“Of course.”
“You’re not mad?”
He shrugged. “A little, maybe. But I’ll get over it.”
I wasn’t sure I wanted him to get over it. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted. Patrick pining away for me in his room? Patrick refusing to eat, wasting away out of love? No, I wanted us to be special friends, just as he said. But after he left, I ran upstairs and bawled.
The thing about being twelve is that you bawl a lot. I wasn’t even sad, particularly. Relieved, maybe. I cried because I really do like Patrick, and hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings; cried because it was over, and I wasn’t sure what would happen next.
We had a gourmet meal at our house that night—pork chops and applesauce, the closest we get to gourmet. Lester fries onions in a skillet, then Dad adds some pork chops and fries those with the onions, and finally I open a can of applesauce and dump it over the top.
When we sat down at the table, Lester announced that he and Marilyn were back together.
“Well!” said Dad, and went on chewing for a while. “How is Crystal going to take it?”
“I don’t know,” Lester said. “I’ve got to tell her tonight. But I know I’m doing the right thing. It just feels right—Marilyn and me together again.”
“Must be something in the air,” said Dad. “I got a letter from the woman who owns the beach house next to Janice’s at Ocean City. She wonders if we can’t get together sometime this fall—go to a concert or something. I’m thinking about it.”
“Well, Patrick and I broke up,” I said, and flopped my pork chop over to see if there were any onions hiding on the other side.
“Oh?” said Dad.
“Why?” asked Lester.
I shrugged. “We decided to be special friends instead.”
“Well, that sounds nice, too,” said Dad.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
That night, after I’d gone to bed, I thought about how I’d always wondered what it would be like to have a boyfriend in winter. Somebody to snuggle up with in front of a fire. If we had a fireplace, that is. Or a boyfriend to walk with in the snow. One minute I was thinking how sad I would be not to have a boyfriend at Christmastime, and the next minute I was thinking how relieved I was that I wouldn’t have to worry about what to give Patrick. And then I started crying again. Between the sixth and seventh grades, something happens to your eyes. They water a lot. I think it’s so you can get all the watering out of the way before you begin wearing mascara.
The first day of seventh grade was a lot different than Pamela, Elizabeth, and I had planned all summer. At least a half dozen times we had talked about how Mark and Patrick would come down to our bus stop and we’d all get on together and sit in pairs, but we’d be sure to talk to Elizabeth and tell everyone that she had a boyfriend at St. Joseph’s.
Now it was Elizabeth and Pamela and me together, without the boys, standing there in our new Levi’s with sweaters sort of draped around our necks, and none of us looking especially happy. When I told Elizabeth and Pamela that Patrick and I weren’t a couple any longer, they thought I was nuts; but deep down I think they were glad about it, just for the company.
“I wanted things to be like before,” I said, not expecting them to understand. Elizabeth did, but Pamela didn’t.
There were a lot of new faces on the bus—kids from other schools, all going to the same junior high school now. Pamela and Elizabeth slid into one of the seats, so I was the odd man out. I sat down alone in the seat in front of them and stared out the window.
Five blocks farther on, the bus stopped at Patrick’s corner, and there he was, his book bag slung over one shoulder. He got on, and Pamela poked me from behind. Patrick came down the aisle, looking at the kids on one side of the aisle, then on the other. I wondered if Patrick—the world traveler who could count in Japanese—ever felt odd and out of place.
Then he saw me, and I gulped. Would he snub me and just walk on by?
He didn’t. Patrick stopped when he got to my seat. “Okay if I sit here?” he asked.
“Sure,” I told him.
It was just like it used to be. We talked about all the new people we didn’t know, and how if you missed the bus you had to take a cab or something, and how our homerooms were right next to each other.
As more people got on and the bus grew noisier, and I was sure that Pamela and Elizabeth couldn’t hear what we were saying, I asked, “Patrick, did you really mean what you said about being special friends?”
“Of course,” he told me.
“It’s not the same as engaged to be engaged to be married or anything?” I wanted to make sure. “I mean, it’s not engaged to be engaged to going steady?”
Patrick shook his head. “It’s just really special friends.”
“How special?” I wanted to know.
“We can still go places together sometimes,” he said. “If you want to,” he added.
“I’d like that,” I told him.
“But we can go out with other kids, too,” said Patrick.
“Other kids” meant other girls. A sort of sad feeling filled my chest. I really didn’t like to think about Patrick going out with other girls, and I wondered all over again if I’d done the right thing—if I’d given up something wonderful just because I wasn’t ready for it yet. When would I be ready? I wondered. When I was eighteen? Twenty-six? Fifty-nine? Never? By then Patrick would be married to somebody else!
I think maybe Patrick was wondering the same thing because he said to me, “You know what? Let’s make a promise that wherever we are on your twenty-first birthday, I’ll call and make a date for New Year’s Eve.”
I stared. “What?”
“Everyone goes out on New Year’s Eve once they’re twenty-one,” Patrick said. “My folks always go out to celebrate.”
“What if you’re already married?” I asked him.
“What if you’re married?” he said in answer.
“At twenty-one?” I croaked. “Patrick, I’ll barely even be grown!”
“Well, I’ll call you up and find out,” he said, and smiled at me. He looked just like he did that day back in sixth grade when he was on patrol duty at the corner and tossed a candy bar over to me—when I first found out he liked me.
“Okay,” I said, grinning back. “I’ll expect a call on my twenty-first birthday, wherever I am, which will probably be at the Melody Inn, a clerk or something dumb.”
“Life is full of surprises,” Patrick said. “Know who said that?”
“Somebody famous?”
“No. My mom.”
The bus pulled up in the circular drive of the school. The building was a lot bigger than our grade school. Here we would have a different teacher for each class and we’d even have to take showers after P.E. It was going to be a whole new world, and I thought how scary it was to go in there alone when I could have had a boyfriend to walk me to class.
We lined up to get out of the bus. Like a chimpanzee, Patrick had crawled over the seat to be with some boys at the back, so Elizabeth and Pamela and I squeezed out the door together.
“What did he say?” Elizabeth asked. “He actually had the nerve to sit with you!”
“Elizabeth, we’re friends!” I told her. “Special friends. We’re not mad or anything.”
“Well, I think you’re nuts!” Pamela told me. “You could have held hands in the halls and everything. You blew it, Alice!”
We went in different directions once we got inside the school. Elizabeth went up to the second floor, Pamela turned at the corner, while I went straight ahead. I was being mangled by knees and shoulders and elbows. Wherever I looked, human bodies were coming at me, and I pressed myself against a drinking fountain to get out of the way. The water came on accidentally and made a big wet spot on the back of my shirt.
A bell rang, and the bodies came even faster. I tried to study the little map I’d gotten in the mail. There had been an orientation day for new students the week tha
t Elizabeth, Pamela, and I were at the ocean, so we didn’t get a tour of the school ahead of time like the other seventh graders did. I turned down the second corridor. What did the bell mean? Was I late already? Should I skip homeroom and go directly to my next class? Where was my next class? Where in the world was my locker?
I heard footsteps behind me.
“We’re right at the end of this hall, Alice,” Patrick said, charging on by.
It really was like old times with Patrick and me, and even better than sixth grade because we were special now. I’ll bet I was the only girl in the whole seventh grade—the whole school, in fact, the whole world, maybe—who had a date for New Year’s Eve nine years off.
I saw Patrick pause in a doorway farther down. “Hey, Alice!” he called. “Catch!”
Something came sailing at me through the air and I put out my hands: a Three Musketeers candy bar, in its shiny wrapper.
“See you in the cafeteria, maybe?” Patrick said, smiling.
“I’ll save you a seat,” I told him, and opened the door to my room.
Find out what happens next for Alice in
THE SEVENTH THING
IN SEVENTH GRADE, YOU GROW BACKWARD. In sixth, I kept a list of all the things I learned that showed I was growing up, and another of all the stupid, embarrassing things I did that proved I wasn’t. Most of the time they were about even. If I still kept a record of all I’ve done, my “backward” list would run right off the page. In a single day—the first day of seventh grade—I accidentally squirted a teacher at the drinking fountain, tripped on the stairs to the second floor, and sat on a doughnut in the cafeteria.
“Who put a doughnut on this seat?” I asked the girl next to me.
“It’s for Kim,” she said.
Now what kind of an answer was that? But even Patrick laughed when it happened.
“Well, how are you liking junior high, Al?” Dad asked that night while we were fixing dinner. My name is Alice, but he and Lester call me “Al.”
“Ask me tomorrow,” I said. “Ask me next week.”
“That bad, huh?” said Lester. Lester’s almost twenty and catches on quick.
“I can think of at least seven things about seventh grade that stink,” I told him. “The boys are shorter than the girls, the math is too hard, Mr. Hensley has bad breath, there isn’t any toilet paper in the johns, we’re going to cook liver in home ec., and half the drinking fountains don’t work.”
“That’s only six,” said Dad.
“The cafeteria serves garbage.”
“You could always transfer back to sixth,” Lester suggested, tackling his salad.
“Ha-ha,” I said. “And don’t take all the Bacon Bits. We live here too.”
I’d been thinking about sixth grade, though—my sixth-grade teacher, anyway, Mrs. Plotkin. Sometimes when I get upset—really upset—I sort of tell myself what I figure she’d say if she were there. Stuff like, “Well, Alice, there aren’t many perfect days, but it’s hard to find a day that doesn’t have a little something nice about it if you look.” It helped, somehow—just saying words like that aloud and pretending it was her voice, not mine.
Dad and Mrs. Plotkin must be on the same wavelength, because just then he said, “Think of at least one good thing about seventh grade. Surely there’s one.”
“We get out at two thirty instead of three.”
“So there you are,” said Dad.
I guess the main problem is that seventh grade’s so different from elementary that it takes some getting used to. Pamela Jones likes it. All Pamela talks about is what she’s going to wear to the eighth-grade dances, and seventh’s one step closer than sixth. When you’ve got blond hair so long you can sit on it, I guess you can expect to get asked to a lot of dances.
Elizabeth Price hates junior high, though—the way people swarm at you in the halls. She was going to switch to the Sacred Heart of the Blessed Mary Middle School but found out they don’t have curtains on their shower stalls, so she reconsidered.
“I’ll probably get used to it after a while,” I said as I passed the macaroni and stopped Lester from taking all the cheese on top. “I remember I had a hard time in kindergarten too, but I got over it.”
“You did, Al?” asked Dad.
I couldn’t help smiling. “There was this boy who made faces at me from behind an easel—he was painting on one side and I was on the other. Every day he’d make faces and I’d cry. Then Mom told me that next time he poked his face around the easel, I should paint a stripe on it, so I did.”
Lester laughed, but Dad went on chewing. “That must have been Aunt Sally who told you that, Al, because your mother died just before you started kindergarten.”
I always manage to do this—confuse Mom with Aunt Sally, and it freaks Dad out.
“Sorry,” I said. “Anyway, it worked. The next time the boy made a face at me, I painted a black stripe on his forehead. He stuck out his tongue, so I painted that too. He never bothered me again.”
“Good old Aunt Sally,” said Les.
What’s really worst about being in seventh grade is that you just got out of sixth. In sixth grade, you’re a safety patrol. You get to go on overnight field trips with your teachers, help out in the office, and rule the playground. If two people form a couple, then everyone pairs off, and the fourth and fifth graders are green with envy.
But when you start seventh grade, you’re at the bottom of the ladder again. You look weird. You feel weird. The boys and girls who were couples back in sixth grade pretend they don’t know each other anymore. I mean, when Patrick and I kissed last summer, it was a quick kiss with his hands on my shoulders, and then we edged over to our own sides of the glider again.
When couples kiss in eighth and ninth grades, I discovered, they touch their lips together lightly two or three times first, and then it’s so embarrassing you have to look away. If their bodies were any closer, they’d be a grilled cheese sandwich.
Almost everything that Pamela told us about seventh grade, that her cousin in New Jersey told her, was wrong. So far, anyway. You don’t have to have a boyfriend or a leather skirt, either one. What you worry about, instead, is whether you can remember your coat locker and P.E. locker combinations both, whether you can get from one end of the building to the other before the bell, whether you’ll drop your tray in the cafeteria and everyone will clap, and whether, when you go in the restroom, there will be any latches on the stalls.
It didn’t help, either, that I had started junior high with an allergy. Dad says that happens sometimes when you move from one part of the country to another. I’d been doing a lot of sneezing the last couple of years, but the fall of seventh grade was absolutely the worst. I had to have Kleenex with me all the time at school, and the large girl who sat in front of me in Language Arts was always looking over her shoulder whenever I blew my nose.
I don’t know what it was, though—maybe the Sara Lee brownies we had for dessert—but after telling Dad the one good thing I could think of about seventh grade, I felt better, and realized that at this particular time in my life, I was friends with everybody. I’ll admit that seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don’t mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she’s okay. She’s neat.”
Alice the Likable, that would be me. So there were at least two good things now about seventh grade: We got out earlier, and I was starting a brand-new school, friends with everyone so far, even Patrick.
By Wednesday of the first week, the count of good things about seventh grade had gone up to three: no recess in junior high. I didn’t realize how much I hated recess until there wasn’t any. You didn’t have to put on your coat and go stand out in the cold. You didn’t have to play tag ball whether you wanted to or not. You didn’t have a teacher blowing a whistle at you every fifteen seconds or
have third-grade boys trying to hit you with volleyballs. There was P.E., of course, but what you got instead of recess was an extra-long lunch hour, and you could do anything you wanted.
By Thursday morning, I had numbers four and five: In seventh grade, you’re only in class with a certain teacher for forty minutes, so if it turns out to be someone awful, you don’t have to stand it all day. The other thing is that the school has its own newspaper—the students write it themselves—and it’s a lot more interesting than the newsletter we put out in sixth grade.
The sixth good thing about seventh grade—absolutely astounding—I discovered Thursday afternoon in P.E. It was the first day we had actually undressed and put on our gym shorts and T-shirts. The class was made up of some seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade girls together, and though the shower stalls had curtains on them and each of us had a towel to wrap up in when we stepped out, some of the older girls didn’t wrap.
Seventh-grade girls used their towels like aluminum foil, encircling their bodies and sealing the seams, but some of the older girls stepped out of the showers, their towels around their hair instead, with their entire bodies on view for the rest of us, the seventh graders in particular.
For the first time in my whole twelve years, I saw naked breasts—big breasts—in person. I couldn’t help staring, they were just so amazing. They came in all shapes and sizes and some were huge. I mean, compared to the breasts I saw in P.E., Pamela, Elizabeth, and I hadn’t even sprouted yet. We were still buds on a tree, moths in a cocoon, tadpoles in a pond, mosquitos in eggs.
I talked about it at dinner that night, and for once I had Lester’s full attention. When I’d finished my revelations about the wonders of the female breast, Dad gave me a little smile and said, “Your mother did nurse you, you know. You’re not quite as deprived as you think.”
“A lot of good that did me. I was too young to remember.”
“And you never saw your aunt Sally’s breasts?” Dad asked.
I stared. “Are you kidding? Aunt Sally wears vinyl siding for a bathrobe!” (She doesn’t, of course. The times we’ve visited her in Chicago, she’s worn a chenille robe, but she clutches it closed with two hands.)