Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

kids kept turning around saying, “Alice! You’re in the paper! You’re a celebrity!”
    I opened my copy to page three . The column was about five inches long, and the photograph was okay. I mean, I was smiling really big, but it wasn’t a fake smile; I didn’t look as though I were sitting on ice cubes or anything. I wished that the lock of hair down over my eyes had been tucked behind one ear instead, but it wasn’t so bad.
    It was a weekly feature called “Getting to Know . . .” and this time it said, “Getting to Know Alice McKinley.”
    Meet Alice, a seventh grader, who likes Language Arts and Life Science, but says that World Studies is only so-so. What this photo doesn’t show is that Alice has blondish hair, freckles, and stands about five foot two in her stocking feet, except that she was wearing Reeboks.
    â€œAl,” as her family calls her, lives with her father and brother, and moved here a year ago from Takoma Park. Chicago, before that. What she misses about Chicago is the lake. What she loves about Maryland is that we’re close to the ocean. So she’s not hard to please.
    Her favorite food is french-fried onions. Her favorite music is country rock. She hasn’t decided yet on a career—maybe a veterinarian, she says, or a basketball player. (You’ll have to grow a little, Alice, to do that!)
    So far she hasn’t joined any clubs; she just wants to look around and take her time. We think it won’t be long before she finds a lot to do here. We hope so, anyway. Welcome, Miss McKinley!
    I couldn’t believe that I came out sounding halfway intelligent and that the photo was okay. I couldn’t help grinning. The girls in back of me couldn’t believe it either.
    â€œI think they purposely choose an unknown,” one of them said. “You know, if they chose people everybody knew, there wouldn’t be any point in writing about them.”
    I didn’t care. Nothing could hurt me now. Even when I saw Elizabeth in the hall, and she said, “It’s a wonderful write-up, Alice, except for the photo.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with it?”
    â€œDidn’t you see ?” asked Elizabeth.
    â€œSee what?”
    Elizabeth unfolded her copy of the paper and pointed. “That poppy seed there between your teeth. It shows.”
    It wasn’t more than a dot—a speck. It could have been merely a flaw in the paper. It didn’t bother me at all.
    But as I went through the door in Language Arts, Denise Whitlock made a point of bumping my arm.
    â€œSoon,” she said. “SGSD.”

 
6
SGSD
    I FINALLY TOLD DAD AND LESTER ABOUT it. I guess I hadn’t wanted them to know that there was anything in junior high I couldn’t handle myself, but the middle of the next week at breakfast, when I ate only half a piece of toast for the third day in a row because my stomach hurt, Dad looked at me and said simply, “Al, what’s wrong?”
    There’s a certain way a father says that that makes your chin tremble and the corners of your mouth turn down, and I sat there trying not to bawl. Finally, though, I blurted it all out—about Denise and her gang, and the possibility that I would either get dunked in the toilets or have to sing to a crowd of fifty at the top of my lungs.
    â€œWell, Al,” Lester said from across the table where he was eating a slice of leftover pizza along with his Corn Chex, “it could be worse. You could sing to a crowd of fifty at the top of your lungs and get dunked in the toilet because of it.”
    â€œThat doesn’t help, Les,” Dad said, and turned to me. “All I can suggest, sweetheart, is that if it happens, carry it off with as much good humor as you can muster.”
    â€œDad, I c-can’t!” I stammered, and felt the tears. “The worse you sing the f-first verse, the more likely they’ll make you sing the second and