Kurt
Not very long after I slipped the note into Alice’s locker, she approached me at mine. It was the end of the day, and I was packing up my numerous books and notebooks and the like into my backpack, and I looked up and there was Alice, standing to my left, holding the note I left her.
“What’s this about?” she said, holding the paper up. She did not seem pleased. Her eyebrows sort of twitched and knit together over her beautiful dark brown eyes.
I couldn’t look at her face. It was too gorgeous. But if I couldn’t look at her face, how would I be able to help her with Algebra II?
“I was simply, um, offering my help. I felt like perhaps you could use that help in your math class.” I sounded like a robot. No, I sounded like a socially illiterate imbecile robot, which I suppose I can be at times. Especially the socially illiterate part.
The hood was down on her sweatshirt. Her short, elfin hair was tucked behind her ears. I forced myself to try and make eye contact, but I could only focus on the bottom half of her face. Her full lips looked like two fresh raspberries, one sitting on top of the other. I noticed a small freckle or two under her bottom lip.
She is perfection. She is a gumdrop. She is everything.
“But why are you offering your help?” Alice said. She sounded accusatory, angry. And who could blame her?
“I just…” I muttered. There was no way I could explain about overhearing her conversation with Mr. Commons without sounding like a stalker. But what other reason could I give? My own unending crush on her?
“You just what?” she said. And for a moment, just a slight sliver of time, I sensed she was more bewildered than annoyed. More perplexed than agitated.
“I just want to help you,” I said, shutting my locker and forcing myself to look her in the eyes. “With math.”
And then the most incredible thing happened. After what seemed like an eternity, Alice Franklin nodded and said, “Okay.” She said this and I felt the floor of Healy High School give out underneath me.
“Do you, like, want to come over to my house?” she added. “Or should I come over to your place?”
“I’ll come over if that would be easier for you,” I answered with no real thought—it was simply the first response that came out of my mouth. Alice scribbled down her address on a corner of my physics notebook. I noticed her long and lean fingers as she gripped the pencil.
Even her fingers are perfect.
5530 Robindell, she wrote. Her letters were bubbly and girlish. Her handwriting made her seem happier than she actually was.
“When should we meet?” I asked.
Alice Franklin put her pencil back in her bag.
“What about tonight? Eight o’clock?”
It was a Friday night, but I had no plans, and I suppose Alice Franklin didn’t either.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
My grandmother loaned me her car to drive over to Alice’s house. When I told her who I was tutoring, her face flinched with a bit of recognition. Even my grandmother knows about Alice Franklin. Now that should tell you something. No doubt she learned about her at a prayer meeting when some sweet, gossipy Healy soul suggested praying for the town’s most wayward girl, but to her credit she didn’t say anything when I mentioned going over to Alice Franklin’s house. She just handed me the keys and reminded me to go easy on the clutch.
I don’t know how I walked from the car to the house, which is a small pink and white bungalow in what some might consider the rougher section of town. But somehow I made the journey. There was a flowerpot full of cigarette butts on the porch just outside the front door, and I wondered if it’s Alice who smokes or Mrs. Franklin. Make that Ms. Franklin. Biologically, Alice has a father of course. But if a Mr. Franklin has ever walked the streets of Healy, no one has ever seen him do it.
My hand formed a fist and knocked on the door, and there was Alice, present before me with a neutral expression on her face. No smile, no hello. She just swung open the door and stood there in her dark blue jeans and a black T-shirt. No sweatshirt for once. The T-shirt had a high neck, I noticed. For this I was grateful.
“Hey,” she said, and I sensed she was wary. “Come in.”
I followed her to the brightly lit kitchen where she had her Algebra II textbook and a pink spiral notebook set out on the table next to a row of freshly sharpened yellow pencils. She sat down in front of them and motioned for me to take the seat at the head of the table so we were sitting catty-corner across from one another. I wondered if Alice’s mom was going to come out from somewhere, and Alice must have read my mind because she said, “My mom isn’t here. She’s out on a date.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you want something to drink? I have Coke and orange juice and water.”
Here was Alice Franklin, the most beautiful girl in Healy. Here she was allowing me into her house, offering me something to drink. I swallowed hard and said, “A Coke, please.” She got herself one, too.
After a few sips from a cold can, Alice opened up her notebook and showed me her current assignment. It was baby stuff for me, and I picked up a pencil and started working problems for her. I narrated as I worked, talking out the problems as slowly as I could. I talked about the binomials and the radicals as if they were intimate friends of mine who I hadn’t talked to in some time. Soon I found myself lost in the graphs and slopes and polynomials. Alice interrupted me as I worked to ask a question or two, and I stopped and explained. Every so often she said, “Oh. Oh. Mr. Commons never made it make sense like that.” Eventually, I handed her a pencil and our fingers touched, and then I watched as she carefully graphed a curve.
“That’s right!” I told her, excited.
“It is?” she said, glancing up at me only briefly before going back to finish the sloping upward line. Like if she looked away for too long she’d make an error somehow.
“Yes!” I told her.
“Wow,” she said, finally putting down the pencil. She looked at me and for an instant she smiled a true, genuine smile. I noticed one of her incisors was a little crooked. Just a little.
“Want to try another one?” I asked, and Alice did, and she got that problem right, too.
“It looks like you might not need my help that much after all,” I said, desperate to say something and then instantly regretful of what I had just said. If she didn’t need my help (which, despite two correct problems, she so clearly did), then how would I see her again?
My comment did something to Alice. Her smile disappeared, and perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I think she frowned. Ever so slightly.
“You want to sleep with me, don’t you?” Alice said, shutting her Algebra II textbook. You might even say she slammed it. “You think I’ll, like, do it with you in exchange for math help, don’t you?” Her cheeks—her perfect cheeks—pinked up like two bowls of strawberry ice cream.
The phrase sleep with me just hanging there in the air made me blush. I could feel it. And here is the truth. I did and I do want to sleep with Alice. How could I say no to that question? I’m almost seventeen years old, and despite my mostly contented loner status and my social inadequacies I have carnal desires that I am all too familiar with, so yes, I want to sleep with Alice Franklin. I want to take her in my arms and kiss her neck just under her elfin hairline and slip my hands under her black T-shirt and touch her skin, which I am sure will be soft and warm and sweet. I want to feel her body under mine in some dark, secret room where no one can bother us. Yes, oh my God, yes, do I want to sleep with Alice Franklin.
But not in the way Alice thought in that moment.
Not like that.
Not in exchange for answers to her Algebra II homework.
So I was not completely lying when I said, “No. No, Alice. Not at all. I just want to help you.”
I must have seemed somewhat sincere because Alice stopped frowning. But she still seemed distrustful of my actions. I wasn’t sure what to say next, so I just sat there, certain this plan was hopeless. I’d made a total ass of myself.
And then Alice pushed back from the kitchen table, and I was convinced she was about to kick me out, but she just sighed, a big hefty sigh that was almost too big for someone so small. Then she said, “Why are you being so nice to me anyway?”
“Because…” I answered. And I thought about the rumors swirling around Alice. The ones I’d surreptitiously gleaned in the hallways and during passing periods before and after classes.
The party. The sexual texts. The abortion.
I thought about the stall on the second floor that I’d heard students talking about, so recently covered in graffiti about Alice Franklin. They’re calling it the Slut Stall.
Alice was waiting for an answer to her question about why I was being so nice. Her face was silent, staring steadily at me.
“Because…” I said again. “Because … I guess I think you deserve it.”
The moment I said it I knew it was exactly the right response.
I also knew it was one hundred percent true.
Alice didn’t kick me out. She looked down at the kitchen floor for a minute, and then she brought her big brown eyes back to look at me.
“Can you help me with one more problem?” she said, opening her book up again.
“With as many as you want,” I told her, and I reached for a pencil.