Books : Alice in Lace : Excerpts

That night at the dinner table, I told Dad and Lester, my soon-to-be twenty-one-year-old brother, about Mr. Everett's class and how I was going to learn to make decisions.

"Excellent idea!" said Dad. "For once the schools are teaching something practical."

"I'm going to learn what to do if I total the car or get pregnant," I added.

Dad stopped chewing.

"Will they accept questions from the outside?" asked Lester.

"Will they help me decide between a brunette and a redhead?"

But Dad interrupted. "Al," he said, "if you're thinking, even remotely, of having sex . . "

"I'm not," I told him. "Well, I think about it, of course, but I'm not about to do anything."

My real name is Alice McKinley, but Dad and Lester call me Al. I think it's because Mom died when I was small that Dad freaks out about me sometimes. It's true that he and Lester don't know diddly about raising a girl, but it bothers Dad a lot more than it bothers Lester.

I chewed thoughtfully on a carrot stick. "Actually, the situations he's going to assign us seem sort of hokey. Who sits down and thinks, 'I guess I'll go total the car tonight' or 'Dad, I want to have a teenage pregnancy'? Sometimes things just happen."

"That's the point," Dad said. "These things happen because nobody thought they would. Nobody did any planning. Somebody has a few beers and gets in his car, or a girl has sex with her boyfriend. They're not thinking 'car wreck.' They're not thinking 'baby.'"

I sighed. Life, as far as I could see, was going to be a sort of obstacle course, with detours, yield signs, stop signs, and cautions.

"What I wish," I said, "is that I was born with a built-in buzzer, and whenever I was about to do something incredibly stupid, it beeped."

"You were," said Dad. "It's called conscience."

"Dad, every time I listen to my conscience it sounds just like you."

"Imagine that," he said.

When we got to health class the next day, Mr. Everett went down the rows passing out worksheets. Each worksheet was different, with one of our names at the top, and as people read their assignments, they groaned or whooped or giggled.

Behind me, Elizabeth gave a gigantic sigh of relief. "All I have to do is buy a car!" she said. "Holy Mary, thank you, thank you, thank you!"

Patrick and I got the same situation. We were engaged to be married, our assignments read, and for the next five weeks we were to plan the wedding and honeymoon, rent an apartment, buy furniture, and work out a budget. I could feel my face redden, but secretly I was pleased. I've known Patrick Long since sixth grade, and he's been my boyfriend on and off. At the moment we were on again. Mr. Everett must have noticed.

"Hey, Patrick! Way to go!" Mark called out. All over the room kids were teasing us.

Patrick looks a lot like Mr. Everett, actually, only younger.

He has red hair and he plays the drums. His dad is a diplomat or something, and they've lived in a lot of different countries. I guess it wasn't as exciting for him to marry a girl who was born in Chicago as it was for me to marry him, but he was smiling at me.

"Mr. Everett," called Brian, who is probably the most handsome guy in eighth grade. "If Alice and Patrick are getting married, does this entitle them to all the . . . uh . . . privileges of married life?"

More laughter.

"Hypothetical situation, Brian," said Mr. Everett.

"Hypo- what?"

"Look it up."

Brian's situation was a DWI offense, Jill had to arrange a funeral for her grandmother, Karen got arrested for shoplifting, Mark had supposedly gotten a girl pregnant, Pamela was pregnant, and Elizabeth was buying a car. And this was just the crowd I hang out with. Some of the others had it worse.

Now all the attention focused on Pamela.

"What am I supposed to do, Mr. Everett?" she asked. "If I'm already pregnant, what's there to decide?"

"What's there to decide?" The teacher gave her a quizzical look. "You're going to be a mother, Pamela."

The whole class broke into laughter. When it died down, he went on: "You're going to have another person to look out for, you have to live somewhere, you have to support the two of you -- and you ask me what there is to decide?"

Pamela shrugged. "Well . . . I mean . . . what if I choose an abortion?"

"What if you do? That's what we want to know. What would that mean to you? Or what happens if you decide to give the baby up for adoption? There are 'what ifs' all over the place. That's what this class is about. Thinking things through before they happen. Planning Your life instead of letting events decide things for you.

"Aren't we really supposed to figure out what you think we should do?" asked Karen.

"If I'm a good teacher, you won't even know what I think," Mr. Everett told her. "All the thinking's got to be done by you. And maybe there isn't just one good solution, but several. Have you considered that?"

I'd wondered if there would be enough stuff in this assignment to fill up the next five weeks, and now I knew there was enough to think about for the next five years.

What was embarrassing, though, was that Pamela was supposed to be pregnant, and Mark was supposed to have gotten a girl pregnant, though not necessarily Pamela, but Mark and Pamela weren't speaking, having broken up just before school started. Pamela was going with Brian now, so Mark and Brian weren't speaking, either.

Worse yet, Elizabeth had only been going with Tom Perona for one week when she found out he had two ID bracelets, and had given one to a girl at St. John's, where he goes to school. Pamela and I were furious with Tom. It couldn't have happened at a worse time. Elizabeth had finally gotten to the place where she could kiss comfortably, and now she had to find out that Tom was two-timing her again, just as he did the summer after sixth grade.

"He's nothing but a Tom-cat, Elizabeth. Forget him," I said.

But Elizabeth blamed us instead. She said her breath must smell or her body smelled, and we hadn't told her. If a boy had been going with her only a week before he started seeing someone else, there obviously was something wrong with her, and that's what came of getting physically close to boys. She simply wasn't ready yet. I sort of agreed, knowing Elizabeth.

"You should date a guy from our own school," Pamela said. "If Tom's around other girls all day and never sees you, he's bound to be attracted to somebody else."

But all Elizabeth would say was, "If you had bad breath or something, I'd tell you," so we just gave up.

"Hey, Alice," Patrick said, coming up behind me after class and tickling the back of my neck. "We've got to do this assignment together. We're engaged, right?" He gave my waist a little squeeze. "What do you want to do first?"

We stopped there in the hall and looked over Mr. Everett's assignment:

Assume that you are high school graduates with no college training, and the maximum you have to spend on your wedding, honeymoon, apartment, and furniture is $5,000.

"Five thousand dollars!" I gasped. "We're rich, Patrick!"

"Hardly," he said.

"I'll call the Post and find out how much it costs to announce the engagement," I told him.

"I'll ask a travel agent about a honeymoon in Hawaii," said Patrick.

"Hawaii?" I said. "I don't want to go to Hawaii."

"You don't? Where do you want to go?"

I hadn't even thought about it, really. I just wanted a choice in the matter. I tried to think of all the places I'd ever wanted to visit. "Well, Disney World, maybe."

"Disney World? You want to go to Disney World on your honeymoon?"

"Well . . . I want to have a say in it, Patrick. You can't just write down that we're going to Hawaii without asking me first."

"Good grief, they've only been engaged for ten minutes and they're quarreling already," Pamela teased.

"Okay," said Patrick. "Let's each make a list of the five places we'd most like to go on a honeymoon and see if we can agree on one of them."