“Not too much. People are who they are, don’t you think?”
“I guess so.”
“You finish your homework?” Jake glanced over at the empty recliner, and Alice took her usual seat, accepting the remote control from her stepfather.
“Yeah, I didn’t have too much to do. Just algebra, and some reading.” Alice flipped the channel to CBS. My Sister Sam was on.
“School going all right for you?”
Alice shrugged. “Yeah, it’s fine.”
“You have friends?”
“Gina.”
“Oh, right, Gina.”
Alice turned to look at Jake, still staring at the television, lips pressed together as though he was concentrating on what was happening on the screen. Alice assumed he must be asking these questions only because Edith had asked him to, or because they’d been discussing it together. But discussing what? The fact that Alice seemed to have only one friend at school?
The truth was that Alice hated Kennewick High School and the students who went there. The incident that sparked this hate had happened her freshman year, when she’d met a senior named Scott Morgan because their lockers were next to one another. He was a lacrosse player with a good smile and bad acne on his forehead. When Alice told him she was from Biddeford, he said that his dad owned a car dealership there, and he mentioned a pizza place that Alice knew. Whenever he saw her again at the lockers, he’d always ask, “How’s Biddeford?” as though she still lived there. On the first warm day in April, he told her about a party that was happening on the beach at midnight. It had been easy for Alice to sneak away; she didn’t even need to be quiet, knowing her mom could sleep through pretty much anything. She wore cutoff shorts and a big hoodie, and carried a bottle of Sprite that she’d spiked with some of her mother’s vodka—not because she wanted to drink it, but because you brought alcohol to a party. When she got to the section of beach that Scott had mentioned, Scott was there alone. He handed Alice an open can of beer and said, “I lied about the party.”
“How come?”
“To get you here alone.”
They were on the south end of the public beach, near the playground and a picnic area shaded by pine trees. They walked to the darkest bench and began to kiss, Scott’s hands instantly fumbling under Alice’s hoodie, and pulling at the zipper of her shorts.
“You a virgin?” Scott asked, when he’d gotten Alice’s shorts down around her ankles.
“Yes.”
“My friend told me that all the girls in Biddeford do it in middle school.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“Do you want to do it now?”
“Sure,” Alice said. It wasn’t something she had planned, but now that it was happening, it seemed like the right thing to do. Clearly, it was what they did in Kennewick, and if she let it happen now, then she wouldn’t need to worry about it later. And Scott was opening up a small plastic packet that looked like a condom, so she wouldn’t have to worry about getting pregnant. Alice reached down to touch him, but he bucked his hips back, saying, “I don’t want to come yet.” But even without being touched he only got about halfway inside of her before he shuddered, his jaw clenching, tendons tensing in his neck.
“Don’t fucking tell anyone, okay?” he said, as he pulled out of her, holding on to the condom.
“Okay. I won’t.”
But on Monday at school, the word WHORE had been written in capital letters with a silver marker across the front of Alice’s locker, and while she was crossing the open walkway to the science building for Period C, a girl that Alice had never noticed before started yelling at her from the smoking pit. “Stay away from Scott, you fucking slut.” She was a blonde with crimped hair. One of the blonde’s friends held her upper arm, restraining her from coming over. Alice kept walking, her heart jackhammering in her chest. Why had Scott told people after telling her not to tell anyone? For the rest of the day she felt like everyone in school was staring at her, and either laughing or judging. She didn’t see Scott once, and assumed that he was avoiding her.
When she did finally see Scott, the following day, he didn’t even look at her, just slammed something into his locker and took off. Alice watched him walk away, still wondering what had happened, when a girl—another friend of the blonde—shoved Alice hard in the shoulder and said, “Don’t even look at him, Bitcheford.” A group of students walking by burst into laughter. For a brief moment Alice almost went after the girl. She imagined grabbing her hair, pulling her hard to the floor, stamping on her neck. But Alice controlled herself; she showed nothing.
It was only at the very end of freshman year that Alice heard the whole story. Gina Bergeron was another freshman whose family had recently moved to Kennewick. She was tall and gangly, and spoke so rapidly that sometimes spit would bubble from her lips. They’d met in science class, where they’d been paired together to dissect a fetal pig. She had two older brothers and two younger sisters, all about a year apart. Alice and Gina became friends almost by default. They were both new to Kennewick, and both friendless, and that was where the similarities ended. Still, it was someone to eat lunch with in the cafeteria.
Gina’s brothers were both athletes; the sophomore was a tennis player, and the junior, Howie, was good at lacrosse. Gina got the story from Howie. There actually had been a party the night that Alice had sex with Scott, but not on Kennewick Beach. It had been down at the Harbor Beach. Scott had skipped out to be with Alice, but when he returned he got drunk and bragged to all his friends how he’d just fucked a freshman girl. His on-off girlfriend, Stacy Homstead, the girl with the crimped hair, heard about it, and she was the one who spread it around school the following day, the story of the slutty freshman from Biddeford who’d steal your boyfriend. The Bitcheford.
“Did you really have sex with him?” Gina asked. They were walking together to Alice’s house, along the sidewalk that bordered the beach.
“Sort of, I guess. It didn’t last very long.”
Gina covered her mouth and laughed, more of a snort.
“What was it like?”
“It was like nothing,” Alice said, and meant it.
“Geez,” Gina said. Alice knew that despite being fascinated, Gina had judged her as well. She also knew that Gina, gawky now, with her giraffe legs and wobbly head, was going to be beautiful by senior year, and that their friendship would not last. She didn’t really care. She’d already resolved to just get through high school on her own. She’d gotten through her whole childhood on her own, after all, without a father or brothers or sisters. She had her mother, who barely counted. Alice felt that she’d been counting down the days to being on her own as an adult for longer than she remembered. She didn’t really need friends, even though Gina and she remained somewhat close throughout all of high school. But Alice’s first prediction did come true. Between junior and senior year, Gina lost her awkwardness and turned into a runway model. It didn’t make her as popular as Alice thought it would, though. The girls seemed to resent her, and the boys were frightened away.
Alice, by senior year, was almost as pretty as Gina. Despite her aloofness, boys occasionally flirted with her, sometimes asking her out, but she had no interest. She’d learned her lesson from Scott. She knew what teenage boys were like, and she’d decided that she preferred the company of men. What she really preferred was the company of Jake Richter, her stepfather. Edith’s afternoon drinking had gotten worse, and, more often than not, she’d either forget to prepare dinner for her husband, or she was already passed out by the time he’d gotten home. One Friday night, Alice and Jake had arrived back at the condo at the same time, finding Edith asleep on the recliner, one of her vodka strawberry smoothies tucked between her legs. They found a chicken in the oven but the oven hadn’t been turned on. Jake laughed.