“Well, you don’t know who it was, so you might as well forget it,” Les said. “Be more careful next time.”
“Somebody was responsible for that!” I declared.
“So what do you want Mr. Ormand to do, Al? Apply thumbscrews till one of the eighth-grade boys confesses?” he asked.
“If it had been you in the closet …,” I began.
“I keep out of closets,” said Lester. “Besides, the poor guy probably did it out of self-defense. If someone cornered me in a closet wearing black net stockings and a peacock feather headdress and enough makeup to sink a ship, I probably would have grabbed the first thing I could put my hands on, too.”
“That is so typical!” I shrieked. “It’s always the girl’s fault. If she’s molested or raped, it’s always because she asked for it.”
Lester tossed his magazine over his shoulder and threw back his head. “Okay, okay! Have Mr. Ormand line up all the boys in eighth grade and shoot every fifth one till somebody comes clean. Will that satisfy you?”
I didn’t know what I wanted. I wanted to be noticed, but not too much. I wanted to be kissed, but not too hard. I wanted to be like everyone else, but at the same time I wanted to be different. I wanted excitement and adventure, but I also wanted protection. Thirteen must be the year of the split personality, that’s all I could figure out.
The phone rang just then, and I went out in the hallway to answer. It was Elizabeth.
“Alice, I just called Patrick and told him what happened,” she said.
“You didn’t!”
“I thought he should know. I mean, a boy has a right to know that the girl he kisses good night is damaged goods, so to speak.”
“What?” Elizabeth was worse than Lester.
“And he said he already knew.”
“What?” Brian, I told myself. It was Brian, and he was going around bragging to everybody.
“So who was it?” I asked.
“Patrick.”
“What?” It seemed the only word I knew.
“Listen, I’m going to hang up because he’s going to call you,” Elizabeth said. “But everything’s okay now, because it was only Patrick.”
Were we all crazy or what?
I hung up after she did, and sat with my hand on the phone. About five seconds later, it rang.
“Yes?” I said, in about as cold a voice as I could manage.
“Alice?” said Patrick. “Listen, I don’t know why I did that. Because it was just the two of us there in the closet, I guess.”
“So if it had been just the two of us in the closet, would it have been okay to rape me?” I asked.
“Who’s talking rape? I thought maybe you’d like it. I mean, you wouldn’t know who it was, and it would be sort of a mystery. Besides, the way you were dressed …”
“Patrick, it was just a costume. I’d never been a showgirl before.”
“Well, I’d never been a zombie before, so I didn’t know how to act. Okay?”
After I hung up, I wished I hadn’t known it was Patrick. I realized it would have been nice to wonder which of the other guys might have done it. What was I making such a fuss about?
I sat there looking at myself in the hall mirror—the peacock feather headdress, the makeup. This is what I needed, I decided. A whole new look. A whole new personality.
The phone rang yet again.
“Alice?” came Pamela’s voice. “I’ve just broken up with Brian.”
“What?” I croaked again for about the fifth time.
“After I got in the car, I started thinking about that kiss in the broom closet, and realized Brian was back there most of the evening. So I called him up and accused him of French-kissing you behind my back.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say much of anything. He just kept saying, ‘What?’ He certainly didn’t deny it.”
“So you …”
“So I told him he was a sneak and a cheat, and it was over between us. I’m a free woman. I might even go back to Mark.”
5
A TOUCH OF GREEN
EVEN AFTER I TOLD PAMELA THAT IT WAS Patrick, not Brian, she still said she was breaking up with Brian, that he was a dork. Handsome, all right, but a real dweeb.
I couldn’t get it off my mind that weekend. Pamela had broken up with Mark in the first place to go with Brian, and now she was breaking up with Brian to possibly go back to Mark; Elizabeth had broken up twice with Tom Perona; when would it happen to Patrick and me? I mean, if he could grab me and French-kiss me without even telling me who he was, couldn’t he just call sometime and say, “Hey, Alice, I’m going with somebody else now”?
Maybe I wanted this to happen. I like Patrick, really like him—better than any other guy I’ve ever known—but will I always feel this way? Sometimes he does really stupid things. What if I met someone I liked better?
What I was thinking of in particular was Crystal’s wedding and the reception afterward. What did I know about receptions? The groom’s younger brother, my escort, was seventeen. What if it turned out I liked—really liked—Peter’s brother?
Dad was making waffles on Sunday morning, so both Lester and I migrated to the kitchen at about the same time.
“What do you do at a wedding reception?” I asked. “I’ve got to know what to expect.”
“Eat,” said Lester, spearing one of the waffles and putting a big hunk of butter on it, where it melted into little square pools of yellow.
“At some point, someone will toast the bride and groom, and you’ll raise your glass like everyone else,” Dad told me. “A lot of time will be spent taking photos of the wedding party—that kind of thing.”
“You’ll dance,” said Lester, reaching for the syrup.
I let my waffle drop off the end of my fork. “Dance?”
“Yeah. Dance. As in moving your feet,” said Lester.
Something told me that at a wedding reception people didn’t just face each other and jiggle their shoulders. They put their arms politely around each other, held hands, and moved in step, and I knew that however they danced at wedding receptions, I didn’t know how to do it.
“I can’t dance!” I wailed, my eyes suddenly brimming over. “Dad, I can’t be in this wedding! I’ll ruin everything!”
“Al, pipe down!” Dad said. “Why is it that everything is the end of the world for you? Crystal’s wedding will go off whether you can dance or not.”
“Teach me!” I begged. “Right now.”
“It’s four weeks off, Al. You still have time to eat your breakfast,” Dad said.
As soon as we finished, though, I hung over the back of his chair until I knew he couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Okay, let’s get this over with,” Dad said.
He went into the dining room, over to our stereo cabinet, and took out a dusty square box of small black disks.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Forty-fives,” Dad said. “This was way back in the olden days, Al. In fact, these belonged to my uncle. I was the musician in the family, so he gave his collection to me.”
He opened our ancient record player, which was about as dusty as the box, and put on one of the forty-fives.
“Okay,” he said, “this is a waltz. They usually play at least one waltz at a wedding reception. You have to think one, two, three, one, two, three. … On the first beat, we take the longest step, and then two smaller steps to catch up.”
ONE, two, three, ONE, two, three, I counted to myself, and suddenly Dad was guiding me backward. My feet were falling all over each other, but he gripped me fast and kept me moving. Then I got the hang of it, and we were really traveling. I was dancing!
Dad started to smile, and we took even bigger steps.
Through the living room, back into the dining room again, around the table, out into the hall …
“I’m doing it, Les!” I called. “I’m waltzing!”
“Bully for you,” said Lester. “Just don’t
fall in the punch.”
“This was one of our favorite songs, Marie’s and mine,” Dad said. “‘Fascination.’” And he began to sing while we danced: “It was fascin-a-tion, I know …”
I loved dancing with Dad and hearing him sing. I thought of him waltzing around with my mom, especially when he got to the last line, about fascination turning to love.
When the music ended, I asked, “What if it’s not a waltz? What if it’s something else?”
“Well, kiddo, I guess you’ll have to wing it. I’m pretty rusty in the dance department. I just sort of make it up as I go along.”
“How do you slow-dance, Lester?” I asked when the record was finished.
“I just put my arms around Marilyn and we move side-ways from foot to foot,” he said.
“Does Miss Summers dance?” I asked Dad.
“We’ve danced some,” he said.
I couldn’t believe I’d only asked one question but gotten the answers to two, so I took a chance: “How close do you dance?”
“Close enough to keep our feet going in the same direction,” Dad said.
Lester was studying all weekend for a huge exam, so I called Elizabeth, but she and her family were taking the baby to visit relatives up in Pennsylvania, so I asked Pamela if I could come over.
“I need a new look,” I told her when she met me at the door. I think maybe Pamela was feeling the same way, that we needed something to rev up our lives, something that would make people really notice us. “In fact, I need a whole new personality. A brain transplant.”
“Never mind the brain, let’s work on your face. You need a new eye shadow,” Pamela said.
“A new eye shadow? I don’t wear any.”
“Then that’s the problem. Your eyes don’t stand out. How can you have any personality if you haven’t got eyes?” She looked at me closely. “Green. If you wore green eye shadow and green eyeliner to match your eyes, it’d be perfect.”
She got some cosmetics from a drawer, and I sat on the edge of her bed while she did my whole face.
“Blush,” she said. “Eyeliner. Lip liner. Mascara …”
When I looked in the mirror, I hardly recognized myself. Like Pamela said, though, my eyes sure stood out.
“That’s you, Alice! That’s your color!” Pamela said excitedly. “See what it does for you?”
It was the first time anyone had suggested I had a color. Miss Summers had called me Alice Green Eyes once, but she hadn’t said I had a color. I had a type! I was a type! There was a color that was distinctly me!
“Here. You can have these,” Pamela said, giving me the green eye shadow and eyeliner. “They don’t work for me. I’m blue.”
I made a detour over to the drugstore on Georgia Avenue on my way home and bought some mascara.
Then I sauntered into the house and sprawled on a chair across from Lester, who had his books and papers all over the coffee table. I picked up the comics and pretended to read.
“Holy …! What is it?” said Lester. “Halloween’s over, kid.”
“It’s the real me, Lester! It’s my color!” I said defiantly, lifting my head so he could get the whole effect.
“You look like something raised from the dead!” he insisted.
Dad came in from the kitchen and looked at me. “You’re not really going to go anywhere looking like that, are you?” he asked.
I lost it then.
“You don’t know anything about makeup and fashions, so why don’t you both just shut up!” I snapped.
“Al, I guarantee that if your mother were here, she wouldn’t let you out of the house looking like that,” Dad said.
“Styles change! Fashions change! She’d at least keep up with what was going on, and color’s big right now! Everybody has a color, and mine’s green!” I yelled.
“But you look like you’re decaying! You’re beginning to mold!” Lester argued. “Al, you look sick around the gills! You look like a dead fish!”
I burst into tears and ran upstairs. Unfortunately, the tears made the eyeliner run, and my face was a mess, but I fixed it up the best I could. I would not give in.
I took a green sweater and held it to my chin in front of the mirror The green around my eyes seemed to leap out. Green was me, all right.
“What did you do to your eyes?” Elizabeth asked the next morning at the bus stop.
“Pamela fixed them up for me. We discovered my color, Elizabeth. It’s green!”
She studied me some more. “Well, it sure makes your eyes stand out,” she said at last. She didn’t exactly say she liked it, but I figured she had to have time to get used to it.
When Patrick got on the bus, though, carrying some posters for the fall band concert, he stopped right by my seat and stared. “What happened to your face? Your skin is green!” he said.
“It’s the style, Patrick,” I said, and for the second time in a week, he seemed just plain stupid to me. What kind of boy looks at a girl and asks, “What happened to your face?”
The fact was, I didn’t much care whether he liked it or not. The reason people were staring was that they weren’t used to me looking dramatic. They were so used to the “innocent Alice” look that they had to get used to the idea of Alice McKinley with a little pizzazz.
But Patrick just wouldn’t quit.
“Well, if you’re going green, how about carrying this around for me?” he said. He held up one of the posters about the band concert, with the word CONCERT in big green block letters.
“Why not?” I said.
“Wait a minute. Better idea!” Patrick took the roll of tape he was going to use to put up the posters and taped two of them together, back to back. “Stand up,” he said. I did, and he hung them over my shoulders like a sandwich board.
At first I felt angry at him, but when everyone on the bus started to laugh, I realized they were laughing with me, not at me.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll wear this all day.”
Patrick looked surprised. “You will?”
I shrugged. “You asked me to wear it, I’m wearing it.” All the kids clapped.
At school, everyone looked at me, pointing and laughing, and I just laughed along with them. Miss Summers noticed too. She was passing my locker and stopped to talk. Her eyes were the bluest I’d ever seen, even though she has brown hair, not blond. She had on a gray and blue and lavender dress that sort of changed colors when she walked.
“Well, you’re looking different these days, Alice!” she said cheerfully. “In fact, you’re a walking advertisement!” She laughed. “How are things going?”
“Great!” I said. “But I miss having you for English this year.”
“I miss having you in my class, too,” she said, and smiled at me with her beautiful blue eyes. I noticed that she didn’t wear blue shadow, though. I wondered what color she wore.
The thing is, I liked being noticed—being a little bit crazy, a little bit wild. I loved going down the halls at school with Patrick’s sandwich board around my neck, and I didn’t want the day to end. There had to be something more I could try. I was ready. Boy, was I ready!
6
SHOCK WAVE
THAT EVENING, BEFORE I WENT TO THE Camera Club the next day, I decided I’d better ask Lester if I could have the camera Crystal had returned after they broke up. I doubted Dad would want me to use his.
Lester and a bunch of his guy friends were in the living room watching Monday night football, and I knew better than to ask him a question during the game. I waited till the team was standing with their arms around each other, then edged over to Lester’s chair. Les had one fist in a bag of Fritos and the other in the air, cheering the team on.
“Lester …,” I whispered.
“Later!” he said. “I’m watching the game.”
I pointed to the set. “They’re just standing there talking,” I protested.
“That’s a huddle, kid,” said one of his friends. “Okay! Here we go!”
&nbs
p; The players lined up, but then they stood around some more, bent over with their hands on their knees. I don’t understand football at all. A minute later all the players were piling onto everybody else, and Lester leaped to his feet.
“Touchdown!” he yelled. You couldn’t prove it by me.
“Lester,” I said again when a commercial came on.
“What?”
“Did you have any plans for that camera you gave Crystal? The one she returned. I’ve signed up for the Camera Club at school and I need it.”
“Actually, I was going to wrap it up and give it to you for Christmas.”
“Lester!”
“Merry Christmas, Al. It’s yours,” he said, and waved me away.
I took it to Dad, who put in a roll of film, showed me how to adjust it for distance, and how to work the flash.
“Have fun,” he said, handing it back. “First roll of film’s on me. After that, you pay for the film and developing. Okay?”
I realized then that it would have been a lot cheaper to sit around the Explorers’ Club and talk about trips on Amtrak than it was going to be to take pictures. I was thinking about going back in the living room and asking Lester if—since this was to be my Christmas present—he’d throw in a couple rolls of film, too, but he and his friends were ab solutely mesmerized by the game.
“I’ll bet I could walk in there naked and they wouldn’t notice,” I told Dad.
“Well, don’t try it,” he said.
The more I thought about it, though, the more curious I got. One of the guys put his feet on the coffee table, all the magazines slid off, and he didn’t even look down. In the movies, of course, a brother’s friends always think his kid sister’s cute, and she grows up and marries one of them. It could happen!
I went upstairs, took off all my clothes, and put on my bathing suit. Then I casually walked through the living room, picking up empty bottles and cans. The guys didn’t even look in my direction. Everyone was yelling at the quarterback.
So I went back up and put on the peacock feather headdress I’d worn on Halloween, and this time I paraded slowly around the living room. I guess I caught a commercial, because suddenly Lester muted the sound. Without even looking, I knew that all eyes were fastened on me.