The Truth About Alice(35)

Alice snorted. “Like what?”

Like you. Of course I didn’t dare say it.

“The way it’s quiet in the evenings,” I told her. “The way you can buy something at Seller Brothers and if you’ve forgotten your wallet they let you take what you need because they know you’ll return and pay later. I don’t know.”

“You mean the way everyone knows your business,” Alice said, and I realized this was the closest we’d ever come to really talking about what happened to her.

“Well, there’s that. That’s not pleasant. I know you know.”

“No,” Alice answered, her eyes not looking at me, her fingers carefully ripping the leftover crust of her sandwich into a small pile of crumbs. “It’s not pleasant at all.” Alice was quiet for a moment and then continued. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if my dad hadn’t left. I mean, the way you must try and picture your life if your parents hadn’t died.”

“When did your father leave?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about Alice’s father.

“I guess he didn’t really leave if he was never really here, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders like that was meant as a familiar, funny punch line. “He was this guy my mom was dating over in Dove Lake. He worked as an auto mechanic. It was after she graduated from high school and she was working at become a dental hygienist. He was a friend of a friend or something from what my mom says. After she got pregnant, they moved in together and tried to make it work. But my mom says I cried so much as a baby. I had colic like crazy bad or something, and I would just scream and scream for hours. And I guess my father, his name was Hank, he couldn’t take it anymore and told my mom he was sorry, but he wasn’t ready to be a father.”

“He sounds like a jerk,” I said.

“I guess,” Alice answered. The plate in front of her was nothing but crumbs, and I watched as she carefully flattened them with her right index finger. “But I still always wonder what life would have been like if things had gone differently. Like, what if I hadn’t had colic? What if I had been the easiest baby in the world? I think my mom must think that sometimes.”

“If he couldn’t have handled colic, he couldn’t have handled other things that would have come up,” I told her, but I stopped because I could see in her expression that Alice didn’t like to hear me criticize her father. She liked to imagine that things might have been better had he stayed. That her life would have been happier somehow.

“I’m such a cliché, aren’t I?” Alice said, and she gave me a wry smirk. “Single mother. Absent father. Too many boyfriends, searching for love in all the wrong places and blah blah blah.”

Sitting there with Alice and talking with her made me so content. So satisfied. So I gathered the guts and said, “Alice, you could never be a cliché. Not in a trillion years.”

Alice looked at me with her gorgeous brown eyes and smiled. “A trillion years? Is that a scientifically proven number?”

I shrugged and smiled.

“Yes,” I said. “And I’m serious.”

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I have my doubts.”

I wondered if this lunch, this conversation, would be the right time to bring up what Brandon had told me, but just as I was trying to figure out how to begin my story, she stretched her arms above her head and said, “Okay, this is getting too heavy duty for me. I should probably go.”

I worried for a moment that I’d scared her off, but as I walked her to the front door, she asked me if we could start up our tutoring sessions once school picked up. I was saddened by the fact that I wouldn’t see Alice for two weeks, but I told her we could start tutoring again as soon as classes started back, and she thanked me once again for all the help.

As she headed out, I asked her if she needed a ride, but she said she wanted to walk.

“After all, what could happen to me in beautiful Healy, where everyone knows your name and your business?” She said this with sarcasm cutting through her voice, and I smiled at her.

“Now Alice,” I joked, “don’t you know nothing ever happens in Healy?”

“Not unless you’re me,” she said with a sigh, rolling her eyes, and after she turned, I watched her back as she made her way down the driveway. Then it hit me when she got to the street that she was going to have to walk in front of Brandon Fitzsimmons’ house to get home. When we’d shown up at my house after school, we’d come in through the side door into the kitchen.

But right then she had to walk right past it. Right past his house and right past the red and white yard sign that read “BRANDON FITZSIMMONS HEALY TIGER WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU!”

I watched as she headed down the sidewalk, and as she crossed in front of Brandon’s house, I thought maybe it was the late December cold that made her reach back and pull her hood up over her head so far up you couldn’t see her face anymore. But probably there was another reason.





Elaine

The Slut Stall has taken on a life of its own. I don’t think Kelsie or any of us ever meant for it to get out of hand the way it did. I mean, it was so completely gross by Christmas I couldn’t believe the stuff some people were writing. I only wrote in it that one time, the day Kelsie told us about Alice’s abortion. But once was all it took. I told you people are always copying the things that I do.