Читать книгу An Unrehearsed Desire - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 3

The prickly sensation started in the back of Alice’s throat, just a tickle really, a sort of hot, dry spot that swallowing didn’t soothe. Oh, please, she thought, don’t let me be getting sick again. Alice got sick frequently, not enough to be branded a weirdo like Arthur Spivak, a penicillin-smelling boy in her class who her mother said was “nearly translucent with illness,” and whose pale temples were marbled with blue veins, but certainly Alice caught more than her fair share of colds and earaches and bouts of tonsillitis.

Alice was playing Mousetrap in Felicity Moreland’s rec room. A room you were supposed to be allowed to wreck, Alice thought, whenever she heard the word, although of course that wasn’t true at all. It was a dingy, chilly room with a gray, poured-concrete floor in the basement of the Moreland’s three-bedroom red-brick bungalow. There were metal poles in the middle of the room that Alice assumed held up the house, and earlier Felicity had hung upside down from one of them and dared Alice to do the same, but she’d said no, because she was afraid of falling and cracking her head open. What an idiot she’d look like if that happened. Felicity now rolled the dice and moved her mouse. She collected a piece of cheese.

“Ha!” she said. “Your turn.”

Alice landed on a dog bone space and so her turn was over. She clicked her tongue at the back of her mouth. It was sore, but not too sore. She decided to ignore it.

Felicity had two younger brothers and their belongings – GI Joes and hockey sticks, balls of various sizes, sports socks and mutilated toy soldiers – were strewn everywhere. The house smelled different than Alice’s house. It smelled of slightly goatish, sweaty boys and fried food. When Alice went to the bathroom, she sniffed the pink towels and wrinkled her nose. Mildew. Sour milk. Perhaps this was what boys brought into a house. Alice herself was an only child, and how so many people got along in one space baffled her. Even when it was just Alice and her mother in their house, which was a split-level and larger than this house, it often seemed like there was no place to go to get away from each other. There was always a sense of the other, somewhere in the kitchen, or the bathroom, or down in the TV room.

Felicity landed on a build spot and added the rickety stairs to the mousetrap. Felicity and Alice were not the best of friends, not even good friends. Felicity belonged to a group of girls who played sports and always had dirty fingernails and scabs on their knees. They raced bicycles and built go-carts out of their old wagons and milk crates. They roller-skated wildly down the hill on Elm Street, howling and shrieking, with no thought to on-coming traffic. They disobeyed their parents and did not fear punishment.

Alice wasn’t part of any particular group, although she very much wished this was not so. She longed to be part of a group, but it wasn’t Felicity’s group she coveted. Alice wanted to be part of the group of girls led by Kathy Baldwin and Carol McKay. These girls wore clothes not made by their mothers and not handed down by older sisters or cousins. They were so sure of themselves, with their shining hair and straight teeth. Pretty and popular and utterly unobtainable, they sat in a huddled group at the farthermost corner of the cafeteria, whispering, and laughing. And they played far more dangerous games than go-carts and field hockey, such as twirling around and around and around while holding their breath, and doing this until they passed out, sprawled on the grass with their legs apart and their eyes half closed, still and unselfconscious as if they were drugged. Sometimes they locked themselves in the girl’s bathroom together and wouldn’t let anyone else in. It was rumoured that they looked at each other’s privates, and examined each other’s chests for signs of breasts. They disobeyed their parents because they were sure of being able to squirm their way out of consequences. Boys became fools around them, cartwheeling, skateboarding, and showing off one minute, punching each other and cursing the next.

Life was like that – one group or the other, or none at all, like Alice, who sat during lunch by herself sometimes, or with other girls who weren’t part of any group, but would never admit to being a group themselves. What would they be? The girls who nobody wanted? It was a peripheral life, as if they were the barnacles they learned about in science class, hanging onto the edge of things, hoping maybe someday the more attractive cluster would envelop them by the power of sheer proximity. Or chance. Or fate. Or there were days like today, when no one much seemed to be around and so by default Alice and Felicity had floated together in the playground until, somewhat reluctantly, Felicity had invited Alice back to her place, to hang out, she said.

Felicity rummaged in the cardboard game lid. “I don’t see it,” she said.

“What?” asked Alice.

“The stupid shoe that’s supposed to tip the bucket that rolls the marble down the rickety stairs. I’ll never trap the stupid mouse.”

“Oh, well,” said Alice.

“I hate living with boys,” said Felicity.

Alice said she had to go to the bathroom.

“Again?” Felicity said.

In the bathroom, Alice swallowed and put her fingers on her throat under her jawbone. Little marble-sized swellings there. She opened her mouth wide and looked in the mirror. The light was at the wrong angle. She couldn’t see if her throat looked sick. She felt awfully tired. She felt hollow inside.

When she went back downstairs, Felicity had turned the television on. The Flying Nun’s feet were just coming off the ground. “Dumb,” said Felicity and she turned off the set. She asked Alice what she wanted to do now.

“I don’t know,” said Alice. “Maybe I should go.” The truth was that her throat felt like it was full of razor blades, but she didn’t want to tell Felicity, who played street hockey with her brothers and never wore shin guards and never complained about bruised shins and cuts and skinned knees.

Felicity shrugged.

Even the short walk from Felicity’s house to Alice’s took an enormous effort. The October wind sliced through her and she shivered. Her legs actually felt weak. Weak-kneed, jelly-legged, spaghetti-legs. She could have cried as she reached her driveway, and then the porch steps, and then the door knob. When she stepped inside the vestibule and called out to her mother that she was home, the air seemed suddenly too hot and her head spun. She smelled roasting meat, but the smell was flat, unappetizing, cloying. Her mother called out to her from the TV room in the basement. Voices from the television reached Alice, but they sounded funny, like someone playing with the volume control, turning it up and down, so that the sound came in waves.

She went up to her room and lay on the bed without taking off her coat or her shoes even. She just looked at the mauve walls, her mother’s favourite colour. Alice’s collection of stuffed animals and figurines decorated the white corner shelves, held up on the wall by metal brackets. The white horse her grandfather had brought her on his last trip reared up on its legs and you could see its private parts underneath. It was a very realistic horse, even if it was plastic. And the little mouse with a real kernel of corn between its paws, the hedgehog, the monkey, the German shepherd, the troll with the bright pink hair. It hurt her eyes to look at that hair. She swallowed. Shattered glass and turpentine. The flannel pillowcase smelled so good, like lavender. It was sweet to lie there, almost like floating.

“What are you doing?” Her mother, Cynthia, stood in the doorway. Little pieces of thread and a tuft of pink fabric clung to her white blouse. She must have been sewing while she watched the television. “You’ve got mud on your shoes! You’re dirtying the carpet!” Her mother’s eyes snapped with disapproval. Floors in general were highly important to Alice’s mother, and none more so than carpeted ones. Her mother was a small woman, barely five foot two, but she gave the impression of taking up a great deal of space. She was the sort of woman who claimed territory like an animal claims it, leaving mysterious scents and traces behind, so that it was clear to all passers-by that it was hers.

“I don’t feel good,” said Alice.

These were magic words, for Alice’s mother was at her best in a health crisis. She put the back of her cool fingers against Alice’s forehead. They smelled of Jergen’s hand lotion.

“You have a fever. I’ll get the thermometer. Get out of those clothes and into your pyjamas.”

This was stern stuff, for it was only five o’clock. It was forbidden to appear at the dinner table in pyjamas. She was being sent to bed. Oh, she thought, I don’t mind. And then she thought, I must be really sick.

Alice took off her clothes and meant to hang them up but then didn’t; she simply put them on her dresser. Her mother would forgive her. Her mother would make an exception. Exceptions were one of the benefits of being sick. She chose her blue flannel pyjamas, the ones with the flowers on them, the groovy ones, like the flowers Goldie Hawn had painted on her stomach on Laugh In.

When her mother came back, she said, “Let me look in your mouth,” and tilted Alice’s head towards the light so she could see inside. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I don’t like the look of your tongue.”

“My tongue?”

“It doesn’t look right at all. Does it hurt?”

“No. My throat hurts.”

“I’ll get you an aspirin. I don’t like the looks of this.” This was gratifying, as was the concern on her mother’s face, altering her normally somewhat severe expression. “I don’t think you’ll be going to school tomorrow.”

Alice nearly smiled. Staying home and having ice cream for lunch and watching The Dick Van Dyke Show and getting to read from The Girl’s Own Annual – a special treat since it was an old and precious book her mother had had when she was just Alice’s age – was a pretty good deal, as her father said. “You’re getting a pretty good deal there,” was what he said to anything he approved of, from the price of their new Ford Falcon, to those times when Alice was permitted to stay up past her bedtime to watch a special program on television. Which is when she remembered about tonight.

“What about Daniel Boone?” It was Thursday night. Her mother permitted her to stay up later, an entire half hour, to see Fess Parker as Daniel Boone.

Her mother shook the thermometer. “What about it? Open.”

“Can I watch it?”

“We’ll see.”

While they waited for the thermometer to register the extent of Alice’s illness, Cynthia picked up the discarded clothes, sorted them for wash or further wear, and put what was dirty in the clothes hamper in Alice’s closet and what was still clean, she folded, and put away in the drawers. She polished away a smudge on the mirror with the cuff of her blouse. Alice’s mother could never pass by a thing out of place. Kitchen cupboards left open were the undoing of her. “Why can’t you close them when you’ve finished,” she’d say. “They look so messy.” “If you pick things up as you go along,” she’d say, “then you’ll have half your work done for you.” “You’ll learn,” she’d say. “When you’re older. You have to conserve yourself.” A woman of few friends and contempt for “joiners” as she called them, Alice’s mother held the world at bay by swatting a dust cloth at it.

The thermometer clicked against Alice’s teeth. Her mother removed it and frowned. “Oh dear,” she said, and put her hand against her Alice’s cheek. The fingers were hard and icy against Alice’s flushed skin. “I’m going to get that aspirin.”

When Alice’s father came in from work, she heard her mother talking to him in the low voice she used for serious matters.

“I’m sure it’s just another bout of tonsillitis,” said her father.

More murmuring from her mother.

“You overreact,” said her father.

“I do not overreact,” said her mother. “You are under-involved.”

“Don’t start, Cynthia. I just got home.”

“I suspect you started before you got here.”

“Oh, come on now, don’t be like that,” said her father, and there was a moment’s quiet, just the sound of someone being kissed. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

“We’ll see,” said her mother.

Her father came up to see her. He still wore his overcoat, and he brought with him the smell of oncoming snow and the metallic scent from inside the commuter train. “What’s my girl up to?” he said.

“I’m sick.”

“I can see that.” He bent to kiss her and the odour of scotch and peppermints and tobacco floated on his breath. “Ah well, tomorrow’s Friday, maybe you’ll just stay home. How about that?”

“My throat hurts.”

“Ice cream for dinner?”

“Sure. What about Daniel Boone?”

By seven thirty, she was set up on the couch, in her mother’s usual place, under a mound of blankets, with a big pillow under her head. If it wasn’t for the pain in her throat, it would be a very good night. Her father sat in his chair, leafing through the paper. They never talked much in the evening. Her mother generally sat in the corner where Alice now sat, next to the good light and the side table, which was covered in an assortment of straight pins in two pin cushions, some with coloured heads, spools of thread, pinking shears, measuring tape, dress patterns in packages with drawings of the finished dresses on the front, a little hooked instrument that ripped out errant stitches, and an ivory nail buffer with a chamois skin that had been Alice’s grandmother’s. The last time she had sat here, Alice had, for reasons mysterious even to her, cut a few things with scissors – the fringe on the sofa cover, some of the paper patterns, and lastly, and most inexplicably, a hunk of her own bangs. The latter she cut so short it looked as though something had taken a bite out of her hair. She got into a lot of trouble for that and her mother had hit her so hard with the hair brush that she broke the handle. When her teacher asked about the hairdo, Alice said her mother had done it.

Her father put down his paper. “Look at those rosy cheeks,” he said. “Picture of health, right kiddo?”

Alice smiled, but the truth was she did not feel anything like the picture of health. In fact, she wasn’t completely sure she even cared much about Daniel Boone and his faithful Indian friend, Mingo. She knew, however, that it was important to her father that she not be too sick, or if she was, not to show it too much.

Alice’s father, Andrew Cavanaugh Hastings, was a man who did not show pain. He had once fallen off a ladder that tipped as he leaned out too far from the roof while putting up Christmas lights. He lay on the ground for a moment, and then rose, brushed off his pant legs and said he was fine. It was not until four days later, when he was walking around all crinked over, that his wife had insisted he go to the doctor. Three broken ribs. When Alice had asked if it hurt, he’d said, “Only when I sneeze, so I’m not going to sneeze any more.” And he’d winked at her. Mr. Hastings also suffered from ulcers, although he never spoke of it and Alice and her mother only knew they were bothering him when he took to eating more ice cream than usual.

Alice’s mother, on the other hand, made quite a drama of trauma, as her father said, using a phoney British accent to make it rhyme nicely. The traumas, though, were rarely Cynthia’s. Cynthia could sniff out a neighbour’s broken leg, or a dented fender, or a case of food poisoning, or a pending divorce with the acuity of a bloodhound. If she kept the world at bay and preferred to distance herself from the scrutiny of friends and relations, barricaded behind a wall of floor polish and fabric softener, she was downright avaricious when it came to other people’s bad luck. She was delighted with any opportunity to get into someone else’s house, under the pretext of delivering a tuna casserole or doing a little tidying up for someone under the weather, either emotional or physical, and was never happier than when she was caring for her own sick child. “You are my very own,” she’d murmur, “my wee girl.” And it was tempting to just lie beneath the milky kindness of those words, even if Alice did sometimes feel hurt when it seemed her mother was disappointed at her eventual recovery.

Her mother had gone off during a commercial break to consult the family medical encyclopaedia on Alice’s present condition. When she returned, she held the book out in front of her, open as an offertory, and she walked with the solemnity of a celebrant. Her face was serious, the eyes slightly wider than normal, the lips firm with courage and determination.

“What?” asked her father.

“I think it could be serious,” said her mother and she transferred the weight of the book to one hand while the other went to her mouth.

“It’s the flu,” said her father.

“Look how red her face is. Alice,” said her mother, coming toward her slowly, careful, as though she might bolt at any moment. “I need to see if you have a rash. It’s all right. I just need to look.”

Alice pulled down the blanket and, with slightly trembling fingers, her mother unbuttoned her pyjama top.

“Oh,” said her mother. “Oh, Andrew.”

There on Alice’s chest was indeed a rash. It looked like sunburn. Her mother lifted her arm. In the crease, there were darker streaks. “Pastia’s lines,” said Cynthia, with something like awe in her voice. “I know what it is,” she said.

“You’re scaring the girl,” said her father. “Stop it.”

In fact, Alice was a little scared, but she was also excited, even through the haze of fever, where everything looked a little further away than it was.

“Look for yourself,” said Cynthia. “Come and see.” She sat beside Alice with her hands clasped and a look of suffering resignation on her face.

Slowly, with accompanying grunting protest, her father approached and looked. He frowned. “Let me see that book,” he said, and then, when he had read what was on the page, “That can’t be right. She’s been inoculated, hasn’t she?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it. Such things happen.

“I don’t think so.”

Cynthia’s hands, still clasped, rose to just under her chin. “Scarlet fever,” she whispered.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” said her father, and shut the book, rather more forcefully than necessary.

Andrew, however, was wrong. It was indeed scarlet fever. The next day Dr. Baldwin confirmed the diagnosis, adding that because Alice had indeed been inoculated, it wasn’t as serious as it might otherwise have been. He prescribed antibiotics and bed rest.

“How long?” said Alice’s mother.

“Oh, I’d say about a week before the infection’s dealt with,” said Dr. Baldwin. He sat down behind his tidy desk and polished his perfectly round shiny head. “Probably a few weeks before the tonsils and glands go completely down.”

“A few weeks,” repeated Cynthia.

And so Alice was kept home from school, and fed milkshakes with a raw egg in them to keep up her strength and home made soups and toast and ice cream and chamomile tea. She took aspirin and antibiotics and throat lozenges. These medicines she kept beside her bed on the turntable of her portable blue record player, like a Lazy-Susan cupboard. She twirled the bottles around and around, the orange aspirins in their brown bottle, the bright yellow lozenges, the mentholated rub in the lovely blue jar to soothe her chest, even though she didn’t have a cough, and the bottle of mauve-ish liquid antibiotic that tasted so foul. Her mother gave her a green grape after each swallow of antibiotic, to wash the taste away. Alice read books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and an assortment of Nancy Drew novels. She watched Andy of Mayberry in the mornings and in the afternoons, she and her mother watched the matinee movie on channel twelve. She dozed while her mother watched Another World.

It was so nice, just her and her mother, passing the days like this. In the evenings, when her father came home from work and came to see her, she liked the way the visit felt formal. She imagined she was a little girl from Victorian times, like the pale heroine of a novel, or like little Colin from The Secret Garden. Her father sat by her bed and asked her how she was feeling. The first few days she said she was feeling pretty good and he said that was wonderful and gave her something he’d brought for her – a chocolate bar, or pack of gum, or a necklace made from candy. If she was allowed to go downstairs and watch television in the evening for an hour or two, cuddled up under the blankets, her father gave her a piggyback to bed, even though she was rather too old for such a thing. Sickness made it possible, her frailty, as her mother called it.

On the fifth day, he asked how she was feeling, she said, “not very much better, I’m afraid.”

“Oh?” said her father. “What’s the matter?”

“Well, I’m sick.”

“I know that. But why is it worse?” He looked annoyed, which is how he often looked if he was worried.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll have a relapse,” she said.

“You heard that from your mother,” her father said. “Did your teacher send you homework so you don’t fall behind?”

“I don’t think so,” Alice said, and she hoped not, because she would much rather read A Wrinkle in Time than study arithmetic any day.

“We’ll see about that,” said her father.

Later, she heard her parents arguing and she knew it was about her, but that didn’t seem like such a bad thing, to be at the centre like this.

The one disappointment was that no one came to visit her, but her mother assured her they would have if they could, but she was simply far too contagious and they didn’t want to put other children at risk, now did they?

“But did anyone deliver homework?” she said.

“You’re such a silly girl. Why would you want to work when you should be working on nothing more than getting better? Besides, you’re so smart, you’ll catch up in no time, when you go back to school.”

That made sense, for she was smart. Alice decided it was perfectly all right to give her energies over to getting better. That should be her focus, as her mother said. So, in between reading and television and snacks, she took naps and lay in bed watching the golden flutter of autumn leaves from the giant oak outside her window. She imagined she was in a glass snow-flake globe, floating in a thick, glossy sea, with gold flakes falling around her.

One night, when he father had carried her up to bed and tucked her in, he said, “Really, Peaches, how are you feeling?”

“Well, I don’t have much strength,” she said.

Her father sighed. He took her hand and held it firmly, patting it over and over. “Listen to me,” he said. “You have to fight, do you understand? You have to fight this thing.”

“It takes weeks,” said Alice.

“Punch it in the nose, kiddo,” said her father, and then he left, closing the door softly behind him.

Alice lay in the dark, wondering what he was talking about. She thought he should be more sympathetic, really.

It was more than three weeks by the end of the illness. Nearly a month, she thought when she woke one morning. I have been a true invalid. Then she thought, well, maybe just a little longer, and called her mother for some toast and tea.

At last, the day came when all the medicine was finished and her glands were down to normal and she was, to tell the truth, just a tiny bit restless. It was a Saturday afternoon and the sun was bright, even if the air was chilly. From the backyards, the voices of her schoolmates rose and fell in the melody of their game. There were no fences around any of the houses and the grassy squares became one long playground. Swing sets behind one house, jungle gym behind another, a tether-ball pole, a basketball net, and in between the rolling, leaf-scattered grass to leap about in, to roll in, to chase each other through. She heard Felicity’s voice, and maybe Carol’s. The sounds were a little foreign, but beckoning, full of resonance.

Alice sat at the kitchen table across from her father. He read the sports section, she read the funnies and did the word games. He lowered the paper and she noticed he hadn’t shaved this morning. “Sounds like a pack of coyotes out there,” he said.

“It’s a terrible noise,” said her mother, who was at the stove browning meat for tonight’s stew. The kitchen smelled of oregano and fat and pepper. “Alice’s friends,” Andrew said.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s her crowd,” said Cynthia.

“I know them. I think that’s Felicity.”

“Why don’t you go see?” said her father. “You’ve been cooped-up in here far too long.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Drew. She’s still convalescing.”

“I, I think I might like to.”

“Don’t feel pressured just because your father says things,”

“Cynthia, she looks like a little ghost. She needs some sun. A good run round will do her the world of good.”

“I’m going to go out. Just for a little while,” said Alice.

“I was going to make you some cinnamon toast,” said her mother. “And some tea.”

The voices were louder now and she could practically smell the sunshine. Her feet tingled. “I won’t be out for long and I can have it when I come back.”

“Well…”

“Please, please?”

“Go on, Alice. Go on,” said her father.

She was up and out of her chair in a flash. Quicker, really, than she’d thought possible. Suddenly she wanted movement, wanted to flex things. She twitched with it.

“Are you sure you’re up to it? Wear your jacket and scarf,” Cynthia called.

Alice rounded the corner of the house and caught sight of them – red and blue and green coats flashing against the dark leaf-tattered tree trunks at the back of the MacKay’s house, where the street, and the yards, dead-ended into forest.

“Hey,” she called, but of course, they couldn’t hear her. “It’s me, Alice.”

She set out at a trot, but in less than a minute she was winded, her legs tired. She wondered if maybe her mother was right, perhaps she wasn’t ready to be out yet, but her heart clenched at the thought of missing Kathy and Carol and even Felicity, whose voice she could clearly hear, louder than the rest, yelling out from between the trees. Things would be different now, she was sure. They would be interested in her since she had suffered this Terrible Illness, and come through it so bravely.

The air was rich with the scent of autumn, of burning leaves and the crisp freshness that foretells oncoming winter. It gave her energy and she walked a little, and ran a little, until she reached the edge of the woods.

“Hey,” she called.

The girls were by the streambed, which was low at this time of year. It was dappled with fallen leaves, gold and red against the slate-gray water and the stones. It was Kathy in the red coat, Carol in the blue. They looked like two painted boulders, hunkered down by the edge of the water. Felicity and the other girls were farther along into the woods, whooping and running, chasing each other with sticks.

“Hi,” said Alice again.

Kathy looked over her shoulder and nudged Carol. “Look who it is,” she said.

“What are you doing out?” said Carol. She brushed her long hair back over her shoulder, tucking it behind her ear.

“I’m all better.”

“No,” said Kathy.

The two girls stood up. Kathy was taller than Carol, but both their noses were perfectly pert and their teeth were straight. Kathy had red hair, as wavy as Carol’s was silken and straight. Even Kathy’s freckles were perfect.

“What are you doing?” said Alice. She smiled with every muscle in her face. She wanted to beam at them, to glow with them. She wondered what she had been doing in the house with her mother all these weeks, when here, right at the end of her street was this magic forest of possibilities. She felt like an elf, maybe, yes – like the three of them, even Felicity and the wild girls, were fairies in this wood, and that anything could happen.

“You can’t be around us,” said Carol, and she linked her arm through Kathy’s.

“What?” The smile on Alice’s face was heavy then, and so she let it droop. “Why?”

“Because you carry germs.” Carol giggled.

“Typhoid Mary, that’s what my mother calls you,” and Kathy giggled as well. “It means you aren’t safe to be around.”

The other girls, the wild girls, had stopped their whooping and hollering and come closer. Alice looked over her shoulder. They formed an unsmiling half circle behind her.

“I don’t carry germs. I’m better,” said Alice.

“We don’t want you here,” said Felicity, coming forward. She had a smear on her cheek and it looked like war paint to Alice. “I’m lucky I didn’t die, being around you, letting you in my house.”

“That’s stupid.” This wasn’t what was supposed to happen at all. Alice’s lower lip began to tremble. She imagined the conversations that had gone on at school these last three weeks. The whispering between Carol and Kathy.

Kathy took a few steps forward. “Go home, Alice. No one wants you around.”

“No.”

“I mean it, go home.” Kathy’s face flushed. She folded her arms across her chest and glared.

“I threw your homework in the garbage,” said Carol, and Alice couldn’t believe how proud of herself she sounded. “As if I’d bring it to your house! My mother said if Mrs. Sergeant wanted you to get your homework she could jolly well bring it to you herself.”

It was strange, and frightening, the way the other girls had gone quiet, as if they were waiting for something to happen, as if they were waiting to pounce. Alice’s heart was a rabbit in her chest, scrunched down and frozen, beating at twelve times normal.

“You’ll fail this year, you’ve missed so much. You’ll get held back and we won’t have to have you in our class again.”

A gust of wind swirled through the trees, and all around them, the golden leaves fluttered and danced. One struck Alice in the face and stuck there. It was cold and a little sharp. She brushed if off while the girls laughed. She would not cry, no matter what they said, she vowed she would not cry. She looked down at her mud-covered shoes. She had stepped into a boggy patch without noticing.

Someone poked her between the shoulder blades. She spun around. Felicity had come up behind her and now pointed her finger. “Scram,” she said.

Alice took a couple of steps back. She hadn’t meant to, she just did, out of shock. Were they actually going to beat her up, like boys? She turned around again, frightened now, of being surrounded. Carol, in her coat as blue as the coldest ice, stepped forward. She pushed Alice in the chest with both hands.

She had been so excited to see them. So pleased. So hopeful.

She’d been such an idiot, thinking they’d be happy to see her. When were they ever truly happy to see her? So smug in their stupid little groups.

Before Alice realized she was going to do it, she grabbed a hank of Carol’s hair. She wrapped it around in her fist and yanked. Carol screamed. The hair felt cool and soft, and so slippery Alice really had to mangle her fingers through it to keep hold. Her stomach churned and her skin was hot with a different sort of fever than the one she’d had before. Carol dug her fingernails into the back of Alice’s hand and yelled for her to let go. It was odd, how quiet the world had gone. Alice was surprised she was doing this. Carol’s fingernails hurt, but it didn’t matter. It made no difference whatsoever. In a detached sort of way, from behind the wall of her fury, she wondered what would happen. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was not going to let go of Carol’s hair until it came out of her head in a hunk. Kathy simply stood there with her mouth open. Carol looked so deeply surprised.

“Hey!” said Felicity, behind her. And then, “whoa!” with something very close to admiration.

In Alice’s head, she heard her father’s words. Fight this thing. Punch it in the nose, kiddo. She tightened her grip. She had never felt stronger.