Alice in Charge (22) - Hardcover

Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1416975527 ISBN 13: 9781416975526

Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2010

Synopsis

Alice’s memorable last year of high school is being overshadowed by some very difficult situations. A sudden increase in vandalism at the school leads Alice to discover an angry and violent group of students—teenage Neo-Nazis. Then an awkward hallway encounter gets a classmate to confess that a new, attentive teacher has been taking advantage of her. All at once, Alice’s safe and comfortable school starts feeling strange and serious—all this plus the normal senior year pressures of college applications and life-making decisions. Alice has two options: step up or melt down. The choice is simple, and true to the character that readers have loved for years....Alice steps up—in a big way.

About this title

About the Author

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written more than 135 books, including the Newbery Award–winning Shiloh and its sequels, the Alice series, Roxie and the Hooligans, and Roxie and the Hooligans at Buzzard’s Roost. She lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. To hear from Phyllis and find out more about Alice, visit AliceMcKinley.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

 

Starting Over

It was impossible to start school without remembering him.

Some kids, of course, had been on vacation when it happened and hadn’t seen the news in the paper. Some hadn’t even known Mark Stedmeister.

But we’d known him. We’d laughed with him, danced with him, argued with him, swum with him, and then . . . said our good-byes to him when he was buried.

There was the usual safety assembly the first day of school. But the principal opened it with announcements of the two deaths over the summer: a girl who drowned at a family picnic, and Mark, killed in a traffic accident. Mr. Beck asked for two minutes of silence to remember them, and then a guy from band played “Amazing Grace” on the trumpet.

Gwen and Pam and Liz and I held hands during the playing, marveling that we had any tears left after the last awful weeks and the day Liz had phoned me, crying, “He was just sitting there, Alice! He wasn’t doing anything! And a truck ran into him from behind.”

It helps to have friends. When you can spread the sadness around, there’s a little less, somehow, for each person to bear. As we left the auditorium later, teachers handed out plas­tic bracelets we could wear for the day—blue for Mark, yellow for the freshman who had drowned—and as we went from class to class, we’d look for the blue bracelets and lock eyes for a moment.

“So how did it go today?” Sylvia asked when she got home that afternoon. And without wait­ing for an answer, she gave me a long hug.

“Different,” I said, when we disentangled. “It will always seem different without Mark around.”

“I know,” she said. “But life does have a way of filling that empty space, whether you want it to or not.”

She was right about that. Lester’s twenty-fifth birthday, for one. I’d bought him a tie from the Melody Inn. The pattern was little brown fig­ures against a bright yellow background, and if you studied them closely, you saw they were tiny eighth notes forming a grid. I could tell by Lester’s expression that he liked it.

“Good choice, Al!” he said, obviously sur­prised at my excellent taste. “So how’s it going? First day of your last year of high school, huh?”

“No, Les, you’re supposed to say, ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life,’” I told him.

“Oh. Well then, this is the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the rest of your life. Even more exciting.”

We did the usual birthday thing: Lester’s favorite meal—steak and potatoes—the cake, the candles, the ice cream. After Dad asked him how his master’s thesis was coming and they had a long discussion, Les asked if I had any ideas for feature articles I’d be doing for The Edge.

“Maybe ‘The Secret Lives of Brothers’?” I suggested.

“Boring. Eat, sleep, study. Definitely boring,” he said.

From her end of the table, Sylvia paused a moment as she gathered up the dessert plates. “Weren’t you working on a special tribute to Mark?” she asked. Now that I was features editor of our school paper, everyone had suggestions.

“I am, but it just hasn’t jelled yet,” I said. “I want it to be special. Right now I’ve got other stuff to do, and I haven’t even started my college applications.”

 “First priority,” Dad said.

“Yeah, right,” I told him. “Do you realize that every teacher seems to think his subject comes first? It’s the truth! ‘Could anything be more important than learning to express yourselves?’ our English teacher says. ‘Hold in those stomach muscles, girls,’ says the gym teacher. ‘If you take only one thing with you when you leave high school, it’s the importance of posture.’ And Miss Ames says she doesn’t care what else is on our plate, the articles for The Edge positively have to be in on time. Yada yada yada.”

“Wait till college, kiddo. Wait till grad school,” said Lester.

“I don’t want to hear it!” I wailed. “Each day I think, ‘If I can just make it through this one . . .’ Whoever said you could slide through your senior year was insane.”

Lester looked at Sylvia. “Aren’t you glad you’re not teaching high school?” he asked. “All this moaning and groaning?”

Sylvia laughed. “Give the girl a break, Les. Feature articles are the most interesting part of a newspaper. She’s got a big job this year.”

“Hmmm,” said Lester. “Maybe she should do an article on brothers. ‘My Bro, the Stud.’ ‘Life with a Philosophy Major: The Secret Genius of Les McKinley.’”

“You wish,” I said.

···

In addition to thinking about articles for The Edge and all my other assignments, I was thinking about Patrick. About the phone conversation we’d had the night before. Patrick’s at the University of Chicago now, and with both of us still raw after Mark’s funeral, we’ve been checking in with each other more often. He wants to know how I’m doing, how our friends are handling things, and I ask how he’s coping, away from everyone back home.

“Mostly by keeping busy,” Patrick had said. “And thinking about you.”

“I miss you, Patrick,” I’d told him.

“I miss you. Lots,” he’d answered. “But remember, this is your senior year. Don’t give up anything just because I’m not there.”

“What does that mean?” I’d asked.

I’d known what he was saying, though. We’d had that conversation before. Going out with other people, he meant, and I knew he was right—Patrick is so reasonable, so practical, so . . . Patrick. I didn’t want him to be lonely either. But I didn’t feel very reasonable inside, and it was hard imagining Patrick with someone else.

“We both know how we feel about each other,” he’d said.

Did we? I don’t think either of us had said the words I love you. We’d never said we were

dating exclusively. With nearly seven hundred miles between us now, some choices, we knew, had already been made. What we did know was that we were special to each other.

I thought of my visit to his campus over the summer. I thought of the bench by Botany Pond. Patrick’s kisses, his arms, his hands. . . . It was hard imagining myself with someone else too, but—as he’d said—it was my senior year.

“I know,” I’d told him, and we’d said our long good nights.

In my group of best girlfriends—Pamela, Liz, and Gwen—I was the closest to having a steady boy­friend. Dark-haired Liz had been going out with Keeno a lot, but nothing definite. Gwen was see­ing a guy we’d met over the summer when we’d volunteered for a week at a soup kitchen, and Pamela wasn’t going out with anyone at present. “Breathing fresh air” was the way she put it.

There was a lot to think about. With our parents worrying over banks and mortgages and retirement funds, college seemed like a bigger hurdle than it had before. And some colleges were more concerned with grades than with SAT scores, so seniors couldn’t just slide through their last year, especially the first semester.

“Where are you going to apply?” I asked Liz. “Gwen’s already made up her mind. She’s going to sail right through the University of Maryland and enter their medical school. I think it’s some sort of scholarship worked out with the National Institutes of Health.”

“She should get a scholarship—all these sum­mers she’s been interning at the NIH,” said Liz. “I don’t know—I think I want a really small liberal arts college, like Bennington up in Vermont.”

We were sitting around Elizabeth’s porch watching her little brother blow soap bubbles at us. Nathan was perched on the railing, giggling each time we reached out to grab one.

“Sure you want a small college?” asked Pamela, absently examining her toes, feet propped on the wicker coffee table. Her nails were perfectly trimmed, polished in shell white. “It sounds nice and cozy, but everyone knows your business, and you’ve got all these little cliques to deal with.”

“Where are you going to apply?” Liz asked her.

“It’s gotta be New York, that much I know. One of their theater arts schools, maybe. Some-body told me about City College, and someone else recommended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I doubt I could get into Cornell, but they’ve got a good drama department. Where are you going to apply, Alice?”

I shrugged. “Mrs. Bailey recommends Maryland because they’ve got a good graduate program in counseling, and that’s where she got her degree.

But a couple of guys from church really like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. . . .”

“That’s a good school,” said Liz.

“. . . And I’ve heard good things about William and Mary.”

“Virginia?” asked Liz.

“Yes. Williamsburg. I was thinking I could visit both on the same trip.”

“You could always go to Bennington with me,” said Liz.

“Clear up in Vermont? Where it really snows?”

“It’s not Colorado.”

Just then a soap bubble came drifting past my face, and I snapped at it like a dog. Nathan screeched with laughter.

What I didn’t tell my friends was that lately I’d been getting a sort of panicky, homesick, lonely feeling whenever I thought about leav­ing for college—coming “home” at night to a dorm room. To a roommate I may not even like. A roommate the complete opposite of me, per­haps. I don’t know when I first started feeling this way—Mark’s funeral? Dad’s worries about investments and the store? But at college there would be no stepmom to talk with across the table, no Dad to give me a bear hug, no brother to stop by with an account of his latest adventure.

It was crazy! Hadn’t I always looked forward to being on my own? Didn’t I want that no-curfew life? I’d been away before—the school trip to New York, for example. I’d been a counselor at sum­mer camp. And yet . . . All my friends had been there, and my friends were like family. At college I’d be with strangers. I’d be a stranger to them. And no matter how I tried to reason myself out of it, the homesickness was there in my chest, and it thumped painfully whenever college came to mind, which was often. I didn’t want to chicken out and choose Bennington just to be with Liz or Maryland just to room with Gwen. Still . . .

Nathan tumbled off the railing at that point and skinned his knee. The soap solution spilled all over the porch, he was howling, and we got up to help. That put an end to the conversation for the time being, and time was what I needed to work things through.

The school newspaper, though, kept me busy. Our staff had to stay on top of everything. We were the first to know how we’d be celebrating Spirit Week, because we had to publish it. We had to know when dances would be held, when games were scheduled, which faculty member had retired and which teachers were new. We were supposed to announce new clubs, student trips, projects, protests. . . . We were the school’s barometer, and in our staff meetings we tried to get a sense of things before they happened.

We were also trying something different this semester. Because of our newspaper’s growing reputation and the number of students who’d signed up to work on The Edge, we’d been given a larger room on the main floor, instead of the small one we’d been using for years. Here we had two long tables for layout instead of one. Four computers instead of two. And on the suggestion of Phil Adler—our news editor/editor in chief—we were going to try publishing an eight-page newspaper every week instead of a sixteen-page biweekly edition.

We wanted to be even more timely. And because the printer’s schedule sometimes held up our paper for a day, we were going to aim for Thursday publication. Then, if there was a snafu, students would still get their copies by Friday and know what was going on over the weekend.

“I’ve got reservations about this, but it’s worth a try,” Miss Ames, our faculty sponsor, told us. “I know you’ve doubled your number of report­ers, and you’ve got an A team and a B team so that not everyone works on each issue. But you four editors are going to have to work every week. That means most Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays after school. Can you can swing it?”

We said we could. Phil and I and Tim Moss, the new sports editor (and Pamela’s old boy­friend), and Sam Mayer, the photography editor (and one of my old boyfriends), all wagged our woolly heads and said, yes, of course, no problem, we’re on it. All completely insane, of course.

It will keep me from thinking so much about missing Patrick, I thought. But each day that passed brought me that much closer to D-day—decision time—and what I was going to do about college.

It was through The Edge that I found out about Student Jury. Modeled after some counties where student juries meet in city hall, ours would be a lot simpler, according to Mr. Beck. He decided that if more decisions and penalties were handed down by students themselves—overseen, of course, by a faculty member—maybe Mr. Gephardt, our vice principal, could have more time for his other responsibilities, and maybe the offenders would feel that the penalties were more fair. Students guilty of some minor infraction would be referred to the jury and would be sentenced by their peers.

The Edge agreed to run a front-page story on it, and I found out that I’d been recommended by the faculty to serve on the jury.

“No way!” I told Gwen. I had assignments to do. Articles to write. If anyone should serve on it, she should.

“So what have you got so far on your résumé?” was her answer.

 “For what? College?”

“Well, not the Marines!” We were undressing for gym, and she pulled a pair of wrinkled gym shorts over her cotton underwear. “Extracurricular stuff, school activities, community service. You’ve got features editor of the paper, Drama Club, the Gay/Straight Alliance, some volunteer hours, camp counselor . . . What else?”

“I need more?”

“It can’t hurt. You’ve got heavy competition.” Gwen slid a gray T-shirt down over her brown arms and dropped her shoes in the locker. “Student Jury—dealing with kids with problems—might look pretty impressive, especially if you’re going into counseling.”

I gave a small whimper. “I told you the paper’s coming out weekly, didn’t I? I’m still working for Dad on Saturdays. I’ve got—”

“And William and Mary is going to care?”

Gwen’s impossibly practical. “You and Patrick would make a good couple,” I told her.

“Yeah, but I’ve got Austin,” she said, and gave me a smug smile.

Later I whimpered some more to Liz and Pamela, but they were on Gwen’s side.

“I’ve heard you need to put anything you can think of on your résumé,” said Pamela. “I’m so glad you guys talked me into trying out for Guys and Dolls last spring. If I was sure I could get a part in the next production, I’d even jump the gun and include that.”

They won. I told Mr. Gephardt I’d serve on Student Jury for at least one semester.

“Glad to have you on board,” he said, as though we were sailing out to sea.

Maybe, like Patrick, I was trying to “stay busy” too. Maybe it made a good defense against going out with other guys. But I did <...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1416975527
• ISBN 13: 9781416975526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336