Free Outrageously Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page A

to be helpful. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
    Lester followed me down to the basement and stared at the pink linen shirt hanging there on the line. “I’ll take care of my own clothes from now on, okay?” he said angrily. “That was a thirty-eight-dollar shirt, Al!”
    “It’s still perfectly good! It’s just pink!”
    “If I’d wanted a pink shirt, I would have bought one. Jeez, Al! Use your head! Who would wash a red sweatshirt and a white linen shirt in the same water?”
    Worse yet, when I folded the clothes later, so much red had come out of the sweatshirt that even it looked more pink than red. Not only that, but because I had put it in the dryer, it was two sizes too small.
    Patrick came over on Friday and asked if I wanted to go to a movie. When we got there, though, the show was sold out, so we just hung around the mall. We went into a tie shop and Patrick tried on the loudest, wildest tie they had. They don’t like that in tie stores, especially if you’re thirteen, but then, they never know who might buy something. We ended up at the Orange Bowl for an orange freeze, and Patrick said that Mark Stedmeister wasinterested in going with Pamela again, now that she’d broken up with Brian.
    “She’s got a lot on her mind these days,” I told him.
    “Yeah, Mark told me about her folks.”
    “What she probably needs more than anything else is just friends to listen when she wants to talk.”
    “Mark can listen,” Patrick said.
    “Mark’s a dweeb.”
    “How come?”
    I looked at Patrick and wondered if boys ever remembered anything. I’ll bet that all the embarrassing things that happen to them just drift right out of their heads afterward. With girls, these memories stick around forever. They im plant!
    “Patrick, don’t you remember what Mark did to Pamela the summer between sixth and seventh grade?” I asked.
    Patrick stopped drinking his orange freeze and looked at me blankly.
    “When she was showing Elizabeth and me a new bra she had bought, and Mark came up behind us and grabbed it out of her hands and went racing around the playground, waving it like a flag?”
    “That was a year ago!” Patrick said. “ More than a year, and she’s gone out with him since!”
    “It doesn’t matter if it was a hundred years ago, or that she went with him again. It happened, and girls remember ! Mark’s a dweeb !”
    “She’s going to hate him forever because of what he did after sixth grade?”
    “Well, what about what he did last summer? When he pulled open the back of her bathing suit and dumped his potato salad in her bikini bottom?”
    “Yeah, I guess that was pretty stupid.”
    “See, Patrick? You’d never do anything that dumb,” I said confidently. “Except for that stupid kiss in the closet, you would never do anything like that.”
    Patrick didn’t answer, just kept sucking on his orange freeze.
    I grinned at him and leaned across the table so he had to look at me. “What’s the stupidest thing you ever did to a girl?”
    No answer. Patrick kept sucking away like a vacuum cleaner.
    “Well?” I said, teasing.
    “You don’t want to know,” he said.
    “I asked, didn’t I?”
    “You’ll get mad.”
    “Why would I get mad?”
    Patrick had reached the bottom of his drink. He lifted the straw out of his glass, turned the straw over, and sucked at the other end.
    “Well,” he said finally, “you remember last May—when we were all over at Mark’s?”
    “In May? They don’t open their pool till June first.”
    “I know, but it was a warm day and we were playing badminton on the lawn.”
    “Wasn’t I sick that weekend? Getting over the flu or something? I remember sitting around feeling woozy and watching the rest of you play. We made lemonade. Somebody brought over this big bag of lemons, and you guys were seeing who could suck a lemon the longest without making a face. Is that the day you mean?”
    “Yeah, that’s the day. Well …” Patrick whirled his glass