Reluctantly Alice (14 page)

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

They only laughed. I began to worry that “Bubbles” was another code word like “SGSD” or something. Denise hadn't called me “Bubbles” in class, though, and if it meant something awful, she'd be the first to do it. I couldn't figure it out.

When I saw Patrick going to his locker right after lunch, I told him about it and he laughed too.

“What's going on, Patrick?” I asked. “Do you know something I don't?”

“Maybe,” he said.

I followed him down the hall to find out what it was all about, and on the inside of his locker door was the picture of me in the bubble bath, poster-size. Some boys going by whistled and grinned at me.

I stared. “Where did you
get
that?” I asked.

“Pamela gave me her picture of you, so I had a poster made,” he said.

“You're nuts, Patrick,” I told him, but I was a little bit pleased. It was a nice, natural, silly picture of me, and I didn't care if boys called me Bubbles. Of course, they wondered who took it and how Patrick got hold of it, but that didn't bother me either. Everyone seemed to understand it was all a joke.

The rest of the day, when boys looked at me and yelled, “Hey, Bubbles!” I'd just laugh. Maybe seventh grade wasn't so bad after all. I wasn't about to tell Aunt Sally about it ever, because she'd say no boy was supposed to see your bare shoulders till you were engaged—something like that. I told Dad, though, and he laughed.
Every
body laughed. Everybody but Pamela.

When I got to the bus stop the next morning, Elizabeth said “Hi,” but Pamela turned away.

“Pamela?” I said.

“Hi,” she said coldly.

“What's wrong?”

“You should know,” she said.

I stared at her back. “
How
should I know? I just got up, ate my Cheerios, walked out here, and suddenly you're mad at me.”

“It's not this morning; it's yesterday,” she said.

“What about yesterday?”

“The way you went around hogging attention. All that Bubbles stuff.”

“Pamela!” I said. “That's
my
fault? Who gave the picture to Patrick in the first place?”

“I didn't know he was going to make a poster.”

“Well,
I
didn't even know he had the picture! What are you mad at
me
for?”

“Well, you certainly acted like you were enjoying it,” Pamela sniffed.

I was really getting angry with her. “So what do you want me to do? Go rip it down?”

“Yeah, Pamela, it's not Alice's fault,” Elizabeth said. “She's just being a good sport about it.”

Pamela stuck her hands in her pockets. “Well, if I was you, I'd ask Patrick to take it down.”

“If I was
you
, I wouldn't go around giving out pictures of friends unless I'd asked them, especially friends I'd promised to be loyal to for life,” I said.

The bus came, Pamela and I took separate seats, and Elizabeth, not wanting to have to choose between us, sat at the back all by herself. The three girls who had promised to be friends forever were sitting three seats apart on the bus.

“Lester,” I said after school. “I don't understand girls.”

“Welcome to the club. You get any insights, share them with me. Who are you having problems with? Denise again?”

“Pamela.” I pulled out the photos of the three of us in the bathtub and showed them to Lester.

“I've seen bare shoulders before,” he said.

“That's not the
point
, Lester!” I told him, and explained about Pamela being jealous.

“That's all the problem?”

“Isn't it enough?”

“Simple as pie. You take
your
photo of
Pamela
down to the print store, get a poster-size copy made, and give it to some boy at school to put inside
his
locker. Boys will start calling
her
Bubbles, and then she'll be happy. I guarantee it.”

“Do you really think this will work?”

“No, because then Elizabeth will feel left out, so if you want to avoid trouble, get a poster-size of each of them and let nature take its course.”

“Okay, I will,” I said, and two days later, with Pamela still not speaking much to me, I arrived at school with two poster-size pictures rolled up in my school bag. I knew where Mark Stedmeister's locker was, so I went there first and waited for him even though he and Pamela were forbidden
to date anymore because they kissed too much. He was really glad to get the picture, and put it on the inside of his locker door just the way Patrick had done with my picture.

The real problem was what to do with Elizabeth's poster. I finally gave it to a boy who always stares at Elizabeth in the cafeteria, and he just kept saying, “Wow! Wow!”

Bull's-eye!
I said to myself.

By the end of the day, I was friends with Pamela again, but Elizabeth said she would never speak to me as long as she lived.

What happened with Pamela's poster was that Mark showed it to every boy who walked by, and they started calling her “Bubbles II.” Whenever guys saw us walking together, they started singing that old song, “I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

What happened with Elizabeth's picture was that the jerk I gave it to didn't have the sense to put it on the door of his locker. He pinned it up on the bulletin board beside the trophy case, and someone came along and drew little red dots with Magic Marker where Elizabeth's breasts would be beneath the bubbles. Elizabeth almost fainted dead away when she found it, but that was after practically every boy in school had seen it.

I took the poster down and tore it up, but Elizabeth bawled all the way home on the bus.

“Elizabeth, I'm sorry,” I told her. “I figured if I had one made of Pamela but not of you,
you'd
be mad.”

“Did I
ask
you to do that?” she sobbed.

“No, but . . .”

“They put
dots
on mine, Alice!”

“Elizabeth, your picture wasn't any different from ours,” Pamela tried to tell her. “Everybody knew the dots were just drawn there.”

“But now everybody knows where my breasts are!” Elizabeth wailed.

“They knew where they were before!” I croaked. “Breasts don't migrate or anything.”

“They'll think I'm
that
kind of g-girl.”

“What kind is that?”

“Who lets people take pictures of her in bathtubs.”

“But you are! I mean, you did!” I said, and she started bawling again.

I walked into our house, dumped my book bag on the floor, and bellowed, “I am resigning from the female species forever!”

“Welcome to the world of men,” Lester said over his bag of pretzels.

I plopped myself down across from him. “Lester, if somebody gave you pictures of Marilyn and Crystal in the bathtub, what would you do with them?”

“Tape them on the ceiling over my bed,” he said.

I gave him a look and went upstairs. But the worst was yet to come. The phone rang, and it was Elizabeth's mother.

“Alice,” she said sternly. “Would you come over, please? I'd like to talk with you.”

I went back downstairs. “If I don't come home,” I told him, “you can have everything in my room except my bracelet from Niagara Falls.” And I marched across the street.

Mrs. Price met me at the door. Elizabeth was sitting in a corner of the living room, her eyes red, and she didn't even look up when I came in. I could tell that, mad as she was at me, she was still embarrassed that her mother had called me over.

“Please sit down, Alice,” Mrs. Price said, and took a chair across from me. “I am very disappointed in you. Elizabeth gave you those pictures in confidence, and you had no right to make poster prints and give them out at school.”

I tried to explain how Pamela had been mad at me and how I didn't want Elizabeth to feel left out.

Mrs. Price stared at me. “How could you possibly
think Elizabeth would be angry if she didn't have a picture of herself in the bathtub pinned up on the school bulletin board?”

I knew that didn't sound right. “I don't know,” I said miserably. “I guess I take stupid pills.” I mean, what was there to say? Elizabeth was staring down at her lap, but I could tell she was trying not to smile when I said that.

Mrs. Price was quiet a moment. Then: “We have her reputation to think about, after all.”

I nodded.

“So, Alice, if you'll promise that you'll never show that picture to anyone else, I won't object if you and Elizabeth remain friends.”

I didn't tell her I'd already torn it up. “I promise not to show it to anyone else if Elizabeth will promise not to take any more pictures of me in the bathtub the next time I come over here for a sleepover.”

Mrs. Price looked horrified. “But . . . it was just a girlish idea. . . . I mean, it wasn't for anyone else to see.” She was flustered. “Surely, Alice, the other students don't think that this is the kind of thing we do when girls come to visit Elizabeth.”

“Well,” I said, “it never happened at anyone else's house.”

Elizabeth had pressed her lips together, trying hard not to laugh, and watching Elizabeth made my own mouth start to stretch, and suddenly we couldn't hold back any longer.

Mrs. Price looked from me to Elizabeth and back again. Then she started laughing too. “This is getting sillier by the minute,” she said. “What do you say we forget the whole thing?”

“Agreed,” I said.

“Agreed,” said Elizabeth. She followed me out on the porch, and we laughed some more.

After dinner that night, I got a saucer of graham crackers and stood in the doorway of the dining room where Dad was working on some papers at his table.

“Dad,” I said, “how do you go your whole life without ever having anyone mad at you? I mean, how can you be a person that everybody likes?”

“You can't,” said Dad, and went on writing.

“Well, how can I go for at least a year with everyone liking me?”

“Impossible.”

I came over and sat down across from him.

“Toots,” said Dad. Sometimes he called me “Toots” when he wants to be really serious. “People who try to
please everybody all the time turn out like oatmeal. You know that, don't you?”

“No.”

“They become so bland, so boring, that no one can get very interested in them.”

I wondered if that's what happened to Mr. Hensley.

“What you have to do first of all is be true to Alice McKinley. And if you're the
best
Alice you can be, you'll just naturally respect the right of other people to be
them
selves.”

I ate another cracker and thought it over. “Is that something Mom would have said, or is that from you?”

“Consider that from both of us.” Dad smiled.

I sighed. “I'm on good terms with Mr. Hensley again. I've made up with Pamela and Elizabeth, but I still don't know what to do about Denise Whitlock.”

“I really can't tell you what to do, Al. I think that this one requires creative thinking.”

“But I never
did
anything to her! She has no reason to hate me!”

“That's life, Al. Sometimes people hate other people for reasons they don't even understand themselves. But I trust you to think up something, and I have the feeling that when the time comes, you'll know what to do.”

“To get even?”

“I didn't say that, did I?”

I kept wondering what Dad meant. All I could think of was how wonderful it would be to wait until Denise was in the shower in P.E., and then take not only her towel but her clothes as well and stuff them all in one of the toilets. I thought of the way she would look when she opened the shower curtain and discovered her towel was gone. How she'd have to walk naked out to the towel table to get another. How she'd come hulking back to her dressing cubicle, mad as blazes, to find that all her clothes were gone. How she'd beat me to a pulp. That wasn't the solution to anything, but I didn't have the foggiest idea what was.

 

THINGS HAD BEEN GETTING WORSE, NOT
better, between Denise Whitlock and me. At first she hadn't seemed to like me because she didn't like all that snuffling and sneezing behind her in Language Arts. She disliked me even more when I got interviewed for the school newspaper. Then the three things happened she just couldn't forgive: Lester rescued me on Seventh-Grade Sing Day just when she had center stage; I laughed when she fell on her stomach in P.E.; and boys started calling me “Bubbles.” Even though my hay fever was gone by December, the message was written all over her face—hers and her crowd's:
Get Alice
. It seemed as though they
were just after me because I was there, because it had become a habit.

They purposely bumped into me in the gym; tripped me in the halls; flipped food at me in the cafeteria; laughed at every mistake, every flub; teased me about my hair, my clothes. If I ignored them, it didn't help. If I tried to laugh it off, it didn't help. If I was rude in return, it made things worse.

“I'd paste them one,” said Pamela. “The next time you go by their table, drop an open carton of milk down Denise's fat neck.”

“If it was me, I'd go to the principal,” Elizabeth said. “I'd make him call Denise in and sit there while I told all the rotten things she'd done to me.”

I was tempted, I'll admit. But I realized I had to make up my mind: Did I want to solve the problem or just get even?

I guess what I really wanted to do was get even first,
then
solve the problem, but the thing about getting even is you never do. When I sat down in my seat in Language Arts, though, and found that Denise had smeared Vaseline all over my desktop, I wanted in the worst way to clobber her, but how could I ever prove she'd done it?