Life is like a dumpster. As soon as you get rid of one embarrassment, you pick up another. I knew that this was going to go on forever unless I found someone to set an example for me, and by the time I got the mustard off my shirt, I’d made up my mind: I’d adopt a mother.
THERE’S A LOT ABOUT GROWING UP THAT’S confusing to Alice McKinley. Her mother died when she was five—how can her father and her nineteen-year-old brother, Lester, teach her what she needs to know? Even buying a pair of jeans can turn into a major embarrassment with Lester in charge.
If only she had a role model, like the beautiful sixth-grade teacher Miss Cole. But instead Alice gets assigned to plain, pear-shaped Mrs. Plotkin’s class. Is Alice doomed to a life of one embarrassment after another?
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COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
AGES 10–14 • 0511
Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*
“I have read your Alice books ever since 5th grade (I’m in 10th grade now) and ever since the first one I read I can’t stop reading them! They are filled with such intrigue! … Alice and her friends and family just seem so real that I expect to look in a Maryland phone book under McKinley and find ‘Benjamin’!!”—Erin
“I absolutely love your books and am looking forward to your many others. My friends love them too. We formed an Alice club at our school. On Tuesdays we get together at the same table at lunch and have a book talk.”—Katie
“I was reading some historical fiction books about the late 1800s and I think it is amazing how little women really knew about their bodies and stuff like that. I’m glad that now we as girls have books like yours to read so we aren’t always clueless.”—Amy
*Taken from actual postings on the Alice website. To read more, visit AliceMcKinley.com.
PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR includes many of her own life experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults, and is the author of more than one hundred and thirty-five books, including the Alice series, which Entertainment Weekly has called “tender” and “wonderful.” In 1992 her novel Shiloh won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.
The Agony of Alice
BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
Shiloh Books
Shiloh
Shiloh Season
Saving Shiloh
The Alice Books
Starting with Alice
Alice in Blunderland
Lovingly Alice
The Agony of Alice
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of
Reluctantly Alice
All But Alice
Alice in April
Alice In-Between
Alice the Brave
Alice in Lace
Outrageously Alice
Achingly Alice
Alice on the Outside
The Grooming of Alice
Alice Alone
Simply Alice
Patiently Alice
Including Alice
Alice on Her Way
Alice in the Know
Dangerously Alice
Almost Alice
Intensely Alice
Alice in Charge
Incredibly Alice
Alice Collections
I Like Him, He Likes Her
It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way
Please Don’t Be True
The Bernie Magruder Books
Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink
Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies
Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel
Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor
Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup
Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure
Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril
Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry
The Cat Pack Books
The Grand Escape
The Healing of Texas Jake
Carlotta’s Kittens
Polo’s Mother
The York Trilogy
Shadows on the Wall
Faces in the Water
Footprints at the Window
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The Witch Herself
The Witch’s Eye
Witch Weed
The Witch Returns
Picture Books
King of the Playground
The Boy with the Helium Head
Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear
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Ducks Disappearing
I Can’t Take You Anywhere
Sweet Strawberries
Please DO Feed the Bears
Books for Young Readers
Josie’s Troubles
How Lazy Can You Get?
All Because I’m Older
Maudie in the Middle
One of the Third-Grade Thonkers
Roxie and the Hooligans
Books for Middle Readers
Walking Through the Dark
How I Came to Be a Writer
Eddie, Incorporated
The Solomon System
The Keeper
Beetles, Lightly Toasted
The Fear Place
Being Danny’s Dog
Danny’s Desert Rats
Walker’s Crossing
Books for Older Readers
A String of Chances
Night Cry
The Dark of the Tunnel
The Year of the Gopher
Send No Blessings
Ice
Sang Spell
Jade Green
Blizzard’s Wake
Cricket Man
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1985 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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Book design by Mike Rosamilia
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.
0311 OFF
This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition May 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds
The agony of Alice / by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Eleven-year-old, motherless Alice decides she needs a gorgeous role model who does everything right; and when placed in homely Mrs. Plotkin’s class she is greatly disappointed until she discovers it’s what people are inside that counts.
ISBN 978-0-689-
31143-7 (hc)
1. Children’s stories, America. [1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction] I. Title.
PZ7.N24Ag 1985 [Fic]—dc19
85007957
ISBN 978-1-4424-2363-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-4424-6576-3 (eBook)
To my sister Norma
Contents
One: Kissing Tarzan
Two: Agnes Under the Mattress
Three: Lips Together, Teeth Apart
Four: Plod-kin
Five: Hiding Out at the Melody Inn
Six: Looking After Lester
Seven: The Maharaja’s Magic
Eight: Bringing Up the Rear
Nine: Dinner With Marilyn
Ten: The Bramble Bush, With Branches Thick
Eleven: Love
Twelve: Eating Squid
Thirteen: Flushing on the Capitol Limited
Fourteen: Aunt Sally, Sir
Fifteen: Something for the Orphans
Sixteen: Who Got the Globe
1
KISSING TARZAN
THE SUMMER BETWEEN FIFTH AND SIXTH grades, something happens to your mind. With me, the box of Crayolas did it—thirty-two colors including copper and burgundy. I was putting them in a sack for our move to Silver Spring when I remembered how I used to eat crayons in kindergarten.
I didn’t just eat them, either. One day when I was bored I stuck two crayons up my nostrils, then leaned over my desk and wagged my head from side to side like an elephant with tusks, and the teacher said, “Alice McKinley, what on earth are you doing?”
Thinking about those crayons and that teacher was so embarrassing that it made my palms tingle, my neck hot. Surely, I thought, it was about the weirdest thing I’d ever done. And then, after I’d packed the Crayolas, I found a copy of a poem I had written in third grade:
There are lots of drops in the ocean,
There are lots of stars in the blue;
But in the whole state of Maryland,
There’s only one person like you.
I stopped worrying about the crayons and cringed at the poem. Do you know who I wrote it for? My father? My grandfather? Aunt Sally? The mailman, when he retired. I hardly even knew him.
The reason I worry about my mind is that as soon as I remembered the mailman, I wondered if he was still alive, and somewhere, deep inside me, I sort of hoped he wasn’t. I didn’t want anybody remembering that poem. I wondered if my kindergarten teacher was alive, too. If I met her on the street tomorrow, would she still remember me as the girl with Crayolas up her nose? Those were absolutely the two most ridiculous things I had ever done in my life, I thought, and then I remembered this big piece of cardboard back in fourth grade and this boy named Donald Sheavers.
Donald was stupid and good-looking, and I liked him a lot.
“Come over and watch television, Donald,” I’d say, and he’d come over and watch television. Any channel I wanted.
“I guess it’s time for you to go home, Donald,” I’d say later, and he’d go home.
I’ll bet if I’d ever said, “Wear your clothes backward, Donald,” he’d have worn his clothes backward. But I never asked him to do that because, as I said, I liked him. Then I found this big sheet of cardboard.
It came in a box with our Sears washing machine. Dad couldn’t fix the old one, so we got a new deluxe model, and I got to keep the cardboard.
I was lying out on the grass in the shade on my cardboard looking up at the box elder and I remembered this old Tarzan movie I’d seen on TV. Tarzan and Jane were on a raft on the river, and they were kissing. They didn’t know it, but the raft was getting closer and closer to a waterfall, and just before it went over the rocks, Tarzan grabbed hold of a vine, picked up Jane, and swung to shore. That was all. But suddenly I wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed on a raft with my life in danger. That’s when I thought of Donald.
“Donald,” I said when he came over, “you want to be in the movies?”
“Yes,” said Donald. He even looked like Tarzan. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and he went around all summer in cutoffs.
I told him about the raft and the waterfall, and I sort of rushed through the part about kissing. “We can’t do it,” Donald said. “We don’t have a river.”
“We’ll just have to pretend that, Donald.”
“We don’t have a vine,” he told me.
I got a rope and tied it to a branch in the box elder.
I was afraid he’d complain about the kissing next, but when the rope was ready, he said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”
And suddenly I thought of all kinds of things we had to do first. We had to be chased through the forest by pygmies, and then there was this quicksand and an alligator, but finally we made it to the raft, and Donald came crashing down beside me. I pushed him away.
“You have to get on the raft gently, Donald,” I told him.
He came running again, grabbed the rope, and lowered himself onto the raft, but this time I rolled off.
“What’s the matter?” asked Donald.
“I don’t know,” I said uncomfortably. “I think we have to start with the pygmies and sort of work into it.”
We went back to the chase scene through the forest. Donald climbed the box elder and pounded his chest and bellowed. We leaped over the quicksand and over the alligator, and there we were on the raft once more.
This time I got the giggles. Donald did his part perfectly, but just when he got close enough that I could smell his breath—Donald always had a sort of stale bubble gum smell—I rolled off again.
For a whole afternoon we tried it. We added cannibals and burning torches and a gorilla, but somehow I could not get through the kissing. Donald laughed and thought it was a joke, but I was disgusted with myself.
It came to an end very quickly. I decided that I could not have any dinner that evening unless I got through the kissing scene. This is it, I thought as we ran through the forest with the gorilla grabbing at our heels. Donald swung around in the box elder yelping and beating his chest. Then the quicksand, the alligator, and the cardboard. Suddenly: “Donald!” came my father’s voice from the side window.
Donald rolled one way, and I rolled the other. The next thing I knew my dad had come outside and was standing there in the grass.
“I don’t think you should be doing that with Al,” said my father. (I’m the only girl in our family, but he still calls me “Al.”) “You’d better go home now, Donald, and the next time you come over, think of something better to do.”
“Okay,” said Donald.
All I did was sit there and stare at my knees. I didn’t even tell Dad that the kissing was my idea, so Donald got the blame.
We didn’t play Tarzan anymore that summer, and I never did get kissed on the raft. When school started and Donald passed me in the hall, sometimes he’d thump his chest and grin, just to tease me, but for the most part I forgot all about it. He became interested in basketball and I got interested in books, and I probably went through fifth grade without thinking of Donald more than a couple of times.
That same afternoon, however, when I was getting ready to move and I dropped the Crayolas in the sack, I started remembering all the embarrassing things I had ever done in my life. The mailman might have died and my kindergarten teacher may have passed away, but Donald Sheavers was alive and well.
I began to wish that he wasn’t. I didn’t really want him to die or anything, just maybe quietly disappear so that the only person left who would remember any of the dumb things I’d ever done would be me. It was bad enough remembering them myself. Exactly one hour later, when I was packing my tinfoil collection, I heard that Donald Sheavers had fallen off his bike and had a brain concussion.
I didn’t eat any dinner. I remembered that Donald was Catholic and I thought maybe if I prayed to one of the saints it might help. I thought maybe women saints helped girls and men saints helped boys, but the only saints I could think of were Saints Mary and Bernadette. Then I thought
of a Saint Bernard dog. I figured there must be a Saint Bernard, so I sat down in a corner of my room and prayed. I told him that if I had ever let one little wish reach heaven about Donald Sheavers disappearing to please, please, disregard it and let Donald live.
“Sure you don’t want any supper, Al?” Dad asked, but I said no.
“You worried about Donald Sheavers?”
I nodded. The next day when I didn’t come down to breakfast, Dad called Mrs. Sheavers, and she said that Donald was better. In fact, she said, it would be perfectly fine if we went to the hospital to see him, so I bought a Hershey bar and Dad drove me over. I closed my eyes and prayed to Saint Bernard one last time. I thanked him for letting Donald live and asked if he could please fix it so that playing Tarzan back in fourth grade would be erased forever from Donald’s mind.
The nurse directed us to room 315, and we went in. Donald was sitting up with a bandage around his forehead, sipping a milk shake. He was still good-looking, even with the bandage. Donald grinned at me, set the milk shake down, and just as I was about to hand him the candy bar, he pounded his chest and gave a Tarzan yell.
I found out later that there are a lot of Saint Bernards, so I figure my prayer just got to heaven and sat around in the dead-letter box.
The movers came the next morning, and we left Takoma Park for Silver Spring, a few miles away. I was glad. I wanted to start a whole new life with different people. But we had only been in the new house five hours and fifteen minutes before I embarrassed my whole family.
2
AGNES UNDER THE MATTRESS
WE’VE MOVED THREE TIMES IN MY LIFE, BUT I only remember two times. We moved from Tennessee to Chicago before I was born, from Chicago to Takoma Park, Maryland, when I was six, and from Takoma Park to Silver Spring when I was eleven. I’ve never had many relatives around. Most of mine are in Tennessee, and we don’t visit unless someone dies or gets married or something.
I had an Uncle Charlie who married when he was fifty-seven and died two days later. We’d just driven back to Maryland and had to turn around and go to Tennessee again to bury him. At the funeral dinner there was this sort of weird-looking cake that they called lemon sponge, but I knew it was just leftover wedding cake with sauce on it.