We were engaged to be married, our assignment read, and for the next five weeks we were to plan the wedding and honeymoon, rent an apartment, buy furniture, and work out a budget. I could feel my face redden, but secretly I was pleased.
ALICE AND PATRICK ARE GETTING MARRIED! Well, sort of. It’s all part of her eighth grade health class. But this is a piece of wedding cake compared to some of her friends’ assignments, where they have to role-play being pregnant or being caught shoplifting. The biggest challenge of all, though, is just growing up—and this health unit is showing that it doesn’t get any easier! Who decided that life was a never-ending obstacle course, anyway?
DON’T MISS
Meet the author, watch videos, and get extras at
KIDS.SimonandSchuster.com
COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
AGES 10–14 • 0811
Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*
“I like your Alice books so much because they’re so funny! They make me laugh out loud every time I read them. Also, they’re realistic. I see parts of myself in Alice, Pamela, and Elizabeth.”—Kayleigh
“I absolutely love your books and am looking forward to your many others. My friends love them too. We formed an Alice club at our school. On Tuesdays we get together at the same table and have a book talk.”—Katie
“Alice and her friends and family just seem so real that I expect to look in a Maryland phone book under McKinley and find ‘Benjamin’!!”—Erin
“I read your books as slowly as I can so they don’t end too soon.” —An Alice Fan
*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.
ALICE IN LACE
Books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
SHILOH BOOKS
Shiloh
Shiloh Season
Saving Shiloh
THE ALICE BOOKS
Starting with Alice
Alice in Blunderland
Lovingly Alice
The Agony of Alice
Alice in Rapture, Sort of
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
Simply Alice
Patiently Alice
Including Alice
Alice on Her Way
Alice in the Know
Dangerously Alice
THE BERNIE MAGRUDER BOOKS
Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink
Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies
Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel
Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor
Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup
Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure
Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril
Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry
THE CAT PACK BOOKS
The Grand Escape
The Healing of Texas Jake
Carlotta’s Kittens
Polo’s Mother
THE YORK TRILOGY
Shadows on the Wall
Faces in the Water
Footprints at the Window
THE WITCH BOOKS
Witch’s Sister
Witch Water
The Witch Herself
The Witch’s Eye
Witch Weed
The Witch Returns
PICTURE BOOKS
King of the Playground
The Boy with the Helium Head
Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear
Keeping a Christmas Secret
Ducks Disappearing
I Can’t Take You Anywhere
Sweet Strawberries
Please DO Feed the Bears
Books for Young Readers
Josie’s Troubles
How Lazy Can You Get?
All Because I’m Older
Maudie in the Middle
One of the Third-Grade Thonkers
Roxie and the Hooligans
BOOKS FOR MIDDLE READERS
Walking Through the Dark
How I Came to Be a Writer
Eddie, Incorporated
The Solomon System
The Keeper
Beetles, Lightly Toasted
The Fear Place
Being Danny’s Dog
Danny’s Desert Rats
Walker’s Crossing
BOOKS FOR OLDER READERS
A String of Chances
Night Cry
The Dark of the Tunnel
The Year of the Gopher
Send No Blessings
Ice
Sang Spell
Jade Green
Blizzard’s Wake
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 the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ALADDIN MIX
Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1996 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and related logo and ALADDIN MIX and related logo
are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
First Aladdin MIX edition February 2009
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Alice in lace / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
“A Jean Karl book.”
Summary: While planning a wedding as part of an assignment for her
eighth-grade health class, Alice thinks about her father’s and older brother’s love lives
and learns that you cannot prepare for all of life’s decisions.
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-80358-1 (hc)
ISBN-10: 0-689-80358-3 (hc)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4424-6583-1(eBook)
[1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Decision making—Fiction. 3. Single-parent family—Fiction.
4. Family life—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N24Akf 1996
[Fic]—dc20
95-30903
ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-7543-4 (MIX pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-4169-7543-8 (MIX pbk)
To Jaime Hinton, with love
Contents
One Thinking Ahead
Two Speaking of Lust
Three The Course of True Love
Four A Balcony, a Jacuzzi, and You
Five Discovery
Six New Girl at the Store
Seven On Pamela and Pregnancy
/> Eight Backseat Drivers
Nine Into the Lion’s Den
Ten Wedding Bells
Eleven Surprise Ending
1
THINKING AHEAD
Patrick and I were getting married, Pamela was pregnant, and Elizabeth was buying a car.
It all happened in our health class, in a unit called Critical Choices. We had entered eighth grade fresh from a summer in Mark Stedmeister’s swimming pool, and one week later we were saddled with all the cares of adulthood.
“What we’re going to study,” Mr. Everett said, “is how the choices you make now can affect the rest of your life.”
He was new to our school this year. Mr. Everett was probably about thirty and really tall, maybe six foot five, wore Dockers, and rolled his shirtsleeves up above his elbows. When he talked, he leaned against the blackboard, arms folded over his chest, feet crossed at the ankles, a lock of blond hair hanging over one eye. A younger version of Robert Redford, Pamela described him.
His smile was what got to us. It was warm. Friendly. You couldn’t call it flirtatious. He just gave the impression of really loving his job.
“When you come to class tomorrow,” he told us, “you’ll each receive a hypothetical situation in which you will find yourself for the next five weeks. Your assignment is to get as much information as you can about your particular problem.”
“Like … what kind of problems?” Mark Stedmeister asked.
The Redford smile again: “Everything from totaling the car to having a baby.”
“Moi—a baby?” Mark said, looking shocked, and everyone laughed.
“You’ll find out tomorrow,” said Mr. Everett. “Now listen up. Your grade will depend not necessarily on how you deal with your problem, but on the larger view you take. I’ll want to know how your solution affects you, the people around you, society, the works.”
Mr. Everett thinks big.
Leave it to Elizabeth to worry, however.
“I’ll just die if he makes me pregnant,” she said as we left class.
“Watch how you say that,” Pamela joked.
But Elizabeth worried that if she got the assignment for teenage pregnancy, she might have to go to the doctor for her first pelvic exam just so she could write it up for her report. She’s hopeless.
That night at the dinner table, I told Dad and Lester, my soon-to-be twenty-one-year-old brother, about Mr. Everett’s class and how I was going to learn to make decisions.
“Excellent idea!” said Dad. “For once the schools are teaching something practical.”
“I’m going to learn what to do if I total the car or get pregnant,” I added.
Dad stopped chewing.
“Will they accept questions from the outside?” asked Lester. “Will they help me decide between a brunette and a redhead?”
But Dad interrupted. “Al,” he said, “if you’re thinking, even remotely, of having sex …”
“I’m not,” I told him. “Well, I think about it, of course, but I’m not about to do anything.”
My real name is Alice McKinley, but Dad and Lester call me Al. I think it’s because Mom died when I was small that Dad freaks out about me sometimes. It’s true that he and Lester don’t know diddly about raising a girl, but it bothers Dad a lot more than it bothers Lester.
I chewed thoughtfully on a carrot stick. “Actually, the situations he’s going to assign us seem sort of hokey. Who sits down and thinks, ‘I guess I’ll go total the car tonight’ or ‘Dad, I want to have a teenage pregnancy’? Sometimes things just happen.”
“That’s the point,” Dad said. “These things happen because nobody thought they would. Nobody did any planning. Somebody has a few beers and gets in his car, or a girl has sex with her boyfriend. They’re not thinking ‘car wreck.’ They’re not thinking ‘baby.’”
I sighed. Life, as far as I could see, was going to be a sort of obstacle course, with detours, yield signs, stop signs, and cautions.
“What I wish,” I said, “is that I was born with a built-in buzzer, and whenever I was about to do something incredibly stupid, it beeped.”
“You were,” said Dad. “It’s called conscience.”
“Dad, every time I listen to my conscience it sounds just like you.”
“Imagine that,” he said.
When we got to health class the next day, Mr. Everett went down the rows passing out worksheets. Each worksheet was different, with one of our names at the top, and as people read their assignments, they groaned or whooped or giggled.
Behind me, Elizabeth gave a gigantic sigh of relief. “All I have to do is buy a car!” she said. “Holy Mary, thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Patrick and I got the same situation. We were engaged to be married, our assignments read, and for the next five weeks we were to plan the wedding and honeymoon, rent an apartment, buy furniture, and work out a budget. I could feel my face redden, but secretly I was pleased. I’ve known Patrick Long since sixth grade, and he’s been my boyfriend on and off. At the moment we were on again. Mr. Everett must have noticed.
“Hey, Patrick! Way to go!” Mark called out. All over the room kids were teasing us.
Patrick looks a lot like Mr. Everett, actually, only younger. He has red hair and he plays the drums. His dad is a diplomat or something, and they’ve lived in a lot of different countries. I guess it wasn’t as exciting for him to marry a girl who was born in Chicago as it was for me to marry him, but he was smiling at me.
“Mr. Everett,” called Brian, who is probably the most handsome guy in eighth grade. “If Alice and Patrick are getting married, does this entitle them to all the … uh … privileges of married life?”
More laughter.
“Hypothetical situation, Brian,” said Mr. Everett.
“Hypo- what?”
“Look it up.”
Brian’s situation was a DWI offense, Jill had to arrange a funeral for her grandmother, Karen got arrested for shoplifting, Mark had supposedly gotten a girl pregnant, Pamela was pregnant, and Elizabeth was buying a car. And this was just the crowd I hang out with. Some of the others had it worse.
Now all the attention focused on Pamela.
“What am I supposed to do, Mr. Everett?” she asked. “If I’m already pregnant, what’s there to decide?”
“What’s there to decide?” The teacher gave her a quizzical look. “You’re going to be a mother, Pamela.”
The whole class broke into laughter. When it died down, he went on: “You’re going to have another person to look out for, you have to live somewhere, you have to support the two of you—and you ask me what there is to decide?”
Pamela shrugged. “Well … I mean … what if I choose an abortion?”
“What if you do? That’s what we want to know. What would that mean to you? Or what happens if you decide to give the baby up for adoption? There are ‘what ifs’ all over the place. That’s what this class is about. Thinking things through before they happen. Planning your life instead of letting events decide things for you.”
“Aren’t we really supposed to figure out what you think we should do?” asked Karen.
“If I’m a good teacher, you won’t even know what I think,” Mr. Everett told her. “All the thinking’s got to be done by you. And maybe there isn’t just one good solution, but several. Have you considered that?”
I’d wondered if there would be enough stuff in this assignment to fill up the next five weeks, and now I knew there was enough to think about for the next five years.
What was embarrassing, though, was that Pamela was supposed to be pregnant, and Mark was supposed to have gotten a girl pregnant, though not necessarily Pamela, but Mark and Pamela weren’t speaking, having broken up just before school started. Pamela was going with Brian now, so Mark and Brian weren’t speaking, either.
Worse yet, Elizabeth had only been going with Tom Perona for one week when she found out he had two ID bracelets, and had given one to a girl at St. John’s, wh
ere he goes to school. Pamela and I were furious with Tom. It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Elizabeth had finally gotten to the place where she could kiss comfortably, and now she had to find out that Tom was two-timing her again, just as he did the summer after sixth grade.
“He’s nothing but a Tom-cat, Elizabeth. Forget him,” I said.
But Elizabeth blamed us instead. She said her breath must smell or her body smelled, and we hadn’t told her. If a boy had been going with her only a week before he started seeing someone else, there obviously was something wrong with her, and that’s what came of getting physically close to boys. She simply wasn’t ready yet. I sort of agreed, knowing Elizabeth.
“You should date a guy from our own school,” Pamela said. “If Tom’s around other girls all day and never sees you, he’s bound to be attracted to somebody else.”
But all Elizabeth would say was, “If you had bad breath or something, I’d tell you,” so we just gave up.
“Hey, Alice,” Patrick said, coming up behind me after class and tickling the back of my neck. “We’ve got to do this assignment together. We’re engaged, right?” He gave my waist a little squeeze. “What do you want to do first?”
We stopped there in the hall and looked over Mr. Everett’s assignment:
Assume that you are high school graduates with no college training, and the maximum you have to spend on your wedding, honeymoon, apartment, and furniture is $5,000.
“Five thousand dollars!” I gasped. “We’re rich, Patrick!”
“Hardly,” he said.
“I’ll call the Post and find out how much it costs to announce the engagement,” I told him.
“I’ll ask a travel agent about a honeymoon in Hawaii,” said Patrick.
“Hawaii?” I said. “I don’t want to go to Hawaii.”
“You don’t? Where do you want to go?”
I hadn’t even thought about it, really. I just wanted a choice in the matter. I tried to think of all the places I’d ever wanted to visit. “Well, Disney World, maybe.”