Reluctantly Alice Read Online Free Page A

her.
    â€œWell, sometimes it’s nice just to have people in for dinner,” Janice said.
    â€œNope, just my friends,” I said, glad I could be honest. I sort of edged toward the door.
    â€œOh, what a shame!” said Janice. “What did your dad do all week? Swim a lot?”
    â€œNo, he doesn’t swim much,” I said. “Mostly he just read and listened to music and stuff.” I knew it was the “and stuff” that bothered her.
    â€œJust kept to himself with all those people around?” Janice kept quizzing me. “Never even went visiting once?”
    How could I answer that? If I said yes, she’d want to know whom he visited, and she already suspected. If I saidno, I’d be lying. So I just didn’t say anything. Not a word. I pretended I had a Band-Aid on my lips.
    â€œI thought so,” said Janice quietly, and left the room.
    Well, I told myself, she can be upset with me if she wants, but I’m not angry at her. Actually, I knew it wasn’t me she was upset with, anyway, but Dad. Yet she couldn’t tell him because he didn’t suspect how she felt, and even if he did, he was her boss. So I could still say I had gone through my first week of seventh grade friends with everybody, the whole world.
    I really liked the idea—getting through the year without a single enemy, everybody liking Alice McKinley. It would feel good not to have one person against me, like Pamela was for a while back in sixth grade when she had the leading role in the class play, I had to be the bramble bush, and I pulled her hair onstage. Or the way Elizabeth was mad at all of us for a while last summer when her boyfriend broke up with her and she felt left out. From now on I was going to try very, very hard to get along with absolutely everybody.
    I had no idea, however, what was ahead.

 
3
SLEEPING OVER
    THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, ALL THREE OF us—Pamela, Elizabeth, and I—were a little amazed we’d survived the first two weeks of junior high. After making the mistake the first day of asking a ninth grader where the girls’ gym was and being sent to the faculty lounge, finding out that the signs had been reversed on the boys’ and girls’ restrooms up on second, and even after my falling down the stairs and sitting on a doughnut, we were still alive to talk about it.
    â€œLet’s have a sleepover,” Elizabeth said on the bus going home. And then, as soon as we nodded our heads, she added, “We had it at my house last time.”
    â€œWe had it at mine the time before,” Pamela reminded us.
    There was only one possible response to that: “We can have it at mine,” I told them.
    â€œFor dinner or after?” Pamela asked.
    â€œDinner, of course,” I said.
    The truth is that in the year since Dad and Lester and I had moved to Silver Spring, I’d never had my friends in for an overnight except for that one week at the ocean, but that was someone else’s house. I knew that the girls wanted to sleep in my room, in my house, but our house isn’t exactly the overnight kind.
    When we sleep over at Elizabeth’s, we sleep in her bedroom with the twin beds, which we push together to sleep on crosswise, and her mother brings in platters of cookies and fruit slices with toothpicks in them. When we sleep over at Pamela’s, we sleep on a hide-a-bed and a cot in the family room, and her mother makes us waffles for breakfast. At my house, there’s a single bed in my room, and Dad’s idea of a party is to buy me a bag of potato chips. Breakfast is Special K, Corn Chex, or Cheerios.
    â€œDad,” I said as soon as he walked in the door that evening. “In forty-five minutes Pamela and Elizabeth are coming here to sleep over, and we’re supposed to give them dinner.”
    â€œYou’re just now telling me this?”
    â€œWell, we sort of decided it on the bus coming home—Elizabeth and