The Truth About Alice(3)

“Of course I believe you,” I said.

And I did.

But I also didn’t.

Honestly, I didn’t know what to believe.

Which I guess should sort of tell you something about Alice Franklin. I mean, there was that time she lied to me about what she did with the lifeguard at Healy Pool North. And everyone still talks about what happened between her and Brandon and Elaine back in eighth grade. She had to know everyone was going to remember that. Maybe that was why I could sort of hear panic in her voice even if she was trying really hard to play it cool.

And to be honest, maybe I started to panic, too. I think right then I started to wonder if being Alice Franklin’s best friend might spell trouble for me. I mean, if people didn’t think what she’d done was a big deal, it would be okay. Probably. But what if it upped the slut factor so much that people started thinking I was a slut by association? I mean, it was one thing to be a girl who’d had sex. But it was something else entirely to be a girl who’d had sex with two guys in one night.

But I had to at least pretend to believe Alice, though. She’d been my first friend in Healy and my ticket into the world of social acceptance, and at first I wasn’t sure how the party rumor would be received. It’s true. If you haven’t realized it, I’m aiming for truth here. Total honesty. And if the party rumor hadn’t turned Alice into this kind of weird pariah from the first day of school on, it would have been easy to decide what to do. Even if the rumors did involve Tommy Cray, it would have been simple to choose to stay friends with her. I would have just gone along with what everybody wanted. But honestly, if what Alice did (or maybe didn’t do) had been held up as some great achievement by everyone at Healy High, I would have still hung out with her. If everyone still liked her, I would have still liked her, too.

I know I sound like the worst person on Earth. I’m totally owning that.

It’s like when we read The Diary of Anne Frank in seventh grade, and I had the sneaking suspicion that I would have been a Nazi back then because I wouldn’t have had the guts to be anything else. Because I would have been too scared to not go along with the majority. Like, I would have been a passive sort of Nazi, but I still would have been a Nazi. I never said anything out loud, of course, but I remember reading that book in Ms. Peterson’s class and everyone was all, “Oh, I would’ve helped Anne. I would have rebelled. I don’t understand how people could have allowed this to happen, blah blah blah.” I mean, I know that everyone wants to believe they would have been the brave one and they would have been the one to hide Anne in their attic and they would have killed Hitler with their own bare hands. But clearly if everybody thinks that way and in reality only a few people actually did it way back then, doesn’t that just make me the honest one?

Anyway, the party was at the very end of the summer, and we’d only been back at school for a little while when Brandon died. The accident happened just a few weeks ago, right after Homecoming. And that was when stuff started getting really nuts because Brandon’s best friend Josh Waverly, who had been in the car with Brandon when the accident happened, told Brandon’s mom that the crash had been Alice’s fault. Things were bad for Alice before the accident, but then it became like this whole other epic level of bad.

Alice called me crying about the car accident rumor, and I told her I was so sorry, and I was sure it wasn’t true. When she called me after that I just didn’t answer. She didn’t call me all last week, and maybe she never will again. A few times she called and I answered and then acted like my mom wanted me to help make dinner or something. Once, back at the very beginning of the year before things got really bad and before Brandon died, she asked me to hang out with her and watch corny musicals at her house like we did back in ninth grade, and then when the weekend came I told her I was sick, but it was actually because Elaine O’Dea had invited me and some other girls over to her house. Like I’m going to turn down Elaine O’Dea to hang out with (allegedly) the biggest slut in the school?

The truth is, in the last few weeks, I’ve started “forgetting” to meet her at her locker before lunch and I’ve just gone straight to the cafeteria, and by the time she shows up, there’s only one empty seat way at the end of the table in no-man’s land. Sometimes no chair at all. I’ve just sort of shrugged my shoulders and done some halfhearted wave at her. Because I’ve been so chicken—because I am so chicken—that I didn’t want Alice to be mad at me. How stupid is that? I wanted her to leave me alone, but I didn’t want to deal with the uncomfortableness of having her upset with me for ignoring her. Totally hypocritical, I know.

We haven’t had some blow up or some drama-filled fight or anything. Nothing like that. Just little by little, Alice Franklin was my best friend and then she was my friend and then she was sort of my friend and now I guess she isn’t my friend at all.

The hard truth is I think I knew we weren’t going to be friends anymore the day after Elaine’s party when I read that text about her and Brandon and Tommy Cray. It sounds terrible and shallow and not at all like something the Kelsie Sanders I knew in Flint would have said, but I’ve spent too many years sitting alone in the cafeteria, and I just can’t handle doing it again.

And I won’t.





Josh

I don’t remember too much about the accident. I woke up in the hospital not knowing what was going on, and then my dad came in and told me what had happened and that Brandon was dead. I remember feeling like I sort of left my body. I’d heard about stuff like that on TV shows, and for a second I thought maybe I was dying, too. Even though my dad had already told me the doctors had said I was out of danger, mostly because I’d been wearing my seatbelt.