Reluctantly Alice (13 page)

I leaned my head in my hand and tried really hard to concentrate on what Mr. Hensley was saying. The trouble was that I didn't care at all about Bolsheviks or Petrograd or even very much about revolutions, not the way Hensley teaches, anyway. He had just walked over to the window again, talking to the trees outside, it seemed, not to us, when suddenly I heard Connie gasp. I blinked and lifted my head.

“Oh no!” I heard Patrick whisper.

I couldn't figure out what was wrong. And then I saw that the little piece of paper had skidded too far this time, and instead of stopping at my desk, had kept going three feet farther. It was lying directly in Mr. Hensley's path, and now he was coming right toward it.

He kept walking until he touched it with the toe of his shoe and then, without pausing once in his lecture, reached down, picked it up, and unfolded it there at the front of the room, all the while talking about Lenin and Alexander Kerensky.

“See?”
Connie whispered over my shoulder.

I didn't even move. Mr. Hensley's voice sort of faded out, and for five seconds or so, he stared at the cartoon in his hands. He didn't look at us, didn't say anything, just stuck the paper in his pocket and went on telling about
why Leon Trotsky was arrested. But his face went from gray to a faint shade of pink.

It was Patrick and I who were upset. As soon as the bell rang and we got outside, I grabbed his arm. “What did you draw on it?” I asked. “Do you think he knows it was him in the cartoon?”

Patrick swallowed. “He knows,” he said, and looked miserable. “I drew wavy lines coming out of his mouth and put a sweatshirt on him that said, ‘Bed Breath Hensley.'”

I moaned.

“I feel awful,” said Patrick.

“So do I.”

We separated for our next class, but for the rest of the day, I knew that Patrick felt as bad as I did. Patrick and I had never meant for Mr. Hensley to see those cartoons. We never showed them to anybody else. It was just a private joke between us.

I didn't have much to say that night while Dad and Lester made dinner. Dad was fixing the salad, and Les and I were making “Pots of Gold,” which is cubes of cheese rolled up in Bisquick and boiled in tomato soup until they're cooked. I did the mixing and rolling and Lester did the boiling.

“
Watch
it, Al!” he said after a minute. “Wait until these
are done before you add any more. Can't you see the pot's full?” Dad says that the only thing worse than Pots of Gold is SpaghettiOs, but he's willing to eat it every six weeks or so because Les and I like it. Les and I like it because it's about as easy to make as SpaghettiOs.

“Something wrong, Al?” Dad asked. “Have hardly heard a peep out of you since I got home.”

“I just feel lousy,” I told him.

“Not coming down with the same thing Les had, are you?”

“Not that kind of lousy,” I said, and explained what Patrick and I had done. “I mean, you can't really change if you're boring, can you?”

“Not easily,” said Dad.

“That's why I feel so awful,” I told him. “But it's not the kind of thing you can apologize for without embarrassing him more.”

Dad agreed. “There are some things that are hard to put back in the bottle, aren't there?”

I dropped more dumplings in the tomato soup.

“How do you know he's sure you and Patrick did it?” Les asked.

“It doesn't
matter
!” I snapped. “He's embarrassed, and
we
did it, and I feel like rotten eggs.”

“Well, maybe you can think of something to do to make it up to him,” Dad suggested.

“Yeah, tell him you really enjoy his bad breath and his spit,” Lester joked.

It wasn't funny. I sat at the table cutting each little ball of Bisquick in two with my fork, watching the melted cheese spill out. Usually this is my favorite part of the meal. But this time, it was like stabbing Mr. Hensley in the heart.

Patrick called about seven and wanted to know if he could come over. I said yes.

“Patrick, huh?” said Dad as we cleaned up the kitchen.

“We're special friends now,” I told him. Maybe that made us sound more special than what I meant, because I noticed that both Dad and Lester left us alone in the living room. Les went upstairs to watch TV, and Dad sat at the folding table in the dining room to answer some letters.

Patrick had his book bag with him. “I've got an idea,” he said, and took out his notebook.

“Whatever we do, Patrick, it's not going to make him feel any better about that cartoon,” I said.

“I know, but I've thought of something else.” He took out the photocopied paper of projects we were supposed to do for the unit on the Russian Revolution. “Have you signed up for any of these yet?”

I shook my head.

“Okay. Veteran's Day is Visiting Day. Right? Parents come to class.”

“I thought we had Visiting Day already.”

“That was Back-to-School Night. The parents came alone. This time they visit classes while we're there.”

“So?”

“So all the other teachers have been getting ready. All the other classrooms have posters and papers and charts up. Right?”

I thought of Language Arts and how Miss Summers, with her Obsession perfume, had decorated the rim of the bulletin board all the way around with book jackets. Our family-tree diagrams covered an entire wall, and another wall had photographs of authors. Even the photographs smelled like perfume. Then I thought of Mr. Hensley's room. Beige walls, gray blackboard, and that's all. If you put all Mr. Hensley's imagination in a teaspoon, it wouldn't even cover the bottom.

“So let's decorate Hensley's room for him,” Patrick said. “Let's sign up together for project seven.”

I studied the paper in Patrick's hand.
Project Seven: Make a linear chart, marked off in years, and indicate when and where the major developments of the Russian Revolution
took place, beginning with the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and ending with the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922
.

“How is this going to brighten up the room?” I asked doubtfully.

“Ta-da!” said Patrick, and pulled out a big roll of paper from his book bag. He unrolled it and it stretched all the way from the front door to the kitchen sink. “We'll get it all done, decorate it with pictures, and have it up on the wall above the blackboard by the eleventh.”

“But the projects aren't due until the twentieth!” I protested.

“So we'll do ours early, just for him.”

We worked until 10:30, just making a list of what needed to be on the chart and marking the paper off into years.

“I saw Patrick's bike outside your house last night,” Elizabeth told me at the bus stop the next day.

“We're working on a World Studies project together,” I told her.

She didn't say anything for a moment, and Pamela was talking to some other girls. But finally Elizabeth asked, “Did you kiss?”

“Last night? Patrick and me? No. Why?”

“I don't see how you can work side by side with someone you used to kiss and then not do it anymore.”

Sometimes it's hard to talk to Elizabeth.

I really tried to pay attention in Mr. Hensley's class the next day. There were no more cartoons sliding across the floor from Patrick's desk to mine. Mr. Hensley hadn't changed at all. He still droned on and on. He still sent out a shower of spittle when he said “Socialist” or “assassination.” If he suspected that Patrick and I had drawn that cartoon, he never let on. He's too much of a gentleman to say anything that might embarrass you, even if you've embarrassed him.

Patrick came over every evening that week and spent most of the weekend at our house. We really had to work hard to make the eleventh. It wasn't easy to illustrate the Russian Revolution, but Dad said he could cut up old
National Geographic
s if we found any pictures of the Soviet Union, and that helped. When we were done at last, Patrick held one end of it and I held the other, and Dad and Lester looked it over and said it was pretty good.

“
Very
good, in fact,” said Dad, and made a couple of suggestions of things we'd left out. We found we could still squeeze them in. Lester even gave us a Russian kopeck from his coin collection to glue on the chart.

On Monday Patrick's dad drove us to school early. Patrick got a stepladder from the custodian, and when Hensley walked in fifteen minutes later, Patrick was up on the ladder, with half the chart taped to the wall, and I was holding the other end.

Hensley paused in the doorway, staring at us, and then walked slowly in, that faint pink in his cheeks again. I think at first he was afraid we were putting up a long cartoon about him, but when he saw what it was, his eyes lit up. It was the first time I ever saw Mr. Hensley look remotely excited.

“You're more than a week early!” he said. Then, walking slowly along the front of the room, studying the chart: “I can see you've put a lot of work into this project.”

“It was fun,” I told him.

He looked at me as though he had never heard the word before. I wondered if anyone else, in all Mr. Hensley's years of teaching, had ever said his class was “fun.”

“You got some excellent pictures!” he said, and even his voice sounded a little excited. “Here, let me help.” He took my end of the chart, stood on his desk chair, and taped it to the wall. The chart went all the way from the windows on one side of the room to the opposite side and curved three feet around one corner.

We had to leave when the first bell rang and go to homeroom, but when we came in later, there were already parents in the room, including my dad and Patrick's folks, studying the chart. I saw Mr. Hensley slip a breath mint in his mouth before he went over to talk to them, pointing out certain things on the chart, and asking Patrick and me to come up and explain others.

Maybe I only imagined it, but I swear I saw Hensley's eyes sparkle. The high point of the period, though, was when the principal came into the room briefly to see how things were going and commented on the chart. Hensley never stopped beaming for the rest of the session.

Sometimes it's possible to show you're sorry when you can't come right out and say it. It didn't change Mr. Hensley a lot. He still wore the same brown pants he always wore; his voice still droned, and he still showered the first row with spit. But he smiled more often. We noticed that.

“For two people who aren't going together anymore, you and Patrick sure have been seeing a lot of each other,” Elizabeth said after school. “He was over at your house almost all weekend.”

I just shrugged.

“If you don't kiss anymore, Alice, do you ever
talk
about kissing? How you used to do it, I mean?”

“Why would we talk about kissing if we don't kiss anymore?” I asked.

“Well, I mean, how can you just pretend it never happened?”

“We
don't
pretend it never happened. We just don't feel like kissing right now. We talk about other things.”

“I don't see how you can possibly talk about anything else when you used to be so close that you'd put your arms around each other and your lips together and . . .”

“Elizabeth, there's more to life than kissing,” I told her.

“I wouldn't know,” she said, and sighed.

I guess if you've never had a real kiss, you think about it all the time. If Elizabeth ever got one, though, she'd want a full orchestra playing, moonlight, waterfalls, the works. Boy, will she be disappointed.

 

I WAS REALLY RELIEVED THAT I CLEARED
things up with Mr. Hensley. I was already on bad terms with Denise and her crowd, which messed up my goal to get through seventh grade without making a single enemy, and I sure didn't want to add a teacher to the list. What I hadn't expected, though, was that I'd soon have one of my closest friends mad at me too. Pamela.

It was only a short while ago that we'd promised to be friends for life. And what made Pamela mad at me was no more my fault than Denise teasing me because I didn't have a mother. Another thing about seventh grade is that it isn't fair. Or maybe it's just life that's not fair.

At lunch one day in the cafeteria, Elizabeth handed little envelopes to Pamela and me. We opened them there at the table, and we both squealed at once. Inside were pictures. Bubble-bath pictures. Last summer, on a sleepover at Elizabeth's, we had taken pictures of each other in the bathtub, covered with bubbles, and Elizabeth's mother developed the film and made prints for each of us of all three.

We promptly had a giggling fit and compared pictures, each of us covered with bubbles, only our shoulders bare. I even had bubbles on top of my head, like Martha Washington's wig or something.

After lunch period was over, I stuck my three pictures in my notebook and didn't think any more about it. Thanksgiving came, and Dad and Lester and I went to the Hot Shoppe as usual for our holiday dinner, and afterward Lester went out with Marilyn, and Crystal called to wish him Happy Thanksgiving, and I lied and said I didn't know where he was, and when Lester came home I said I'd never lie for him again so he's better get his act together as to whether he liked Crystal or Marilyn better. By nine that night, we were all hungry again, so Lester sent out for a pizza. A typical Thanksgiving at our house.

When I went back to school on Monday, though, I was
walking down the hall between first and second periods when someone I didn't even know said, “Hi, Bubbles.”

“What?” I said.

Seventh-grade boys get weird sometimes, so I didn't think much of it, but when I was in Language Arts later, two more boys called me Bubbles. “Hey, Bubbles! How ya doin'?” they said.