Alice in Charge
Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
ALICE IN CHARGE
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
Almost Alice
Intensely Alice
Alice in Charge
Incredibly Alice
Alice Collections
I Like Him, He Likes Her
It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way
Please Don’t Be True
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
Cricket Man
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
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 © 2010 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
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.
First Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition August 2011
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Alice in charge / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Along with the usual concerns of senior year in high school, Alice faces some very difficult situations, including vandalism by a group of neo-Nazis and a friend’s confession that a teacher has been taking advantage of her.
ISBN 978-1-4169-7552-6 (hardcover)
[1. High schools—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Neo-nazism—Fiction. 4. Race relations—Fiction. 5. College choice—Fiction. 6. Family life—Maryland—Fiction. 7. Maryland—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.N24Akdm 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2010000798
ISBN 978-1-4169-7555-7 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-4424-6605-0 (eBook)
To Victoria
Contents
One: Starting Over
Two: Marshaling the Troops
Three: Student Jury
Four: An Unexpected Invitation
Five: The Meaning of Eight
Six: Road to Chapel Hill
Seven: Call Girl
Eight: Night in Chapel Hill
Nine: Decisions
Ten: The Face of America
Eleven: Letting Off Steam
Twelve: Incident Number Three
Thirteen: Call to Aunt Sally
Fourteen: Relationships
Fifteen: Dinner Guests
Sixteen: Amy
Seventeen: Alice in Charge
Eighteen: Change
Nineteen: Conference
Twenty: Confrontation
Twenty-one: Wrap-up
Twenty-two: To Life
Incredibly Alice excerpt
1
STARTING OVER
It was impossible to start school without remembering him.
Some kids, of course, had been on vacation when it happened and hadn’t seen the news in the paper. Some hadn’t even known Mark Stedmeister.
But we’d known him. We’d laughed with him, danced with him, argued with him, swum with him, and then … said our good-byes to him when he was buried.
There was the usual safety assembly the first day of school. But the principal opened it with announcements of the two deaths over the summer: a girl who drowned at a family picnic, and Mark, killed in a traffic accident. Mr. Beck asked for two minutes of silence to remember them, and then a guy from band played “Amazing Grace” on the trumpet.
Gwen and Pam and Liz and I held hands during the playing, marveling that we had any tears left after the last awful weeks and the day Liz had phoned me, crying, “He was just sitting there, Alice! He wasn’t doing anything! And a truck ran into him from behind.”
It helps to have friends. When you can spread the sadness around, there’s a little less, somehow, for each person to bear. As we left the auditorium later, teachers handed out plastic bracelets we could wea
r for the day—blue for Mark, yellow for the freshman who had drowned—and as we went from class to class, we’d look for the blue bracelets and lock eyes for a moment.
“So how did it go today?” Sylvia asked when she got home that afternoon. And without waiting for an answer, she gave me a long hug.
“Different,” I said, when we disentangled. “It will always seem different without Mark around.”
“I know,” she said. “But life does have a way of filling that empty space, whether you want it to or not.”
She was right about that. Lester’s twenty-fifth birthday, for one. I’d bought him a tie from the Melody Inn. The pattern was little brown figures against a bright yellow background, and if you studied them closely, you saw they were tiny eighth notes forming a grid. I could tell by Lester’s expression that he liked it.
“Good choice, Al!” he said, obviously surprised at my excellent taste. “So how’s it going? First day of your last year of high school, huh?”
“No, Les, you’re supposed to say, ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life,’” I told him.
“Oh. Well then, this is the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the rest of your life. Even more exciting.”
We did the usual birthday thing: Lester’s favorite meal—steak and potatoes—the cake, the candles, the ice cream. After Dad asked him how his master’s thesis was coming and they had a long discussion, Les asked if I had any ideas for feature articles I’d be doing for The Edge.
“Maybe ‘The Secret Lives of Brothers’?” I suggested.
“Boring. Eat, sleep, study. Definitely boring,” he said.
From her end of the table, Sylvia paused a moment as she gathered up the dessert plates. “Weren’t you working on a special tribute to Mark?” she asked. Now that I was features editor of our school paper, everyone had suggestions.
“I am, but it just hasn’t jelled yet,” I said. “I want it to be special. Right now I’ve got other stuff to do, and I haven’t even started my college applications.”
“First priority,” Dad said.
“Yeah, right,” I told him. “Do you realize that every teacher seems to think his subject comes first? It’s the truth! ‘Could anything be more important than learning to express yourselves?’ our English teacher says. ‘Hold in those stomach muscles, girls,’ says the gym teacher. ‘If you take only one thing with you when you leave high school, it’s the importance of posture.’ And Miss Ames says she doesn’t care what else is on our plate, the articles for The Edge positively have to be in on time. Yada yada yada.”
“Wait till college, kiddo. Wait till grad school,” said Lester.
“I don’t want to hear it!” I wailed. “Each day I think, ‘If I can just make it through this one …’ Whoever said you could slide through your senior year was insane.”
Lester looked at Sylvia. “Aren’t you glad you’re not teaching high school?” he asked. “All this moaning and groaning?”
Sylvia laughed. “Give the girl a break, Les. Feature articles are the most interesting part of a newspaper. She’s got a big job this year.”
“Hmmm,” said Lester. “Maybe she should do an article on brothers. ‘My Bro, the Stud.’ ‘Life with a Philosophy Major: The Secret Genius of Les McKinley.’”
“You wish,” I said.
In addition to thinking about articles for The Edge and all my other assignments, I was thinking about Patrick. About the phone conversation we’d had the night before. Patrick’s at the University of Chicago now, and with both of us still raw after Mark’s funeral, we’ve been checking in with each other more often. He wants to know how I’m doing, how our friends are handling things, and I ask how he’s coping, away from everyone back home.
“Mostly by keeping busy,” Patrick had said. “And thinking about you.”
“I miss you, Patrick,” I’d told him.
“I miss you. Lots,” he’d answered. “But remember, this is your senior year. Don’t give up anything just because I’m not there.”
“What does that mean?” I’d asked.
I’d known what he was saying, though. We’d had that conversation before. Going out with other people, he meant, and I knew he was right—Patrick is so reasonable, so practical, so … Patrick. I didn’t want him to be lonely either. But I didn’t feel very reasonable inside, and it was hard imagining Patrick with someone else.
“We both know how we feel about each other,” he’d said.
Did we? I don’t think either of us had said the words I love you. We’d never said we were dating exclusively. With nearly seven hundred miles between us now, some choices, we knew, had already been made. What we did know was that we were special to each other.
I thought of my visit to his campus over the summer. I thought of the bench by Botany Pond. Patrick’s kisses, his arms, his hands. … It was hard imagining myself with someone else too, but—as he’d said—it was my senior year.
“I know,” I’d told him, and we’d said our long good nights.
In my group of best girlfriends—Pamela, Liz, and Gwen—I was the closest to having a steady boyfriend. Dark-haired Liz had been going out with Keeno a lot, but nothing definite. Gwen was seeing a guy we’d met over the summer when we’d volunteered for a week at a soup kitchen, and Pamela wasn’t going out with anyone at present. “Breathing fresh air” was the way she put it.
There was a lot to think about. With our parents worrying over banks and mortgages and retirement funds, college seemed like a bigger hurdle than it had before. And some colleges were more concerned with grades than with SAT scores, so seniors couldn’t just slide through their last year, especially the first semester.
“Where are you going to apply?” I asked Liz. “Gwen’s already made up her mind. She’s going to sail right through the University of Maryland and enter their medical school. I think it’s some sort of scholarship worked out with the National Institutes of Health.”
“She should get a scholarship—all these summers she’s been interning at the NIH,” said Liz. “I don’t know—I think I want a really small liberal arts college, like Bennington up in Vermont.”
We were sitting around Elizabeth’s porch watching her little brother blow soap bubbles at us. Nathan was perched on the railing, giggling each time we reached out to grab one.
“Sure you want a small college?” asked Pamela, absently examining her toes, feet propped on the wicker coffee table. Her nails were perfectly trimmed, polished in shell white. “It sounds nice and cozy, but everyone knows your business, and you’ve got all these little cliques to deal with.”
“Where are you going to apply?” Liz asked her.
“It’s gotta be New York, that much I know. One of their theater arts schools, maybe. Somebody told me about City College, and someone else recommended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I doubt I could get into Cornell, but they’ve got a good drama department. Where are you going to apply, Alice?”
I shrugged. “Mrs. Bailey recommends Maryland because they’ve got a good graduate program in counseling, and that’s where she got her degree. But a couple of guys from church really like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill….”
“That’s a good school,” said Liz.
“… And I’ve heard good things about William and Mary.”
“Virginia?” asked Liz.
“Yes. Williamsburg. I was thinking I could visit both on the same trip.”
“You could always go to Bennington with me,” said Liz.
“Clear up in Vermont? Where it really snows?”
“It’s not Colorado.”
Just then a soap bubble came drifting past my face, and I snapped at it like a dog. Nathan screeched with laughter.
What I didn’t tell my friends was that lately I’d been getting a sort of panicky, homesick, lonely feeling whenever I thought about leaving for college—coming “home” at night to a dorm room. To a roommate I may not even like. A roommate the complete opposite o
f me, perhaps. I don’t know when I first started feeling this way—Mark’s funeral? Dad’s worries about investments and the store? But at college there would be no stepmom to talk with across the table, no Dad to give me a bear hug, no brother to stop by with an account of his latest adventure.
It was crazy! Hadn’t I always looked forward to being on my own? Didn’t I want that no-curfew life? I’d been away before—the school trip to New York, for example. I’d been a counselor at summer camp. And yet … All my friends had been there, and my friends were like family. At college I’d be with strangers. I’d be a stranger to them. And no matter how I tried to reason myself out of it, the homesickness was there in my chest, and it thumped painfully whenever college came to mind, which was often. I didn’t want to chicken out and choose Bennington just to be with Liz or Maryland just to room with Gwen. Still …
Nathan tumbled off the railing at that point and skinned his knee. The soap solution spilled all over the porch, he was howling, and we got up to help. That put an end to the conversation for the time being, and time was what I needed to work things through.
The school newspaper, though, kept me busy. Our staff had to stay on top of everything. We were the first to know how we’d be celebrating Spirit Week, because we had to publish it. We had to know when dances would be held, when games were scheduled, which faculty member had retired and which teachers were new. We were supposed to announce new clubs, student trips, projects, protests. … We were the school’s barometer, and in our staff meetings we tried to get a sense of things before they happened.
We were also trying something different this semester. Because of our newspaper’s growing reputation and the number of students who’d signed up to work on The Edge, we’d been given a larger room on the main floor, instead of the small one we’d been using for years. Here we had two long tables for layout instead of one. Four computers instead of two. And on the suggestion of Phil Adler—our news editor/editor in chief—we were going to try publishing an eight-page newspaper every week instead of a sixteen-page biweekly edition.
We wanted to be even more timely. And because the printer’s schedule sometimes held up our paper for a day, we were going to aim for Thursday publication. Then, if there was a snafu, students would still get their copies by Friday and know what was going on over the weekend.
“I’ve got reservations about this, but it’s worth a try,” Miss Ames, our faculty sponsor, told us. “I know you’ve doubled your number of reporters, and you’ve got an A team and a B team so that not everyone works on each issue. But you four editors are going to have to work every week. That means most Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays after school. Can you can swing it?”
