Alice Alone Read Online Free

the countryside because she thought maybe she could learn how serious the relationship is.”
    “Well, now, how am I supposed to know that? ” Dad shot back. “If a woman asks me if there are as many sheep in England as the postcards makethem out to be, how am I supposed to know she’s really asking about Sylvia?”
    Lester laughed. “Because the woman’s had a major crush on you since day one,” he said.
    “Major, major! ” I added. “Dad, if you ever asked Janice Sherman to marry you, she’d be in a bridal gown by six that evening.”
    “You two are exaggerating,” Dad said. “Janice may have had a mild interest in me at one time, but she’s dated a number of men over the years.”
    “Mostly music instructors there at the Melody Inn just to make you jealous,” I told him.
    “Nonsense,” said Dad. “Anyway, Marilyn seemed quite happy about it.” He smiled. “What she said was, ‘It’ll be nice to have someone sharing your pillow again, Mr. M., won’t it?’ Now in my day I wouldn’t have dared say something like that to my boss.”
    “That’s Marilyn!” said Lester, and all three of us laughed.
    And then I did the stupidest thing. With all this talk of sharing pillows, I brought up the coed sleepover. “Well, guess what I’m going to do on Saturday? I’m going to a coed sleepover,” I said, my brain on vacation.
    And without missing a beat, Dad said, “Over my dead body.”
    “Everyone’s going to be there—the whole gang.”
    “Everyone but you. I don’t care if the Pope and all his cardinals will be there. You are not going to a coed sleepover. I never heard of such a dumb idea,” Dad said.
    “Al, I never went to a coed sleepover,” Lester said, siding with Dad.
    I couldn’t believe that things could go downhill so fast. One minute we’d all been eating fried rice and talking about Dad’s engagement, and the next minute the bottom had dropped out of my world.
    I had promised myself that when I started high school I was going to act more mature. When Dad and I disagreed about something, I was going to discuss it with him calmly. No more breaking into tears and running upstairs to slam my door. So what did I do? Break into tears. All I could think of was that everyone would be there— Patrick would be there, probably—and I wouldn’t.
    “I can’t believe you!” I sobbed. “Y-you don’t know anything about it, either of you. You just have these knee-jerk reactions, and think that just because a bunch of kids are in sleeping bags, something’s going to happen.”
    My outburst took us all by surprise, I guess. We’d all been feeling mellow, and now this. But if I wasn’t sleeping on the floor next to Patrick, who would be?
    “Al,” Dad said, trying to sound reasonable. “What adults in their right minds would allow a bunch of fourteen-year-old boys and girls to spend the night together? Think! ”
    “Churches do it! Libraries do it! It’s no big deal,” I told him, wiping my eyes and trying to sound more grown up. “All you can think about is sex! Everyone simply brings a sleeping bag and we watch TV and eat popcorn and talk and play cards, and then everyone goes to sleep in his own sleeping bag. Do you actually think some guy is going to crawl into a girl’s bag with a dozen other kids lying only two feet away?”
    “At two o’clock in the morning in a dark room? Yep!” put in Lester.
    I turned on him then. “Karen said her church group had one and they all got up the next morning and scrubbed down the pews.”
    “What’d they do the night before? Have a food fight?” Lester asked.
    “No! It was a work project, but they started with a sleepover. Mark said the public library had one when he was in sixth grade, and the librarians slept right there with the kids.”
    Dad sighed. “So what adult is going to sleep on the floor with you ?”
    “Karen’s mom, I suppose.”
    “Where’s her father?”
    “They’re divorced.”
    “Al, if you are going to be