Free Reluctantly Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

didn’t even know what color socks I was going to wear the next day, and Pamela already knew how she was going to wear her hair to a ninth-grade dance. Pamela just assumed she’d be invited. I not only wasn’t sure I’d be invited, I wasn’t even sure I’d be alive—not if Denise and her gang got hold of me. I guess if you have long blond hair, you think about it a lot. But if I counted up how much time I fussed over my hair, it would probably be thirty second in the morning and maybe fifteen seconds at night. Ninth grade, as far as I was concerned, was light-years away.
    Elizabeth had been thinking about it, though. Ninth grade. Hair. “How?” she asked.
    â€œThe sides brought up like this,” said Pamela, sweeping up the long yellow locks beside her face, “and pinned up with curls at the top and flowers tucked all around.”
    â€œWho do you suppose we’ll be dating then?” Elizabeth asked. “You know, ninth grade wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t have to go through seventh and eighth to get there.”
    â€œBut once we graduate,” I reminded them, “we’ll have to start high school, and then we’ll be at the bottom of the heap again.”
    â€œAnd after high school, there’s college,” said Elizabeth mournfully.
    â€œAnd once we get a job, we’ll be at the bottom of the ladder,” Pamela added. “Maybe that’s all life is, you know? Just climbing up, coming down, and starting all over again.”
    It was depressing, all right. We sat for a long time, looking out over the playground, and finally it was Elizabeth who broke the silence. “Someday,” she said, “we’ll think back to this very day when we were sitting here talking like this, and we’ll realize how wonderful it was. You know what we should do? I think we should promise each other that no matter what happens to us in junior high or high school, no matter how awful or embarrassing it is, we can always tell each other, and none of us will ever laugh.”
    â€œI promise,” I said right off, feeling just how serious this was.
    â€œSo do I,” said Pamela.
    We sort of crossed arms so that all three of us were shaking hands on it at the same time, and it was like our own secret promise, just the three of us, friends forever. Through high school, anyway.
    On Monday, Denise and her friends were lying low. I guess they decided that after cramming all that toilet paper through the vents in my locker, they’d made enough trouble for a while, but it didn’t mean they were through with me. Not at all. A girl whose brother saves her just when the initiation is going full blast isn’t going to get off the hook that easily. Not only had Lester loused up their plan, but he’d embarrassed Denise in front of the other kids who had come to watch. Denise would take it out on me. I knew it as surely as there were ears on my head.
    What I couldn’t figure out about Denise was why she and the three girls she went around with acted like the world was against them. At first I thought maybe it was because they looked the way they did. Then I realized that there were several girls in school who were as heavy as Denise— heavier , even—who always seemed to have a crowd of friends around them and were always on committees and things. The reporter who interviewed me for the newspaper was short, one of the cheerleaders was tall and thin, and the president of the ninth-grade class, who led the pep rally, had zits. So was it zits and height and weight that made a difference, or how you felt about it?
    That noon in the cafeteria, something really crazy happened—not with Denise and her gang, but with agroup of ninth-grade boys who had just finished eating and were leaving. We always watched the ninth-grade boys, because they seemed so much more clever and wonderful than seventh- and eighth-grade boys. They were joking