Kurt
Shortly after sharing Christmas pizza and beer with Alice Franklin, we reached the end of the first semester at Healy High. It’s always a half day before Winter Break, and there’s no real purpose in even going to school that day. It’s merely an excuse to eat candy and watch movies in class. On most days I feel the work at Healy High is much too easy for me, but on days like the half day before Winter Break, I feel insulted that I’m even expected to show up for school.
But I tried to get into the spirit of things. Since I’ve been tutoring Alice, there’s a reason to look forward to walking the halls of the school building. I might see Alice there, and she’ll smile at me. Dip her head ever so slightly. Peer out from that sweatshirt and raise her eyebrows at me in a greeting.
I know I’m the only one on the receiving end of those greetings, and this makes me feel special and happy. In fact, I’m fairly certain that I’m the only one at Healy High who Alice speaks to anymore. Sometimes I have fantasies that she will come and eat lunch with me in the cafeteria, but a few weeks ago, Alice stopped eating in the cafeteria completely. I’m not sure where she goes during lunch. There’s no end to the rumors about Alice, and from what I overhear there’s no end to the graffiti in the so-called Slut Stall upstairs. Not that I’ve seen it or want to see it.
On the half day before break there was no lunch served, of course, and my stomach was growling as I prepared to gather my books out of my locker and head home. Maybe I was feeling lightheaded from lack of nutrition, because it’s the only explanation for the bold act I soon found myself committing.
I found her as I was walking out of the main hallway. She had on that sweatshirt, and her backpack was slung low against her rear end. I tried not to glance there too long because it made me feel a little guilty, honestly. She was alone, staring into the trophy case full of team photographs and rusting trophies from decades past.
“Hello, Alice,” I said, standing next to her. I felt like this was something I could do. After all, we ate pizza together. We drank beer together. She cried in front of me. I gave her a Christmas present. We worked together at her house twice a week. But still, I was nervous to discover her reaction.
I shouldn’t have been. Alice turned to me and smiled. Smiled broadly enough that her crooked incisor peeked out at me.
“Hello, Kurt,” she said, and although I know it’s biologically impossible, my heart dropped down into my stomach for a moment before returning to my chest.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, motioning to the trophy case.
“Oh, I guess I’m wondering how many of these people ever left Healy,” she said, peering back at some old photos from the seventies, complete with long hair and bell-bottoms.
“Probably not many.”
“Probably you’re right. So, are you ready for break?”
“I certainly am,” I answered. “Are you?”
Alice shook her head ruefully but she smiled. “Do you even have to ask that question?”
We stood there for a moment, and then my food-starved brain made its move.
“Alice, would you like to come over to my house to have lunch? To celebrate the next two weeks without Healy High?”
Alice mastered a response that was the perfect blend of politeness and shock. She smiled and opened her eyes wide at the exact same moment. For that small space of time, it was as if we had been transported back in time. Back to the days before the rumors and the bathroom stall and the banishment. Back to the days when someone like me asking someone like Alice Franklin over to his house for lunch would be akin to successfully confirming the existence of the fourth dimension.
Impossible.
But it was not that time. It was now, and after Alice processed what I was saying, she said, “Okay, sure. Yes. That would be great.”
“My grandmother is making grilled cheese sandwiches,” I said, and I instantly regretted saying anything so stupid. I sounded like a kindergartner. Alice had been to parties where people smoked marijuana and got drunk. Regardless of the validity of the rumors about her and Brandon Fitzsimmons, Alice Franklin was almost certainly not a virgin, yet here I was, a virgin talking about grilled cheese sandwiches.
“I like grilled cheese sandwiches,” she said.
“Well,” I told her, “good. But unfortunately, I don’t have any shitty Lone Star beer to go with it.”
Alice laughed, and I was pleased at myself for coming up with such a reply and pleased she got the reference.
As we walked out of the school, there were groups of students clumped together in the front of the main entrance. Some were wearing Santa hats to celebrate the season. Others were texting or playing with their phones. I could feel eyes on us as the two of us strolled past.
“Well, Kurt,” she whispered, and her voice sounded even more appealing in a whisper, “how does it feel to be seen walking the streets with the biggest slut in Healy High?”
“Probably the same as you feel walking the streets with the school’s biggest weirdo,” I answered back.
Alice laughed, and I joined in, and my heart journeyed down to my stomach and back again.
My grandmother did have grilled cheese sandwiches waiting for me, and when she saw Alice, she acted surprised for a moment and then became the hostess she prides herself on being.
“Would you like some milk? Some juice?” she asked, poking around the refrigerator.
“Water’s fine, thank you,” Alice answered, and after my grandmother got her a glass of ice water she disappeared, leaving Alice and me sitting in what grandmother calls the breakfast nook.
“This is good,” Alice said, taking a bite.
“Yeah, it is,” I said. “My grandmother’s a really good cook.”
“You’ve lived with her almost all your life?” Alice asked. “Ever since your parents died?”
“Yes,” I answered, and I admired the way she just asked me directly about my mother and father. Not like grandmother’s church friends who refer to my parents’ “passing on” in some vague, strange way as if they just disappeared one day while out and about.
“Why were you guys living in Chicago, anyway?”
“My mother was a professor of history at Northwestern. My father worked in the education department at the Art Institute.”
“Wow,” Alice said. “Smart. But that makes sense, I guess. Where’d they meet?”
“In college. At Rice. Did you know my father was the first and only student from Healy High ever to go there?” I said it not to brag, but just because it’s always amazed me that one of the best schools in the country is a little over an hour away and not more students from Healy attend or even apply.
“Maybe you’ll go,” Alice told me. “I’m sure someone as smart as you could get in, too.”
I shrugged. I haven’t thought much about where I’ll go to school after my senior year. I’m sure my grandmother would love it if I went to Rice and stayed close by. Still, there’s a part of me that would love to go to school in Chicago. When I told this to Alice, she asked if it was because I miss it.
“I don’t remember it well enough to miss it,” I said. “But I guess I feel on some level like I should go back there. Like it was my destiny to live there, and I need to let my destiny play out.” I cringed inside for using the word destiny. I was afraid it made me look strange or like I was the type of nerd who plays Dungeons and Dragons.
But Alice just nodded like she understood. “You would have had such a different life if you’d stayed there, wouldn’t you? I mean, you know. Educated parents. A big city. Lots of opportunities.”
“That’s true,” I said. I’d only considered how different things would have been for me millions of times, even as I tried to make peace with my existence in Healy and the circumstances that brought me here. “Then again, I’m sure there would have been aspects of living in Chicago that I wouldn’t have enjoyed. And I would have missed out on certain aspects of living here.”
Alice snorted. “Like what?”
Like you. Of course I didn’t dare say it.
“The way it’s quiet in the evenings,” I told her. “The way you can buy something at Seller Brothers and if you’ve forgotten your wallet they let you take what you need because they know you’ll return and pay later. I don’t know.”
“You mean the way everyone knows your business,” Alice said, and I realized this was the closest we’d ever come to really talking about what happened to her.
“Well, there’s that. That’s not pleasant. I know you know.”
“No,” Alice answered, her eyes not looking at me, her fingers carefully ripping the leftover crust of her sandwich into a small pile of crumbs. “It’s not pleasant at all.” Alice was quiet for a moment and then continued. “Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if my dad hadn’t left. I mean, the way you must try and picture your life if your parents hadn’t died.”
“When did your father leave?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about Alice’s father.
“I guess he didn’t really leave if he was never really here, right?” she said, shrugging her shoulders like that was meant as a familiar, funny punch line. “He was this guy my mom was dating over in Dove Lake. He worked as an auto mechanic. It was after she graduated from high school and she was working at become a dental hygienist. He was a friend of a friend or something from what my mom says. After she got pregnant, they moved in together and tried to make it work. But my mom says I cried so much as a baby. I had colic like crazy bad or something, and I would just scream and scream for hours. And I guess my father, his name was Hank, he couldn’t take it anymore and told my mom he was sorry, but he wasn’t ready to be a father.”
“He sounds like a jerk,” I said.
“I guess,” Alice answered. The plate in front of her was nothing but crumbs, and I watched as she carefully flattened them with her right index finger. “But I still always wonder what life would have been like if things had gone differently. Like, what if I hadn’t had colic? What if I had been the easiest baby in the world? I think my mom must think that sometimes.”
“If he couldn’t have handled colic, he couldn’t have handled other things that would have come up,” I told her, but I stopped because I could see in her expression that Alice didn’t like to hear me criticize her father. She liked to imagine that things might have been better had he stayed. That her life would have been happier somehow.
“I’m such a cliché, aren’t I?” Alice said, and she gave me a wry smirk. “Single mother. Absent father. Too many boyfriends, searching for love in all the wrong places and blah blah blah.”
Sitting there with Alice and talking with her made me so content. So satisfied. So I gathered the guts and said, “Alice, you could never be a cliché. Not in a trillion years.”
Alice looked at me with her gorgeous brown eyes and smiled. “A trillion years? Is that a scientifically proven number?”
I shrugged and smiled.
“Yes,” I said. “And I’m serious.”
“Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I have my doubts.”
I wondered if this lunch, this conversation, would be the right time to bring up what Brandon had told me, but just as I was trying to figure out how to begin my story, she stretched her arms above her head and said, “Okay, this is getting too heavy duty for me. I should probably go.”
I worried for a moment that I’d scared her off, but as I walked her to the front door, she asked me if we could start up our tutoring sessions once school picked up. I was saddened by the fact that I wouldn’t see Alice for two weeks, but I told her we could start tutoring again as soon as classes started back, and she thanked me once again for all the help.
As she headed out, I asked her if she needed a ride, but she said she wanted to walk.
“After all, what could happen to me in beautiful Healy, where everyone knows your name and your business?” She said this with sarcasm cutting through her voice, and I smiled at her.
“Now Alice,” I joked, “don’t you know nothing ever happens in Healy?”
“Not unless you’re me,” she said with a sigh, rolling her eyes, and after she turned, I watched her back as she made her way down the driveway. Then it hit me when she got to the street that she was going to have to walk in front of Brandon Fitzsimmons’ house to get home. When we’d shown up at my house after school, we’d come in through the side door into the kitchen.
But right then she had to walk right past it. Right past his house and right past the red and white yard sign that read “BRANDON FITZSIMMONS * HEALY TIGER * WE WILL NEVER FORGET YOU!”
I watched as she headed down the sidewalk, and as she crossed in front of Brandon’s house, I thought maybe it was the late December cold that made her reach back and pull her hood up over her head so far up you couldn’t see her face anymore. But probably there was another reason.