Free Alice At The Home Front by Mardiyah A. Tarantino

proudly wore her bracelet to school Monday morning, and one of the girls said, “Ugh! You’ve got bugs on your wrist.”
    “They’re scarabs, stupid,” Alice snapped back. “All the way from Egypt.”
    “Well they look like bugs. All the way from Rhode Island.”
    “You’re a bug. And a real ugly one. Plus, you don’t know what a scarab is, dumbbell.”
    Laughter broke out in the classroom.
    “Alice!” The teacher had overheard her. “Would you like to go see Miss Prichard?”
    “Yes, please!” answered Alice. “She’s a good friend of mine.” She turned and grinned at the class.
    A couple of the girls laughed louder.
    “Do not be sassy, Alice,” her teacher admonished.
    Some of the kids laughed again. Alice wasn’t sure whether it was with her or against her. “Grunty,” she said under her breath. Fortunately, no one heard her.
    At recess, most of the girls carried around playing cards in boxes. They would find a place in the schoolyard sheltered from the wind and trade them whenever they weren’t in class. Everybody had playing cards except Alice. Some were plain bicycle cards; some were very fancy: hunting scenes or copies of famous paintings from the museum. The girls themselves decided which ones were the most valuable. A fancy painting was worth three bunnies and a bouquet of flowers.
    Silvia, for instance, always had the very fanciest of all. Her parents bought the most elegant packs of cards and would play bridge by candlelight during the dimming, which was not allowed.
    Once in a while Alice, in a wistful mood, regretted not joining the other girls. She would walk by and say, “Anybody want to trade a Lockheed B-25 for a Grumman?” They’d look at her and at each other and shake their heads.
    One of Alice’s teachers—the one who had asked if she wanted to see Miss Prichard—called her over during recess the following day.
    “I’ve thought of an excellent project for you. A little task in order to remind you not to show off to people,” she said. “Just come over to the library—you like the library, don’t you, Alice?
    “It depends.”
    They went in and sat down, Alice with one eye on the wall clock behind the teacher’s head. This was going to take all day.
    “Even though you were rude to Deborah, which was wrong, you were right in frowning when she didn’t know what a scarab was.”
    “I didn’t frown. I called her a dumbbell.”
    “Yes, well that was rude. Now, since you know what a scarab is and have a bracelet of them, I’d like you to do a little research and present the class with a paper on the subject.”
    “How?”
    “My name is Miss Higgenbottom, Alice. Remember?
    “How, Miss Higgenbottom?”
    The big hand was way past the six. They’d been sitting there ten minutes already. Alice could think of a dozen things to do in ten minutes: feed Bagheera, look for the missing plane card, hide Suzie’s dolls in the washer …
    “Let me introduce you to the encyclopedia index, in case you’ve never used it.”
    Alice sighed. Not the encyclopedia. It took hours to look something up and even longer to read about it.
    “This’ll take forever,” Alice moaned as she opened her binder. A torn sheet of Chinese characters fell out along with the drawing of a shark-mouthed Curtiss. Alice stuffed them back in.
    “That’s the beauty of it, Alice. You’re a bright girl, and you secretly like difficult words and long sentences, don’t you? You can start right now. And let’s not copy. We teachers know all about copying, you know.” She pinched Alice’s arm slightly on the way out.
    Looking up scarabs in the index of the encyclopedia wasn’t so bad, but finding the S volume was a nuisance. Alice didn’t want to bother, so she asked the librarian to help her.
    The librarian said laughingly, “Next time, why don’t you just memorize the alphabet? You know, A B C D E F G,” she sang.
    Behind her back, Alice stuck out the tip of her tongue.
    She sighed, took up the