Almost Alice

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  I have to say, I handled it pretty well the next day. I really tried to put myself in Elizabeth’s place. If I hadn’t gone out with a guy for a long time, and a friend called to tell me she had dates with two guys, and then apologized for upsetting me, how would I want her to treat me the next day?

  I decided that another apology would only emphasize the fact that she didn’t have a boyfriend. So I didn’t even mention our phone conversation. She happened to be wearing a yellow sweater, and with her dark hair and lashes, she looked terrific.

  “That’s a great color on you,” I said as I hung up my jacket in my locker.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  At lunch I didn’t mention the Sadie Hawkins Day dance. I think Liz was surprised that I talked about our cat instead, how she kept forgetting where her litter box was among all the stuff piled in our living room.

  Someone eventually brought up the dance, and when I still didn’t bite, Liz said, “Hey, did you know that Alice invited Scott Lynch?” and everyone turned toward me.

  I casually explained that he was a friend from the newspaper staff, that I’d asked him because Patrick was busy that night.

  “Well, hey!” said Pamela.

  “Wow!” said Gwen.

  But I was so offhand about it that the attention soon shifted to someone else. And when Liz asked me later if I had a tampon, I gave her the only one I had left. What are friends for?

  I was nervous about seeing Scott at school. I mean, one day we’re friends working on the newspaper together, and the next we’ve got a date for a dance. Did he realize I’d had a crush on him for a long time, or did he think it was just a spur-of-the-moment invitation? All the way to school that morning, I’d mentally practiced what I’d say if I met him in the hall. Had even stood in front of the mirror practicing a smile that wasn’t too eager, not too strained, not too wide, not too narrow.… I was making myself sick.

  And then, just before gym, I was putting some stuff in my locker when I heard a voice say, “Hi, Alice,” and there was Scott, books tucked under one arm.

  “Oh!” I tried to speak and swallow at the same time, and started coughing. He grinned and patted me on the back.

  “You okay?” he asked, and I felt my face growing hot.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Sorry!” he said, and waited till the coughing was under control. “Well, look. About the dance …”

  He’s backing out! I thought, feeling weak in the knees.

  “… I don’t want to disrupt your plans or anything, but Don e-mailed me last night and said a girl had invited him, and he wanted to know if we could double. I know that this is your party, but I was going to offer to drive and …”

  I was so relieved, I almost choked again. “Of course! It’s fine!” I said.

  Don was the senior photographer for our newspaper, and he and Tony had been with Liz and me last semester when I’d researched my feature story “The City at Night.” Don’s a nice guy. Then I had another thought: What if the girl who had invited him was Jacki Severn? What if we were double-dating with Don and Jacki?

  “Is Don taking anyone I know?” I asked.

  “Another senior, Christy Levin,” he said.

  I smiled. “Great,” I said. This was great. Scott was great. Life was great.

  “I’ll tell him, then,” Scott said, and nodded down the corridor. “Gotta run. Chem’s at the other end of the building.”

  “See you,” I called out.

  Pamela was out with Tim Moss on Saturday night, so Gwen and Liz and I went to Molly’s to play Scrabble with her.

  She wasn’t wearing her old sweat suit this time, but had on jeans and a fleece pullover, a baseball cap on her head.

  “You look like you’re feeling better,” I told her, and she did.

  “It’s been an okay week,” she told us. “Either the chemo’s helping or I’m just getting more used to it.”

  She had the board set up on a card table in one corner of the family room, and her mom brought in a high-calorie shake for her, Cokes and chips for the rest of us.

  Q, of course, is the most difficult letter to play because you need a U to go along with it. All the tiles were drawn, and I got stuck with a Q at the end of the game, while Molly was stuck with two U’s.

  “Two!” I cried. “You’ve been holding out on me, Molly!”

  But in the next game Molly played the word quiz, with the high-scoring Q and the Z.

  “Whoeee!” she cried, and even her dad looked in and grinned.

  “Hey, girl, you’ve got those tiles marked!” Gwen joked.

  Molly held up the two letters to show that the backs of the tiles were clean. “X-ray vision,” she said. “I can see through wood.”

  I wished I could see through things. Through people. I wished I could see through Molly and tell if the treatment protocol she was on was working. I wished I could read the fortunes of all four of us there at the card table: Molly, the sickest of the lot; Gwen, the smartest; Liz, the most beautiful; and me, the most ordinary. It would be interesting to know what each of us would be doing three years from now. Five years. Ten years… .

  Then again, maybe not.

  3

  Yo Te Quiero

  The SAT wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Maybe, having taken the PSAT last fall, I was better prepared or wasn’t as nervous. I can’t say I sailed through it, but I felt more confident than I had before. I’d been boning up on it every week since October and attended two Saturday workshops in January, and that helped. Liz took the test with me, and we both were relieved and hopeful when it was over. At last we could think about other things for a while.

  Liz was really into track, but the school newspaper kept me busy, and I wanted to get back to working for Dad at the Melody Inn on Saturdays, to earn some cash. Then there was the Gay/Straight Alliance, and on the first Thursday in February, I went to my first meeting.

  It was good to know that Lori thought enough of me to invite me into the group and nice to see how much in love she and Leslie were with each other. The GSA had only been active in our school since last fall, though there were chapters in lots of high schools and colleges all over the country—just straight and gay friends, bonding together, offering support, so that gays didn’t have to feel like a separate species and straights didn’t have to feel they’d be labeled if they stood up for gay rights.

  Everyone was sitting around in a loose circle when I came in, kidding with each other, sharing iPods, discussing new bands, showing off new jackets or hairstyles. I slid onto a chair next to Lori and listened to the chatter. Finally Mr. Morrison, the faculty sponsor, came in, said hello to the group, welcomed the new people, then started some sort of casual ritual, which everyone seemed to understand except me.

  “My name is James,” he said, smiling around the room, “and my socks are blue.”

  Whaaaaat? I thought. What did that have to do with anything? Especially because, glancing at his feet, I saw that his socks were definitely not blue, they were brown. Everyone was smiling, and I could tell that a lot of people were watching me, the new kid, to see my reaction.

  Mr. Morrison turned to the person next to him, a large guy, one of the football players maybe, and this guy continued the ritual: “My name is Cary, and my socks are red.”

  His socks were white! What was going on? Were we talking in code or something? How did you play this game?

  A girl was next. She grinned. “I’m Denisha, and my socks are pink.” Yeah, they were. Well, coral maybe. It was hopeless.

  As the strange ceremony continued, Lori leaned over and whispered, “The socks under your pants.” And when I stared at her quizzically, she whispered, “Your underwear. But Morrison won’t let us say that in case some parent goes berserk and tries to shut the group down.”

  What? Then it was Leslie’s turn, then Lori’s: “My name is Lori, and my socks are white.”

  What color underwear d
id I put on this morning? I thought desperately. But it was my turn, and all eyes were on me. All faces smiling.

  “My name is Alice,” I said, “and my socks are … are polka dot.”

  Everybody broke into laughter, and I was in. And I understood what the ritual was all about. In a way, it was a takeoff on Alcoholics Anonymous, where each person gives his first name and admits that he’s an alcoholic. He says the words to own it—to make sure he recognizes that this is his problem.

  But here, by describing our underwear, we were saying in effect that what we were didn’t matter. We all wear underwear—well, except for one guy who said he wasn’t wearing any socks at all. But who cared if they were red or blue? Who cared if you didn’t know? Nobody had to answer that he or she was gay or straight or bisexual or transsexual because it wasn’t considered a problem.

  The next half hour was a sort of free-for-all. Anyone could share something that had happened during the past week—any problems, feelings, whatever.

  “Somebody asked me how I felt about the word ‘queer,’” one boy said. “And I thought, ‘I don’t know, man.’ It seems okay when my friends and I use it, but if someone else calls me that … I’m not sure.”

  “Doesn’t bother me,” said another guy. “I look at it as a sort of status thing. You know, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Like we’re the ones with style.”

  Somebody told a derogatory joke he’d heard in the locker room, and we talked about that for a while. This drifted into a joke-telling session, till we were so far off course that Mr. Morrison had to drag us back to business.

  “We were planning to have a table at the Sadie Hawkins Day dance,” he said. “Everybody okay with that?”

  “No one expects trouble, do they?” asked Leslie.

  “There wasn’t any trouble at the Snow Ball, and there were at least three gay couples there,” someone answered.

  “Whose turn is it to table?” Morrison asked.

  “Phil’s and Lori’s,” said someone, checking a clipboard, and for the rest of the session there was a recap of coming events and distribution of new brochures describing GSA, and then the meeting was over and everyone left.

  I felt pretty good as I drove home in Sylvia’s car. I think that the more groups you join, the more you feel you belong. And to tell the truth, I felt very content at that moment—two guys, three best friends plus a bunch of others, a dad and a brother whom I loved, a stepmom I was beginning to love… .

  And then, as always, I felt the wave of sadness that my real mom wasn’t alive for me to talk with—that the last time she’d seen me, I was five years old. I wished she could have known me now.

  It was time to do something for Lester. I asked Gwen and Liz and Pamela if they’d help me decorate his car for Valentine’s Day to make him think he had a secret admirer. Then he wouldn’t wonder if he was losing his appeal, and he could concentrate more on his studies and finish his master’s thesis. Not that he was wondering, but then, people are always insecure after a breakup, aren’t they? And hadn’t he just broken up with the “party girl”?

  Valentine’s Day was on a Thursday. Gwen, Pamela, and Liz agreed to go with me around nine on Wednesday evening to lavishly decorate his car. Yolanda, Gwen’s friend from church, wanted to go with us, so that made five. I just said I was going out with my gal pals, and Dad let me have his car. I told him I’d be back around ten.

  We had ribbons and streamers and hearts and paper bouquets. We had valentine messages printed on hearts. We whooped and giggled all the way down Georgia Avenue and made the turnoff at last into Takoma Park.

  Lester lives in the upstairs apartment of a big Victorian house owned by Otto Watts, who’s elderly and lives in the rooms downstairs. Les has two roommates, Paul Sorenson and George Palamas, and our big worry was that one of them might come home late and catch us in the act. But when I pulled up in front of the house next door, we saw two cars in Mr. Watts’s driveway and Lester’s car parked at the curb.

  “Are we lucky or are we lucky?” I whispered as we got out; we didn’t even close the car doors, we were that quiet. Just reached in and took out all the stuff we’d prepared at home.

  “Gwen, why don’t you and Pamela and Yolanda do the rear windshield, and Liz and I will do the front,” I suggested. “Then we’ll drape streamers along both sides and take off.”

  Liz and I taped love messages against the front windshield so that the words could be read from the driver’s seat. Your secret crush, read one. Loving you from afar, read another. There were bows and arrows, X’s and O’s, and I love you in three different languages.

  We taped a large pair of open lips on a side window, cardboard “eyes” with fringed eyelashes over each headlight, a plastic cupid where a hood ornament might have gone. We tied a pair of black lace panties to the antenna.

  Then the five of us unfurled the red and pink and white crepe paper streamers along each side of the car and around the bumpers. When I reached the door handle, I started to wrap the streamer twice around it to keep it from dragging, when suddenly the car erupted into a series of loud honks and beeps and sirens.

  I jumped backward.

  A theft alarm! When had Lester installed that?

  “Omigod!” cried Pamela.

  “Run!” I yelled. “Hide!”

  We grabbed the rest of the streamers and started to run. Gwen lost her shoe, and we stopped to retrieve that, then barreled on, collapsing behind a panel truck parked two houses down.

  Porch lights came on. A door opened. Then another.

  “Alice, why didn’t you tell us it was wired?” Gwen breathed on the back of my neck as we crouched practically on top of each other.

  “It wasn’t before! I didn’t know!” I cried.

  “They went that way!” a woman hollered. “I saw them running. I bet they’re after the air bags!”

  “Whose car is it?” we heard a man yell.

  And another answered, “That one in front. Looks like somebody just got married.”

  I didn’t realize anyone paid attention to those burglar alarms anymore. They’re always going off, and nobody gets too excited. If we’d only had a minute longer …

  We heard footsteps coming down the steps at the side of the house, and I knew in my bones it was someone from Lester’s apartment.

  “What the …?” came a familiar voice.

  A pause, then laughter.

  “Hey, Les, somebody’s got your number,” another voice said.

  The beeping stopped, and there was a long, plaintive yell from Lester: “Al-lice!”

  “How did he know it was me?” I whispered to the other girls. “How? How?”

  “Your dad’s car,” said Liz, and I crumpled.

  “Al!” Lester bellowed again.

  “Come on,” said Gwen. “We’ve got to face the music.”

  Slowly we came out from behind the panel truck and walked sheepishly back toward Les and his two roommates, streamers trailing behind us. George Palamas, the shorter, dark-haired guy, was laughing, and Paul Sorenson was trying to read the messages on the rear window.

  “That’s them!” shouted the woman across the street on the front steps.

  And at that very moment a squad car came rolling down the street, its light flashing.

  “Al-lice!” Liz cried shakily.

  The police car pulled over, and two officers got out.

  “It’s okay,” called Les. “We’ve got ’em.”

  The policemen didn’t respond, just came walking over, hands touching their belts. What they saw, of course, was three grown men with five young girls, and Les had his hand tightly on the back of my neck.

  “Who called?” asked one officer.

  “That’s them!” screeched the woman across the street. “I saw ’em running.”

  “They were hiding behind that panel truck,” yelled someone else.

  “Oh, brother!” said George.

  “So what’s the problem here?” asked the second officer. And to L
es, he said, “Put your hands down, please.”

  Les instantly released his grip on my neck.

  “We didn’t really do anything,” I said quickly. “I’m his sister.”

  “We all did it together!” cried Liz.

  “Jeez!” Les said through clenched teeth.

  “The car!” Gwen said quickly, the only one of us who sounded intelligent just then. “All we did was decorate his car.”

  The policemen looked from us to the car and back again.

  “Someone reported that there was an attempted car theft,” said the first officer. “That didn’t happen?”

  “My sister here set off my car alarm, and someone must have seen them running,” Les explained. “The neighborhood’s had some air bags stolen recently, and we’re sort of looking out for each other, that’s all.”

  “We didn’t take anything, honestly!” I said.

  One of the officers gave us a weary smile, then turned to Les again. “You want the girls to undecorate your car?” he asked.

  “Not until you’ve read the messages!” said Pamela. “We worked hard on this!”

  “I’ll handle it,” Les told the policemen. “Thanks.”

  They got back in the cruiser and took off.

  The people on their porches turned then and went back inside. Lester stared at his car, then at me. “Al—,” he started.

  But Pamela interrupted. “We’re freezing, Lester. Can’t we come in for something hot before we undecorate it?”

  He sighed. “Come on,” he said, and turned toward the steps.

  Four of us squeezed together on the sofa, and Pamela sat on the floor, holding a coffee mug. Liz and Pam hadn’t been in Lester’s apartment since he’d let us help him move in, and Gwen and Yolanda hadn’t seen it at all.

  George sat across the room reading some of the heart messages he’d torn off the back windshield. Paul was rummaging around the kitchen for another cup.

  “What is all this, Al?” Les asked. “What were you trying to do?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Valentine’s Day?” I asked.