. She has to know what Donald and I are doing every single minute.
If she’s working in the kitchen and we’re quiet for even a moment, she’ll call, “Don-ald! Al- ice! What are you do-ing?”
Then Donald will tell her what we’re doing—watching TV or working on a puzzle. Why can’t people be left alone just to think, I wonder? Why do we always have to be doing something?
Once Donald went in his room for a while, and I was in their living room by myself, reading a book.
“Don-ald! Al-ice!” Mrs. Sheavers called. “What are you do-ing?”
“Breathing!” I answered.
That night at dinner I said, “Nobody has to take care of me. I’m not a baby.”
“I know,” said Dad. “But I don’t want you here alone in case there’s an emergency.”
“Like what?” I asked. “Like a fire? A tornado?”
“Like you might choke on a piece of hot dog or something,” he said.
“If I was choking on a hot dog, what would Lester do?” I asked.
“I’d grab you by the heels and shake you up and down,” said Lester.
That didn’t sound right to me. I started making a list of all the emergencies I could think of, but only got to three when Rosalind called. I told her that Dad was worried about emergencies but I was worried about Lester. I didn’t think he’d know what to do even if something bad did happen at our house. Also, I couldn’t think of anything else except fire, floods, and tornadoes. Could she?
I shouldn’t have asked Rosalind. Rosalind can think of things nobody else would even want to think about.
“You could always drown in the bathtub,” she said.
I wrote that down on my list.
“The house could fill with gas and you could explode,” she added. “You could catch your hair on fire or lock yourself in the basement.”
Now I was really sorry I’d asked Rosalind.
“You could fall down the stairs and twist your neck or cut yourself on the can opener or lean too far out the window… .” Rosalind can think of things that have never happened before in human history. “Or,” she went on, “you could get your foot stuck in the toilet or accidentally glue your eyelids shut.”
“Rosalind,” I said, “have any of these things ever happened to you?”
“No,” said Rosalind.
“Then why do you think they’ll happen to me?” I asked.
“Because you’re a blunderbuss,” she said. “Right?”
There was a fire drill at school the next day. I think I’m more afraid of the fire alarm than I am of a fire.
When the fire alarm goes off, you jump out of your skin. Your heart pounds and your ears buzz and your brain melts and all you want to do is get away from that horrible noise.
“Get up and walk quickly out the door and to your right,” said Mr. Dooley.
“Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred dollars,” said Donald.
I held my hands over my ears to drown out the fire alarm. Outside we stood around waiting for the bell that means we could come back in again.
“Yay! The roof is on fire! No more school!” someone joked.
“Anybody got a match?” said someone else.
Mr. Dooley said that wasn’t funny. He said if there really was a fire, we’d be smart to know what to do.
Two days later, just when I thought I didn’t have to worry about a second fire drill for a while, there was another kind of alarm. This was a loud beep . . . beep . . . beep, a tornado drill.
“Go out the door, turn left, and stand in the hallway just outside the lunchroom,” said Mr. Dooley.
We stood against the wall where there weren’t any windows. You never know if a fire drill is real or not till you get outside, but we all knew that the tornado alarm was just a drill because the day was bright and sunny.
“Here we go, up in a whirlwind, all the way to Kansas!” somebody said with a giggle.
When we got back to our room, there was a fireman waiting for us. He said he was visiting all the classrooms to talk about safety and he would answer any questions we had.
I raised my hand. “What should you do if somebody falls out of a window or chokes on a hot dog?” I asked.
“Look for the nearest adult,” the fireman said. That didn’t sound much better than Lester grabbing me by the ankles and shaking me up and down.
I had to go to the Sheaverses’ after school. Donald’s mother had grape juice and vanilla wafers for our snack. Donald told her about the tornado drill at
school, and I told her about all the emergencies Rosalind said could happen to me.
“Ha!” said Donald’s mother. (When she says “Ha!” her earrings jangle underneath her reddish hair.) “I’d say Rosalind left out a few. What about all the other things kids think of doing? What about opening your mouth so wide it dislocates your jaw? What about crawling down a storm drain and getting swept out to sea?”
I stared at Mrs. Sheavers and then at Donald. Did mothers actually talk like that? If I had a mother, would she warn me not to open my mouth too wide?
Donald was reading a comic book. I don’t think he even listens to her.
I had just gone to bed that night when the wind grew stronger and stronger. Then it began to rain—a hard, October rain. Suddenly I climbed out of bed and padded down the hall to the living room, where Dad was reading a book.
“Hurricanes,” I said.
Dad looked up. “What?”
“Hurricanes. That’s another thing that could happen.”
Dad patted the couch beside him with his big square hand, and I went over and snuggled up against him, against his soft gray sweater.
“Why are you so worried all of a sudden?” he asked, rubbing my shoulder.
“I wasn’t until you said I could choke on a hot dog,” I told him.
Dad grinned. “That’s what you get for trying to talk me into letting you stay here alone,” he said.
Then I told him what Mrs. Sheavers had said about dislocated jaws and storm drains. This time Dad laughed out loud.
“You know what?” he said. “I think that when there’s only one parent in a family, that person has to do all the worrying for two.”
I had forgotten, I guess, that Donald didn’t have a dad. A live-in dad, I mean.
“What happened to Donald’s father?” I asked.
“I’m not sure. They’ve been separated for quite some time,” said Dad.
This, of course, made a worry of another kind. If I needed a mom and Donald needed a dad… I sat up straight and looked hard at my father. “Dad, please don’t…”
“. . . marry Mrs. Sheavers?” He smiled again. “I won’t.”
“But what if she wants to marry you?” I asked.
“Then I’ll tell her I’m already taken,” said Dad.
I stared. “Are you marrying someone else?”
He laughed. “Not that I know of. I’ll tell her that being the father of Alice McKinley is a full-time job and that I can’t add one more thing to my schedule,” Dad said, and sent me back to bed.
I lay there listening to the wind and rain and thought some more about what he’d said. Did it mean that he didn’t have time for any woman at all or just Mrs. Sheavers? That he wouldn’t marry again till I was all grown up? That I might never get a mother?
4
STOMACH PROBLEMS
I DIDN’T GO OUT TRICK-OR-TREATING this year because it rained even harder on Halloween. Dad said I could go to the houses on our own block if I went with Donald. The first place we stopped at, though, gave us paper bags of popcorn, and by the time we got to the second house, they were a mess. The popcorn tasted like wet newspaper. I came back home.
Besides, I looked stupid. I hadn’t thought of a good costume for our school party, so Dad had let me wear his old tuxedo jacket and gave me a baton, like an orchestra conductor.
“Who are you supposed to be?” everyone asked me. “A magician?”
“J. S. Bach,” I said, because I’d heard Dad talk about him. I thought he was a famous conductor, but when I got home from school, Lester said Bach was a composer who lived about three hundred years ago. So when I went out with Donald, I didn’t wear any costume at all, and it looked like I was just begging.
If you miss out on Halloween, though, it’s like missing a birthday. Like missing Christmas, almost. Now you have to wait a whole year for it to come again.
Lester wasn’t sorry about it, though. Only two people came to our house for candy. “All these Snickers bars, just for me,” he said, and took a handful to his room in the basement.
A week later, though, a nice thing happened. Megan Beachy had a sleepover birthday party. She invited her two best friends—Jody and Dawn—and me and my two best friends, Rosalind and Sara. At first she wasn’t going to invite Sara because she says Sara smells. A lot of kids feel that way.
Sara used to smell, especially her hair, and it still smells sometimes if she goes too long without washing it. Most of the time, though, she smells like anyone else. It’s hard for kids to change their minds about you, even after you change. But because Megan likes me and I like Sara, Sara was invited too.
Megan’s little sister, Marlene, met me at the door when I got there.
“Put your present on the dining-room table and your sleeping bag down in the family room,” she said importantly to each guest who arrived. She sounded like a teacher or something.
“No, not there! In there!” Marlene said when someone walked into the kitchen by mistake. I decided I was glad I didn’t have a little sister. A sister like Marlene, anyway. I was also glad that Sara had changed her shirt and combed her hair. I think she’d even squirted on some cologne, because she smelled like roses. Except that I don’t like roses.
We all went down to the family room.
“Okay, everybody, you’re going to play musical chairs!” Marlene said in a loud voice.
“Marlene, be quiet,” said Megan. Then she shouted, “Mom, make her go back upstairs.”
Megan’s mother came to the doorway at the top of the stairs and looked down, and Marlene went over to sit on the bottom step, pouting.
We arranged five chairs in a row, and Mrs. Beachy put on a CD. Every time she stopped the music, we had to scramble for a seat. I was out on the very first try. Jody was out on the next, as another chair was taken away. Finally only Dawn was left. She got the prize: a necklace of orange and yellow glass beads.
After that we played a game called Scramble and ended up laughing in a heap on the floor. And after that we tried to see who could find the most number of words in birthday by mixing up the letters. Megan won that one, but her mother gave the prize to the girl who had won the next most number of words, and that was me. My prize was a baseball cap with WHATEVER printed on the front. I put it on so that the bill came down over my eyes, and everyone laughed.
We were tired of playing games after that, so we went upstairs and had pizza and carrot sticks with Megan’s mom and dad and little sister. Then there was the birthday cake and presents.
My friends always like the presents I give them because Dad lets me choose cool stuff from the Gift Shoppe at the Melody Inn. He’s the manager, so I guess he can do whatever he wants. For Megan I chose a tiny music box with a dancing bear on top. It went around and around when you turned the key.
At nine o’clock we put on our pajamas, and then Mr. Beachy played a movie. It was Harriet the Spy, but some of us had seen it before, so mostly we didn’t watch. We just lay on our sleeping bags and talked and giggled.
Marlene kept creeping downstairs, peeking at us.
“Go back upstairs, Marlene!” Megan yelled at her.
Marlene went back up, but after a while we heard the stairs creak again.
“Marlene, I mean it!” Megan called. She looked over at me. “I’ll trade you one sister for one brother,” she said.
“I have two brothers,” said Rosalind. “One of them plays in a band with Alice’s brother.”
“The Naked Nomads,” I said.
Everyone laughed.
“Do they get naked?” asked Jody.
“They only take their shirts off,” I told her.
“I don’t have any brothers or sisters. There are only three people in my family,” said Jody.
“There are five people in mine,” said Rosalind.
“Four in mine,” said Megan.
When it was my turn, I said, “Just three.”
“How can there be three if you have a brother?” asked Jody.
“My mom’s dead,” I said.
Everyone looked at me, everyone except Rosalind and Sara, who already knew. Megan knew too, I think. Everyone put on her “sympathy” face.
“How did she die?” asked Dawn.
“She got real sick,” I said.
“Were you with her when she died?” asked Megan.
“No. She was at the hospital.”
The kids were quiet for a moment, and their eyes looked sad.
“I wonder what it’s like to be in a room when someone dies,” said Sara. “Does an angel come to get you or what?”
“Oh, Sara!” said Rosalind.
“Well, anyway, you’ll see her in heaven,” said Dawn.
“I guess,” I said.
Around midnight Rosalind got hungry, so we all went back upstairs for some more ice cream. Rosalind’s as round as Sara is skinny. When we were done eating, Megan’s mother said, “Settle down now, girls.”
It was warm down in the family room, too warm to get inside our sleeping bags, so we just lay down on top of them. Rosalind said that if anyone’s sleeping bag was touching anyone else’s sleeping bag, the girls had to kiss, so we all screamed and pulled our sleeping bags away from each other so we wouldn’t have to kiss anyone.
“Okay, everybody. Lights out!” Mr. Beachy called from the top of the stairs.
I was lying on my back, looking up at the ceiling where the streetlight made stripes through the blinds, and I was thinking about angels—if my mother was an angel. And suddenly my stomach made a loud gurgling noise, just like Mr. Dooley’s stomach growled at school. It sounded like water going down the drain.
“Hey!” said Jody. “Whose stomach was that?”
Everyone laughed.
I didn’t say anything. It happened again, even louder.
“Whose is it?” Rosalind giggled, getting up on her knees and looking around.
I breathed out. Gurgle, gurgle. I breathed in. Gurgle, gurgle.
Sara’s squeaky laugh was loudest of all. “Let’s see whose stomach it is!” she cried.
Now the girls were all crawling around over the sleeping bags, putting their ears to each other’s stomach to see where the gurgling was coming from. I tried holding my breath to see if that would stop it. It didn’t make any difference. Gurgle, gurgle.