Read Reluctantly Alice Online

Authors: Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Tags: #fiction, #GR

Reluctantly Alice

 

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 COMES HOME FROM SCHOOL ON THE
first day of junior high with a list of seven things about seventh grade that stink. Just about the only good thing she can think of is that she's friends with everyone. Maybe that's how to survive seventh grade—make it through the entire year with everyone liking her.

That turns out to be easier said than done, when Alice gets on the wrong side of the school bully, Denise “Mack Truck” Whitlock. But Alice's problems with Denise pale before the romantic entanglements of both her father and her older brother, Lester. And when Alice decides to help them out, life gets even more complicated.

 

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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:
*

“Alice and her friends seem sooooo real!!! They go through all the problems life throws you!! I'm not saying that I like seeing people go though problems, it's just that it's great to see you can get over these problems and have a great life too.”—dragnfly

“I feel like Alice is my next door neighbor and Elizabeth lives across the street from me. Pamela is in most of my classes at school and Patrick is my childhood best friend. Sometimes I wish soooooo badly Alice and everyone in these books were real.”—Leslie

“I think that what I love most about your Alice books is that they are so real. The things that take place in the books are things that have happened to me. . . . It was so amazing to read your books and think, gee, that happened to me.”—a fan

*
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.

 

Reluctantly 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

The Witch Books

Witch's Sister

Witch Water

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

Keeping a Christmas Secret

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 © 1991 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

A
THENEUM BOOKS FOR
Y
OUNG
R
EADERS
is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
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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

Reluctantly Alice / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Alice experiences the joys and embarrassments of seventh grade while advising her father and brother on their love lives.

ISBN 978-0-689-31681-4 (hc)

[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Single-parent family—Fiction. 3. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.N24Re 1991 [Fic]—dc20

90037956

ISBN 978-1-4424-2361-9 (pbk)

978-1-4424-2361-9 (print)

978-1-4424-6578-7 (eBook)

 

To Catherine Wood, my college speech teacher, who generously considered my writings entertaining, and to Marion Tucker, an early editor, who helped make them better

 

Contents

One: The Seventh Thing

Two: Helping Lester

Three: Sleeping Over

Four: Saving Dad

Five: Celebrity

Six: SGSD

Seven: Bodies

Eight: The Frog Stand

Nine: Mother Alice

Ten: The Trouble with Hensley

Eleven: “Bubbles”

Twelve: Taking Chances

Thirteen: Questions and Answers

Fourteen: Hallelujah

 

1
THE SEVENTH THING

IN SEVENTH GRADE, YOU GROW BACKWARD.
In sixth, I kept a list of all the things I learned that showed I was growing up, and another of all the stupid, embarrassing things I did that proved I wasn't. Most of the time they were about even. If I still kept a record of all I've done, my “backward” list would run right off the page. In a single day—the first day of seventh grade—I accidentally squirted a teacher at the drinking fountain, tripped on the stairs to the second floor, and sat on a doughnut in the cafeteria.

“Who put a doughnut on this seat?” I asked the girl next to me.

“It's for Kim,” she said.

Now what kind of an answer was that? But even Patrick laughed when it happened.

“Well, how are you liking junior high, Al?” Dad asked that night while we were fixing dinner. My name is Alice, but he and Lester call me “Al.”

“Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me next week.”

“That bad, huh?” said Lester. Lester's almost twenty and catches on quick.

“I can think of at least seven things about seventh grade that stink,” I told him. “The boys are shorter than the girls, the math is too hard, Mr. Hensley has bad breath, there isn't any toilet paper in the johns, we're going to cook liver in home ec., and half the drinking fountains don't work.”

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