All but Alice

  “Aren’t they wonderful?” sighed Pamela.

  After the sacred relics were passed around, we started our fan letters.

  “Make it different,” said Brian Brewster. “If it stands out from all the rest, somebody will notice.”

  I decided to write the wildest one I could, but not mail it.

  Pamela finished first and read her letter aloud for comment:

  Dear Izzy:

  Do you know how many times I have dreamed about you in the past month? Nineteen. I want you, want you, want you; need you, need you, need you. I adore you, darling Izzy, and can never be happy unless I have your picture to look at always. If you would autograph it too, or just send an autographed poster, I’d be delirious.

  Pamela Jones

  If Pamela wanted, needed, and adored Izzy, I wondered, how could she be happy with only a poster?

  “It’s okay, Pam, but ‘I adore you’ is sort of old. Write something with a little more pizzazz,” Brian told her.

  I was just writing mine for a joke, so I didn’t care.

  “Dear Breath of Life,” I scribbled. “I am looking at a picture of you from the paper. I worship the hair on your legs, the veins on your temples, the pistol tattoo on your biceps.” I tapped the pencil on the desk and grinned as I wrote the next line: “I love your sweat; your saliva; the dirt beneath your fingernails—even worship your dandruff, if you have any—the lint in your belly button.” I smiled to myself. “Please, my precious, send a poster for my very own, so that I may experience ecstasy everlasting. Your passionate playmate, Alice McKinley.”

  Pamela reached over and snatched the letter from my hand. “What are you laughing at?” she asked, and then, to the others, “Alice is through with hers.”

  “No!” I said, but she held me off.

  “Listen up,” she called, and read it aloud.

  “Oh, my gosh!” said one of the girls. “Did you really mean what you said about the lint in his belly button? Alice, what if he doesn’t have any lint in his belly button?”

  “It’s wonderful!” proclaimed Brian. “No revision necessary!” And he passed it along to the girl at the envelope table, who addressed it, stamped it, and dropped it into our letter box. I was glad Elizabeth wasn’t a member of the All-Stars Fan Club. If she had heard my letter she would have passed out on the floor.

  * * *

  “Lester,” I said at dinner that evening, “what’s the chance of getting an answer if you write a rock star?”

  “About the same as getting hit on the head by a meteorite,” he said.

  I didn’t know if I was glad or sorry. I’d be embarrassed if I thought Izzy actually read my letter, but it would be sort of nice to have a poster of him on my bulletin board and see Pamela’s face when she walked into my room. I might not be able to stand him, but a lot of other girls could, and they’d all come by to see him, especially if it was Izzy in his shorts.

  “You’re writing to rock stars, Al?” asked Dad, as he served the jambalaya. I think there’s a real recipe for this somewhere, but in our house it’s made with whatever leftover meat and vegetables we find in the refrigerator, mixed in the skillet with a raw egg. If it looks pretty good when it’s done, Dad serves it over rice. If it doesn’t, he hides it in a bun. Tonight’s jambalaya was served in a huge hard roll, so I didn’t bother to peek.

  “Oh, Pamela’s been trying to get a poster of the Velvet Pistols, so I wrote a letter too,” I said.

  Lester was about to take a bite of salad, but he lowered his fork. “The Velvet Pistols! Ye gods, Al!”

  Dad turned around. “What do you see in them, Al? Of all the rock groups you could have picked …”

  “I don’t even know them!” I said, plunking down my glass. “Pamela just wants a picture of the drummer, so I joined this fan club. …”

  “You don’t even know the group, and you write for a picture of the drummer?” asked Dad.

  Now I was getting defensive. “So what do you know about them?”

  “A sales rep was by with some promotional material, and I took a look at some of their lyrics. Mercifully, I can’t remember anything more than a feeling of profound disgust,” said Dad.

  “‘Zombie Girls,’ for starters,” offered Lester, and proceeded to recite it for me:

  “Turn’ em over once,

  Turn ’em over twice,

  Havin’ sex with zombie girls

  Is really kinda nice.”

  I stared. “Dead people?” I asked.

  “No, that’s another song—‘My Necrophiliac Lover,’” said Lester. “This one’s about making out with girls who are drunk or stoned.”

  “See what I mean?” said Dad.

  I blushed, and I’m not even Elizabeth. “If they’re so awful, why do you even have their music in your store?”

  “I don’t. I didn’t order any.”

  “That’s censorship,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t just become a groupie for the Velvet Pistols, the way I was standing up for them.

  “That’s selection, Al. One store can’t stock everything. I have to pick and choose, and I chose not to stock the Pistols. I didn’t say nobody else could, either.”

  “It’s not just their music,” added Lester. “One of the band members was arrested for molesting a teenage girl, and they’ve also been fined for trashing a hotel room. Not exactly the sort you’d like to pin up on your wall. …”

  “Okay, send me to a convent!” I squealed. “All I wanted was one lousy poster. You already told me I had as much chance of hearing from them as a meteorite falling on my head.”

  “Right. Falling on your head at exactly one minute past seven on Saint Patrick’s Day, to be exact,” said Les, and grinned.

  I didn’t tell them what I’d actually said in the letter. If I did that, I’d probably be sent to the Sacred Heart of Our Blessed Mary Middle School by morning. If Aunt Sally knew what I’d written, I’d be in a convent before the evening was out.

  What I was most concerned about at the moment was taking off my earrings for the first time and getting them back on again. After two weeks, you’re supposed to take them off once a day.

  The coming-out ceremony took place that Friday in the girls’ restroom over lunch period. Pamela said that the first thing to do was close the stopper in the sink so that your earrings couldn’t fall down the drain. I didn’t have any trouble taking the backs off and pulling the studs out, even though my earlobes were still sensitive, but putting the studs back in again was a different matter. No matter how I turned my head, I couldn’t find the holes.

  “You just sort of have to poke around with one finger behind your ear so you’ll know when the end is coming through,” instructed Pamela.

  I could see Elizabeth in the mirror, backed up against the wall.

  “I have better luck when I wet the earlobe with my finger,” said a girl named Jill. “It makes the hole stand out.” But I still couldn’t do it. My earlobe was feeling worse by the minute, as none of the jabs went through. One of the holes began to ooze a little blood. Elizabeth was turning pale.

  “You’ve got to get them back in before the bell,” said a girl who was washing her hands farther down. “If you don’t put them in when your ears are oozing like that, the holes will close up for sure.”

  “This is so gross!” said Elizabeth. “I am never going to pierce my ears as long as I live. I don’t care if boys never ask me out. I don’t care if I’m the only one who doesn’t go to the prom. They’d have to knock me out and—”

  “Shut up, Elizabeth,” said Pamela. “We’ve almost got one in.” She put the left earring in, but not the one on the right. The bell rang.

  “What you have to figure out,” said Jill, coming over, “is which way the hole slants. Each hole is different. Once you figure out how they slant, you can guide the stud in a little better.”

  My ears were burning now, and I could feel angry tears in my eyes. How could I have thought it would be as simple as hanging Christmas orn
aments on a tree? Pamela managed to get the second stud in place, and I finally made it to Language Arts, my earlobes fiery red. Even Miss Summers noticed.

  “New earrings?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “Nice,” she said.

  After that I felt terrific just thinking about the way the girls had fussed over me there in the restroom, the way they’d helped and encouraged me. I’d been surrounded with Sisters, I realized, and now the most beautiful Sister of all had said, “Nice.” I beamed.

  The following Wednesday, when I entered 2IB, I was surrounded again.

  “You got a reply!” one of the All-Stars Fan Club girls shrieked. “It’s from New York.”

  I couldn’t imagine how someone else would know that I got a letter. Then I remembered that our fan mail was sent out with the school address in the upper left corner so that all the replies came here.

  While Pamela and the other members gathered around me, I examined the envelope. It was bulky—obviously something more than a letter, but impossibly small for a poster. “Open it!” Pamela screeched.

  I did, and it smelled awful. Inside was a dirty sock, with a note pinned to the top: “Sweat and all. You got it, kid. Izzy.”

  5

  SEX

  I WAS SUDDENLY “IN.” NO ONE IN THE club had ever received a personal item from a rock star before, and they crowded around me as though I had just won the lottery. What I knew positively, however, was that I did not want to pin Izzy’s sock on my bulletin board, Sisterhood or not.

  “I could always wash it, I suppose,” I said.

  You’d think I had suggested whitewashing the Mona Lisa. “No!” chanted the girls beside me. “Alice, don’t! Not ever! You told him you loved his sweat, and he sent you some.”

  “If I’d wanted a smelly sock, I could have borrowed my brother’s,” I told them.

  “Sell it!” said Brian. “Auction it off.”

  Which is why, the following day, there was a notice on the school bulletin board, saying:

  TO BARTER, TRADE, OR SELL

  One used sock belonging to

  Izzy Herrigan of the Velvet Pistols.

  Autograph included.

  Best offer.

  Alice McKinley, room 46A.

  So this is what it’s like to be popular, I thought, as people stopped me in the halls all day to make offers. The highest offer was fifty dollars and the lowest was a gerbil. I finally traded it to Pamela for two pairs of fourteen-karat gold earrings, and she said she was keeping the sock under the plastic dome of a cheese server, sort of a shrine, I guess. Seventh grade sure is weird.

  Take the unit we were studying in health, for example: Our Changing Bodies. Boys took it too, only in separate classes. We took the class from Mrs. Bolino, who’s gorgeous. Not exactly the kind you’d go to with a problem, but gorgeous. The boys took it from Mr. Parks, the basketball coach, who looks like Paul Newman with black hair. If Mrs. Bolino wasn’t already married, we figure she’d be dating Mr. Parks. What the unit was all about, of course, was sex, but you can’t exactly label a course sex 101, so twice a week we sat in a room next to the gym to learn about Our Changing Bodies.

  You had to have a note from home before you could take the course, and Elizabeth didn’t really want to, but her mother made her, which is surprising. Her mother said that if she didn’t learn it in school she might pick it up on the street. I’ve heard that before but I’ve never understood. I look out our window and don’t see a single person who would start talking to me about sex just because I didn’t study it in school. Anyway, Elizabeth and I sat beside each other, and as soon as Mrs. Bolino began, Elizabeth wrapped her arms tightly around her body, as though she wasn’t about to let hers do any changing, ready or not.

  For the past week we’d been studying the female reproductive system, and when we got to class on Friday, there was a surprise quiz. The teacher gave each of us a diagram of a woman’s reproductive organs, and we had to label everything in sight. We set to work, trying to decide if the little flowery thing at the end of the fallopian tube had a name, when the door opened and Mr. Parks walked in, looking for the volleyball net.

  And suddenly, like a pack of starlings, girls started screeching and covering their diagrams. I think Elizabeth started it, actually, but the scream went around the room like a brush fire. A couple girls even leaned over and bodily protected their ovaries and fallopian tubes from the astonished gaze of Mr. Parks.

  The coach got the volleyball net in a hurry, and after he left the room, Mrs. Bolino faced us, frowning.

  “Girls,” she said. “I hope … most sincerely … that I will never again witness what has just gone on in this room. You negate yourselves when you put on a display like that. To cover the drawings of your own reproductive organs shows that you feel there is something embarrassing about your sex. If you are embarrassed about your sex, it must mean that you feel there is something demeaning or disgusting about being female. You are all wondrously made, girls. Remember that: wondrously made, and you should carry your sex proudly, a badge of honor.”

  I simply could not help myself. I tucked one edge of the paper under my chin so that the diagram of the reproductive organs covered my chest, and then I stood up and raised my arms above my head like a champion: I was proudly carrying my sex.

  I shouldn’t have tried that with Mrs. Bolino.

  “A wonderful idea, Miss McKinley,” she said. “Since you were so taken with my lecture, you may tape the diagram to your chest and wear it to your next class.”

  There was absolute quiet in the room. I stared. The girls gaped. If Mrs. Bolino really, truly believed that there was nothing embarrassing about our sexual organs, why was she making me wear them as punishment?

  She got some tape from her drawer, and after checking my answers, taped the diagram to my T-shirt. When the bell rang, I walked out into the hall.

  There was nothing to stop me from tearing it off, of course, and I suspect Mrs. Bolino figured I would.

  “Take it off, Alice!” Elizabeth begged, when we’d turned the corner. “She’s awful! You don’t have to wear that! You know you don’t.”

  But I’m stubborn too, sometimes. If she told me to wear the darn diagram, I’d do it. Elizabeth wouldn’t walk beside me, though. I guess she figured that if anybody hadn’t known we had fallopian tubes, she didn’t want them to know now, so she walked as far ahead of me as she could get.

  I was going to get even with Mrs. Bolino by wearing the paper all day, and hoped the principal would stop me in the hall so I could tell him about this cruel and unusual punishment. But by the time the day was half over, the momentum had worn off and the paper was torn and wrinkled. Kids who knew nothing about the Our Changing Bodies quiz thought I was weird. But I wanted Patrick to see it before I took it off, so I wore it to gourmet cooking. Patrick has traveled all around the world with his folks; they’re diplomats or something. He probably thinks that nothing exciting ever happens to me, so I marched in with my reproductive organs on my chest.

  “What’s that all about?” he asked, when I sat down at our workstation. We’re partners when we use the stove. “I saw you wearing it in the hall this morning.”

  “Mrs. Bolino made me do it for smarting off,” I said.

  He studied the diagram, turning his head sideways. “The cervix. You missed that one.”

  I felt my face redden. “How do you know?” I demanded. He didn’t even have a sister!

  “Because we finished the unit on male organs last week and have already started the female.”

  That meant that we were going to study male organs next. I pulled the diagram off my chest and threw it into the trash. I decided I wanted to sit right behind Elizabeth in that class so that when she fell over backward, I could catch her.

  Meanwhile, however, I felt like a drip. Especially when one of the Three Handsome Stooges found my paper in the wastebasket. He started smirking and whispering with the other boys, and I wished for all the world I’d c
rumpled that diagram up and stuck it in my book bag.

  What was worse, we were cooking liver that day, and we figured we’d been tricked. The first day of gourmet cooking we’d made pizza, and that was okay. But now we realized that gourmet cooking was just another name for nutrition. The difference was that last semester we’d divided food into the four basic food groups, and this semester we had to cook it. On this day each workstation was given a glistening slab of dark red liver, which sat quivering on our countertop like an organ waiting to be transplanted.

  The instructor had gone to the door to take a message, when the Stooge who had found my diagram picked up his piece of liver, dangled it by one end, and said to a boy across the room, “Hey, Jim! Placenta! Catch!” And gave it a toss. From there it went to Patrick, then to a guy over by the window, and by the time the teacher stopped the show, the liver had been under the radiator, in the wastebasket, and had left a wet spot on the blackboard.

  Some of the girls were glaring at me for bringing our reproductive organs to class. I swiveled around on my stool and faced the liver.

  “I don’t think I can stand this, Patrick,” I said as he floured and seasoned it the way the teacher told us, then pounded it with the edge of a saucer to make it tender.

  “It’s okay. I’ll eat yours,” he said. Patrick, who has traveled everywhere and eaten squid in Japan, came to the rescue once again.

  I ate the two obligatory bites you have to take to pass, however, and it wasn’t half bad.

  The beginning of February, in Washington, D.C.—which is only a few miles from Silver Spring—is about the ugliest time of year. Nothing’s in bloom, of course, and all you can see are monuments and buildings, which is why Aunt Sally decided to come. There wouldn’t be any tourists around, she said, and she could have the city to herself. The main reason was that Carol was flying to Washington to attend a three-day conference, and Aunt Sally decided to come along and see for herself how well or how poorly we were running our lives without Mom.