* * *
My grandmother loaned me her car to drive over to Alice’s house. When I told her who I was tutoring, her face flinched with a bit of recognition. Even my grandmother knows about Alice Franklin. Now that should tell you something. No doubt she learned about her at a prayer meeting when some sweet, gossipy Healy soul suggested praying for the town’s most wayward girl, but to her credit she didn’t say anything when I mentioned going over to Alice Franklin’s house. She just handed me the keys and reminded me to go easy on the clutch.
I don’t know how I walked from the car to the house, which is a small pink and white bungalow in what some might consider the rougher section of town. But somehow I made the journey. There was a flowerpot full of cigarette butts on the porch just outside the front door, and I wondered if it was Alice who smoked or Mrs. Franklin. Make that Ms. Franklin. Biologically, Alice has a father of course. But if a Mr. Franklin has ever walked the streets of Healy, no one has ever seen him do it.
My hand formed a fist and knocked on the door, and there was Alice, present before me with a neutral expression on her face. No smile, no hello. She just swung open the door and stood there in her dark blue jeans and a black T-shirt. No sweatshirt for once. The T-shirt had a high neck, I noticed. For this I was grateful.
“Hey,” she said, and I sensed she was wary. “Come in.”
I followed her to the brightly lit kitchen where she had her Algebra II textbook and a pink spiral notebook set out on the table next to a row of freshly sharpened yellow pencils. She sat down in front of them and motioned for me to take the seat at the head of the table so we were sitting catty-corner across from one another. I wondered if Alice’s mom was going to come out from somewhere, and Alice must have read my mind because she said, “My mom isn’t here. She’s out on a date.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you want something to drink? I have Coke and orange juice and water.”
Here was Alice Franklin, the most beautiful girl in Healy. Here she was allowing me into her house, offering me something to drink. I swallowed hard and said, “A Coke, please.” She got herself one, too.
After a few sips from a cold can, Alice opened up her notebook and showed me her current assignment. It was baby stuff for me, and I picked up a pencil and started working problems for her. I narrated as I worked, talking out the problems as slowly as I could. I talked about the binomials and the radicals as if they were intimate friends of mine whom I hadn’t talked to in some time. Soon I found myself lost in the graphs and slopes and polynomials. Alice interrupted me as I worked to ask a question or two, and I stopped and explained. Every so often she said, “Oh. Oh. Mr. Commons never made it make sense like that.” Eventually, I handed her a pencil and our fingers touched, and then I watched as she carefully graphed a curve.
“That’s right!” I told her, excited.
“It is?” she said, glancing up at me only briefly before going back to finish the sloping upward line. Like if she looked away for too long she’d make an error somehow.
“Yes!” I told her.
“Wow,” she said, finally putting down the pencil. She looked at me and for an instant she smiled a true, genuine smile. I noticed one of her incisors was a little crooked. Just a little.
“Want to try another one?” I asked, and Alice did, and she got that problem right, too.
“It looks like you might not need my help that much after all,” I said, desperate to say something and then instantly regretting what I had just said. If she didn’t need my help (which, despite two correct problems, she so clearly did), then how would I see her again?
My comment did something to Alice. Her smile disappeared, and perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I think she frowned. Ever so slightly.
“You want to sleep with me, don’t you?” Alice said, shutting her Algebra II textbook. You might even say she slammed it. “You think I’ll, like, do it with you in exchange for math help, don’t you?” Her cheeks—her perfect cheeks—pinked up like two bowls of strawberry ice cream.
The phrase sleep with me just hanging there in the air made me blush. I could feel it. And here is the truth. I did and I do want to sleep with Alice. How could I say no to that question? I’m almost seventeen years old, and despite my mostly contented loner status and my social inadequacies I have carnal desires that I am all too familiar with, so yes, I want to sleep with Alice Franklin. I want to take her in my arms and kiss her neck just under her hairline and slip my hands under her black T-shirt and touch her skin, which I am sure will be soft and warm and sweet. I want to feel her body under mine in some dark, secret room where no one can bother us. Yes, oh my God, yes, do I want to sleep with Alice Franklin.
But not in the way Alice thought in that moment.
Not like that.
Not in exchange for answers to her Algebra II homework.
So I was not completely lying when I said, “No. No, Alice. Not at all. I just want to help you.”
I must have seemed somewhat sincere because Alice stopped frowning. But she still seemed distrustful of my actions. I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I just sat there, certain this plan was hopeless. I’d made a total ass of myself.
And then Alice pushed back from the kitchen table, and I was convinced she was about to kick me out, but she just sighed, a big hefty sigh that was almost too big for someone so small. Then she said, “Why are you being so nice to me anyway?”
“Because…” I answered. And I thought about the rumors swirling around Alice. The ones I’d surreptitiously gleaned in the hallways and during passing periods before and after classes.
The party. The sexual texts. The abortion.
I thought about the stall on the second floor that I’d heard students talking about, so recently covered in graffiti about Alice Franklin. They’re calling it the Slut Stall.
Alice was waiting for an answer to her question about why I was being so nice. Her face was silent, staring steadily at me.
“Because…” I said again. “Because … I guess I think you deserve it.”
The moment I said it I knew it was exactly the right response.
I also knew it was 100 percent true.
Alice didn’t kick me out. She looked down at the kitchen floor for a minute, and then she brought her big brown eyes back to look at me.
“Can you help me with one more problem?” she said, opening her book up again.
“With as many as you want,” I told her, and I reached for a pencil.
Kelsie
These are the things that keep running through my brain even though I don’t want them to:
• The Slut Stall.
• Telling people about Alice and the abortion.
• The Really Awful Stuff that happened to me last summer.
• Alice and Tommy that night at Elaine’s party.
• Tommy Cray in general.
• Alice Franklin in particular.
• Whether or not I deserve to go to hell if there actually is a hell for me to go to.
It’s like my brain has been working so crazy hard at not thinking about certain things that I don’t really have time to appreciate the fact that I’m a full-fledged popular girl now. I sit with Elaine and Maggie and all their friends every single day, right in the middle of the noise and the inside jokes and the attention. I hang out at Elaine’s house a lot and we gossip about everything. And it’s really fun. I would be a huge, ridiculous liar if I told you it isn’t fun.
But.
Still.
The other day I noticed Alice talking to Kurt Morelli in the hallway. Elaine and me and some of the other girls were walking by and there they were. Alice was standing there in her gray sweatshirt and jeans, her arms squeezed up tight around her chest with her hands tucked under her armpits. Like she was trying to shrink into nothing. Kurt was acting like he didn’t know where to look or put his body, like he was just really uncomfortable being alive. Alice was saying something and Kurt was nodding his head and it
was the weirdest image I’d seen in a long time.
“What the hell is that about?” Elaine muttered to me, and not all that quietly either.
“Oh my God,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think of.
“I hope he doesn’t get her pregnant,” somebody added, and we all sort of collapsed into each other, giggling. The thought of Kurt and Alice doing it was so hilarious that we had to hold each other up to keep from passing out with laughter.
I don’t know if Alice heard what we said or not.
Seeing her talking to Kurt Morelli was totally bizarre. Even though I know the other girls don’t feel the same way, there is still a little part of me that sees Alice as this unattainably cool girl in my freshman homeroom on the first day of high school. The kind of girl who swore out loud with total confidence and deemed me worthy of being her friend even though my mom was way too crazy into religion and I didn’t know how to put on eyeliner. The kind of girl who acted like getting asked out by a guy was the most boring thing in the whole world because it happened to her, like, every single day.
So seeing Alice talking to the strangest guy in school was really unsettling.
But the truth is, even though there’s some of me that can remember what it was like to meet the Incredible Alice Franklin way back in ninth grade, mostly it feels like the real Alice Franklin has moved away. Or turned into a ghost or a different person. Like she’s transformed into a gray sweatshirt with legs.
There’s another thing on the list of things I try not to think about. And that is that first time Alice hung out at my house. We wandered into my den, and my brain was working overtime trying to think of what to say to sound cool, and she ran her raspberry-colored fingernails over the spines of all my mom’s religious books, including Jesus Calling and Power of a Praying Wife. I remember how my cheeks flared up super hot as she peered at some of the covers. I remember holding my breath as she looked around the room and took in all the Christian stuff on the walls.
“My mom’s really intense about the religion thing,” I said, “but I’m, um, totally not.” I hoped my mother couldn’t overhear our conversation from back in the kitchen. Denying your faith in the Lord was the ultimate no-no.
“Oh,” said Alice like she hadn’t even noticed. “That’s cool. I mean, I believe in God and everything. No big deal.”
I remember how my shoulders sank ten feet with relief when she said that.
I miss her. I actually miss her. I know I always got jealous of her and I know she lied to me about giving Mark Lopez a blow job and I know that one of the guys she (probably/maybe) slept with at Elaine’s party was Tommy Cray. I know that when I’m the most upset about The Really Awful Stuff, I blame her for it even though logically that doesn’t make sense … I miss her. I miss doodling on magazines and ordering pizza and eating an entire pan of brownies together just because we wanted to. I miss watching corny, crazy musicals like Cry-Baby and The Apple and singing the songs out loud. I miss asking her questions about what sex is like and having sleepovers and watching her call boys in the middle of the night and do a really bad Chinese accent and ask if they wanted extra egg rolls with their order. And I miss gossiping and texting in class to fight off our boredom.
Kelsie I am so bored in this class I want 2 poke my eyeballs out with hot sticks.
Don’t do it your eyes are pretty.
I could walk around with sticks in my eyes where the eyeballs had been. You could lead me around and be my helper.
Are U saying I would be your seeing eye dog?
Yes but not a dog. Just a helpful friend.
U are a freak Alice!!!!
I know U R 2!!!!
I miss her and I know it’s a totally hypocritical, pathetic thing to say. Given everything I’ve done to her and everything I’ll probably still do.
And all just to sit at the good table in the cafeteria.
But it’s true. I’d deny it to anyone who asked me straight out, but most of the time—actually lots of the time—I miss Alice Franklin.
I guess I don’t deserve to. But I do.
Kurt
Even the gods themselves must have eventually gotten used to being around Aphrodite.
And so it is that after almost two months of meeting twice a week, I’m finally starting to relax a little at Alice’s house. Despite her beauty, her appeal, her perfect knees and lips and face, I’m no longer a jumbly mess during our tutoring sessions. I’m not a placid lake of calmness either, mind you. But I can breathe regularly at least.
She always has her math textbook ready and waiting for me on the kitchen table, next to the sharpened pencils and an ice-cold can of Coke. She never drinks anything during our sessions. She just studies me carefully as I work the problems, offer explanations, answer her questions.
Her mother is almost never home. Once I caught a glimpse of her as she walked out of the house during one of my sessions with Alice. She’s an older version of her daughter, but with shoulder-length hair and a face that isn’t anywhere near as soft and as sweet as Alice’s face. She told Alice not to wait up, and she didn’t even say hello to me.
I get the sense that Alice is very much on her own.
One evening after a long set of problems, Alice looked at me and said, “How did you get to be so good at this anyway?”
I shrugged my shoulders and told her the truth. “I don’t know. It just comes easily to me, I guess. It’s not hard at all. But the things that come easily to other people don’t come easily to me, so I suppose there is a trade-off.”
“What doesn’t come easily to you?” Alice said, frowning a little. “You’re a straight A student.”
“Academics aren’t the problem,” I told her. “But, for example, talking to people. About the weather or sports or what have you. I can’t do that. I’m not good at just talking.”
Alice’s slight frown turned into a smile.
“Well, aren’t we talking now?”
I flushed. “Yes, we are. We’re talking about talking.”
“Talking about talking,” Alice repeated. Her smile grew a little more. My brain grasped at every corner of my head, searching for something to say, but I couldn’t find anything.
After a moment of quiet, Alice said, “Should we get back to work?” Maybe she sensed my discomfort.
“Okay,” I said, grateful to be able to talk about polynomials again.
* * *
Then I got an idea. The holidays were around the corner, and I thought of a gift I wanted to get Alice. I have money to spend. Plenty, actually. My parents had been smart in their financial planning, and I’m well aware that my grandmother has a sizable amount with which to raise me. I could afford to be magnanimous. When I asked my grandmother for the money I’d need to buy the present, she asked me who it was for.
“Alice Franklin,” I said. I can’t lie to my grandmother.
“Well,” my grandmother answered, “you never ask for anything, Kurt. So I suppose if you want to spend a hundred dollars on this gift, that’s your choice.”
Would Alice think I was trying to purchase her affection? Maybe. But I searched around online and found what I wanted and bought it anyway, hoping for the best possible outcome. Which is to say, I hoped that Alice Franklin would love her present.
I was scheduled to go to Alice’s house on a Thursday evening. But I hadn’t realized that that particular Thursday was Brandon Fitzsimmons’s seventeenth birthday. Rather, it would have been had he lived. And with this birthday, Healy High plummeted into full grieving mode once again. Brandon’s locker was covered with balloons in the school colors and girls started crying in class and lessons were suspended so people could talk about their feelings with a grief counselor that the principal brought in specifically for the occasion.
I hadn’t seen Alice at all that day, and when I showed up at her house with my gift in hand, she answered the door, and I knew right away she’d been drinking. There was the smell of beer on her breath, her cheeks were red,
and her smile was lopsided and generous. If I wasn’t mistaken, her eyes looked as if she’d been crying.
“Hey, Kurt,” she said. She sort of slid toward the kitchen where there was no spiral notebook or Algebra II textbook or sharpened yellow pencils. There was a can of Lone Star beer on the counter. She took a sip from it with her perfect lips.
“It’s what my mother drinks. Isn’t it gross? But whatever.”
“Oh,” I said, unsure of what to do or think.
“Do you want one?” Alice asked me.
“Okay,” I said.
I took a fresh can from her and leaned in for a sip, and for a moment my mind sped back to the last time I drank beer. To a warm Saturday night at the very beginning of fall. Then my mind slipped to the thing I wanted to tell Alice Franklin.
* * *
It was a Saturday night in the very early fall, not long into junior year. I was up late, reading in my bedroom. It was around one in the morning. Sometimes I suffer from insomnia, but I’ve come to embrace it over the years because it gives me time to stay up and read. And I’ve discovered I can actually get by with four or five hours of sleep. I’m lucky that way.
I had the window open. In Healy, you could do that. It was a hot Texas night, but my grandmother loves to turn off the air conditioning during the evenings and open the windows instead. She says it’s good for a body to breathe the fresh night air. I’m assuming it’s also good for the electric bill.
“Kurt, hey. Kurt!”
It was a very loud whisper that actually came out louder than simply speaking in a normal tone of voice. I thought perhaps I’d started to drift off and hear things, but then it came at me again, straight through the open window.
“Kurt Morelli, do you hear me?”
I pulled on my sweatpants and headed to the window. Across the way I saw Brandon Fitzsimmons balancing himself on the roof of his house, just outside his bedroom. He was drinking a can of beer and calling my name.
I put my finger to my mouth to shush him and ventured downstairs, creeping as quietly as I could. When I made it outside, I stared up at Brandon from the ground.
The Truth About Alice Page 7