Alice Close Your Eyes Read Online Free

different. You’re a clever girl, Alice. Learn to use what you have.”
    She dismissed me after that, but called to me as I left the room.
    “Don’t mention any of this to your mother,” she said.
    The next day, and the days after that, I worried over the problem of Danny Kukal. He was the large centerpiece of a straggling army, and I was a loner, now more than ever. I had no ally, no rebuttal to what he’d gleefully hit upon as a successful series of taunts that the group repeated now and then, with gradual loss of interest, as at a joke that has played out. I kept my face still and thought about what Nana had said.
    On my way home from school about a week later, I stopped in front of the Kukals’ double-wide. The family dog came rushing up to edge of his pen, broken teeth bared, snapping and growling as he did every day. He was junkyard ugly, a bad-tempered nuisance with a grizzled brown coat and one missing ear. All the neighborhood kids hated and feared Schultzie. Everyone but Danny Kukal. He was proud to be the only one the dog didn’t bite.
    “Hey, Schultz,” he would croon, tossing down his backpack after school. “Hey, Schultzie, I saved you a cookie.”
    Danny really loved that dog.
    That afternoon, most of the boys were at baseball practice, so the house stood empty. No car in the driveway, no bikes in the street.
    Learn to use what you have, Alice.
    I went around the side of the dog pen and sat down in the grass with my back to the fence. The dog made repeated runs at me, barking dementedly, snarling with his muzzle stuck through the chain links. For several minutes I sat quietly, braiding strands of grass like hair, and let him carry on. When the barking turned to grumbling, I took out what was left of my ham sandwich, broke off a piece and fed it to him carefully, keeping my fingers out of reach and avoiding his filmy eye. He devoured it with grunts and wet snorts, slapping his nose with his wide pink tongue. A bite at a time I fed him all I had, followed by a few leftover chips I was saving for an after-school snack.
    He ate it all, thinking he’d made a friend.
    That night, after my mother and Nana went to bed, I snuck into the laundry room and found Nana’s rat poison. I mixed it with a gob of peanut butter, made a sandwich and stowed it in my backpack.
    I thought about the sandwich all day. Several times when the teacher spoke to me I didn’t hear her, and during the morning’s math test I thought I would be sick and had to run without permission to the girls’ room, where I stayed until the teacher came to get me.
    At lunch I took the sandwich out and looked at it. Sniffed it. Turned it over in my hands.
    “You should eat that,” Danny called from across the cafeteria. “Maybe you’ll get fat. Maybe you’ll get boobs like your mom.” And then, “Would take a lot of sandwiches, though.”
    The boys hooted and carried on, chanting. Eat it, eat it. I didn’t look up. Just kept turning the sandwich over in my hands. Eat it, eat it, eat it .
    After school I walked alone to the Kukals’ house and sat down at the far end of Schultzie’s pen. This time the dog didn’t bark as much. He put his muzzle through the pen and flapped his tongue at me.
    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I rolled up the sandwich and stuffed it through the chain-link fence.
    The poison didn’t take effect immediately the way I thought it would. At first the horrible old mutt rolled his eyes almost comically, nipped and growled at his stomach as though he was angry at whatever was happening inside him. He was so ridiculous about it that I began to smile, with the beginnings of a sort of relieved remorse bubbling in my chest. The stupid dog was too tough and mean to die. This was a lame attempt on my part. I’d let it go and find some other way to get even with Danny Kukal.
    But then Schultzie began to cry. The comical expression on his face became a grimace, freakishly exaggerated with the whites of his eyes