Outrageously Alice (5 page)

As soon as I got in the house, Lester said, “Well, she’s back from the dead—Dracula’s daughter.”

Dad was sitting at his music stand with his flute, trying out some new sheet music. “Have a good time?” he asked, leaning forward to turn a page.

“I was violated,” I said.

All the expression went out of Dad’s face, and Lester lowered the sports page. I’ll admit, I enjoyed having
something
exciting to announce for a change.

“What happened, Al?” asked Dad.

I told them about the haunted house and the broom closet and how somebody had given me a French kiss. A couple of them.

Dad looked relieved when he found out it was only a kiss.

“Where in the world were the teachers?” he asked.

“They were all over the place, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Well, I’m glad it wasn’t anything more than a kiss.”

That really got me. Didn’t he
care
?

“I was still violated!” I insisted, sounding more like e\Elizabeth by the minute. Something outrageous had happened to me, and nobody was paying attention.

“Well, you don’t know who it was, so you might as well forget it,” Les said. “Be more careful next time.”

“Somebody was responsible for that!” I declared.

“So what do you want Mr. Ormand to do, Al? Apply thumbscrews till one of the eighth-grade boys confesses?” he asked.

“If it had been
you
in the closet …,” I began.

“I keep out of closets,” said Lester. “Besides, the poor guy probably did it out of self-defense. If someone cornered
me
in a closet wearing black net stockings and a peacock feather headdress and enough makeup to sink a ship, I probably would have grabbed the first thing I could put my hands on, too.”

“That is so
typical
!” I shrieked. “It’s always the girl’s fault. If she’s molested or raped, it’s always because she asked for it.”

Lester tossed his magazine over his shoulder and threw back his head. “Okay, okay! Have Mr. Ormand line up all the boys in eighth grade and shoot every fifth one till somebody comes clean. Will that satisfy you?”

I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to be noticed, but not too much. I wanted to be kissed, but not too hard. I wanted to be like everyone else, but at the same time I wanted to be different. I wanted excitement and adventure, but I also wanted protection. Thirteen must be the year of the split personality, that’s all I could figure out.

The phone rang just then, and I went out in the hallway to answer. It was Elizabeth.

“Alice, I just called Patrick and told him what happened,” she said.

“You
didn’t
!”

“I thought he should know. I mean, a boy has a right to know that the girl he kisses good night is damaged goods, so to speak.”

“What?” Elizabeth was worse than Lester.

“And he said he already knew.”

“What?”
Brian
, I told myself. It was Brian, and he was going around bragging to everybody.

“So who was it?” I asked.

“Patrick.”

“What?”
It seemed the only word I knew.

“Listen, I’m going to hang up because he’s going to call you,” Elizabeth said. “But everything’s okay now, because it was only Patrick.”

Were we all crazy or what?

I hung up after she did, and sat with my hand on the phone. About five seconds later, it rang.

“Yes?” I said, in about as cold a voice as I could manage.

“Alice?” said Patrick. “Listen, I don’t know why I did that. Because it was just the two of us there in the closet, I guess.”

“So if it had been just the two of us in the closet, would it have been okay to rape me?” I asked.

“Who’s talking rape? I thought maybe you’d like it. I mean, you wouldn’t know who it was, and it would be sort of a mystery. Besides, the way you were dressed …”

“Patrick, it was just a costume. I’d never been a showgirl before.”

“Well, I’d never been a zombie before, so I didn’t know how to act. Okay?”

After I hung up, I wished I
hadn’t
known it was Patrick. I realized it
would
have been nice to wonder which of the other guys might have done it. What was I making such a fuss about?

I sat there looking at myself in the hall mirror—the peacock feather headdress, the makeup. This is what I needed, I decided. A whole new look. A whole new personality.

The phone rang yet again.

“Alice?” came Pamela’s voice. “I’ve just broken up with Brian.”

“What?” I croaked again for about the fifth time.

“After I got in the car, I started thinking about that kiss in the broom closet, and realized Brian was back there most of the evening. So I called him up and accused him of French-kissing you behind my back.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say much of anything. He just kept saying, ‘What?’ He certainly didn’t deny it.”

“So you …”

“So I told him he was a sneak and a cheat, and it was over between us. I’m a free woman. I might even go back to Mark.”

EVEN AFTER I TOLD PAMELA THAT IT WAS
Patrick, not Brian, she still said she was breaking up with Brian, that he was a dork. Handsome, all right, but a real dweeb.

I couldn’t get it off my mind that weekend. Pamela had broken up with Mark in the first place to go with Brian, and now she was breaking up with Brian to possibly go back to Mark; Elizabeth had broken up twice with Tom Perona; when would it happen to Patrick and me? I mean, if he could grab me and French-kiss me without even telling me who he was, couldn’t he just call sometime and say, “Hey, Alice, I’m going with somebody else now”?

Maybe I wanted this to happen. I like Patrick,
really
like him—better than any other guy I’ve ever known—but will I always feel this way? Sometimes he does really stupid things. What if
I
met someone I liked better?

What I was thinking of in particular was Crystal’s wedding and the reception afterward. What did I know about receptions? The groom’s younger brother, my escort, was seventeen. What if it turned out I
liked—really
liked—Peter’s brother?

Dad was making waffles on Sunday morning, so both Lester and I migrated to the kitchen at about the same time.

“What do you do at a wedding reception?” I asked. “I’ve got to know what to expect.”

“Eat,” said Lester, spearing one of the waffles and putting a big hunk of butter on it, where it melted into little square pools of yellow.

“At some point, someone will toast the bride and groom, and you’ll raise your glass like everyone else,” Dad told me. “A lot of time will be spent taking photos of the wedding party—that kind of thing.”

“You’ll dance,” said Lester, reaching for the syrup.

I let my waffle drop off the end of my fork. “Dance?”

“Yeah. Dance. As in moving your feet,” said Lester.

Something told me that at a wedding reception people didn’t just face each other and jiggle their shoulders. They put their arms politely around each other, held hands, and moved in step, and I knew that however they danced at wedding receptions, I didn’t know how to do it.

“I can’t dance!” I wailed, my eyes suddenly brimming over. “Dad, I can’t be in this wedding! I’ll ruin everything!”

“Al, pipe down!” Dad said. “Why is it that everything is the end of the world for you? Crystal’s wedding will go off whether you can dance or not.”

“Teach me!” I begged. “Right now.”

“It’s four weeks off, Al. You still have time to eat your breakfast,” Dad said.

As soon as we finished, though, I hung over the back of his chair until I knew he couldn’t stand it anymore.

“Okay, let’s get this over with,” Dad said.

He went into the dining room, over to our stereo cabinet, and took out a dusty square box of small black disks.

“What
are
they?” I asked.

“Forty-fives,” Dad said. “This was way back in the olden days, Al. In fact, these belonged to my uncle. I was the musician in the family, so he gave his collection to me.”

He opened our ancient record player, which was about as dusty as the box, and put on one of the forty-fives.

“Okay,” he said, “this is a waltz. They usually play at least one waltz at a wedding reception. You have to think
one
, two, three,
one
, two, three. … On the first beat, we take the longest step, and then two smaller steps to catch up.”

ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three
, I counted to myself, and suddenly Dad was guiding me backward. My feet were falling all over each other, but he gripped me fast and kept me moving. Then I got the hang of it, and we were really traveling. I was
dancing
!

Dad started to smile, and we took even bigger steps.

Through the living room, back into the dining room again, around the table, out into the hall …

“I’m doing it, Les!” I called. “I’m waltzing!”

“Bully for you,” said Lester. “Just don’t fall in the punch.”

“This was one of our favorite songs, Marie’s and mine,” Dad said. “‘Fascination.’” And he began to sing while we danced: “It was fascin-a-tion, I know …”

I loved dancing with Dad and hearing him sing. I thought of him waltzing around with my mom, especially when he got to the last line, about fascination turning to love.

When the music ended, I asked, “What if it’s
not
a waltz? What if it’s something else?”

“Well, kiddo, I guess you’ll have to wing it. I’m pretty
rusty in the dance department. I just sort of make it up as I go along.”

“How do
you
slow-dance, Lester?” I asked when the record was finished.

“I just put my arms around Marilyn and we move side-ways from foot to foot,” he said.

“Does Miss Summers dance?” I asked Dad.

“We’ve danced some,” he said.

I couldn’t believe I’d only asked one question but gotten the answers to two, so I took a chance: “How close do you dance?”

“Close enough to keep our feet going in the same direction,” Dad said.

Lester was studying all weekend for a huge exam, so I called Elizabeth, but she and her family were taking the baby to visit relatives up in Pennsylvania, so I asked Pamela if I could come over.

“I need a new look,” I told her when she met me at the door. I think maybe Pamela was feeling the same way, that we needed something to rev up our lives, something that would make people really notice us. “In fact, I need a whole new personality. A brain transplant.”

“Never mind the brain, let’s work on your face. You need a new eye shadow,” Pamela said.

“A
new
eye shadow? I don’t wear any.”

“Then that’s the problem. Your eyes don’t stand out. How can you have any personality if you haven’t got eyes?” She looked at me closely. “Green. If you wore green eye shadow and green eyeliner to match your eyes, it’d be perfect.”

She got some cosmetics from a drawer, and I sat on the edge of her bed while she did my whole face.

“Blush,” she said. “Eyeliner. Lip liner. Mascara …”

When I looked in the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. Like Pamela said, though, my eyes sure stood out.

“That’s
you
, Alice! That’s your color!” Pamela said excitedly. “See what it does for you?”

It was the first time anyone had suggested I had a color. Miss Summers had called me Alice Green Eyes once, but she hadn’t said I had a color. I had a type! I
was
a type! There was a color that was distinctly me!

“Here. You can have these,” Pamela said, giving me the green eye shadow and eyeliner. “They don’t work for me. I’m blue.”

I made a detour over to the drugstore on Georgia Avenue on my way home and bought some mascara.

Then I sauntered into the house and sprawled on a chair across from Lester, who had his books and papers
all over the coffee table. I picked up the comics and pretended to read.

“Holy …! What
is
it?” said Lester. “Halloween’s over, kid.”

“It’s the real me, Lester! It’s my color!” I said defiantly, lifting my head so he could get the whole effect.

“You look like something raised from the dead!” he insisted.

Dad came in from the kitchen and looked at me. “You’re not really going to go anywhere looking like that, are you?” he asked.

I lost it then.

“You don’t know anything about makeup and fashions, so why don’t you both just shut up!” I snapped.

“Al, I guarantee that if your mother were here, she wouldn’t let you out of the house looking like that,” Dad said.

“Styles change! Fashions change! She’d at least keep up with what was going on, and color’s big right now! Everybody has a color, and mine’s green!” I yelled.

“But you look like you’re decaying! You’re beginning to mold!” Lester argued. “Al, you look sick around the gills! You look like a dead fish!”

I burst into tears and ran upstairs. Unfortunately, the
tears made the eyeliner run, and my face was a mess, but I fixed it up the best I could. I would not give in.

I took a green sweater and held it to my chin in front of the mirror The green around my eyes seemed to leap out. Green was me, all right.

“What did you do to your eyes?” Elizabeth asked the next morning at the bus stop.

“Pamela fixed them up for me. We discovered my color, Elizabeth. It’s green!”

She studied me some more. “Well, it sure makes your eyes stand out,” she said at last. She didn’t exactly say she liked it, but I figured she had to have time to get used to it.

When Patrick got on the bus, though, carrying some posters for the fall band concert, he stopped right by my seat and stared. “What happened to your face? Your
skin
is green!” he said.

“It’s the style, Patrick,” I said, and for the second time in a week, he seemed just plain stupid to me. What kind of boy looks at a girl and asks, “What happened to your face?”

The fact was, I didn’t much care whether he liked it or not. The reason people were staring was that they weren’t used to me looking dramatic. They were so used
to the “innocent Alice” look that they had to get used to the idea of Alice McKinley with a little pizzazz.