Reluctantly Alice (9 page)

Elizabeth had been thinking about it, though. Ninth grade. Hair. “How?” she asked.

“The sides brought up like this,” said Pamela, sweeping up the long yellow locks beside her face, “and pinned up with curls at the top and flowers tucked all around.”

“Who do you suppose we'll be dating then?” Elizabeth asked. “You know, ninth grade wouldn't be so bad if we didn't have to go through seventh and eighth to get there.”

“But once we graduate,” I reminded them, “we'll have to start high school, and then we'll be at the bottom of the heap again.”

“And after high school, there's college,” said Elizabeth mournfully.

“And once we get a job, we'll be at the bottom of the ladder,” Pamela added. “Maybe that's all life is, you know? Just climbing up, coming down, and starting all over again.”

It was depressing, all right. We sat for a long time, looking out over the playground, and finally it was Elizabeth who broke the silence. “Someday,” she said, “we'll think back to this very day when we were sitting here talking like this, and we'll realize how wonderful it was. You know what we should do? I think we should promise each other that no matter
what
happens to us in junior high or high school, no matter how awful or embarrassing it is, we can always tell each other, and none of us will ever laugh.”

“I promise,” I said right off, feeling just how serious this was.

“So do I,” said Pamela.

We sort of crossed arms so that all three of us were shaking hands on it at the same time, and it was like our own secret promise, just the three of us, friends forever. Through high school, anyway.

On Monday, Denise and her friends were lying low. I guess they decided that after cramming all that toilet paper through the vents in my locker, they'd made enough trouble for a while, but it didn't mean they were through with me. Not at all. A girl whose brother saves her just when the initiation is going full blast isn't going to get off the hook that easily. Not only had Lester loused up their plan, but he'd embarrassed Denise in front of the other kids who had come to watch. Denise would take it out on me. I knew it as surely as there were ears on my head.

What I couldn't figure out about Denise was why she and the three girls she went around with acted like the world was against them. At first I thought maybe it was because they looked the way they did. Then I realized that there were several girls in school who were as heavy as Denise—
heavier
, even—who always seemed to have a crowd of friends around them and were always on committees and things. The reporter who interviewed me for the newspaper was short, one of the cheerleaders was tall and thin, and the president of the ninth-grade class, who led the pep rally, had zits. So was it zits and height and weight that made a difference, or how you felt about it?

That noon in the cafeteria, something really crazy happened—not with Denise and her gang, but with a
group of ninth-grade boys who had just finished eating and were leaving. We always watched the ninth-grade boys, because they seemed so much more clever and wonderful than seventh- and eighth-grade boys. They were joking around, and just after they'd passed our table, one of them yelled, “Boxer check!” And while Pamela, Elizabeth, and I stared, along with every other girl in the cafeteria, they unzipped their pants, lowered their jeans, and compared their boxer shorts to see who had the loudest, wildest underwear that day.

I positively gaped, my mouth hanging open. One boy had Mickey Mouse on his; another had zigzag stripes of pink, yellow, and purple; another had red hearts and cupids; and the fourth had Hawaiian palm trees and surfers. Everybody was standing up trying to see, clapping and cheering, and the guy with the palm trees was declared the winner. We all laughed, even the teacher on duty, the boys pulled their jeans up again, picked up their books, and went outside.

Pamela and I had our heads on the table in laughter, and when we finally got our breath and looked up, we saw Elizabeth staring straight ahead, unblinking, her face peppermint pink.

“Hey, Elizabeth,” I said, waving one hand in front of her eyes.

“I can't believe it,” she murmured. “I just can't believe it.”

Pamela was still giggling. “Alice, can you imagine any
seventh
-grade boy doing something like that?”

No, I could not. I remembered when a boys' gym class joined ours for a day of basketball the week before. While we were all sitting on the floor getting instructions, one of the seventh-grade boys, sitting in the knee-chest position, pulled the bottom of his T-shirt down over his legs and pretended his knees were breasts poking through his shirt. Except for a boy back in third grade who stuck crayons up his nose once and pretended he was an elephant, that was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen. “Boxer check” was a whole lot more fun. But not, evidently, for Elizabeth.

“I never saw a boy in his underpants in my life except on Calvin Klein billboards,” she said, still in shock.

We didn't realize what a big deal it was for Elizabeth, though, until a few days had gone by and she was still talking about it. What if somebody called “Boxer check” and one of the boys had a hole in his shorts? she wondered. What if somebody called “Boxer check” and one of the boys wasn't wearing any shorts at all? Her imagination was working overtime.

By the end of the week, I found out why. Pamela
invited us to her house for a sleepover. Her parents went out to a movie, and that's when Elizabeth started talking.

I guess there's something about three girls in front of a fireplace making s'mores together that makes them feel warm and close and comfortable with one another. We were just sitting there, licking the chocolate and marshmallow off our fingers, watching the flames dance, when Elizabeth said suddenly, “Remember the other day on the playground when we promised we could tell each other secrets and nobody would laugh?”

Pamela and I nodded.

“Well . . .” Elizabeth raised her shoulders and took a deep breath, then stared down at her feet. “I'm twelve years old, I'm in junior high, but I've—I've never seen a boy naked.”

I was waiting for her to get to the point, then realized that
was
the point.

“So?” I said. “Elizabeth, you can still graduate.”

She gulped. “You don't understand. I just feel so—so stupid. So backward and babyish and everything.”

“But how
could
you see a boy naked? You don't have any brothers,” I said, trying to make her feel better.

She looked at me intently. “You've seen Lester, then.” I guess that's what she really wanted to know.

“Well, of course! Dad, too. . . .” And then I realized I was going to have to explain. It wasn't like we all took our clothes off and paraded around. If someone took a shower, though, and went to his room to dress, he may or may not have a towel around him. It just wasn't very important in our house. But Elizabeth's face was turning peppermint again.

“Haven't you ever seen
your
dad?” I asked her.

“No!” She looked at me in horror.

“Haven't you ever seen
pictures
of naked men?” Pamela asked curiously.

“No!”
Elizabeth said indignantly. And then she looked miserable again. “Just statues and things. I mean, if those ninth-grade boys ever pulled down their
shorts
, I'd probably faint.”

“No, you wouldn't,” said Pamela, and now we were both looking at her, and it was Pamela's turn to blush. “Listen, I've got something to tell you, but you've got to promise,
promise
, that you won't ever tell the other kids at school.”

Elizabeth promised and crossed herself. I just crossed my arms over my chest and promised, and hoped that would do.

“Well,” said Pamela, “I've seen a whole lot of boys naked all at once, and it wasn't that great, believe me.”

“Where?” Elizabeth and I asked together, as though we were going to get up and race right to wherever it was.

Pamela hugged herself with her arms and stared into the fire. “My parents . . . ,” she began, then stopped. “My parents . . . ,” she said again, “are nudists.”

Elizabeth and I couldn't take our eyes off her. I couldn't quite believe what I'd heard.

“You mean they . . . ?”

Pamela nodded. “They go to a camp sometimes, and everybody takes off their clothes.”

“In
front
of everyone?” Elizabeth said, aghast.

“Of course. Everybody does. They took me once on visiting day, but I decided I didn't want to join, so I didn't have to take mine off.”

“What . . . d-do they do . . . a-after they take off their clothes?” Elizabeth stammered.

“The same things they do when they have their clothes on. Swim, play tennis, hike, sit around and talk.”

“Then why . . . ?” I just couldn't understand.

“Because they say it feels better to be naked.”

“And nobody ever . . . ?” I just couldn't stop. I was worse than Elizabeth.

“No. It's supposed to be bad manners to even stare at someone else. At
those
places, I mean.”

I couldn't figure it out. If you only wanted to take off your clothes, you could do it at home. If you wanted to take off your clothes in front of people, you went to a nudist camp. But if you couldn't look at anybody else after they took their clothes off, then . . .

But right now that wasn't my problem. Right now Pamela and Elizabeth were looking at me, because they had each confided something very personal, and it was my turn. So I finally told them about the most embarrassing moment in my life so far: how I had first met Patrick when I opened the door of the wrong dressing room at a store, and there stood this boy with red hair and blue underpants. Pamela and Elizabeth both squealed in embarrassment.

“But you know,” I said, “I don't think it bothered Patrick much at all.”

“He'd make a good nudist,” said Pamela.

After we went to bed that night in the Joneses' family room, I was thinking how just a couple months ago, I'd never heard of SGSD. I didn't know that Lester was going to have to choose between Marilyn and Crystal. I didn't know that Dad was going to be caught between Janice Sherman and Helen Lake. And I certainly didn't know that Pamela's parents took off their clothes outside
on weekends. What would I discover a few months from
now
? What was waiting to shock me once I was in eighth grade? In ninth? In
college
?

Saturday morning at breakfast, I couldn't help staring at Mrs. Jones as she made our waffles. She looked like an ordinary woman in an ordinary robe, but I knew better. When Pamela's father walked though the kitchen in his sweatpants and shirt to go jogging, I imagined him running through the woods without any pants at all. Maybe when you come right down to it, nobody is an “ordinary person.” Maybe everyone has secrets. Janice, for example. When I put in my three hours at the Melody Inn later, I was thinking how nobody else who walked in that store would have guessed that the woman in charge of sheet music was secretly in love with her boss.

That night at dinner, I told Dad and Lester about the Joneses going to a nudist camp (I hadn't promised not to tell my family), and when neither one appeared shocked, I grew awfully quiet.

“Have
you
ever been to a nudist camp, Dad?” I asked finally.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Dad shrugged. “Oh, I don't know. Maybe if it was back
in the 1890s and we all wore tight collar and long sleeves in the summertime, I might consider it. But the way people can walk around outdoors now with hardly anything on at all—well, I just don't see the point.”

If there were any secrets in my family, I wanted to find out about them now, so I turned to Lester. “Have
you
ever been to a nudist camp?”

Lester was wolfing down a big plate of ravioli.

“No,” he said between bites. “Takes all the mystery out of life. I like a
little
something left to the imagination.”

After dinner, I took a sack of pretzels to my room and thought about bodies. I decided that if there was one thing seventh-grade girls think about more than anything else—certainly more than boys—it's bodies. I guess it's because eighth- and ninth-grade girls have so much more body than we do, we're always wondering when the rest of ours is going to arrive. They have curves where we have angles. Our knees and elbows still look like ice picks. I couldn't wait to start feeling more like a butterfly and less like a praying mantis.

I was thinking, too, about what I could do for Elizabeth. Hadn't we promised we were friends for life? What would a real friend do? By the time my homework was done, I had a plan.

I went to the shelves in our dining room where Dad stores all our old magazines and journals, and I picked up an ancient issue of
National Geographic
. I was determined to find every single photograph I could of a naked man or boy, paper-clip it, and put it aside for Elizabeth.

There were about four hundred issues to go through, but I kept at it. Actually, there were only a few pictures of men from the front. Too many photographs had been taken from behind, or with the man holding a spear or shield right over the place Elizabeth most wanted to see.

By Sunday evening the floor of the dining room was half covered with separate piles of
National Geographic
s—the best photos in one, the side views in another, the rear views in another, with paper clips strewn all over the place.

“Ye gods, Al, what the heck are you working on?” Lester asked, coming through.

“A project,” I told him. “I'm almost done.”

He pulled out a chair, sat down, and leaned over to look at a mountain climber on the cover of one. “Well, if your teacher knows how much time you put into this, you'll get the best grade in the class,” he said.