When Dad came home, I helped him make dinner. I stirred the tomato sauce while he boiled the spaghetti. My dad looks like a big teddy bear. He has thick hair at the sides of his head, not so much on top. It’s a little gray above the ears, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkles when he smiles.
He was humming to himself as we cooked, but I was thinking about Sara. There were a lot of kids in her family. I tried to imagine them all living in a tent. Living in a car! I tried to imagine us living in our car. Dad sleeping on the front seat, maybe, and Lester stretched out in back.
When Lester got home and we finally sat down at the table, I said, “Dad, would you ever just wake me up some morning and say, ‘Alice, let’s move’?”
Dad paused with a forkful of spaghetti halfway to his mouth.
“Not unless he’d just robbed a bank or something,” said Lester.
I toyed with my salad, turning a pickled beet over and over. “If we ever got so poor we had to live in our car, would I have to sleep on the floor?” I asked.
“Naw, we’d probably stick you under the hood, Al. Stuff you down between the engine and the radiator,” said Lester.
“So who’s moving and who’s poor?” asked Dad.
“Sara,” I said. “They had to leave because they couldn’t pay their rent. Donald thinks maybe they’re living in a tent or even their car.”
“Well, I hope not!” said Dad. “There are places they can go for help, though.”
But why hadn’t Sara asked me for help? I wondered. I would have given her all my money. I would have even gone around and collected money from neighbors, just so Sara could keep coming to our school.
I lay in bed that night thinking about her. About the way at first nobody liked the skinny girl who chewed with her mouth open and never washed her hair.
Then Rosalind and I invited her for a sleepover at my house, and we called it a shampoo party. We all washed our hair and brushed Sara’s to show her how great it looked when it was clean, and we pretended we were rich ladies having tea at the Plaza, chewing our dainty sandwiches with our lips closed.
I wanted her back so I could tell her how funny she was, how smart she was, how many times she had made me laugh. Like the time I took a picture of her with coat hangers draped over her ears. And then she put two big buttons over her eyes and scrunched up her face to hold them there. I wanted her to know I loved her stories. Sara made up the scariest stories! Especially the one about a girl’s mother who turns into a praying mantis and her arms drop off and she gets this long bony face with huge eyes and jaws! I wanted to tell her how much fun I’d had at her house once, playing in big boxes out in the yard and helping myself to whatever I wanted in the refrigerator for lunch.
Maybe Rosalind and I could go looking for her. If she was in a tent, maybe we’d find it. If she was sleeping in her family’s car, maybe we’d see her there. I felt my mattress jiggle as Oatmeal, my gray and white cat, jumped up on my bed to sleep with me. I reached out and scratched her behind the ears in the darkness. She licked my hand, but she didn’t purr. I didn’t feel like purring either.
PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR includes many of her own life experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults, and is the author of more than one hundred and thirty-five books, including the Alice series, which Entertainment Weekly has called “tender” and “wonderful.” In 1992 her novel Shiloh won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY JULIA DENOS
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Beetles, Lightly Toasted
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 20
03 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition
Book design by Mike Rosamilia
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Old Style Book.
This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition September 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Alice in Blunderland / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourth-grader Alice tries unsuccessfully to avoid embarrassing mistakes and to establish better relations with her older brother Lester.
ISBN 978-0-689-84397-6 (hardcover)
[1. Embarrassment—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Single-parent families—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7 .N24Akd 2003
[Fic]—dc21 2002154700
ISBN 978-1-4424-4643-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4424-4644-1 (eBook)
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, Alice in Blunderland
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