Reluctantly Alice

  “Yes.”

  “Going to let Denise and her gang know they can scare you off?”

  “Yes.”

  “So they’ll be even bolder when they try something else?”

  I thought about that a moment. “No,” I said finally, and the next day I went to school.

  All three of us—Pamela, Elizabeth, and I—sat huddled together on one seat of the bus, as though somehow we could protect ourselves by sticking together. Of the three of us, Pamela was the least concerned. The same Pamela who got the lead part in our sixth-grade play because she could sing probably knew she could carry it off if anybody backed her against the wall. In fact, the way she was chattering on and on about it, I figured she sort of hoped she would be cornered in the hallway, because she loved an audience.

  Elizabeth was scared, though. She was afraid she would forget the words to the second and third verses and kept wanting to recite them to me to make sure she had them right. Mostly, she was afraid that if she was dunked in the drinking fountain, her hair would look awful, and if she was dunked in the toilets, she’d throw up.

  I wasn’t as worried about the drinking fountain or toilets as I was about the humiliation of opening my mouth and letting pure noise come out.

  As soon as we were inside the school, Elizabeth, Pamela, and I stuck together as long as we could before we had to separate to go to different homerooms. I saw Patrick walking down the hall ahead of me and ran to catch up with him. I knew that if anyone came up to me when I was with Patrick and asked me to sing, Patrick would sing it for me if he could. Or sing along with me. He’s like that.

  “Hi,” I said, wedging myself between him and the wall and getting in step.

  Patrick guessed right away. “You know what day it is, huh?”

  “Is it? Patrick, are you sure?”

  “I heard someone say so on the bus. Nobody’s letting on until after the morning announcements, because they don’t want the principal trying to head it off.”

  “P-Patrick!” I gulped, in a small squeaky voice, like a chicken. “What am I going to do?”

  “About what?” he said. And you know, that was one of the nicest things he ever said to me, because it meant he’d forgotten all about how I can’t sing. When you think something’s wrong with you, you believe that everyone is thinking about it all the time. Like it’s the only important thing about you. But Patrick actually had forgotten.

  “I can’t sing!” I told him.

  “Oh. That,” he said. “Well, just pretend you have laryngitis, Alice. Open your mouth, move your lips, and point to your throat.”

  I knew that wouldn’t work with Denise and her crowd if she got hold of me. I’d have to go all day long not talking to anyone, not even teachers, and still, I’ll bet, no one would believe me. “Patrick,” I said, “what are you doing after lunch? I mean, you want to go out and sit on the wall with me?”

  “There’s going to be an extra band rehearsal,” he said. “All the percussion players have to be there.”

  My last hope. As I ducked into homeroom, Patrick said, “Cheer up, Alice. It’s not the end of your life.”

  Maybe not for Patrick, who could play the drums, the cymbals, the marimba, and the piano and could belt out songs like he’d written them himself. But it could be the end of my life in seventh grade as I’d known it up till then. I wondered if anyone ever died of embarrassment, if the heart just stopped beating or something.

  I sat clutching my books to my chest while the home-room teacher collected health forms, then sat some more while the principal made the daily announcements. Finally, when the bell rang, I took a deep breath and plunged into the hallway.

  I hadn’t even gotten to my first class before I saw some guy backed up against the lockers and two ninth graders, holding his arms, making him sing. The poor kid was singing in a soft little voice, and the older boys kept saying, “Louder! We can’t hear you! Louder!” The boy’s face was as pink as bubble gum. Other kids stopped to watch and laugh. I wished my picture had never been in the school newspaper. Now everyone knew I was a seventh grader. Somebody tried to grab my arm and stop me just before I ducked into Language Arts, but I made it. I even got there before Denise and sat with my heart pounding. When she came in, she gave me her usual “poor you” smile and said nothing.

  I don’t think the teachers even knew about SGSD yet. Miss Summers, who wears Obsession perfume (I know because she smells just like Crystal Harkins, and that’s what Crystal wears), talked about words that had more than one meaning, such as “funny,” which could mean either hilarious or peculiar, and I decided that the most peculiar thing of all was that there was torture and horror going on right under the teachers’ noses and they didn’t even recognize it.

  By lunchtime, no one had caught me yet, but I could see Denise and her friends eyeing me from three tables away. When they left the cafeteria before I did, I knew they were up to something.

  “Well, I haven’t been stopped all morning!” said Pamela, and I think she actually was disappointed. “All this worry for nothing. I’m going right out on the school steps after lunch and get some sun.”

  “I’m going to go in a restroom and bolt the door to a toilet stall and sit there till the bell rings,” Elizabeth said shakily.

  “What about the library?” I asked.

  “I already looked,” Elizabeth said. “There are ninth graders stationed at both ends of the hall. They grab you before you even get to the door.”

  I wasn’t going to sit outside with Pamela, but I wasn’t going to lock myself in a stall, either. If Denise saw me going into a restroom, she’d simply corner me. I tried to think of where I could go that kids usually didn’t and finally decided on the faculty parking lot. I’d sit down between the principal’s and the vice principal’s cars. It was the only place I could think of that I had any chance at all.

  When we were through eating, I walked to the main door of the cafeteria and peered out to make sure Denise wasn’t there. Then, while Elizabeth headed for a restroom and Pamela went right out the front entrance, just begging to be caught, I slipped around a side door and headed across the grass toward the faculty lot.

  I could hear someone singing the school song in front of the building. I saw a girl backed up against a tree out near the sidewalk, a group of older students gathered around her saying, “Second verse! Louder!”

  And just as I started down the row of parked cars, I saw Denise and her gang coming toward me. I stopped, and it seemed as though the whole world had stopped turning.

  It was sort of like standing out in the middle of the road watching a truck bear down on you. I knew that if I turned around and ran, they’d catch me. If I went left, I was up against the brick building. If I went right, I’d be out in the middle of traffic. If I continued straight ahead . . .

  This is what it’s like to die, I told myself, and leaned against a car as Denise came toward me.

  “Hey, Widdle Alwice,” said Denise.

  I tried smiling. I couldn’t even fake it.

  “Your mama teach you to sing?” Denise went on, and the three other girls giggled. One was tall and stoop-shouldered, one was short and square, and the other had a face full of zits. They were four girls who acted as though nobody could possibly like them very much, so nobody did.

  “We want to hear the school song,” the tall one said, squinting her eyes at me.

  The short girl started yelping, “Song! Song!” to call other kids over, and people started coming from all directions, like ants at a picnic.

  Denise nudged my arm. “We’re waiting,” she said. “Sing.”

  “I—I can’t,” I said. “I know the words, but I can’t sing. I can say them for you, though.”

  Did you ever see the way lions and tigers sort of walk around their food before they tear into it? The purring noise they make? That’s what Denise was doing right then—the way her eyes started to smile, her lips started to stretch. Soft laughter began at the back of her throat and
worked its way out.

  “No good,” she said. “We want to hear you sing it, Widdle Alwice. When you go to basketball games, you have to be able to sing. How are you going to help the team along if you’re just standing there saying the words?”

  “Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!” the other three girls began to chant, and then some of the other kids joined in. “Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!”

  “I can’t,” I said again.

  The kids crowded in closer. It was probably the nearest Denise had ever come in her life to being onstage, the most attention she had ever got. “You can’t sing?” she asked in mock horror. “What’s the matter? Is your singer broken? Every American girl can sing.” She nudged me a little harder. “Try it.”

  I shook my head and stared at the ground. I felt like I was going to throw up, and imagined puking all over Denise’s Nikes. I imagined her knocking the daylights out of me.

  “Maybe she needs to spray her throat first with a little toilet water,” the girl with the zits said.

  “Yeah, a little dunk in the toilet might help,” the tall girl suggested.

  “I can’t sing,” I told them again. “I never could.”

  “Well, we want to hear what it sounds like, anyway,” said Denise. She was really enjoying herself now and was talking louder so everyone could hear. “Everyone listen, now. Widdle Alwice is going to try.”

  They crowded in closer still. They were all grinning.

  “Last chance,” said Denise. “Do or dunk. Which will it be?” She turned to the short girl beside her. “You know that toilet up on second? The one that doesn’t flush? Widdle Alwice is going to smell really nice after we dunk her in that one.”

  I knew exactly which toilet they were talking about. It always stunk, and it was filled almost to the top with toilet paper and crud.

  Why couldn’t the principal look out of his window right now and see what was going on? Why couldn’t Patrick get out of band practice early and come rescue me? Why couldn’t real life be like fairy stories once in a while, where there’s always a prince when you need him?

  “Sing!” Denise ordered, starting to sound angry, and then, somewhere behind me, I heard my name.

  “Hey, Al.”

  I turned. It was Lester. I couldn’t believe it.

  Everyone else turned too. Lester was strolling across the driveway, and I could see his car parked out by the curb.

  “Hey, Al!” he said again. “How you doin’?” He was making like we weren’t related, I knew. Just a friend who had dropped by.

  I didn’t know what to say. But Lester took over. “I was driving by, saw you out here, and thought I’d stop,” he said, putting one arm around my shoulder and walking me out of the circle. “What’s up? What’s been happening lately?”

  Denise and her friends stared after us. I could see Denise’s eyes as I walked away, small and squinty with that “I’ll get you” look. The other kids began to wander off and finally, when Les and I got around to a tree and were by ourselves, I tried hard not to bawl.

  “They almost had me, Lester,” I said shakily.

  “I sort of figured that,” he said, and put his hands in his pockets. “How long before lunch period is over?”

  I looked at my watch. “Four or five minutes.”

  “I’ll hang around,” he said. “It’ll only make me a few minutes late to class.” He looked over to where Denise and her gang were still standing. “The hefty one. That’s Denise?”

  I sniffled and nodded. “I couldn’t do it, Les. I couldn’t sing. They were going to dunk me in a toilet up on second that’s been stopped up for a month.”

  “Well, after today, SGSD is over, isn’t it? Think you can get out of the building at two thirty and onto the bus?”

  “Sure.”

  I don’t know what we talked about for the next five minutes. Lester did the talking, I guess, trying to make it look as though we were catching up on news. He walked me around to the door that was just outside my math class, and when the bell rang, I said, “Thanks, Les,” went inside, and Lester left.

  It was nice to know he’s been concerned about me—that he actually cared enough to drive over and see what was happening before he went to the university. But at the same time, I had the horrible feeling it would have been better if he hadn’t come—if they’d gone ahead and dunked me. At least it would be over with. I knew Denise wouldn’t let me off so easily, and when she found out that Les was my brother, as she surely would, she’d be all the more determined to do me in. If Les hadn’t come, my hair would be smelly and the kids would tease me, but at least it would be over, like a dental appointment you’ve been dreading for months. Now I had to worry every day, forever and ever, about what Denise would think up next.

  I soon found out. When I went to my locker after school, someone had been there first. Someone had taken tissue paper from the toilet up on second and pushed it, wet and smelly, through the air slots of my locker. Crud was running down the other side, and my books and jacket smelled like sewage.

  7

  BODIES

  THE WEEKEND COULDN’T COME FAST enough for me. Pamela and Elizabeth were glad too. Elizabeth had stayed in the restroom so long at lunchtime that someone reported it, and Elizabeth was embarrassed by the nurse knocking on the door of the toilet stall and asking if she was all right. Pamela had her nose out of joint because after all the worry about SGSD, and then her decision that it might be very nice to sing in front of an audience, she wasn’t asked.

  We rode our bikes over to the grade school on Saturday afternoon and shot baskets. I’m pretty good at basketball, even though I’m shorter than both Elizabeth and Pamela. I’m quick, too, and can jump higher than they can. Pamela’s not bad either, but Elizabeth always wants to stop as soon as she starts to sweat. So after we’d played for twenty minutes, we took off our jackets and sprawled on the school steps in the sunshine, looking out over the sidewalk where we used to play hopscotch.

  There was something about coming back to the grade school that felt like going home to Grandma’s—all the memories, I mean. There were the kindergarten and first-grade windows with drawings of colored leaves and pumpkins pasted on them. We could even see into the library, where the rocking chair sat in one corner, just inviting a boy or girl to curl up on its lap and read a story. We remembered how we had come out the front door for the big Halloween parade and realized that this year we weren’t even going trick-or-treating.

  “I didn’t know how much I liked sixth grade until I left,” Elizabeth said. “They never would have allowed an SGSD here, and no one would ever have had to lock herself in a toilet stall.”

  “It was more fun in sixth grade,” Pamela agreed. “We got to do more. We got to go on overnight camping trips with our teachers, we got to put on a play. It was always the sixth graders people clapped for the most in the Halloween parade. Everybody paid attention to us. In seventh, no one even knows who we are. Personally, I can’t wait till I’m in ninth. I already know how I’m going to wear my hair to the ninth-grade semiformal. I saw a picture of it in a magazine.”

  I didn’t even know what color socks I was going to wear the next day, and Pamela already knew how she was going to wear her hair to a ninth-grade dance. Pamela just assumed she’d be invited. I not only wasn’t sure I’d be invited, I wasn’t even sure I’d be alive—not if Denise and her gang got hold of me. I guess if you have long blond hair, you think about it a lot. But if I counted up how much time I fussed over my hair, it would probably be thirty second in the morning and maybe fifteen seconds at night. Ninth grade, as far as I was concerned, was light-years away.

  Elizabeth had been thinking about it, though. Ninth grade. Hair. “How?” she asked.

  “The sides brought up like this,” said Pamela, sweeping up the long yellow locks beside her face, “and pinned up with curls at the top and flowers tucked all around.”

  “Who do you suppose we’ll be dating then?” Elizabeth asked. “You know, ninth grade wouldn’
t be so bad if we didn’t have to go through seventh and eighth to get there.”

  “But once we graduate,” I reminded them, “we’ll have to start high school, and then we’ll be at the bottom of the heap again.”

  “And after high school, there’s college,” said Elizabeth mournfully.

  “And once we get a job, we’ll be at the bottom of the ladder,” Pamela added. “Maybe that’s all life is, you know? Just climbing up, coming down, and starting all over again.”

  It was depressing, all right. We sat for a long time, looking out over the playground, and finally it was Elizabeth who broke the silence. “Someday,” she said, “we’ll think back to this very day when we were sitting here talking like this, and we’ll realize how wonderful it was. You know what we should do? I think we should promise each other that no matter what happens to us in junior high or high school, no matter how awful or embarrassing it is, we can always tell each other, and none of us will ever laugh.”

  “I promise,” I said right off, feeling just how serious this was.

  “So do I,” said Pamela.

  We sort of crossed arms so that all three of us were shaking hands on it at the same time, and it was like our own secret promise, just the three of us, friends forever. Through high school, anyway.

  On Monday, Denise and her friends were lying low. I guess they decided that after cramming all that toilet paper through the vents in my locker, they’d made enough trouble for a while, but it didn’t mean they were through with me. Not at all. A girl whose brother saves her just when the initiation is going full blast isn’t going to get off the hook that easily. Not only had Lester loused up their plan, but he’d embarrassed Denise in front of the other kids who had come to watch. Denise would take it out on me. I knew it as surely as there were ears on my head.

  What I couldn’t figure out about Denise was why she and the three girls she went around with acted like the world was against them. At first I thought maybe it was because they looked the way they did. Then I realized that there were several girls in school who were as heavy as Denise—heavier, even—who always seemed to have a crowd of friends around them and were always on committees and things. The reporter who interviewed me for the newspaper was short, one of the cheerleaders was tall and thin, and the president of the ninth-grade class, who led the pep rally, had zits. So was it zits and height and weight that made a difference, or how you felt about it?