Kelsie I am so bored in this class I want 2 poke my eyeballs out with hot sticks.
Don’t do it your eyes are pretty.
I could walk around with sticks in my eyes where the eyeballs had been. You could lead me around and be my helper.
Are U saying I would be your seeing eye dog?
Yes but not a dog. Just a helpful friend.
U are a freak Alice!!!!
I know U R 2!!!!
I miss her and I know it’s a totally hypocritical, pathetic thing to say. Given everything I’ve done to her and everything I’ll probably still do.
And all just to sit at the good table in the cafeteria.
But it’s true. I’d deny it to anyone who asked me straight out, but most of the time—actually lots of the time—I miss Alice Franklin.
I guess I don’t deserve to. But I do.
Kurt
Even the gods themselves must have eventually gotten used to being around Aphrodite.
And so it is that after almost two months of meeting twice a week, I’m finally starting to relax a little at Alice’s house. Despite her beauty, her appeal, her perfect knees and lips and face, I’m no longer a jumbly mess during our tutoring sessions. I’m not a placid lake of calmness either, mind you. But I can breathe regularly at least.
She always has her math textbook ready and waiting for me on the kitchen table, next to the sharpened pencils and an ice cold can of Coke. She never drinks anything during our sessions. She just studies me carefully as I work the problems, offer explanations, answer her questions.
Her mother is almost never home. Once I caught a glimpse of her as she walked out of the house during one of my sessions with Alice. She’s an older version of Alice, but with shoulder-length hair and a face that isn’t anywhere near as soft and as sweet as Alice’s face. She told Alice not to wait up, and she didn’t even say hello to me.
I get the sense that Alice is very much on her own.
One evening after a long set of problems, Alice looked at me and said, “How did you get to be so good at this anyway?”
I shrugged my shoulders and told her the truth. “I don’t know. It just comes easily to me, I guess. It’s not hard at all. But the things that come easily to other people don’t come easily to me, so I suppose there is a trade-off.”
“What doesn’t come easily to you?” Alice said, frowning a little. “You’re a straight A student.”
“Academics aren’t the problem,” I told her. “But, for example, talking to people. About the weather or sports or what have you. I can’t do that. I’m not good at just talking.”
Alice’s slight frown turned into a smile.
“Well, aren’t we talking now?”
I flushed. “Yes, we are. We’re talking about talking.”
“Talking about talking,” Alice repeated. Her smile grew a little more. My brain grasped at every corner of my head, searching for something to say, but I couldn’t find anything.
After a moment of quiet, Alice said, “Should we get back to work?” Maybe she sensed my discomfort.
“Okay,” I said, grateful to be able to talk about polynomials again.
Then I got an idea. The holidays were around the corner, and I thought of a gift I wanted to get Alice. I have money to spend. Plenty, actually. My parents had been smart in their financial planning, and I’m well aware that my grandmother has a sizable amount with which to raise me. I could afford to be magnanimous. When I asked my grandmother for the money I’d need to buy the present, she asked me who it was for.
“Alice Franklin,” I said. I can’t lie to my grandmother.
“Well,” my grandmother answered, “you never ask for anything, Kurt. So I suppose if you want to spend a hundred dollars on this gift, that’s your choice.”
Would Alice think I was trying to purchase her affection? Maybe. But I searched around online and found what I wanted and bought it anyway, hoping for the best possible outcome. Which is to say, I hoped that Alice Franklin would love her present.
I was scheduled to go to Alice’s house on a Thursday evening. But I hadn’t realized that that particular Thursday was Brandon Fitzsimmons’s seventeenth birthday. Rather, it would have been had he lived. And with this birthday, Healy High plummeted into full grieving mode once again. Brandon’s locker was covered with balloons in the school colors and girls started crying in class and lessons were suspended so people could talk about their feelings with a grief counselor that the principal brought in specifically for the occasion.
I hadn’t seen Alice at all that day, and when I showed up at her house with my gift in hand, she answered the door, and I knew right away she’d been drinking. There was the smell of beer on her breath, her cheeks were red, and her smile was lopsided and generous. If I wasn’t mistaken, her eyes looked as if she’d been crying.
“Hey, Kurt,” she said. She sort of slid toward the kitchen where there was no spiral notebook or Algebra II textbook or sharpened yellow pencils. There was a can of Lone Star beer on the counter. She took a sip from it with her perfect lips.
“It’s what my mother drinks. Isn’t it gross? But whatever.”
“Oh,” I said, unsure of what to do or think.
“Do you want one?” Alice asked me.
“Okay,” I said.
I took a fresh can from her and leaned in for a sip, and for a moment my mind sped back to the last time I drank beer. To a warm Saturday night at the very beginning of fall. Then my mind slipped to the thing I wanted to tell Alice Franklin.
It was a Saturday night in the very early fall, not long into junior year. I was up late, reading in my bedroom. It was around one in the morning. Sometimes I suffer from insomnia, but I’ve come to embrace it over the years because it gives me time to stay up and read. And I’ve discovered I can actually get by with four or five hours of sleep. I’m lucky that way.
I had the window open. In Healy, you could do that. It was a hot Texas night, but my grandmother loves to turn off the air conditioning during the evenings and open the windows instead. She says it’s good for a body to breathe the fresh night air. I’m assuming it’s also good for the electric bill.
“Kurt, hey. Kurt!”
It was a very loud whisper that actually came out louder than simply speaking in a normal tone of voice. I thought perhaps I’d started to drift off and hear things, but then it came at me again, straight through the open window.
“Kurt Morelli, do you hear me?”
I pulled on my sweat pants and headed to the window. Across the way I saw Brandon Fitzsimmons balancing himself on the roof of his house, just outside his bedroom. He was drinking a can of beer and calling my name.