Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page A

rally is, see, is where they introduce the members of the basketball team, and everybody cheers, and then they tell you how important it is for everybody to go to the next game. The cheerleaders come out onthe floor to teach you a few yells, the band plays the school song again, and then everybody sings it. Everybody but me, of course. I just mouthed the words and nobody cared. I was going to appear in the newspaper, and I couldn’t even sing, and nobody cared! It was wonderful.
    When the assembly was over, though, and we were all crowding out the door, I was busy talking to Elizabeth and accidentally bumped into the girl on the other side of me. It was Denise. Denise Whitlock.
    â€œSorry,” I said.
    She frowned and rubbed her arm where my notebook had scraped.
    â€œSorry,” I said again.
    Denise smiled then, but it wasn’t a real smile; sort of a “poor you” kind of look. She waited until I had moved slightly ahead of her, and then she said, “SGSD.”
    â€œWhat?” I said, turning, not knowing if she was swearing or talking to me.
    She just laughed, and the other three girls with her laughed too.
    â€œWhat did she mean, ‘SGSD’?” I asked Pamela.
    â€œI don’t know. She’s weird. Forget her,” said Pamela.
    I think I would have forgotten about it if I hadn’t seenthose same initials scribbled on the blackboard in math class, down in one corner, and Denise isn’t even in that class. It was when I saw it scribbled on a locker, though, and then on the sidewalk in front of the flagpole, that I got a little worried.
    â€œWhat do you suppose it means?” I asked some of my other friends, but no one seemed to know, not even Patrick.
    In the cafeteria the next day, Denise and her girlfriends were laughing, looking around and whispering the way they do, and suddenly they started chanting, “S-G-S-D, S-G-S-D,” and they laughed again. People turned and looked at them and went on eating, but a few chanted it along with them. It gave me the creeps.
    And then, after school, Elizabeth had the answer. She told us on the bus going home. Her eyes were huge as we squeezed in beside her on the very back seat.
    â€œI asked a girl in P.E., an eighth grader,” she said breathlessly, “and she told me that every fall, the upper classmen pick one certain day and call it ‘Seventh-Grade Sing Day’—SGSD—and on that day they can stop any seventh grader in the halls and ask him to sing the school song. If he can’t, he gets dunked in the water fountain, if he’s lucky; in the toilets, if he’s not.”
    I felt as though someone had just told me I’d be executed.
    â€œWhen?” I asked. “I’ll stay home! I’ll be sick!”
    â€œPeople don’t find out until they get to school,” Elizabeth said, chewing her lip. “They never tell you in advance.”
    â€œThe teachers just let them do it?” I choked.
    â€œIt’s against the rules, this girl said, but the faculty isn’t too strict about it. Sometimes the principal gets on the loud speaker and says there will be no dunking, but there is anyway. Teachers can’t be everywhere at once.”
    I stared at Pamela, then Elizabeth. “What are we going to do?” I bleated.
    â€œLearn the school song!” said Elizabeth. “Sometimes they let you off with just one verse, but sometimes they ask you to sing all three. And they always make you sing it at the top of your lungs, with everyone looking. I guess it’s like an initiation.”
    I knew then what it was like to live on death row. There were rumors that SGSD would be the following Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, but the days came and went and it never happened. I began to think that maybe this year they were going to let it slide.
    On Friday the school newspaper came out, the issue with my picture on it. The teacher passed the papers out inhomeroom, and