Outrageously Alice
Well, I was getting one thing straight, I decided as I walked to the
cafeteria. I was getting across the fact that I wasn’t sweet little Alice
McKinley anymore—a generic type of girl with no imagination or style.
NOW THAT SHE IS SETTLING INTO EIGHTH
grade, the class she used to envy, Alice McKinley is discovering that it isn’t all that exciting. But maybe it’s up to her to make this year as thrilling as she thought it would be. Out with the old, plain-Jane Alice, in with the new, stylish, creative Alice. She’s sick of being boring. It’s time to be outrageous!
But what if outrageous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? What if Alice finds herself in situations that are more embarrassing than they are wild and fun? Is Alice destined to be the same boring girl forever?
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COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
AGES 10–14 • 0811
Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*
“I love your books! Now, I’m sure everyone says that, but it’s way more when I say it.… Long live Naylor!”—SoccAllis
“Every one of your books makes me laugh, cry, blush, feel embarrassed and just plain silly at points. They are as real as life is now.… Thanks for writing such great books!! I’m not just saying that. I really mean it!”—Zoey
“If I have kids when I grow up, I think I’m going to force-feed them Alice (just joking … sorta).”—Tanya
“I want to say thank you very much. I introduced [my daughter] to Alice years ago, and she became addicted. I was amazed because my daughter wasn’t into reading until she started reading Alice.”—A Happy Mother
*Taken from actual postings on the Alice website. To read more, visit
AliceMcKinley.com
.
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.
Outrageously Alice
BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
Shiloh Books
Shiloh
Shiloh Season
Saving Shiloh
The Alice Books
Starting with Alice
Alice in Blunderland
Lovingly Alice
The Agony of Alice
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of
Reluctantly Alice
All But Alice
Alice in April
Alice In-Between
Alice the Brave
Alice in Lace
Outrageously Alice
Achingly Alice
Alice on the Outside
The Grooming of Alice
Alice Alone
Simply Alice
Patiently Alice
Including Alice
Alice on Her Way
Alice in the Know
Dangerously Alice
Almost Alice
Intensely Alice
Alice in Charge
Incredibly Alice
Alice Collections
I Like Him, He Likes Her
It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way
Please Don’t Be True
The Bernie Magruder Books
Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink
Bernie Magruder and the
Disappearing Bodies
Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel
Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor
Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup
Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure
Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril
Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry
The Cat Pack Books
The Grand Escape
The Healing of Texas Jake
Carlotta’s Kittens
Polo’s Mother
The York Trilogy
Shadows on the Wall
Faces in the Water
Footprints at the Window
The Witch Books
Witch’s Sister
Witch Water
The Witch Herself
The Witch’s Eye
Witch Weed
The Witch Returns
Picture Books
King of the Playground
The Boy with the Helium Head
Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear
Keeping a Christmas Secret
Ducks Disappearing
I Can’t Take You Anywhere
Sweet Strawberries
Please DO Feed the Bears
Books for Young Readers
Josie’s Troubles
How Lazy Can You Get?
All Because I’m older
Maudie in the Middle
One of the Third-Grade Thonkers
Roxie and the Hooligans
Books for Middle Readers
Walking Through the Dark
How I Came to Be a Writer
Eddie, Incorporated
The Solomon System
The Keeper
Beetles, Lightly Toasted
The Fear Place
Being Danny’s Dog
Danny’s Desert Rats
Walker’s Crossing
Books for Older Readers
A String of Chances
Night Cry
The Dark of the Tunnel
The Year of the Gopher
Send No Blessings
Ice
Sang Spell
Jade Green
Blizzard’s Wake
Cricket Man
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
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 © 1997 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
A
THENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.
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Book design by Mike Rosamilia
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.
0711 OFF
This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition August 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Outrageously Alice / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Jean Karl book.”
Summary: Alice is in eighth grade, and while she wants her life to be exciting and outrageous, she also wants to feel protected and safe.
ISBN 978-0-689-80354-3 (hc)
[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Single-parent families—Fiction. 4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.N24Ou 1997
[Fic]—dc20
96007744
ISBN 978-1-4424-2853-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-44246-584-8 (eBook)
To Erinn Lindsay Geyer
,
whose love of books will make them
her lifelong friends
1
FACING UP
ABOUT THE THIRD WEEK OF OCTOBER
, I decided it was turning out to be one of the weirdest months of my life. Not that there have been that many of them—Octobers, I mean. Thirteen, to be exact. But here’s what had happened so far:
Lester, my twenty-one-year-old brother, who has been juggling two or more girlfriends for several years, just got word that one of his
main
girlfriends, Crystal, was engaged to be married at Thanksgiving. And I was to be a bridesmaid. Now that’s weird.
And of course I was still holding my breath to see whether Miss Summers, my English teacher last year,
would marry Dad or our vice principal, Mr. Sorringer, who’s in love with her too.
Then Elizabeth, my friend who lives across the street, got a baby brother. At last she found out what a boy looks like naked. Is
that
weird, or what?
And finally, the student council at our junior high voted to create a haunted house for Halloween in the school gym to raise money for our library. What the school was going to do, see, was charge a buck fifty apiece to scare little kids half out of their minds. Patrick, my boyfriend, who’s vice president of the student council, asked if I wanted to help out.
Well, why not? I thought. October couldn’t get any crazier than it was already.
I was wrong. It got even crazier. Crystal Harkins’s maid of honor invited me to a bridal shower—a
lingerie
shower—and I’d never been to a shower before.
But you know what? All of these things—the engagement, the bridal shower, the baby brother, the haunted house—were happening to somebody else. I was just on the outside looking in. Not much that is really dramatic, outrageous, and wonderful has ever happened to
me—
something to remember forever and ever. If there was a prize for the girl with the most boring life, I thought, I’d win it, hands down.