Well, I was getting one thing straight, I decided as I walked to the
cafeteria. I was getting across the fact that I wasn’t sweet little Alice
McKinley anymore—a generic type of girl with no imagination or style.
NOW THAT SHE IS SETTLING INTO EIGHTH grade, the class she used to envy, Alice McKinley is discovering that it isn’t all that exciting. But maybe it’s up to her to make this year as thrilling as she thought it would be. Out with the old, plain-Jane Alice, in with the new, stylish, creative Alice. She’s sick of being boring. It’s time to be outrageous!
But what if outrageous isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? What if Alice finds herself in situations that are more embarrassing than they are wild and fun? Is Alice destined to be the same boring girl forever?
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
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AGES 10–14 • 0811
Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*
“I love your books! Now, I’m sure everyone says that, but it’s way more when I say it.… Long live Naylor!”—SoccAllis
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*Taken from actual postings on the Alice website. To read more, visit AliceMcKinley.com.
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.
Outrageously Alice
BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
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Starting with Alice
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Reluctantly Alice
All But Alice
Alice in April
Alice In-Between
Alice the Brave
Alice in Lace
Outrageously Alice
Achingly Alice
Alice on the Outside
The Grooming of Alice
Alice Alone
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Patiently Alice
Including Alice
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Dangerously Alice
Almost Alice
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ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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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 © 1997 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition August 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Outrageously Alice / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Jean Karl book.”
Summary: Alice is in eighth grade, and while she wants her life to be exciting and outrageous, she also wants to feel protected and safe.
ISBN 978-0-689-80354-3 (hc)
[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Identity
—Fiction. 3. Single-parent families—Fiction. 4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title. PZ7.N24Ou 1997
[Fic]—dc20
96007744
ISBN 978-1-4424-2853-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-44246-584-8 (eBook)
To Erinn Lindsay Geyer,
whose love of books will make them
her lifelong friends
Contents
One: Facing Up
Two: Getting a Life
Three: Jungle Fever
Four: In the Closet
Five: A Touch of Green
Six: Shock Wave
Seven: Outrageous
Eight: Studies in Forgiveness
Nine: Religion and Sex
Ten: Emergency
Eleven: Rehearsal
Twelve: The Waltz
1
FACING UP
ABOUT THE THIRD WEEK OF OCTOBER, I decided it was turning out to be one of the weirdest months of my life. Not that there have been that many of them—Octobers, I mean. Thirteen, to be exact. But here’s what had happened so far:
Lester, my twenty-one-year-old brother, who has been juggling two or more girlfriends for several years, just got word that one of his main girlfriends, Crystal, was engaged to be married at Thanksgiving. And I was to be a bridesmaid. Now that’s weird.
And of course I was still holding my breath to see whether Miss Summers, my English teacher last year, would marry Dad or our vice principal, Mr. Sorringer, who’s in love with her too.
Then Elizabeth, my friend who lives across the street, got a baby brother. At last she found out what a boy looks like naked. Is that weird, or what?
And finally, the student council at our junior high voted to create a haunted house for Halloween in the school gym to raise money for our library. What the school was going to do, see, was charge a buck fifty apiece to scare little kids half out of their minds. Patrick, my boyfriend, who’s vice president of the student council, asked if I wanted to help out.
Well, why not? I thought. October couldn’t get any crazier than it was already.
I was wrong. It got even crazier. Crystal Harkins’s maid of honor invited me to a bridal shower—a lingerie shower—and I’d never been to a shower before.
But you know what? All of these things—the engagement, the bridal shower, the baby brother, the haunted house—were happening to somebody else. I was just on the outside looking in. Not much that is really dramatic, outrageous, and wonderful has ever happened to me— something to remember forever and ever. If there was a prize for the girl with the most boring life, I thought, I’d win it, hands down.
Here’s where I miss my mom. If Mom were alive, she could have told me how to keep from being ordinary. She’d know what you take to a bridal shower, too. But because she died when I was four, I have to ask Dad and Lester, who don’t know diddly, all my questions, and if I’m really desperate, I call Aunt Sally in Chicago. This time I tried Dad and Lester first.
“I’ve been invited to a lingerie shower for Crystal,” I said at dinner that night. “Any ideas about what I could get her?”
“A chastity belt,” Lester mumbled.
“What?”
“He’s joking, Al,” said Dad. He and Lester call me Al.
Lester just glared down at his tuna and noodles. I guess he figured his girlfriends would go on waiting all their lives for him to make up his mind, and it was really a shock that one of them got engaged.
“What is a chastity belt?” I asked, curious.
“A metal device that some medieval men bought their wives when the men were going to be gone from their fiefdoms,” said Dad. “Only the husbands had the key. It was to insure that their wives would be faithful while they were away. Now you know how ridiculous this conversation is getting to be.”
I couldn’t believe it. “You mean it fit around their …?”
“Exactly,” said Lester. “Now shut up.”
“But how did they go to the bathroom?” I have to know things like that.
“With difficulty, I imagine,” Dad said.
I looked from Dad to Lester. That was so unfair! “What about the men? Did they have to wear chastity belts while they were gone to make sure they weren’t unfaithful?” I demanded.
Lester winced.
I was indignant. “What about a metal pipe that fitted over their …?”
“Okay, okay! Just drop it, will you?” Lester snapped. He’s been pretty touchy these days. Ever since Crystal returned all the things he’d ever given her and told us she was getting married, he’s been a real grouch.
I’m not sure why I was asked to be one of her bridesmaids, but I think it’s because her fiancé’s younger brother is going to be in the wedding party. He’s seventeen, and Crystal needs someone young to walk back up the aisle with him. Or maybe Crystal’s still mad at Lester and is trying to rub it in. Whatever, I’m prepared to enjoy myself.
“I don’t see how you can buy Crystal anything without knowing her sizes,” Dad said, trying to be helpful.
“Big,” said Lester. “Big hips, big boobs—a narrow waist, though.”
“Do you want to buy it for me, Lester?” I asked.
He glared daggers at me. “What do you think?”
I went up to my room after dinner and tried to figure out what would look nice on Crystal Harkins. If she were to step out of the bathroom on her wedding night and present herself to her new husband, what would look best on her? She has short red hair in a feather cut, and I imagined her in a sheer white nightgown with lace over her breasts so you could see her nipples.
I took the invitation out of the envelope again to see if they gave Crystal’s sizes on the back. They didn’t. But there was a little card enclosed that said the shower was being given jointly by Betsy Hall, Crystal’s maid of honor, and Fantasy Creations, which, it said, for eleven years has been making the kind of lingerie “every woman dreams of possessing, but only a few will dare.”
“Huh?” I said.
I went straight to the phone and dialed my cousin Carol in Chicago. She’s Aunt Sally’s daughter, and I always try her first. Carol’s a couple years older than Lester and, having been married once to a sailor, she knows everything there is to know in the sex department. The phone rang eight times at her place, though, and she didn’t answer, so I had to call Aunt Sally.
“Is Carol there, by chance?” I asked when Uncle Milt answered.
“Why, Alice, sweetheart! How nice to hear from you!” he said. “No, she’s on a business trip, but your aunt Sally’s right here. Just a minute.”
“Alice?” said Aunt Sally. “What’s wrong?”
I come from one of those families where if you call long distance, they figure someone just died.
“Nothing! I just wanted to ask a question.”
“Oh! Certainly!” said Aunt Sally, sounding relieved. She’s Mom’s older sister, who took care of us for a while after Mom died, before we moved to Maryland.
“I’ve been invited to a bridal shower, and I’m wondering what to buy.”
“Not Pamela or Elizabeth!” Aunt Sally gasped. Pamela’s my other best friend, and we’d all three gone by Amtrak to visit Aunt Sally last June.
“No. An old girlfriend of Lester’s, actually. She’s marrying someone else.”
“Good for her!” said Aunt Sally, who thinks it’s time Lester settled down himself. “Now what kind of shower is it to be? Kitchen? Linen?”
“Lingerie,” I said. “The kind every woman dreams of possessing, but only a few will dare.”
There was a soft noise at the other end of the line. I think Aunt Sally had just sat down.
“Pajamas,” she said finally. “Alice, you can’t go wrong with pajamas. If I were you, I’d buy a pretty pair of pink pajamas, and I promise she’ll thank you.”
Crystal would thank me, all right, but would she wear them? I thought not. So after I’d talked to Aunt Sally, I dialed the maid of honor herself, who told me that I wasn’t supposed to buy anything in a
dvance.
“Just come,” Betsy said, “and you can order from the Fantasy Creations catalog when you get here. We’ll have Crystal’s sizes, and she’ll choose the things she likes. You might like to buy something for yourself, too.”
Now that was the weirdest idea of all, because I don’t have much of a body yet. I suppose that will come. At least I hope so. But what I really want is a life, not a new bra. I want to do things. I want people to notice me.
Elizabeth Price is beautiful, she takes ballet and piano, and she has a little brother to take care of, even though his poop is yellow and Elizabeth says she’ll never eat mustard again. Gorgeous Pamela Jones, my other best friend, is taking tap and gymnastics, and Patrick’s on the track team, the debate team, the student council, and the school newspaper. He’s also in the band. Me? I’m just not a joiner, I guess.
When Patrick came over later, we walked to our old elementary school and fooled around on the jungle gym. He chased me over and under the bars but never did tag me, and finally we sat on the swings, turning around and around until the chains wouldn’t wind anymore, and then we’d let go and spin the other way.
Patrick was talking about how busy he was going to be this year, with track meets and all, and suddenly I said, “Patrick, is it possible to get through life without joining anything?”
“You mean … like a church or a political party?”
“A band, a chorus, a club, a group, Girl Scouts, Boy scouts, Triple A, anything?”
Patrick dug his feet into the ground to stop the swing. “I suppose, but why would you want to? You allergic to people?”
“No! I like people! I just don’t want to end up being like everybody else. Like a … a piano key, that’s all.” I thought that was pretty original, but Patrick thought I was nuts.
“Well, I guess you can have a full and interesting life without joining anything, but what do you do for excitement, Alice? Besides me, of course.” He grinned.
Suddenly it seemed like one of the most embarrassing questions I’d ever been asked.
“I guess I figured I was busy enough,” I murmured.
“A college might not think so,” said Patrick.
“What does college have to do with it?”
“You have to list all your hobbies and extracurricular activities on your application, Mom says. And if you don’t have any, well …”