The Agony of Alice

  Life is like a dumpster. As soon as you get rid of one embarrassment, you pick up another. I knew that this was going to go on forever unless I found someone to set an example for me, and by the time I got the mustard off my shirt, I’d made up my mind: I’d adopt a mother.

  THERE’S A LOT ABOUT GROWING UP THAT’S confusing to Alice McKinley. Her mother died when she was five—how can her father and her nineteen-year-old brother, Lester, teach her what she needs to know? Even buying a pair of jeans can turn into a major embarrassment with Lester in charge.

  If only she had a role model, like the beautiful sixth-grade teacher Miss Cole. But instead Alice gets assigned to plain, pear-shaped Mrs. Plotkin’s class. Is Alice doomed to a life of one embarrassment after another?

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  COVER DESIGN BY JESSICA HANDELMAN

  COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2011 BY JULIA DENOS

  ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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  AGES 10–14 • 0511

  Here’s what fans have to say about Alice:*

  “I have read your Alice books ever since 5th grade (I’m in 10th grade now) and ever since the first one I read I can’t stop reading them! They are filled with such intrigue! … 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 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 at lunch and have a book talk.”—Katie

  “I was reading some historical fiction books about the late 1800s and I think it is amazing how little women really knew about their bodies and stuff like that. I’m glad that now we as girls have books like yours to read so we aren’t always clueless.”—Amy

  *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.

  The Agony of Alice

  BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR

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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 © 1985 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

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  Book design by Mike Rosamilia

  The text for this book is set in Berkeley Oldstyle Book.

  0311 OFF

  This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition May 2011

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds

  The agony of Alice / by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. —1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eleven-year-old, motherless Alice decides she needs a gorgeous role model who does everything right; and when placed in homely Mrs. Plotkin’s class she is greatly disappointed until she discovers it’s what people are inside that counts.

  ISBN 978-0-68
9-31143-7 (hc)

  1. Children’s stories, America. [1. Teacher-student relationships—Fiction] I. Title.

  PZ7.N24Ag 1985 [Fic]—dc19

  85007957

  ISBN 978-1-4424-2363-3 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-4424-6576-3 (eBook)

  To my sister Norma

  Contents

  One: Kissing Tarzan

  Two: Agnes Under the Mattress

  Three: Lips Together, Teeth Apart

  Four: Plod-kin

  Five: Hiding Out at the Melody Inn

  Six: Looking After Lester

  Seven: The Maharaja’s Magic

  Eight: Bringing Up the Rear

  Nine: Dinner With Marilyn

  Ten: The Bramble Bush, With Branches Thick

  Eleven: Love

  Twelve: Eating Squid

  Thirteen: Flushing on the Capitol Limited

  Fourteen: Aunt Sally, Sir

  Fifteen: Something for the Orphans

  Sixteen: Who Got the Globe

  1

  KISSING TARZAN

  THE SUMMER BETWEEN FIFTH AND SIXTH grades, something happens to your mind. With me, the box of Crayolas did it—thirty-two colors including copper and burgundy. I was putting them in a sack for our move to Silver Spring when I remembered how I used to eat crayons in kindergarten.

  I didn’t just eat them, either. One day when I was bored I stuck two crayons up my nostrils, then leaned over my desk and wagged my head from side to side like an elephant with tusks, and the teacher said, “Alice McKinley, what on earth are you doing?”

  Thinking about those crayons and that teacher was so embarrassing that it made my palms tingle, my neck hot. Surely, I thought, it was about the weirdest thing I’d ever done. And then, after I’d packed the Crayolas, I found a copy of a poem I had written in third grade:

  There are lots of drops in the ocean,

  There are lots of stars in the blue;

  But in the whole state of Maryland,

  There’s only one person like you.

  I stopped worrying about the crayons and cringed at the poem. Do you know who I wrote it for? My father? My grandfather? Aunt Sally? The mailman, when he retired. I hardly even knew him.

  The reason I worry about my mind is that as soon as I remembered the mailman, I wondered if he was still alive, and somewhere, deep inside me, I sort of hoped he wasn’t. I didn’t want anybody remembering that poem. I wondered if my kindergarten teacher was alive, too. If I met her on the street tomorrow, would she still remember me as the girl with Crayolas up her nose? Those were absolutely the two most ridiculous things I had ever done in my life, I thought, and then I remembered this big piece of cardboard back in fourth grade and this boy named Donald Sheavers.

  Donald was stupid and good-looking, and I liked him a lot.

  “Come over and watch television, Donald,” I’d say, and he’d come over and watch television. Any channel I wanted.

  “I guess it’s time for you to go home, Donald,” I’d say later, and he’d go home.

  I’ll bet if I’d ever said, “Wear your clothes backward, Donald,” he’d have worn his clothes backward. But I never asked him to do that because, as I said, I liked him. Then I found this big sheet of cardboard.

  It came in a box with our Sears washing machine. Dad couldn’t fix the old one, so we got a new deluxe model, and I got to keep the cardboard.

  I was lying out on the grass in the shade on my cardboard looking up at the box elder and I remembered this old Tarzan movie I’d seen on TV. Tarzan and Jane were on a raft on the river, and they were kissing. They didn’t know it, but the raft was getting closer and closer to a waterfall, and just before it went over the rocks, Tarzan grabbed hold of a vine, picked up Jane, and swung to shore. That was all. But suddenly I wanted to know what it felt like to be kissed on a raft with my life in danger. That’s when I thought of Donald.

  “Donald,” I said when he came over, “you want to be in the movies?”

  “Yes,” said Donald. He even looked like Tarzan. He had dark hair and brown eyes, and he went around all summer in cutoffs.

  I told him about the raft and the waterfall, and I sort of rushed through the part about kissing. “We can’t do it,” Donald said. “We don’t have a river.”

  “We’ll just have to pretend that, Donald.”

  “We don’t have a vine,” he told me.

  I got a rope and tied it to a branch in the box elder.

  I was afraid he’d complain about the kissing next, but when the rope was ready, he said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  And suddenly I thought of all kinds of things we had to do first. We had to be chased through the forest by pygmies, and then there was this quicksand and an alligator, but finally we made it to the raft, and Donald came crashing down beside me. I pushed him away.

  “You have to get on the raft gently, Donald,” I told him.

  He came running again, grabbed the rope, and lowered himself onto the raft, but this time I rolled off.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Donald.

  “I don’t know,” I said uncomfortably. “I think we have to start with the pygmies and sort of work into it.”

  We went back to the chase scene through the forest. Donald climbed the box elder and pounded his chest and bellowed. We leaped over the quicksand and over the alligator, and there we were on the raft once more.

  This time I got the giggles. Donald did his part perfectly, but just when he got close enough that I could smell his breath—Donald always had a sort of stale bubble gum smell—I rolled off again.

  For a whole afternoon we tried it. We added cannibals and burning torches and a gorilla, but somehow I could not get through the kissing. Donald laughed and thought it was a joke, but I was disgusted with myself.

  It came to an end very quickly. I decided that I could not have any dinner that evening unless I got through the kissing scene. This is it, I thought as we ran through the forest with the gorilla grabbing at our heels. Donald swung around in the box elder yelping and beating his chest. Then the quicksand, the alligator, and the cardboard. Suddenly: “Donald!” came my father’s voice from the side window.

  Donald rolled one way, and I rolled the other. The next thing I knew my dad had come outside and was standing there in the grass.

  “I don’t think you should be doing that with Al,” said my father. (I’m the only girl in our family, but he still calls me “Al.”) “You’d better go home now, Donald, and the next time you come over, think of something better to do.”

  “Okay,” said Donald.

  All I did was sit there and stare at my knees. I didn’t even tell Dad that the kissing was my idea, so Donald got the blame.

  We didn’t play Tarzan anymore that summer, and I never did get kissed on the raft. When school started and Donald passed me in the hall, sometimes he’d thump his chest and grin, just to tease me, but for the most part I forgot all about it. He became interested in basketball and I got interested in books, and I probably went through fifth grade without thinking of Donald more than a couple of times.

  That same afternoon, however, when I was getting ready to move and I dropped the Crayolas in the sack, I started remembering all the embarrassing things I had ever done in my life. The mailman might have died and my kindergarten teacher may have passed away, but Donald Sheavers was alive and well.

  I began to wish that he wasn’t. I didn’t really want him to die or anything, just maybe quietly disappear so that the only person left who would remember any of the dumb things I’d ever done would be me. It was bad enough remembering them myself. Exactly one hour later, when I was packing my tinfoil collection, I heard that Donald Sheavers had fallen off his bike and had a brain concussion.

  I didn’t eat any dinner. I remembered that Donald was Catholic and I thought maybe if I prayed to one of the saints it might help. I thought maybe women saints helped girls and men saints helped boys, but the only saints I could think of were Saints Mary and Bernadette. Then I thoug
ht of a Saint Bernard dog. I figured there must be a Saint Bernard, so I sat down in a corner of my room and prayed. I told him that if I had ever let one little wish reach heaven about Donald Sheavers disappearing to please, please, disregard it and let Donald live.

  “Sure you don’t want any supper, Al?” Dad asked, but I said no.

  “You worried about Donald Sheavers?”

  I nodded. The next day when I didn’t come down to breakfast, Dad called Mrs. Sheavers, and she said that Donald was better. In fact, she said, it would be perfectly fine if we went to the hospital to see him, so I bought a Hershey bar and Dad drove me over. I closed my eyes and prayed to Saint Bernard one last time. I thanked him for letting Donald live and asked if he could please fix it so that playing Tarzan back in fourth grade would be erased forever from Donald’s mind.

  The nurse directed us to room 315, and we went in. Donald was sitting up with a bandage around his forehead, sipping a milk shake. He was still good-looking, even with the bandage. Donald grinned at me, set the milk shake down, and just as I was about to hand him the candy bar, he pounded his chest and gave a Tarzan yell.

  I found out later that there are a lot of Saint Bernards, so I figure my prayer just got to heaven and sat around in the dead-letter box.

  The movers came the next morning, and we left Takoma Park for Silver Spring, a few miles away. I was glad. I wanted to start a whole new life with different people. But we had only been in the new house five hours and fifteen minutes before I embarrassed my whole family.

  2

  AGNES UNDER THE MATTRESS

  WE’VE MOVED THREE TIMES IN MY LIFE, BUT I only remember two times. We moved from Tennessee to Chicago before I was born, from Chicago to Takoma Park, Maryland, when I was six, and from Takoma Park to Silver Spring when I was eleven. I’ve never had many relatives around. Most of mine are in Tennessee, and we don’t visit unless someone dies or gets married or something.

  I had an Uncle Charlie who married when he was fifty-seven and died two days later. We’d just driven back to Maryland and had to turn around and go to Tennessee again to bury him. At the funeral dinner there was this sort of weird-looking cake that they called lemon sponge, but I knew it was just leftover wedding cake with sauce on it.