The Truth About Alice(9)

? On the first day of tenth grade in Ms. Galanter’s English class, when we had to make a list of our favorite things, I managed to glimpse and memorize the following: favorite book—The Outsiders, favorite smell—fresh cut grass, favorite sound—the French language, favorite day of the week—Saturday, favorite band—The Beatles.

? Also during tenth grade I found her in the library after school trying to finish up homework for Geometry. She was leaning over her notebook and chewing the end of her pencil and writing and erasing and writing and erasing. I walked by and somewhere deep inside of my soul I found the temerity to ask her if she needed help. She said, “Well, do you have a sec?” I sat next to her. She smelled of vanilla. Her perfect cleavage was peeking out of a pink top. I had to struggle to explain the problem and ended up just doing it for her. When I was done, she said, “Thanks, Kurt.” All the way home that afternoon I was smiling to myself because Alice Franklin called me by my name. Admittedly, there are only 150 people in our class, so everyone knows everyone else’s name. But still, it was nice to hear my name uttered by her voice.

Even a recluse like me learned of the events that allegedly occurred at Elaine O’Dea’s party, and even a recluse like me could have seen the slow shift in Alice Franklin’s behavior and in the behavior of those she was normally surrounded by. The girls she sat with in the cafeteria have drifted away, one by one. There’s quite an enormous difference between a person like me, who enjoys eating alone, and a person like Alice Franklin, who has had isolation placed upon her as a mark of shame. Lately, Alice Franklin doesn’t even eat in the cafeteria anymore.

Then Brandon Fitzsimmons died, not that long ago, and people have been claiming that Alice caused the accident by sending him inappropriate texts. Lately, it seems Alice has become magnetic for all sorts of negative attention. She’s started coming to school dressed in a bulky sweatshirt. You can’t see her perfect cleavage anymore. She’s taken to wearing the hood up, even in the hallways. It’s like she wants to disappear.

Yesterday, after the final bell, I was walking past the football stadium bleachers behind the school, and I saw Alice sitting there. Her face looked tear-stained.

At that moment, it seemed like the opportunity I had been looking for. To talk to her. To tell her what I knew. Because—and this was shocking—I know something about Alice. I know something—a fact, a truth—that might perhaps bring her relief but at the same time might perhaps only bring her more pain. I formed the words in my mouth, rolling my tongue over them, attempting multiple times to push them out through my lips. How idiotic I must have seemed just standing there, looking at her, saying nothing. Practicing words.

Finally, Alice noticed me.

“What the hell do you want?” she snapped. This time, she didn’t call me Kurt.

“I…” I said, opening and closing my mouth. How desperately I wanted to tell her what I knew. How much I wanted to share the information I had that no one else at Healy High had a claim on but me.

“Seriously, what the hell?” she said, standing up and shoving her hands into the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. She stomped off down the bleachers. “I’m not a sideshow attraction.”

And she wasn’t. Not to me.

She was the main attraction.

But I had no way to tell her that.





Kelsie

We moved here from Michigan because my dad got a job working for his uncle as an electrician. Also, Jesus wanted us to come here. At least according to my mother, who is personal, best friends with Jesus Christ. Jesus has to okay everything with my mother before she does it. I guess he even okayed The Really Awful Stuff that happened to me last summer. But I don’t know, because my mom and I have never talked about it since.

Anyway, before we left Flint to come here, I made a promise to myself. When I got to Healy, I wasn’t going to sit by myself in the cafeteria reading a book and I wasn’t going to sit in the front row in class answering all the questions just because I could. I was going to learn how to wear eyeliner and I was going to start figuring out what colors looked right with other colors and I was going to force my mother to let me start shaving my legs even if Jesus said I shouldn’t. I wasn’t going to spend my weekends making shoebox dioramas by myself for fun and I was going to start talking to people who weren’t my parents and I wasn’t going to be the same lame Kelsie Sanders that I’d been all of my fourteen-year-old life.

I spent my last summer in Flint working so hard. Just like I’d once worked on my shoebox dioramas, I spent those weeks reading the magazines and watching the televisions shows that all the girls in my class talked about, trying to get as much information as I could about the right way to behave. I babysat for snotty Jerry Baker next door and saved up all my money for the right clothes and the right makeup, and when my mom told me Christian girls didn’t wear skinny jeans, I did it anyway.

“You’re new, right?” Alice Franklin said to me that first day of ninth grade as I sat in the back row of Mrs. Hennesey’s homeroom.

“Yeah,” I said, eyeing her raspberry lipstick and trying really hard not to look impressed. My mother might not have noticed my shaved legs, but she sure wasn’t going to let me out of the house with raspberry lipstick on.

“Well, we’re all new to high school, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Even if most of us have lived here for a bajillion years.” She said bajillion like the word tasted like rotten eggs.