Reluctantly Alice

  I woke up one morning remembering that while we had General Music, we didn’t have to sing unless we wanted to. We could play a tune on a recorder instead. No more lining up to walk to the all-purpose room where a woman at the piano taught you a song. No more teachers making us sing it row by row, then two by two, until they found out where that awful sound was coming from—namely, me. I would never have to sing another note in front of people in my life unless I wanted. Which I didn’t.

  Patrick thinks it’s weird that I’m the only one in my family who can’t carry a tune. Lester says that Mom sang all the time; Dad sings and plays the piano, the flute, and the violin; Lester can play the trumpet, sing, and play the guitar. I don’t do anything but sort of hum to myself when I’m running the vacuum cleaner.

  Last summer Patrick taught me to play some duets with him on our piano, and I did fine. It’s just that when I try to hum a tune, what comes out of my mouth doesn’t sound like music at all—to Patrick, to anyone. The worst part is that I can’t tell the difference.

  “So have me tested! Operate!” I told Dad the last time he brought it up, and he said he’d never mention it again. He didn’t.

  Pamela and Elizabeth, of course, promptly joined the Seventh Grade Chorus, and Patrick joined the band. He became second drummer, and on the days he had practice, his dad drove him to school with his drums and cymbals in the backseat.

  I didn’t join anything. I wasn’t sure I wanted to join something the first year of junior high. Maybe I just wanted to watch what the other kids did and make up my mind later.

  “You’re not going out for anything, Alice?” Pamela asked. “You really should, you know.”

  “Why?”

  “To meet people.”

  “I’m meeting people all the time! I’m meeting people every time I walk into a classroom!”

  “But you don’t really get a chance to do anything with them or go anywhere,” Pamela continued. “My cousin in New Jersey says that you should join everything you possibly can, because even if it’s only a girls’ club, most girls have brothers, and the brothers have friends, and it’s sort of like taking out an insurance policy that by the time the ninth-grade formal comes along, someone will fix you up.”

  “Fix me up?”

  “You know, make sure you have a date—that someone invites you.”

  “I’d rather someone invited me all by himself.”

  “Oh, Alice, you just don’t understand how things work.” Pamela sighed.

  That night Lester and I were making tostadas for dinner—I was chopping the cheese and lettuce, and Lester was cooking the beef and beans.

  “Les,” I said, “did anyone ever fix you up on a date?”

  “A few times,” he told me. “Disasters, mostly.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. That’s the trouble.”

  I gave him my disapproving “Aunt Sally” look, but that wasn’t what Lester meant.

  “No sparks,” he said. “No music. Just one big mismatch.”

  I took the tostada shells out of the microwave and helped Lester pile on the stuff. “I’m not ever going to let anyone fix me up with anybody.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far, Al. That’s how I met Crystal, after all.”

  “You did?”

  Les nodded. “I was really hurting after Marilyn broke up with me, and one of the guys knew this girl who had a sister who had a friend . . . That kind of thing. It was Crystal.”

  Lester and I sat down across the table from each other, putting some food aside for Dad because he was working late.

  “What’s going to happen with you and Crystal and Marilyn?” I asked him.

  I thought he might tell me it was none of my business, but he didn’t.

  “It’s up to Marilyn now,” he said. “I told her if she’s ready to get engaged, I’ll give her a ring and give up Crystal. If she’s not . . . well, I don’t want to be jilted again.”

  I picked up all the little pieces of cheese on my plate, mashed them with my finger, and put them in my mouth all at once. “What did she say, Les?”

  “She’s thinking about it. The ball’s in her court.”

  “I like them both,” I said. “A lot.”

  “Yeah, that’s the trouble. So do I.”

  The next day at school, something absolutely wonderful happened. The cafeteria was serving hamburgers on poppy-seed rolls, the only food they make that’s any good, and Pamela and Elizabeth and I had just eaten ours and were heading outside, sharing a bag of Fritos, when we saw two ninth-grade boys standing in the doorway. I noticed that one of them was holding a notebook and pen, and the other had a camera. Just as we reached the door, the one with the pen said, “Hi. You a seventh grader?”

  I waited for Pamela or Elizabeth to answer, then realized he was looking right at me. I nodded.

  “Well, I’m a roving reporter for the Eagle and this is our photographer. I wondered if we could interview you for the school paper.”

  I stared. “Me?”

  “If you don’t mind,” he said. “We choose a different person every issue—help students get acquainted.”

  Not Pamela with her long blond hair? Not Elizabeth with her creamy complexion and thick black eyelashes? Me, Alice McKinley, with this sort of blondish-reddish hair and freckles?

  “Uh . . . I guess so,” I said. We went out in the hall, where Pamela and Elizabeth sat down on a bench to wait.

  I sat down on another bench facing the reporter while the photographer tinkered with his camera.

  “Okay now,” the reporter said. “You’re . . .”

  “Alice McKinley,” I said, and spelled it for him.

  “What are your favorite subjects?”

  “Uh . . . Language Arts and Life Science. I guess.”

  “Worst subject?”

  “World Studies.” Oh, boy, wouldn’t I be popular with Hensley when he read that.

  “Joined any clubs yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you think of junior high so far?”

  The interview lasted about five minutes. Every time I gave an answer, I realized how stupid it would look in the paper and wished I’d said something else. The boy with the camera took three different pictures of me and said he’d print the best one. Then the interview was over and they left. Pamela and Elizabeth rushed over.

  “Alice!” Pamela squealed. “You’re going to be in the newspaper!”

  “What did they ask?” Elizabeth cried.

  “What did you say?” both of them asked together.

  I could feel my face blushing, and told them everything I could remember.

  “Why do you suppose they chose you?” asked Pamela finally.

  I guess that wasn’t exactly a compliment. I would have liked to think it was my beautiful smile or my glowing hair or my gorgeous figure or something. But I was so excited and surprised, I didn’t worry too much about it. I was going to be in the paper!

  There was a pep rally that afternoon. Everybody had to go, but I didn’t mind. I practically floated to the top row of the bleachers, anyway, I felt so high. The band was playing the school song, and I could see Patrick playing the cymbals.

  What a pep rally is, see, is where they introduce the members of the basketball team, and everybody cheers, and then they tell you how important it is for everybody to go to the next game. The cheerleaders come out on the floor to teach you a few yells, the band plays the school song again, and then everybody sings it. Everybody but me, of course. I just mouthed the words and nobody cared. I was going to appear in the newspaper, and I couldn’t even sing, and nobody cared! It was wonderful.

  When the assembly was over, though, and we were all crowding out the door, I was busy talking to Elizabeth and accidentally bumped into the girl on the other side of me. It was Denise. Denise Whitlock.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She frowned and rubbed her arm where my notebook had scraped.

  “Sorry,” I said again.


  Denise smiled then, but it wasn’t a real smile; sort of a “poor you” kind of look. She waited until I had moved slightly ahead of her, and then she said, “SGSD.”

  “What?” I said, turning, not knowing if she was swearing or talking to me.

  She just laughed, and the other three girls with her laughed too.

  “What did she mean, ‘SGSD’?” I asked Pamela.

  “I don’t know. She’s weird. Forget her,” said Pamela.

  I think I would have forgotten about it if I hadn’t seen those same initials scribbled on the blackboard in math class, down in one corner, and Denise isn’t even in that class. It was when I saw it scribbled on a locker, though, and then on the sidewalk in front of the flagpole, that I got a little worried.

  “What do you suppose it means?” I asked some of my other friends, but no one seemed to know, not even Patrick.

  In the cafeteria the next day, Denise and her girlfriends were laughing, looking around and whispering the way they do, and suddenly they started chanting, “S-G-S-D, S-G-S-D,” and they laughed again. People turned and looked at them and went on eating, but a few chanted it along with them. It gave me the creeps.

  And then, after school, Elizabeth had the answer. She told us on the bus going home. Her eyes were huge as we squeezed in beside her on the very back seat.

  “I asked a girl in P.E., an eighth grader,” she said breathlessly, “and she told me that every fall, the upper classmen pick one certain day and call it ‘Seventh-Grade Sing Day’—SGSD—and on that day they can stop any seventh grader in the halls and ask him to sing the school song. If he can’t, he gets dunked in the water fountain, if he’s lucky; in the toilets, if he’s not.”

  I felt as though someone had just told me I’d be executed.

  “When?” I asked. “I’ll stay home! I’ll be sick!”

  “People don’t find out until they get to school,” Elizabeth said, chewing her lip. “They never tell you in advance.”

  “The teachers just let them do it?” I choked.

  “It’s against the rules, this girl said, but the faculty isn’t too strict about it. Sometimes the principal gets on the loud speaker and says there will be no dunking, but there is anyway. Teachers can’t be everywhere at once.”

  I stared at Pamela, then Elizabeth. “What are we going to do?” I bleated.

  “Learn the school song!” said Elizabeth. “Sometimes they let you off with just one verse, but sometimes they ask you to sing all three. And they always make you sing it at the top of your lungs, with everyone looking. I guess it’s like an initiation.”

  I knew then what it was like to live on death row. There were rumors that SGSD would be the following Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, but the days came and went and it never happened. I began to think that maybe this year they were going to let it slide.

  On Friday the school newspaper came out, the issue with my picture on it. The teacher passed the papers out in homeroom, and kids kept turning around saying, “Alice! You’re in the paper! You’re a celebrity!”

  I opened my copy to page three. The column was about five inches long, and the photograph was okay. I mean, I was smiling really big, but it wasn’t a fake smile; I didn’t look as though I were sitting on ice cubes or anything. I wished that the lock of hair down over my eyes had been tucked behind one ear instead, but it wasn’t so bad.

  It was a weekly feature called “Getting to Know . . .” and this time it said, “Getting to Know Alice McKinley.”

  Meet Alice, a seventh grader, who likes Language Arts and Life Science, but says that World Studies is only so-so. What this photo doesn’t show is that Alice has blondish hair, freckles, and stands about five foot two in her stocking feet, except that she was wearing Reeboks.

  “Al,” as her family calls her, lives with her father and brother, and moved here a year ago from Takoma Park. Chicago, before that. What she misses about Chicago is the lake. What she loves about Maryland is that we’re close to the ocean. So she’s not hard to please.

  Her favorite food is french-fried onions. Her favorite music is country rock. She hasn’t decided yet on a career—maybe a veterinarian, she says, or a basketball player. (You’ll have to grow a little, Alice, to do that!)

  So far she hasn’t joined any clubs; she just wants to look around and take her time. We think it won’t be long before she finds a lot to do here. We hope so, anyway. Welcome, Miss McKinley!

  I couldn’t believe that I came out sounding halfway intelligent and that the photo was okay. I couldn’t help grinning. The girls in back of me couldn’t believe it either.

  “I think they purposely choose an unknown,” one of them said. “You know, if they chose people everybody knew, there wouldn’t be any point in writing about them.”

  I didn’t care. Nothing could hurt me now. Even when I saw Elizabeth in the hall, and she said, “It’s a wonderful write-up, Alice, except for the photo.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Didn’t you see?” asked Elizabeth.

  “See what?”

  Elizabeth unfolded her copy of the paper and pointed. “That poppy seed there between your teeth. It shows.”

  It wasn’t more than a dot—a speck. It could have been merely a flaw in the paper. It didn’t bother me at all.

  But as I went through the door in Language Arts, Denise Whitlock made a point of bumping my arm.

  “Soon,” she said. “SGSD.”

  6

  SGSD

  I FINALLY TOLD DAD AND LESTER ABOUT it. I guess I hadn’t wanted them to know that there was anything in junior high I couldn’t handle myself, but the middle of the next week at breakfast, when I ate only half a piece of toast for the third day in a row because my stomach hurt, Dad looked at me and said simply, “Al, what’s wrong?”

  There’s a certain way a father says that that makes your chin tremble and the corners of your mouth turn down, and I sat there trying not to bawl. Finally, though, I blurted it all out—about Denise and her gang, and the possibility that I would either get dunked in the toilets or have to sing to a crowd of fifty at the top of my lungs.

  “Well, Al,” Lester said from across the table where he was eating a slice of leftover pizza along with his Corn Chex, “it could be worse. You could sing to a crowd of fifty at the top of your lungs and get dunked in the toilet because of it.”

  “That doesn’t help, Les,” Dad said, and turned to me. “All I can suggest, sweetheart, is that if it happens, carry it off with as much good humor as you can muster.”

  “Dad, I c-can’t!” I stammered, and felt the tears. “The worse you sing the f-first verse, the more likely they’ll make you sing the second and third.”

  “So sing the second and third and act like you’re enjoying yourself,” Dad told me. “They’ll take their cues from you. If you’re embarrassed, they’ll stare and whisper. But if you look like you’re enjoying it, they’ll lose interest.”

  I didn’t for a moment believe it. We ate in silence, and finally Lester said, “Dad, do you remember the junior high band I played in back in Chicago?”

  “Yes?”

  “Remember how on Wednesdays a bus picked up band members from all the area schools and took us to a high school auditorium where we practiced together in one group?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “Well, what I never told you was that every so often one of the guys lost his pants.”

  “What?”

  “A guy would get his pants pulled off and thrown out the window of the bus. It was sort of a tradition. We’d get to where we were going, and there would be one kid who, if he couldn’t fight the older guys off, would be in his underpants for the rehearsal. The bus driver never caught on, the band director never caught on—there were too many of us. Whichever kid was chosen, his friends would sort of crowd around him to shield him from view, so the adults never found out. Or if they did, they never did anything about it.”

  “Why didn’t some
one report it?”

  “That’s the part I always wondered,” Lester said. “But nobody did. We probably figured if we told, we’d really get it. I suppose it happened maybe five or six times during the whole school year, and I don’t know what those five or six kids told their parents about their pants.”

  Dad studied Lester over his coffee. “How come you never told me?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve thought about that, too. I guess I figured there was nothing you could do—it was just something I had to deal with myself. But for a whole year I dreaded Wednesdays. I used to lie awake half of Tuesday night worrying about it, and I quit band the next year. But I never said why.”

  I sat there looking at my brother, imagining him back in seventh grade worrying about losing his pants in front of all the other kids. I’d never thought Lester would be embarrassed about anything, but now I knew. Which was worse, I wondered—having to sing in front of fifty kids when you can’t carry a tune, or having to go to band practice in your underpants? I wasn’t sure.

  “When is this Seventh-Grade Sing Day going to be?” Lester asked.

  “That’s the worst part. Nobody knows. Soon. Monday, probably. I’m not so worried about before or after school, because there’s just enough time to get from the bus to the building and back again. It’s the lunch period that scares me. You have to eat and then either go outside or to the library. You can’t stay in the cafeteria the whole period. And I hear the eighth and ninth graders guard the library so you can’t get in.”

  “Well, Al, the worst that can happen is that they’ll embarrass you. But you’ll still be alive the next day,” Dad said, as though that was any comfort.

  SGSD didn’t happen on Monday, but the rumors went around like wildfire. Everywhere I went I heard the whispers: “Tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . . tomorrow . . .”

  I really had a stomachache that night. I think I ate one french fry and two bites of hamburger.

  “Everybody says it will be tomorrow,” I told Dad. “Please can’t I stay home?”

  “You going to run away, Al, when the going gets tough?”