I stomped back upstairs and sat glaring at the near-empty bulletin board. Chances were, in another year, I wouldn’t even want some of the things that were up there now!
And then it came to me that I would probably have this bulletin board until I was through college. I was twelve, and if I graduated when I was twenty-one, that was nine more years. It wasn’t as though my life was over. It was still being written, and the thing about bulletin boards—the reason for bulletin boards—was you could change things around. Add and subtract. Then I didn’t feel so bad.
The phone rang. It was Pamela.
“Guess what?” she said breathlessly.
“You got a newer, bigger bulletin board,” I guessed.
“No. Mother said I can start wearing different earrings now, Alice! I don’t have to go on wearing these little gold balls I’ve had since third grade. I can wear hoops if I want. Even French hooks! You want to go shopping with us this weekend?”
I knew right then I could not go another year, another month, another week even, without pierced ears. Whatever Pamela did, that’s what I’d do. Whatever Elizabeth had, that’s what I wanted. Always before, Dad and I smiled secretly at the kids who came in the music store all dressed alike, all wearing black, all with an earring in one ear and the same kind of makeup. I’d think how stupid it was to try to be a copy of someone else.
But suddenly it was happening to me. I was turning into a lemming! If all the girls in junior high suddenly raced to the roof and plunged madly over the edge, I would be sailing off into space with them.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Reluctantly Alice
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