Reluctantly Alice (2 page)

“That's only six,” said Dad.

“The cafeteria serves garbage.”

“You could always transfer back to sixth,” Lester suggested, tackling his salad.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “And don't take all the Bacon Bits. We live here too.”

I'd been thinking about sixth grade, though—my sixth-grade teacher, anyway, Mrs. Plotkin. Sometimes when I get upset—
really
upset—I sort of tell myself what I figure
she'd say if she were there. Stuff like, “Well, Alice, there aren't many perfect days, but it's hard to find a day that doesn't have a
little
something nice about it if you look.” It helped, somehow—just saying words like that aloud and pretending it was her voice, not mine.

Dad and Mrs. Plotkin must be on the same wavelength, because just then he said, “Think of at least one good thing about seventh grade. Surely there's
one
.”

“We get out at two thirty instead of three.”

“So there you are,” said Dad.

I guess the main problem is that seventh grade's so different from elementary that it takes some getting used to. Pamela Jones likes it. All Pamela talks about is what she's going to wear to the eighth-grade dances, and seventh's one step closer than sixth. When you've got blond hair so long you can sit on it, I guess you can expect to get asked to a lot of dances.

Elizabeth Price hates junior high, though—the way people swarm at you in the halls. She was going to switch to the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Mary Middle School but found out they don't have curtains on their shower stalls, so she reconsidered.

“I'll probably get used to it after a while,” I said as I passed the macaroni and stopped Lester from taking all
the cheese on top. “I remember I had a hard time in kindergarten too, but I got over it.”

“You did, Al?” asked Dad.

I couldn't help smiling. “There was this boy who made faces at me from behind an easel—he was painting on one side and I was on the other. Every day he'd make faces and I'd cry. Then Mom told me that next time he poked his face around the easel, I should paint a stripe on it, so I did.”

Lester laughed, but Dad went on chewing. “That must have been Aunt Sally who told you that, Al, because your mother died just before you started kindergarten.”

I always manage to do this—confuse Mom with Aunt Sally, and it freaks Dad out.

“Sorry,” I said. “Anyway, it worked. The next time the boy made a face at me, I painted a black stripe on his forehead. He stuck out his tongue, so I painted that too. He never bothered me again.”

“Good old Aunt Sally,” said Les.

What's really worst about being in seventh grade is that you just got out of sixth. In sixth grade, you're a safety patrol. You get to go on overnight field trips with your teachers, help out in the office, and rule the playground. If two people form a couple, then everyone pairs off, and the fourth and fifth graders are green with envy.

But when you start seventh grade, you're at the bottom of the ladder again. You look weird. You feel weird. The boys and girls who were couples back in sixth grade pretend they don't know each other anymore. I mean, when Patrick and I kissed last summer, it was a quick kiss with his hands on my shoulders, and then we edged over to our own sides of the glider again.

When couples kiss in eighth and ninth grades, I discovered, they touch their lips together lightly two or three times first, and then it's so embarrassing you have to look away. If their bodies were any closer, they'd be a grilled cheese sandwich.

Almost everything that Pamela told us about seventh grade, that her cousin in New Jersey told
her
, was wrong. So far, anyway. You don't have to have a boyfriend or a leather skirt, either one. What you worry about, instead, is whether you can remember your coat locker and P.E. locker combinations both, whether you can get from one end of the building to the other before the bell, whether you'll drop your tray in the cafeteria and everyone will clap, and whether, when you go in the restroom, there will be any latches on the stalls.

It didn't help, either, that I had started junior high with an allergy. Dad says that happens sometimes when you
move from one part of the country to another. I'd been doing a lot of sneezing the last couple of years, but the fall of seventh grade was absolutely the worst. I had to have Kleenex with me all the time at school, and the large girl who sat in front of me in Language Arts was always looking over her shoulder whenever I blew my nose.

I don't know what it was, though—maybe the Sara Lee brownies we had for dessert—but after telling Dad the one good thing I could think of about seventh grade, I felt better, and realized that at this particular time in my life, I was friends with everybody. I'll admit that seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don't mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she's okay. She's neat.”

Alice the Likable, that would be me. So there were at least two good things now about seventh grade: We got out earlier, and I was starting a brand-new school, friends with everyone so far, even Patrick.

By Wednesday of the first week, the count of good things about seventh grade had gone up to three: no recess in junior high. I didn't realize how much I hated recess until there wasn't any. You didn't
have
to put on
your coat and go stand out in the cold. You didn't
have
to play tag ball whether you wanted to or not. You didn't have a teacher blowing a whistle at you every fifteen seconds or have third-grade boys trying to hit you with volleyballs. There was P.E., of course, but what you got instead of recess was an extra-long lunch hour, and you could do anything you wanted.

By Thursday morning, I had numbers four and five: In seventh grade, you're only in class with a certain teacher for forty minutes, so if it turns out to be someone awful, you don't have to stand it all day. The other thing is that the school has its own newspaper—the students write it themselves—and it's a lot more interesting than the newsletter we put out in sixth grade.

The sixth good thing about seventh grade—absolutely astounding—I discovered Thursday afternoon in P.E. It was the first day we had actually undressed and put on our gym shorts and T-shirts. The class was made up of some seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade girls together, and though the shower stalls had curtains on them and each of us had a towel to wrap up in when we stepped out, some of the older girls didn't wrap.

Seventh-grade girls used their towels like aluminum foil, encircling their bodies and sealing the seams, but
some of the older girls stepped out of the showers, their towels around their hair instead, with their entire bodies on view for the rest of us, the seventh graders in particular.

For the first time in my whole twelve years, I saw naked breasts—big breasts—in person. I couldn't help staring, they were just so amazing. They came in all shapes and sizes and some were huge. I mean, compared to the breasts I saw in P.E., Pamela, Elizabeth, and I hadn't even sprouted yet. We were still buds on a tree, moths in a cocoon, tadpoles in a pond, mosquitos in eggs.

I talked about it at dinner that night, and for once I had Lester's full attention. When I'd finished my revelations about the wonders of the female breast, Dad gave me a little smile and said, “Your mother did nurse you, you know. You're not quite as deprived as you think.”

“A lot of good that did me. I was too young to remember.”

“And you never saw your aunt Sally's breasts?” Dad asked.

I stared. “Are you kidding? Aunt Sally wears vinyl siding for a bathrobe!” (She doesn't, of course. The times we've visited her in Chicago, she's worn a chenille robe, but she clutches it closed with two hands.)

“What about Carol?” Lester asked. Carol is Aunt Sally's
daughter, and she's a couple years older than Les. “You never saw her in the nude?”

“No,” I said. “Did you?”

Lester turned bright red.

“
Got
-cha!” I said.

“No,” Lester said quickly. “I never did. Don't be stupid.”

“Well, then!” said Dad. “You've achieved a twelve-year goal today, Al! So how are you liking seventh grade?”

“Fine,” I told him. “And if I can think of one more good thing about it, it'll cancel out all the bad ones.”

I went to school on Friday searching for it—the seventh good thing about seventh. I wanted to like junior high. According to Mrs. Plotkin,
wanting
to do things is half the battle. In each of my classes I looked for something that was different from sixth grade that made junior high better. The teacher in Life Science was nice. So was Miss Summers in Language Arts. Nice and pretty, too. My math instructor was kind and was good at explaining problems, but as the day went on and I was in and out of classrooms, there wasn't one particular class that stood out. Finally there was just one period left, Mr. Hensley's World Studies, and I thought,
Wouldn't it be great if I discovered the Seventh Wonder of Seventh Grade in here?

This is the only class I have with Patrick, and all week
we'd been sitting in the last row, as far as we could get from Mr. Hensley's bad breath. Patrick hasn't exactly been ignoring me, but after we'd seen the way eighth and ninth graders make out at lunch time, leaning against the walls outside, all the kids who had been going together as couples in sixth grade sort of developed amnesia. None of us wanted to remember the silly things we'd done over the summer. Like the boys running around the playground with Pamela's new Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra. No ninth-grade boy would do that, and no ninth-grade girl would get hysterical if he did. So here before class is the one place Patrick and I can talk a little and catch up on things without attracting attention.

“How's it going?” Patrick said.

“Better. I actually think I'm going to like junior high.” I crossed my fingers. “Maybe.” I stole him a look. “You been to P.E. yet?” I wondered if seventh-grade boys had the same kind of revelations when they looked at older boys in the nude as girls did when they saw older girls in the shower.

“Yeah! It's neat!” Patrick said. “We're doing track right now, and you should see the legs on some of those guys on our team!”

I smiled.

Then the bell rang and Horse-Breath Hensley was up in front of the room, pacing back and forth the way he does when he talks to the class. This time he was talking about fairness, and the way he was going to conduct the class. He's already given us an outline of the course and told us when the big reports were due, and he said that he knew he wasn't one of the most exciting teachers in the school, but he hoped we would remember him as one of the fairest. So far so good, I thought. Maybe this will be the Seventh Thing.

Then Mr. Hensley said that probably all our lives, we had been treated alphabetically as an example of fairness. The Adamsons were always called on first in class and the Zlotskys were always called on last.

True, I thought, but I'll admit I'd always liked that. With a last name right smack in the middle of the alphabet, it had always been comforting to know that I wouldn't be the first to have to stand up and give a report or the last one, either. If Mr. Hensley reversed it and called on the Z's first and the A's last, “McKinley” would still be in the middle. I smiled to myself.

“And so,” Mr. Hensley said, “just to even things up a bit, in this class we go alphabetically by
first
names, and we're seated accordingly. If you will now move to the
desks I assign you. . . . Alice McKinley, first seat, first row, please. Barbara Engstrom, next seat, first row . . .” He read off his list, filling up the front row all the way across, then starting on the second.

I don't remember the rest. The only thing I knew for certain was that the class was rearranged, Patrick and I were separated, and I realized that for the rest of the semester I would be the first one called on for everything. I was also directly in line of fire of Mr. Hensley's breath.

“I think that was a
wonderful
idea!” said a girl named Yvonne Allison as we left the room.

I swallowed. The seventh best thing about seventh grade turned out to be the worst of all.

 

IT WAS LESTER, THOUGH, WHO WAS HAVING
real trouble at the moment. Lester turned twenty that Friday. He had just transferred from Montgomery College to the University of Maryland for his junior year, but was working part-time at an appliance store, so Dad and I waited till he got home to have his celebration. The problem was that two girls had sent him presents, and Lester had to tell one of them that it was over. I'd never seen him so miserable.

“Lester,” I said after he'd opened my present, which was two half-pound bars of Hershey's chocolate, light and dark, with and without almonds. Dad had gone out in the kitchen for the ice cream. “Why do you have to give one
girl up? Why can't you keep one as your true love and the other as best friend or something?”

“Don't be stupid,” said Les. Then he remembered I'd just given him the chocolate, so he tried to explain: “I always thought it was the real thing with Marilyn, Al. And then, when she broke it off and I finally met Crystal, I figured maybe it was for the best, because I really like Crystal. Now that Marilyn wants me back, I realize how much I love her, but I can't seem to make myself give up Crystal. And neither one of them would settle for being only ‘best friend.' Take my word for it.”

Boy, I'd never had anything like that happen to me, and I was glad I wasn't in Lester's shoes. “Crystal doesn't even know yet?”