Alice on Her Way

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  As soon as I’d come back from New York, I’d signed up for the driver training course so I could at least start it before my birthday on May 14. Dad let me have time off work on Saturday mornings.

  I carried the Maryland Driver’s Handbook with me wherever I went, and it seemed like I was studying for my SAT. I’d hand the book to anyone—Liz in the cafeteria, Sam in his car, Gwen in the library, Pamela on my porch—and say, “Ask me anything.”

  “True or false,” Gwen might say. “When approaching a cyclist on the road ahead of you, you should sound your horn to let him know you are there.”

  “False,” I said. “You’d startle him.”

  “How many feet in advance do you start signaling before making a turn?” Sam might ask.

  “One hundred.” I had it down pat.

  My driving instructor, Mr. Higgins, was a man entirely lacking in humor. He would take three of us out at a time—two in the backseat, one at the wheel—and then we’d trade off. One of the students was a guy who must have been six feet seven. His head cleared the roof of the car by a half inch. The other, a girl who always wore a brown sweater, reminded me of a little mouse because she squeaked and squealed when she got nervous.

  If she was trying to make a turn downtown and pedestrians were crossing in front of her, she’d inch the car forward but squeal and slam on the brakes each time someone else crossed. Inch her way forward and squeal again. Kenny—the tall guy—and I would sit in back desperately trying not to laugh, and once he even stuffed a tennis ball in his mouth to block the sound. That made me laugh out loud.

  Mr. Higgins never laughed at anything. We saw his eyes watching us from the dual rearview mirrors. “You two won’t think it’s funny when you go for your driving test and don’t know your ass from your elbow,” he said. “You pay attention, you might learn something.” And then he’d be extra hard on me or Kenny when one of us was in the driver’s seat next, and I guess we deserved it.

  “Four little words, and you can’t read ’em,” he said to me. “‘No turn on red.’ Which of those words don’t you understand?”

  A week before my birthday Dad asked, “What should we plan for your sixteenth, Al? This is a biggie, right?”

  This, of course, meant he hadn’t planned anything yet at all. His own birthday had come and gone, and I’d only bought him a book and some candy. I felt guilty even suggesting something. What I wanted most, of course, next to world peace, was my driver’s license, yet I couldn’t even begin to parallel park.

  “I don’t know, Dad,” I said about my birthday. “Surprise me.”

  “Do you want a party?” he asked.

  “Sure. I want to wear a beaded gown and a feather headdress and enter on the back of an elephant,” I answered.

  “Seriously? A party?” he said.

  “Not if I have to plan it,” I told him. I just wished I could click my heels together, whirl around three times, and be sixteen, without the fuss and bother. Or did I? To make matters worse, my birthday was on a Saturday this year, and half the kids I knew were working weekends.

  Lester took me out a couple more times for driving lessons, but he was busy too, and each hour he spent with me was one hour less he might have spent with Tracy. For some reason, learning to drive was harder for me than I’d expected, and I could tell that Les felt I should be catching on sooner than I did.

  Between school and church and driver’s training and the orthodontist and Sam, I hardly had any time for myself. What little I had left over I tried to reserve for Pamela. She had looked forward to New York so much, and now she seemed to have shrunk back into the shadows. With Brian and Tony and some of the other guys, who gave her knowing looks and made suggestive comments, she was brash and flirty, but around us we could see that sad and desperate look we knew so well.

  She’d sit through a class with her mind a million miles away. Go home from school and take a nap. A lot of times I’d call and could tell I’d woken her up. We’d all been worried about Faith, and now even Faith was concerned about Pamela.

  I decided I had enough to worry about without trying to get my license the day after I turned sixteen. I would simply put it out of my mind, get more practice with Dad or Les, and go in for my test when I felt up to it. Forget the calendar. Besides, I didn’t want to ruin my birthday celebration, whatever it was going to be. Neither Dad nor Sylvia had said one word about a party on Saturday, and if they’d been planning one, I should have known by now. As for my friends, when a birthday falls on the weekend, we usually celebrate it on Friday at school.

  Friends are supposed to go all out on your birthday. They usually decorate your locker with balloons and streamers and ribbons. They’ll even wallpaper the inside sometimes. They’ll bring you flowers and Hershey’s bars and teddy bears.

  It’s fun if you have a lot of friends. It’s not so fun if you don’t. The really popular kids get tons of stuff and walk around all day loaded down with it to show how popular they are. I hung out with the really popular crowd only once, in seventh grade, when a bunch of us called ourselves the “Famous Eight.” But we weren’t famous for long, and I’ve never tried to be Miss Popularity since. But I was really disappointed when I rounded the corner to my locker on Friday. There was Sam, holding a bunch of cellophane-wrapped flowers, but my locker door was as bare as a baby’s bottom.

  Nothing. No notes, no balloons, no ribbons or streamers. I was afraid I might cry, silly as it was, or that Sam would see the disappointment on my face.

  “Oh, thanks! You remembered!” I said.

  “How could I forget?” he said, and kissed me.

  I turned the combination on my lock. Maybe they decorated the inside, I thought. I’ll bet when I open the door, a sea of balloons will float out. I opened the door. Nothing. Just a few books and a forgotten sweater.

  “Do you want your present now or later?” Sam asked, smiling.

  “Now is fine,” I said, really wanting to go straight home and crawl into bed. This meant that there was no party planned for tomorrow or Sam would have waited till then. He wanted me to have at least something to show my friends, even if he was the only one who remembered.

  He handed me two little boxes wrapped together with a single gold ribbon and bow. I opened the smaller one on top—a miniature box from Godiva of six chocolates in the shape of clamshells and mushrooms that smelled more like perfume than chocolate.

  The larger box was heavier, and when I lifted the lid, I found a small framed photo of Sam and me, taken by his mom at their condo the night of the dance. It was a good photo. We both look either deliriously happy or slightly manic, depending on your interpretation. What was the matter with me? I wondered. Why didn’t I feel a rush of love for this wonderful, caring guy?

  “Oh, Sam,” I said. I was embarrassed to feel a tear roll down my cheek.

  He reached over and kissed it. “I’m sentimental too,” he said. “Mom gave me an enlargement, and I’ve got it on my wall above the bed.” I felt even worse.

  As I headed for class, though, I had another thought. If nobody wishes me happy birthday—if no one says anything at all about it—I’ll know they’re up to something, I decided. But they did mention it.

  “Happy birthday, Alice,” said Liz. “Are your dad and Sylvia going to take you somewhere special tomorrow?”

  “Happy b-day!” called Pamela when we passed in the hall.

  “Heeey! Sweet sixteen and she’s sweeeeeet!” yelled Mark Stedmeister.

  It’s when friends, who know how much a birthday is supposed to mean to you, especially this one, let you down that you really feel awful. Hadn’t I baked brownies for Pamela on birthdays in the past? Hadn’t I traded earrings with Liz? Didn’t they remember all the times I’d tied balloons to the handles of their lockers? The cards? The candy? Was this old hat, now that we were growing up? Just freshman stuff?

  I wanted the day to end. All afternoon I watched the clock, and when the last bell rang, I went to my locker, fully expecting to s
ee Sam waiting for me, ready to give me a ride home. But he wasn’t. Even Sam, it seemed, had run out of steam. I opened the locker, and there was a little piece of folded paper on the floor, on top of a pair of old running shoes. Probably Sam apologizing for not having the car today, I thought.

  I unfolded the paper and recognized Pamela’s handwriting:

  Important! There’s a note for you at the front office.

  I stared at it. Now what? Something about her mom, I guessed. I was going to get caught up in some new mother/daughter conflict. Have to testify for what I saw or didn’t see her do in New York.

  The office was on the other side of the school, and as I made the long trek down the hall and then down the stairs to the first floor, I wondered if it had to do with Faith instead. Maybe Liz and I, as witnesses, were going to have to testify in court against Ron, but then, why wouldn’t this note have been from Liz?

  I went into the office. “Did someone leave a note for me?” I asked. “Alice McKinley?”

  “Yep. Right here,” said the clerk, and handed me a small white envelope with my name on it. Liz’s careful printing, with the daisy she always uses to dot the i in Alice. What is this? I wondered, and opened the envelope.

  Important! Go to the Pizza Hut across the street. Ask for Mike and say, “McKinley.”

  By now I’d missed my bus, but I didn’t care. The gloom that had settled over me all day suddenly lifted, and I laughed out loud as I walked outside.

  The Pizza Hut was actually a half block away, but I trotted obediently down the sidewalk. I thought I saw Molly down at the far corner holding her cell phone to her ear, but she slipped behind a parked car and I wasn’t sure.

  Inside the Pizza Hut, I half expected the gang to yell, Surprise! It was full of students, but none of the friends in our crowd. I waited my turn in line, then said, “Is Mike here?”

  The older of the two guys came over. “Yeah?” he said.

  “McKinley,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah!” He grinned and reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a paper, neatly folded into smaller and smaller squares. “Here you are,” he said.

  I took it back outside.

  Important! Go to the library

  on Colesville Road and look up

  “sex” in the World Book

  Encyclopedia.

  “You guys!” I hooted when I saw Liz and Pamela behind the shrubbery up ahead, but they just ducked and laughed, so I went on over to Colesville Road and down the hill to the library. Brian and Mark were pretending to read newspapers in the magazine section. I figured I’d been watched since I opened the first note.

  I went into the reference room, but they told me that the World Book Encyclopedia was in the children’s section. When I went there, a large boy with one finger up his right nostril had the S volume opened on the table and was laboriously copying a whole passage from an article on satellites.

  “Is this the only World Book set that you have?” I asked the librarian.

  “I’m afraid so,” she said. “But we have the newest edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. What did you want to look up?”

  “Uh… never mind,” I said, and went back to sit across from the boy whose finger must have got stuck up his nose, because it was still there.

  How long had he had the volume? I wondered. What if he’d found the note and read it? What if he’d thrown it away?

  “Excuse me,” I said to him finally. “Could I look up something in that book? I’ll give it right back to you.”

  The boy slowly raised his head, dislodged his finger, and licked it. I tried not to gag. “You can have it when I’m done,” he said, and went on writing.

  I saw Molly and Gwen watching from the doorway, hands over their mouths.

  “It’s sort of urgent,” I said to the boy.

  “So is this,” he said. “My aunt’s going to pick me up in ten minutes, and I’ve got to have this done.”

  I reached in my backpack for my change purse and held up a quarter. “Could I have it for just a minute?”

  He stared at the quarter, shook his head, and went on writing. This time I knew I heard Molly laugh.

  I dug around in my backpack for my wallet and pulled out a dollar. “Can I have it for just a second?” I asked, waving it in front of his eyes. If he didn’t take it, I was going to snatch the encyclopedia out from under his nose.

  He looked at me like I was a crazy person. “Okay,” he said, and took the dollar.

  I quickly looked up sex and at first didn’t see the note, because it was folded into tiny pleats so that it was thin as a pencil, tucked deep into the crease of the binding.

  “Thanks,” I said, and slid the book back to him.

  Now he was really staring. “Are you a spy?” he asked, wide-eyed.

  “Something like that,” I told him, and heard my friends laugh as I scooted my chair out from the table and left the library with an entourage behind me: Pamela, Gwen, Elizabeth, Molly, Sam, Mark, and Brian. I opened the piece of paper:

  Go to Starbucks and look for a note

  taped to the underside of the table

  by the window.

  How long had it taken them to work this out? I wondered. Had they all stayed after school just for this? We were all laughing as I entered Starbucks.

  The shop was full. Every table was taken—people drinking coffee and reading newspapers and munching scones. I looked toward the table by the window. A thirty-something couple sat there deep in conversation, their eyes only on each other, hands interlocked. From where I stood, I noticed that the woman had slipped off one shoe and was running her toes slowly up under the man’s right trouser leg.

  “You guys!” I whispered, giggling. “How am I going to interrupt?”

  “Go for it!” said Pamela. “It’s your birthday!”

  I made my way over to the window. “Excuse me,” I said.

  They looked up at me impatiently without answering.

  “I think there’s something under the table meant for me,” I said. “Would you mind if I took a look, just for a second?”

  “What?” said the man.

  “I just have to crawl under your table for a minute,” I said.

  I could tell that the woman was desperately fishing around for her shoe.

  “Couldn’t you come back later?” the man said. “We’re having a conversation here.”

  “Please don’t stop,” I said. “I’ll just take a quick look and leave.” I couldn’t believe I had the nerve, and I probably never would have done it if I hadn’t had an audience egging me on.

  The couple stared in disbelief as I crawled between their legs under the table. A piece of paper was taped to the underside. I pulled and it tore in half.

  Now the manager was coming over.

  “Could you do something about the girl under our table?” the woman said indignantly.

  I was desperately trying to pull off the other half of the note. I saw an upside-down face peering at me, scowling.

  “Miss?” the manager said sternly. Everyone in Starbucks was staring now.

  I got the other half of the paper and crawled out, and the gang by the door whooped and cheered. We went outside where I unfolded the last piece of paper:

  Go directly home. Do not pass Go.

  Do not collect $200. Let’s party!

  “Yes!” I said. “You guys are the best!”

  Sam and Brian and Molly all had cars, so we piled in, and a few minutes later we pulled up in front of my house, where Karen and Jill were waiting. I saw that both Dad’s and Sylvia’s cars were there and knew that they must have been in on the secret too.

  I couldn’t believe who all showed up, and they seemed to keep coming. Penny and Lori and Leslie and, my God, even Patrick!

  The gifts were small and silly: a little bottle of champagne delivered in an old sneaker; a scented candle; crazy socks; thong panties (two pair) from Liz and Pamela; a snow globe with her picture inside from Gwen; a miniature bubb
le gum machine. There were cards, too, from friends who couldn’t make it. Even Rosalind.

  Dad and Sylvia had put out a buffet of Mexican food from my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, and we took our plastic plates and forks and spread out in the living room, most of us on the floor. It was like a big picnic.

  Molly told Dad and Sylvia about the treasure hunt and how I had to bribe the boy in the library. “He was, like, ‘No! Get your own!’” she said, and Dad chuckled.

  But when Gwen told them how I had to crawl under the table at Starbucks—“And the woman was trying to get her shoe back on…”—both Dad and Sylvia threw back their heads in laughter.

  “What scared us most was the encyclopedia,” said Pamela. “When we saw the kid go pick it up right after I’d put the note in it, we were afraid he’d find it.”

  “When did you take those notes around?” I asked.

  “We were on our cell phones, one step ahead of you the whole way,” said Liz.

  The party had started right after school and didn’t end till about seven. People began to drift off after that, and others stayed to help clean up. I hugged every single person, even Patrick. “This is the best party yet,” I said. “I hope you guys know how much I love you.”

  “And you thought we’d forgotten you,” said Liz. “We’ve been planning this party the whole week!”

  I got kissed by almost everyone there too. Sam was no surprise, but when Patrick left, he kissed my cheek, and I’ll admit there was still some zing. Sam probably noticed. But, hey, it was my birthday, and you’re only sixteen once.

  Faith called that evening to wish me a happy birthday too. She’d had another dental appointment after school so had to miss the celebration. I could tell she was still in pain, but we were getting used to her speaking slower.

  “How are things going?” I asked. “Liz and I will testify if you want us to.”

  “Oh, thanks,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ll need that. Ron has to pay a fine, all my dental expenses, and attend an anger management course. He started yesterday, I think.”