“What about Carol?” Lester asked. Carol is Aunt Sally’s daughter, and she’s a couple years older than Les. “You never saw her in the nude?”
“No,” I said. “Did you?”
Lester turned bright red.
“Got-cha!” I said.
“No,” Lester said quickly. “I never did. Don’t be stupid.”
“Well, then!” said Dad. “You’ve achieved a twelve-year goal today, Al! So how are you liking seventh grade?”
“Fine,” I told him. “And if I can think of one more good thing about it, it’ll cancel out all the bad ones.”
I went to school on Friday searching for it—the seventh good thing about seventh. I wanted to like junior high. According to Mrs. Plotkin, wanting to do things is half the battle. In each of my classes I looked for something that was different from sixth grade that made junior high better. The teacher in Life Science was nice. So was Miss Summers in Language Arts. Nice and pretty, too. My math instructor was kind and was good at explaining problems, but as the day went on and I was in and out of classrooms, there wasn’t one particular class that stood out. Finally there was just one period left, Mr. Hensley’s World Studies, and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if I discovered the Seventh Wonder of Seventh Grade in here?
This is the only class I have with Patrick, and all week we’d been sitting in the last row, as far as we could get from Mr. Hensley’s bad breath. Patrick hasn’t exactly been ignoring me, but after we’d seen the way eighth and ninth graders make out at lunch time, leaning against the walls outside, all the kids who had been going together as couples in sixth grade sort of developed amnesia. None of us wanted to remember the silly things we’d done over the summer. Like the boys running around the playground with Pamela’s new Up-Lift Spandex Ahh-Bra. No ninth-grade boy would do that, and no ninth-grade girl would get hysterical if he did. So here before class is the one place Patrick and I can talk a little and catch up on things without attracting attention.
“How’s it going?” Patrick said.
“Better. I actually think I’m going to like junior high.” I crossed my fingers. “Maybe.” I stole him a look. “You been to P.E. yet?” I wondered if seventh-grade boys had the same kind of revelations when they looked at older boys in the nude as girls did when they saw older girls in the shower.
“Yeah! It’s neat!” Patrick said. “We’re doing track right now, and you should see the legs on some of those guys on our team!”
I smiled.
Then the bell rang and Horse-Breath Hensley was up in front of the room, pacing back and forth the way he does when he talks to the class. This time he was talking about fairness, and the way he was going to conduct the class. He’s already given us an outline of the course and told us when the big reports were due, and he said that he knew he wasn’t one of the most exciting teachers in the school, but he hoped we would remember him as one of the fairest. So far so good, I thought. Maybe this will be the Seventh Thing.
Then Mr. Hensley said that probably all our lives, we had been treated alphabetically as an example of fairness. The Adamsons were always called on first in class and the Zlotskys were always called on last.
True, I thought, but I’ll admit I’d always liked that. With a last name right smack in the middle of the alphabet, it had always been comforting to know that I wouldn’t be the first to have to stand up and give a report or the last one, either. If Mr. Hensley reversed it and called on the Z’s first and the A’s last, “McKinley” would still be in the middle. I smiled to myself.
“And so,” Mr. Hensley said, “just to even things up a bit, in this class we go alphabetically by first names, and we’re seated accordingly. If you will now move to the desks I assign you… . Alice McKinley, first seat, first row, please. Barbara Engstrom, next seat, first row …” He read off his list, filling up the front row all the way across, then starting on the second.
I don’t remember the rest. The only thing I knew for certain was that the class was rearranged, Patrick and I were separated, and I realized that for the rest of the semester I would be the first one called on for everything. I was also directly in line of fire of Mr. Hensley’s breath.
“I think that was a wonderful idea!” said a girl named Yvonne Allison as we left the room.
I swallowed. The seventh best thing about seventh grade turned out to be the worst of all.
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.
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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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 © 1989 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds
Alice in rapture, sort of / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: The summer before she enters the seventh grade becomes the summer of Alice’s first boyfriend, and she discovers that love is about the most mixed-up thing that can possibly happen to her, especially since she has no mother to go to for advice.
ISBN 978-0-689-31466-7 (hc)
[1. Single-parent family—Fiction] I. Title.
PZ7.N24A1 1989 [Fic]—dc19
88008174
ISBN 978-1-4424-2362-6 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-442-46577-0 (eBook)
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of Page 13