“Like … what kind of problems?” Mark Stedmeister asked. The thousand-watt smile again: “Everything from totaling the car to having a baby.”
“Moi—a baby?” Mark said, looking shocked, and everyone laughed.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” said Mr. Everett. “Now listen up. Your grade will depend not necessarily on how you deal with your problem, but on the larger view you take. I’ll want to know how your solution affects you, the people around you, society, the works.”
Mr. Everett thinks big.
Leave it to Elizabeth to worry, however.
“I’ll just die if he makes me pregnant,” she said as we left class.
“Watch how you say that,” Pamela joked.
But Elizabeth worried that if she got the assignment for teenage pregnancy, she might have to go to the doctor for her first pelvic exam just so she could write it up for her report. She’s hopeless.
That night at the dinner table, I told Dad and Lester, my soon-to-be-twenty-one-year-old brother, about Mr. Everett’s class and how I was going to learn to make decisions. “Excellent idea!” said Dad. “For once the schools are teaching something practical.”
“I’m going to learn what to do if I total the car or get pregnant,” I added.
Dad stopped chewing.
“Will they accept questions from the outside?” asked Lester. “Will they help me decide between a brunette and a redhead?”
But Dad interrupted. “Al,” he said, “if you’re thinking, even remotely, of having sex …”
“I’m not,” I told him. “Well, I think about it, of course, but I’m not about to do anything.”
My real name is Alice McKinley, but Dad and Lester call me Al. I think it’s because Mom died when I was small that Dad freaks out about me sometimes. It’s true that he and Lester don’t know diddly about raising a girl, but it bothers Dad a lot more than it bothers Lester.
I chewed thoughtfully on a carrot stick. “Actually, the situations he’s going to assign us seem sort of hokey. Who sits down and thinks, ‘I guess I’ll go total the car tonight’ or ‘Dad, I want to have a teenage pregnancy’? Sometimes things just happen.”
“That’s the point,” Dad said. “These things happen because nobody thought they would. Nobody did any planning. Somebody has a few beers and gets in his car, or a girl has sex with her boyfriend. They’re not thinking ‘car wreck.’ They’re not thinking ‘baby.’”
I sighed. Life, as far as I could see, was going to be a sort of obstacle course, with detours, yield signs, stop signs, and cautions.
“What I wish,” I said, “is that I was born with a built-in buzzer, and whenever I was about to do something incredibly stupid, it beeped.”
“You were,” said Dad. “It’s called conscience.”
“Dad, every time I listen to my conscience it sounds just like you.”
“Imagine that,” he said.
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice the Brave
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