Even a recluse like me learned of the events that allegedly occurred at Elaine O’Dea’s party, and even a recluse like me could have seen the slow shift in Alice Franklin’s behavior and in the behavior of those she was normally surrounded by. The girls she sat with in the cafeteria have drifted away, one by one. There’s quite an enormous difference between a person like me, who enjoys eating alone, and a person like Alice Franklin, who has had isolation placed upon her as a mark of shame. Lately, Alice Franklin doesn’t even eat in the cafeteria anymore.
Then Brandon Fitzsimmons died, not that long ago, and people have been claiming that Alice caused the accident by sending him inappropriate texts. Lately, it seems Alice has become magnetic for all sorts of negative attention. She’s started coming to school dressed in a bulky sweatshirt. You can’t see her perfect cle**age anymore. She’s taken to wearing the hood up, even in the hallways. It’s like she wants to disappear.
Yesterday, after the final bell, I was walking past the football stadium bleachers behind the school, and I saw Alice sitting there. Her face looked tear-stained.
At that moment, it seemed like the opportunity I had been looking for. To talk to her. To tell her what I knew. Because—and this was shocking—I know something about Alice. I know something—a fact, a truth—that might perhaps bring her relief but at the same time might perhaps only bring her more pain. I formed the words in my mouth, rolling my tongue over them, attempting multiple times to push them out through my lips. How idiotic I must have seemed just standing there, looking at her, saying nothing. Practicing words.
Finally, Alice noticed me.
“What the hell do you want?” she snapped. This time, she didn’t call me Kurt.
“I…” I said, opening and closing my mouth. How desperately I wanted to tell her what I knew. How much I wanted to share the information I had that no one else at Healy High had a claim on but me.
“Seriously, what the hell?” she said, standing up and shoving her hands into the pockets of her hooded sweatshirt. She stomped off down the bleachers. “I’m not a sideshow attraction.”
And she wasn’t. Not to me.
She was the main attraction.
But I had no way to tell her that.
Kelsie
We moved here from Michigan because my dad got a job working for his uncle as an electrician. Also, Jesus wanted us to come here. At least according to my mother, who is personal, best friends with Jesus Christ. Jesus has to okay everything with my mother before she does it. I guess he even okayed The Really Awful Stuff that happened to me last summer. But I don’t know, because my mom and I have never talked about it since.
Anyway, before we left Flint to come here, I made a promise to myself. When I got to Healy, I wasn’t going to sit by myself in the cafeteria reading a book and I wasn’t going to sit in the front row in class answering all the questions just because I could. I was going to learn how to wear eyeliner and I was going to start figuring out what colors looked right with other colors and I was going to force my mother to let me start shaving my legs even if Jesus said I shouldn’t. I wasn’t going to spend my weekends making shoebox dioramas by myself for fun and I was going to start talking to people who weren’t my parents and I wasn’t going to be the same lame Kelsie Sanders that I’d been all of my fourteen-year-old life.
I spent my last summer in Flint working so hard. Just like I’d once worked on my shoebox dioramas, I spent those weeks reading the magazines and watching the televisions shows that all the girls in my class talked about, trying to get as much information as I could about the right way to behave. I babysat for snotty Jerry Baker next door and saved up all my money for the right clothes and the right makeup, and when my mom told me Christian girls didn’t wear skinny jeans, I did it anyway.
“You’re new, right?” Alice Franklin said to me that first day of ninth grade as I sat in the back row of Mrs. Hennesey’s homeroom.
“Yeah,” I said, eyeing her raspberry lipstick and trying really hard not to look impressed. My mother might not have noticed my shaved legs, but she sure wasn’t going to let me out of the house with raspberry lipstick on.
“Well, we’re all new to high school, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “Even if most of us have lived here for a bajillion years.” She said bajillion like the word tasted like rotten eggs.
“Yeah,” I answered, already picturing myself alone in the cafeteria since I could only come up with one-word answers.
“See that boy over there?” Alice said suddenly, pointing to a boy with short blond hair and a Texas Longhorns T-shirt on.
“Yeah?”
“Stay away from him. His name is Kyle Walker. We went out in middle school, and he’s a total ass**le.”
Back then I never swore, not even privately in my head, and I know I started blushing.
Just then a pretty cute guy sitting next to us turned and asked Alice if she was free that weekend and wanted to hang out. And just at the moment when I knew I would never be cool enough for this girl, Alice said in her most bored voice possible, “Um, I’m free every weekend. It’s in the Constitution.”
Before I could tell myself to shut up, stupid! I exclaimed, “Oh my God, do you know Grease 2? That’s a line from Grease 2!”
That’s how we became friends. We both liked to watch really stupid musicals like Xanadu, and Can’t Stop the Music, and even Paint Your Wagon, and we both liked to eat frosting straight from the can, and we both thought Elaine O’Dea acted way cuter than she actually was. When she came over to my house for the first time, she didn’t seem to be weirded out by the Smile! Jesus Loves You! pencils in the kitchen by the to-do list or the Bible Stories Bingo game on the coffee table. She was just nice about it, and during our third sleepover after we’d watched Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and we were buried in our sleeping bags and it was totally dark and the only sound was the air conditioner cycling on and off—when I chose that second to tell Alice Franklin that back in Flint I’d never had anyone over for a sleepover—Alice didn’t laugh.
“I’m glad you had me over,” she said. “I’m glad we’re friends.”
Even though I know I did what I had to do, and even though lately Alice has completely disappeared from my life and into her big bulky sweatshirt and wherever it is she goes to eat lunch … even though I don’t regret what I did and I would do it again, it’s that memory that hurts the most when I think about how I dumped Alice.