The Truth About Alice(23)

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 sweat pants 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.

“Morelli,” he said, this time not whispering but sort of burping in the middle of uttering my last name. He was drunk. Obviously.

“Fitzsimmons,” I answered. “Knackered again, I see.”

“If knackered is smart boy talk for lit to the tits, then yeah, I am. Morelli, what I love about you is you always shoot straight with me. You don’t beat around the bush. You see I’m drunk and you tell me I’m drunk. You see the lights of the moon shining down upon you, and you say hi to the moon.”

“I haven’t said hi to the moon. You’re simply incredibly intoxicated.”

“Come up man, just come up.”

I shrugged my shoulders and headed toward the back of Brandon’s house to get the ladder the Fitzsimmons keep next to the garage. Starting in the eighth or ninth grade, Brandon had had me up on the roof a few times in the late night hours, so I knew where it was. I laughed to myself as I imagined the rest of the Healy High population catching a glimpse of the highest-and lowest-ranked men in the Healy High hierarchy sitting next to one another on a roof, talking. At school, Brandon didn’t acknowledge me unless it was to make fun of my size or my grades. Truthfully, he did it so good-naturedly I couldn’t really mind. I mean, he called me a poindexter and he grinned when he did it. It was almost quaint.

“Wanna beer?” He slipped his hand inside his bedroom window and handed me one. I opened it.

“Wow, Morelli, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“It’s beer, not cyanide.”

“What’s cyanide?”

“A poison. Members of the Jonestown cult consumed it in mass quantities on the order of their leader, Jim Jones. They all died immediately after.”