Alice in Charge

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

She’d be smiling, of course. Maybe she’d be sitting with her arm around Les. Or maybe she’d just lay one hand over his on the table. She’d probably have a funny story to tell us about Les when he was little, and maybe she’d have her other arm around me.

  I wondered if Les was thinking of her just then. Wondered if Dad was thinking of her. And when he said, “Marie would have been so proud,” I was sure of it.

  Maybe more people read The Edge than we’d thought. We got so many responses to Curtis’s article that we had to give “Sound Off” a full page in our last issue before Christmas. I knew we’d have even more waiting for us when we came back from winter break.

  Miss Ames wrote the introduction:

  These are the first responses to Curtis Butler’s essay in last week’s Edge. We recognize that emotions run high on this subject, but we believe that as civilized people, any debate is preferable to keeping our feelings under wraps. We will take him at his word that he doesn’t believe in violence. The Edge will print all responses as long as they are signed by students attending this school and do not resort to profanity, threats, or slurs. Your ability to write in this manner will demonstrate your maturity.

  —Shirley Ames, Faculty Adviser

  Was that essay by Curtis Butler a joke? Do we really have Nazis in our school? Somebody say it ain’t so! I can’t believe what I read!

  —Emma Cortez, sophomore

  How far back can this dude trace his ancestors? Does he realize that the first humans originated in Africa?

  —Jack Berg, senior

  How did that diatribe by Curtis Butler get front-page space in our newspaper? We don’t need racists in this school. I threw the issue in the trash, where it belongs.

  —Sean Farmer, junior

  What Curtis said in last week’s paper may have seemed pretty racist, but I’ll bet a lot of people feel the same way and are afraid to speak up. When you see people who aren’t citizens getting free medical care and their kids go to school while your own family has to pay every time you go to the emergency room and pay taxes and stuff, you get a little pissed.

  —Jon Klaybrook, freshman

  I can’t believe you would print that article “Standing Up for the White Race.” What are you trying to do? Start a race war?

  —Christy Lavies, senior

  You tell it, bro! Just go live in Germany and take your prejudice with you.

  —Aaron Truitt, junior

  Let’s have a school debate and invite Curtis Butler to be on the panel. Here’s a question for starters: Since all the explorers who discovered America were men, should only men have rights of citizenship in this country?

  —Zachary Murdo, senior

  Hitler was right, but history got it wrong. If he really had managed to weed out the misfits and create a superrace of strong people with superior minds, the world wouldn’t be having the problems we have today.

  —Eric Haller, sophomore

  If we really want to be fair and just, the United States should belong to the Native American tribes who were here first, and the rest of us should get the heck out.

  —Jacob Early, senior

  Congratulations to The Edge for printing what will undoubtedly cause a lot of flak, but hopefully a lot of good discussion. Keep it coming. That’s where our paper gets its name.

  —Shauna Perkins, senior

  The security guards were very visible the day this latest issue came out, the last day of school before Christmas vacation. Some of the GSA members wore their rainbow armbands to show their solidarity. A few guys and one girl painted double eights on their foreheads, and there was a shoving match near the gym, but it was broken up in a hurry, not by security, but by students themselves.

  The newspaper staff was nervous, I’ll admit. Beck and Gephardt had only halfheartedly endorsed our approach at the start, but once the racist views in our school rose to the surface where we could now touch them, the administration seemed to think the newspaper coverage might help turn things around.

  I was miserable regardless. My throbbing head and stuffed-up nose used up my energy. I knew that with all the tension of the last couple of weeks, my resistance was low, but why did I have to have a cold at Christmas?

  One good thing happened, though. Mr. Beck paid a visit to the newsroom.

  “However this plays out, I think you’ve done the school a service,” he told us. “This is only the beginning of a dialogue we need to get started in this school. We’re thinking of organizing a periodic ‘talk-out’ in January, where we divide students in groups of ten, with a moderator, and everyone can express their feelings as long as they can do it with respect and consideration for all points of view.”

  “Fingers crossed,” said Phil.

  Patrick called me that night.

  “Just got in,” he said. “I’ve been doing research for one of the poli-sci profs, and he wanted me to stay one more day. I told him there’s a certain girl I have to see. Can I come over?”

  “Of course!” I said. “But I’ve got a cold!”

  “You sound like it,” he said. “In fact, you sound really awful.”

  “It’s been coming on for a week. Just all the uproar at school. I don’t want you to catch it.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if you had the plague. I’m coming,” he said.

  We hugged there in the hallway. I tried to keep my germs away from him, but it was difficult. He kissed my forehead, not my mouth, and seemed to be even taller than he’d been when I visited him in July.

  “Of all times for me to be sick, Patrick!” I wailed. “I’ve waited for this for so long.”

  “Remember the time I got sick and couldn’t take you to the eighth-grade semi-formal?” Patrick reminded me. “You were pretty understanding then, if I remember correctly.”

  “But I didn’t love you half as much then,” I whispered. Was this the first time I’d actually said love?

  “Then let’s just enjoy now,” he said, and held me tight.

  “Maybe your mom will change her mind about leaving and will talk your dad into staying here another few years,” I said hopefully into the collar of his shirt. A really stupid comment. The movers were coming in—what?—five days.

  “No. They’ve made up their minds. I’m just supposed to see them through it.” He held me even closer. “It would be different if I were still in high school, Dad said. But I’m there at the university, about an hour from my uncle’s.”

  “Can we get together with the gang while you’re home?” I asked. “Are you going to tell them good-bye?”

  “It’s not like I’m saying good-bye, Alice. I’ll be coming back for your prom. You’ll be coming to visit me. You’ve got an aunt in Chicago.” He held me away from him for a moment and shook me gently. “You worry too much.”

  “And you don’t worry enough,” I told him. “A lot can happen when two people are apart.”

  “A lot can happen when they’re together,” he said. “Look at Jill and Justin. They broke up.”

  “They’re back together,” I said.

  “So there you have it!” he joked as I guided him to the family room.

  We spent part of Christmas Eve with each other. Patrick was here for dinner and helped me wrap some last-minute gifts for my family because I was continually holding a tissue to my nose. My head felt as heavy as a pumpkin, and either my nose was running like a faucet or it was stopped up and I had to breathe through my mouth.

  “I don’t want you to catch this!” I insisted. “You’ll be miserable if you have to fly back with a cold. You are flying, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I have to go back on the twenty-seventh, but Mom and Dad will leave in the car as soon as the movers are gone the next day. I’ll be working for this professor all through winter break. He’s paying minimum wage.”

  “What’s he doing that’s so special?”

  “He’ll be teaching a course in Spain next year, part of a foreign studies class for upperclassmen. Wants to have his lesson plans al
l done before June.”

  “And you’re an expert on Spain?”

  “Hey, I’m an expert on everything,” Patrick joked, and kissed the back of my neck, about the only safe spot.

  We opened our gifts to each other. Patrick gave me a gorgeous scarf of lamb’s wool, soft as a breeze, in graduated shades of green.

  “It’s beautiful!” I said, holding it out at arm’s length, afraid I’d drip on it.

  I guess we both had the same theme in mind—something to keep the other warm when we couldn’t be together—because I gave him a gray sweater with narrow black stripes.

  When he left later to go to a midnight service with his parents, I lay in bed, Kleenex stuffed in one nostril, a box of Tylenol PM on my night stand, and wondered what Fate had against me that I’d had to wait three months to see my boyfriend and then couldn’t even kiss him properly.

  We spent Christmas Day alone with our families, and Christmas night with the gang over at the Stedmeisters’; we’d told Mark’s mom we were stopping by, and she begged us to stay for supper, so we did. Eleven of us crowded into their living room, some bringing tree ornaments with Mark’s name on them, some of us with brownies or Christmas cookies, and I could tell how pleased his parents were that we had come. I tried to sit apart from the others so I wouldn’t infect anyone.

  Mr. Stedmeister showed us Mark’s room, which he had turned into a photo gallery almost, having framed about every photo he’d taken of his son. Moving left to right, you could follow Mark from the day he came home from the hospital, up through his toddler years, Cub Scouts, his first dance, first car….

  “God, I miss him,” his dad said as we neared the end of the photos, and there was a tremor in his voice. “But he’ll always be a part of this house, this family.”

  Just like the Fourth of July, when rain had kept us from going to the fireworks celebration, we hunkered down on their living room rug to watch a Christmas special at the Kennedy Center on TV, the Stedmeisters moving in and out of the room with leftover turkey and ham, homemade mincemeat pie and coconut cake, each of us having pigged out already at Christmas dinners with our own families.

  Brian Brewster, in what had to be the most insensitive gesture of the evening, came by in the new yellow Toyota his dad had bought for him now that his license had been restored and invited us to come outside to admire it. As though Mark’s accident had never happened. As though the Stedmeisters didn’t have to live with the knowledge that their son reached the end of his life crushed between an SUV and a delivery truck.

  “Brian …,” I said, as he stood just inside the door, beaming and jiggling his car keys.

  And it suddenly took.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, shoving the keys back in his pocket and coming on in. “Sometimes I get carried away. Merry Christmas, everybody. How’s it going?”

  Mrs. Stedmeister offered him a plate. “Just help yourself to what’s on the table there,” she said. “It’s so nice to see you, Brian.”

  * * *

  Patrick spent his last night, the twenty-sixth, with me. Not the whole night. Not even a whole evening. My nose wasn’t running quite as much, but it was still red and sore. Dad and Sylvia came in to chat awhile, then left the family room and the fire to us. But we heard Dad rummaging around in the kitchen a few times, and Sylvia went into the office next to the dining room to get something. We put our feet on a hassock and let the fire warm our legs, my head on Patrick’s shoulder, his arms pulling me close.

  “How am I going to get through the next semester without seeing you once?” I asked. “It’s a long time until May.”

  “It won’t be easy for me either,” he said.

  “Patrick, everything is easy for you!” I protested.

  I could feel his body stiffen. “We’ve had this conversation before, Alice. You know it’s not.”

  I was instantly sorry. “You’re right. I want a perfect life, I guess. I want you here, not in Chicago. And if I can’t have you here full-time, I want you back for vacations. And if I can’t have you back for vacations, I want … I don’t know. To stow away in your suitcase and let you smuggle me back to your dorm.”

  He nuzzled my hair. “To sleep in my dorm room with Jonah and me?”

  I sighed. “There’s always a spoiler, isn’t there?”

  We talked a long time about what had gone on at school—about Curtis Butler and his white-power views; about Dennis Granger, now that his case had gone public; about the Stedmeisters and Molly and Keeno and Brian—and finally we took the lap robes Sylvia keeps around the family room and tiptoed out onto the back porch, where the two-seater glider rocked slightly in the wind.

  The cushions were dusty and cold, but we put one of the lap robes beneath us, and in time the warmth of the robes and the heat of our own bodies replaced the chill. We clung to each other.

  “I wish … we could have each other,” Patrick whispered in my ear.

  My heart was racing. “So do I,” I whispered back. “But this isn’t a good place.”

  “I know. Just wishing,” he said, and stroked my breasts.

  “Patrick,” I said, my head against his chest. “When we do … I don’t want it to be a one-time thing….”

  “A one-night stand? Why do you think it would be?”

  “I mean, I want it to be the best place, the best time … when we could have each other again and again. I don’t want you going off somewhere when … things … are still sort of … new.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled away from him. “You understand?”

  “I think so.” He pulled me down on his chest again. “But … God! I do want you.”

  I guided his hand beneath my sweater, and wordlessly, we unbuttoned buttons, unzipped zippers, and explored each other’s bodies under the blankets, listening to the sound of our breathing and our pleasure in each other.

  Three days after Christmas, the same day the moving van came and the Longs left for their new home in Wisconsin, I got early acceptance from the University of Maryland.

  “Yay!” I said, opening the envelope there in the kitchen where Dad and Sylvia were making kebabs for dinner. “I’m in! You won’t have to mortgage the house!”

  “Well, that’s good to know!” Dad said. “I didn’t think you’d be hearing from colleges so soon, Al. You applied for early acceptance? This doesn’t obligate you to go there, does it?”

  “No, but it means I’m pretty serious about it.”

  “Well, let’s don’t make a final decision until you’ve heard from the others,” Dad said. “You might like being farther away—a whole new community to explore.”

  “Or not,” I said. “If one of you got sick … or the store closed … I could live at home and commute, and it would save you a bundle.”

  “Al, you’re not going to choose a college on a bunch of what-ifs. I want you to go to the college of your choice. But if you decide on the University of Maryland, you’ve got to live in a dorm. I’m willing to buy you a used car when it’s time so you can get home now and then, but you have to live there during the school year. That’s a must.”

  “I … have to?”

  “That’s my condition. You’ve got to have the experience of living independently, learning to trust yourself, getting along with roommates … That’s as much a part of college as the courses.”

  I silently began setting the table for dinner. The thought of having a car helped considerably. Still … were they kicking me out? Had they been waiting for the chance to have the house to themselves for so long that all they could think of was having me gone? What if Patrick …?

  And suddenly I realized that if I was living in a dorm, Patrick could visit me there. I could arrange for my roommate to be out for the evening. I could smuggle him into my bed. We wouldn’t have to sit out on a cold glider on a freezing porch in December. We wouldn’t have to talk in a family room with parents close by. And it didn’t matter which college I chose, I could still invite Patrick.


  “Okay,” I said with finality. “If I choose Maryland, I’ll live in a dorm.”

  22

  TO LIFE

  On the twenty-ninth I was feeling well enough to make a short visit to the mall. I had just used a gift card from Aunt Sally when I almost bumped into Curtis Butler. He was coming out of a Sports Authority store, bag in hand.

  “Hey, Curtis!” I said, backing up to avoid a collision.

  “Hey,” he said, looking at me uncertainly. “How ya doin’?”

  I think he was going to walk on by, but because I stopped, he did. It was awkward.

  “How was Christmas?” I asked.

  “It was okay. How about yours?”

  “Nice. My brother graduated from Maryland, so it was sort of special,” I told him.

  “I guess.” He looked about hesitantly, took a few steps toward the escalator, then stopped and came back. “Listen. I just wanted you to know that some of that stuff—and a couple of letters—I didn’t do. Sometimes the other guys get carried away.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Glad you told me.”

  We fell silent again. I nodded toward the ice-cream tables in one of the side corridors. “Want to sit down for a minute? I’ve got some questions.”

  He shrugged. We walked over to a table, and he put his bag on it. Shoes, I guessed. He sat perched on the edge of his chair as if to say, A minute’s all I’ve got.

  “The Edge has been getting a lot of letters since we published your piece, and one of them, as you probably know, suggested a debate. The newspaper would be glad to sponsor it.” Here I go again, I thought, climbing out on a limb all by myself.

  “We’re … really not into that,” Curtis said.

  I studied him. “Who’s we, exactly?”

  He looked away. “Different groups. Different names.”

  “Do you consider yourselves racist?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. In a good sense.”

  “Good how?”

  “We’re not saying that other races shouldn’t exist. I’m not, anyway. We’re just saying that the white race has been getting a bum rap, and it’s time we took the country back, that’s all.”