Alice on Her Way

by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

  Like a true friend, Pamela called me the next morning.

  “I know it hurts to talk,” she said, “so I’ll do it. Everyone missed you—really. All the guys asked about you—Harry, Chris—and Molly had everyone sign a program for you. I’ll bring it over when you’re better.”

  “Did Ron…?” I croaked, wincing as I tried to talk.

  “Yeah, the jerk was there. He kept his arm around Faith all evening, until it began to look more like a chain instead of an arm. He is such a loser! Every time Faith even talked to another guy, Ron would nuzzle the side of her face to distract her. Listen, get better, okay? I’ll call again tomorrow and see how you’re doing. And hey! I had a good time, believe it or not.”

  When Sam called to see how the last performance had gone and Dad told him I was sick, it was only an hour before he arrived at our house with some of his mom’s soup—turkey something-or-other. Do mothers have this stuff just sitting around or did she make up a fresh batch just for me? I wondered. He wanted to come up to see me but Sylvia told him he’d better not, I might be contagious, and I was grateful. I would have locked myself in the bathroom if they’d let Sam see me looking like this.

  Anyway, Dad took me to the doctor on Monday for a throat culture, and by Wednesday, when I felt tons better, he said I could go back to school. The culture turned out to be negative for strep, but it didn’t do my homework for me, and I had two days of catching up to do.

  Liz and I were barely home from school that day—I’d stopped by her house to play with Nathan—when Pamela phoned.

  “You two have got to come over,” she said. “You won’t believe what I got in the mail just now.”

  “Can’t you tell us?” I said over Elizabeth’s shoulder.

  “No,” came Pamela’s voice. “You’ve got to see for yourselves.” And she giggled.

  I had been sitting on the couch, pretending to be reading as Nathan ran around and around—through the hall, then the kitchen, the dining room, the living room—and each time he’d pass the couch, I’d reach out and try to grab him. He’d shriek with delight.

  “You’re wearing me out, buddy,” I told him as I slipped my jacket on again. “Just wait till next time! I’ll catch you for sure!”

  “We’re going over to Pam’s, Mom,” Liz called.

  Pamela lives a few blocks from us and when we got to her house and she opened the door, she waved a newspaper in my face. “Just arrived from my cousin in New Jersey,” she said. “The Village Voice.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “It’s the weekly newspaper of Greenwich Village. Anyone who’s cool, wild, and outrageous reads the Village Voice. This will tell us exactly where to go.” And then, with a sly grin, she said, “Now, don’t have a spaz, Liz.” Pamela flung open the newspaper to a full-color photo double spread.

  I yelped and Liz covered her eyes momentarily as rows and rows of crouching women exposing their backsides came into view, with captions such as TWO GIRL SPECIAL and HOT TRANS SEX and BEST BODY SHAMPOO IN NYC, all with phone numbers.

  “Oh… wow!” said Elizabeth. We giggled as we sat down together on the couch to look some more.

  “Hey, Alice, this is you,” said Pamela, pointing to the headline of one ad: LOCAL GIRLS GO WILD.

  “No, this is you!” I said, pointing to HOT NASTY GIRLS. And then we found the perfect one for Elizabeth: OVER THE KNEE SPANKING AND MUCH MORE. We howled.

  “Good thing Dad’s not home or he’d cancel my trip,” Pamela said. Slowly, she turned the pages while we gaped and commented and wondered aloud how a woman could allow herself to be photographed “this way” and “that way” and “o’m’God, look at that way!”

  “Okay, now we’ve got to get serious,” said Pamela, grabbing a felt-tipped pen. “Clubs! We’ve got to find some clubs.”

  Liz was holding the paper now, propped against her thighs, feet on the coffee table. “Here’s one,” she said. “‘Shadow-dancing barkeep performs nude in upstairs sultan’s tent.’”

  “Mark it!” I said. Pamela drew a large circle around the ad.

  “What about this?” I suggested. “‘A three-dollar cover gets you into the Tuesday night rubfest, where you can gawk at funky hipster chicks dancing on well-stocked bars.’”

  “We won’t be there on a Tuesday,” said Pamela.

  “How are we going to get into any of these places?” I asked.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Pamela declared, making another circle on the paper. “Whee! Look at this one. ‘Well-oiled studs do karaoke in the raw’!”

  “Yes!” Liz and I said together.

  “And this!” I said. “‘Be participant or observer as you sip your drink under the stern tutelage of whip-bearing waiters’!” So much for the dignity and worth of every human being.

  “Pamela, how are we going to do any of this?” Elizabeth asked. “They’ve already told us there’s lockup each night.”

  “I’ve got a plan,” said Pamela. “After lights-out we—”

  “Lights-out? This isn’t camp,” I objected.

  “Lights-out, lockup, whatever. We put on our robes over our regular clothes and go down to the front desk. We tell them we smell smoke up on our floor. There will be a lot of confusion, and they’ll send people up to check. They might even set off the fire alarms. That’s when we slip out. And nobody can blame us for leaving our room if we smelled smoke, right?”

  I thought about it. “Okay. We’re standing outside. What do we do with our robes?”

  “Yeah, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet. If we go down in our jackets, though, they won’t believe us about the smoke.”

  “I know!” said Elizabeth. “Let’s each bring an old robe we don’t want anymore, and after we get outside, we’ll give them to a street person.”

  We gave each other a high five.

  “Okay, then what?” I asked.

  “Then we get in a cab and go to one of these places. Bring lots of money.”

  Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “What time is this supposed to be? The school’s got our evenings planned. We’ll have parent chaperones breathing down our necks till we go to our rooms.”

  I was afraid there was a hitch somewhere. “Yeah, we’ve got to get away for a whole evening, Pamela,” I said.

  Pamela chewed at her lip. She appeared to be thinking so hard, her brains hurt. “Plan B,” she said. “Forget the robes and the smoke. I’ll have my cousin call me on my cell phone and tell me her mother just died. I’ve got to go to her house for the night and comfort my relatives.”

  “What about us?” asked Liz.

  “I have to bring my two best friends to help. Three, counting Gwen. There are a lot of relatives.”

  “Pamela, you know that’ll never fly,” I said.

  She threw back her head in exasperation. “Okay, plan C. Forget the smoke, the robes, and my dead aunt. We’ll crawl out a window or something. Where there’s a will there’s a way! The thing is, we have to be committed to having a night on the town. If we’re just going to buckle under and spend a perfectly good New York night in our room, then we might as well stay home. Are we in this or not? Are we going to give up the best chance we ever had to do something really wild together?”

  “No,” I said, feeling adventurous and daring. “We’ve got to at least try.”

  “I agree,” said Liz. And added, with a melodramatic flair, “Even virgins have to cut loose now and then.”

  At the next newspaper staff meeting we were supposed to be talking about the feature article each of us was to write for a coming issue of The Edge. What we were doing instead was checking out who was going to New York and who wasn’t. Sam, of course, had signed up as soon as he knew I was going.

  “When I go to New York, it won’t be with a school group,” said the junior roving reporter. “It’ll be me and my buds with tickets to Madison Square Garden.”

  Tim, our assistant editor, and Tony, our sports editor, were going to go, but Jayne, the editor in
chief, wasn’t. She said she always went up with her aunt, and they took in a couple of plays over a weekend.

  I sure haven’t traveled much. I mean, some people my age have been to France and Spain. I’ve been to Chicago and Tennessee. Big deal. That’s why New York City seemed a lot more exciting to me than it did to some of the others.

  “Last year my aunt and I did three plays in one weekend,” said Jayne.

  “I’d spend the whole time shopping if I could,” said another girl. “The stores stay open practically all night long, and you can buy absolutely anything you ever wanted.”

  “Hel-lo!” said Miss Ames, our sponsor. “We have a paper to put out here! Jayne, what features do you have lined up so far?”

  Jayne snapped to attention and started down the list. When she got to me, I said, “I thought maybe I could do a feature on what students worry about the most.”

  “Grades!” said Tim.

  “College,” said Jayne.

  “Sex,” said Tony, and I wondered if I only imagined it or if he glanced at me when he said it. We all laughed.

  “That’s an interesting topic, and you seem good at drawing out people’s feelings, Alice,” Miss Ames said. That really pleased me. “I wonder how you can sort out the flip answers from the real McCoy, though.”

  “I think she ought to keep the kids anonymous,” said Tim. “She needs to promise them that she won’t use their names in the article.”

  “Yeah. Go for it,” said Sam.

  They all agreed. Usually we try to use as many students’ names as possible in each issue because everyone likes to see their names in The Edge. But this time we’d leave them out.

  When the meeting was over and we were gathering up our stuff, Tony said, “You want a ride home, Alice?”

  And before I could open my mouth, Sam said, “I’m taking her. I’ve got the car.”

  “Okay. See ya,” Tony said, and went out.

  Sam gave me a puzzled smile.

  “What?” I said.

  “Doesn’t he know I took you to the dance?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “What does it matter?”

  “I guess it doesn’t,” said Sam. “I just wondered if he had designs on you.”

  “Designs?” I said. “What is he? A tattoo artist?”

  “Okay, the hots,” said Sam.

  I just laughed. “You’d have to ask Tony.”

  Sam put his arm around me as we walked out to his mom’s car. “When we get to New York,” he said, “I want you all to myself.”

  Why didn’t that make me all tingly and excited? I wondered. In a way it did. But all Sam and I had talked about so far was sitting together on the bus going up and back. I also had big plans with the girls. Now I was stuck with a balancing act: How much time to give Sam? How much attention to Pamela and Elizabeth and Gwen? I wanted a real feeling of getting away, and now I felt as though I would be dragging my life in Silver Spring along with me.

  Somehow it must have registered on my face. When I didn’t respond, Sam gave my waist a little tug. “You okay with that?” he asked.

  “Well, they’ve got us on a pretty full schedule,” I said.

  “We can always find a way to slip out,” said Sam.

  “Okay. But I’m rooming with Gwen and Pamela and Liz, so part of the time I’ll be with them,” I said.

  He looked disappointed. “I thought we could do lots of things together. I mean, that was the point of going, wasn’t it? For me, anyway.”

  “I could be with you here, Sam. We don’t need to go to New York for that.”

  “I mean, away from everybody.”

  I tried to laugh it off. “When we’re in your car, we’re away from everybody.”

  “Not as much as I’d like.” He grinned and nuzzled my ear.

  15

  Problem

  Les had a few hours to spare on Saturday afternoon, so Dad let me off work early for my first driving lesson. In Dad’s car. His new car. Dad had said he’d give me a few lessons himself if he had to but that all his gray hair had come from teaching Les to drive. If he had to teach me, too, his hair would probably fall out.

  Everyone under eighteen who applies for a license in Maryland has to go through thirty hours of driver’s ed, but nobody wants to look like a complete nerd at the wheel, especially if other students are in the car with you. We all want to look cool, as if we’ve driven before and are just taking the course because we have to. With Dad’s permission to miss work, I was planning to sign up for four Saturday mornings plus two evenings a week after we got back from New York.

  I grinned excitedly as I slid into the driver’s seat. Les helped me adjust the side and the rearview mirrors and pull the seat up until I felt a comfortable distance from the wheel. I turned on the ignition. There’s something about the sound of the engine engaging and the whole car beginning to vibrate and purr that makes you feel so powerful. Excited and scared both, because Dad’s car was only six months old.

  “Okay,” said Les. “Put the car in reverse and back slowly down the driveway.”

  I put my hand on the gearshift and moved it to the R. The car began to roll. I panicked and slammed my foot on the brake. Lester’s head jerked backward.

  “Easy, Al!” he yelped.

  I inched my foot off the brake, and the car began to move again.

  “Watch for cars,” Lester said.

  I braked again, more gently this time. A car was coming on the left, so I waited. When the road was clear, I rolled out into the street.

  Bang! Crash!

  I screamed and braked again. Two of the neighbor’s metal trash cans went rolling down the street. Lester swore under his breath, got out and returned them, waved to the neighbors, and got back in. Now I was crosswise in the road, and a car was coming in each direction.

  “Lester!” I screamed again.

  “Al, will you please quit screaming?” he said. “Put the car in drive. Then slowly—slowly—turn the wheel and get out of the way of that BMW.”

  In the rearview mirror I could see the car behind me inching forward. I pushed the gearshift to D and moved the car over to the right side of the road so the car facing me could get by. As soon as it had passed, the car behind me gunned its motor and went tearing around us.

  “Did I dent anything?” I asked in a shaky voice.

  “No. The bumper hit the cans. Now move.”

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Be grateful,” Les told me. “When I was learning to drive, we had a manual transmission. You’ve got power brakes, power steering, automatic transmission…. Piece of cake!”

  Lester had me drive to the empty parking lot at the grade school and made me practice pulling in and out of parking spaces. I did so well after a half hour that he tried to teach me to parallel park behind a small bulldozer that was parked at one end.

  “Jeez! Stop!” he yelled at one point. “Al, you came within an inch of scraping the side.”

  I was near tears. “I’m not ready for this, Lester!” I said.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll save that for another time. Let’s go back through the neighborhood and call it a day,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

  “For what?”

  “For laughing at you when you were learning to drive,” I sniffled. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Well, you should be,” he said.

  I steered in the direction Les was pointing and turned left. “I’m sorry I clapped and carried on when you were trying to park and knocked over that bucket with the broom in it,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Lester.

  “I’m sorry I made so much noise in the backseat and—”

  “Al! You just went through a red light!” Lester yelled. “Watch what you’re doing!”

  “You said I could make a right turn on red, Lester!” I howled.

  “Not when another car’s coming, you can’t! I’d like to live long enough to raise a family, you know.”
<
br />   He seemed even more relieved than I was when we reached our street and I finally made it up the driveway.

  “So if you live long enough to raise a family, will it be with Tracy?” I asked, taking a chance on being nosy.

  “Why? Has Dad said anything to you about her?” he wanted to know.

  “He said you have a good head on your shoulders.”

  He grinned. “I do. And so does she.”

  At the “Our Whole Lives” class the next morning we had our infamous “putting a condom on a banana” lesson. It was too funny to be embarrassing. For some reason, the guys seemed more embarrassed than the girls, but we were all good sports about doing it. Gayle and Bert were good sports about answering our questions too, questions like, “What happens if a condom comes off inside a woman?”

  “So what do you do?” Liz asked on the bus the next morning when I was explaining all this to her and Pamela.

  “It doesn’t usually happen, but you can fish it out with your fingers if you have to. Or the man could do it for you. It’s not like you’re some endless cave.”

  Liz cringed.

  “So what else did they ask?” Pamela wanted to know.

  I grinned. “Whether condoms make a noise if they pop. We spent part of the class just blowing them up like balloons, then holding them closed and popping them.”

  “I don’t understand your church,” said Liz. “When I go to mass, everything I touch is revered—a rosary, a prayer book, a candle….”

  I thought about that some. “I guess you could say we revere life,” I told her, “and so do you. Sex is part of life, so my church isn’t so different, really.”

  That got me thinking some more about my feature article on what students worry about. I was quite sure no one at school would confess any worries about condoms or possibly even religion, but I wondered if even my best friends would level with me.

  So on Monday I buttonholed as many strangers as I could—kids in the cafeteria, in the gym, at their lockers, in the halls—and told them what I was working on. I said I didn’t want their names, because we weren’t using any in the article, but I wanted to know the things they worried about most.