When Dad came home, I helped him make dinner. I stirred the tomato sauce while he boiled the spaghetti. My dad looks like a big teddy bear. He has thick hair at the sides of his head, not so much on top. It’s a little gray above the ears, and the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkles when he smiles.
He was humming to himself as we cooked, but I was thinking about Sara. There were a lot of kids in her family. I tried to imagine them all living in a tent. Living in a car! I tried to imagine us living in our car. Dad sleeping on the front seat, maybe, and Lester stretched out in back.
When Lester got home and we finally sat down at the table, I said, “Dad, would you ever just wake me up some morning and say, ‘Alice, let’s move’?”
Dad paused with a forkful of spaghetti halfway to his mouth.
“Not unless he’d just robbed a bank or something,” said Lester.
I toyed with my salad, turning a pickled beet over and over. “If we ever got so poor we had to live in our car, would I have to sleep on the floor?” I asked.
“Naw, we’d probably stick you under the hood, Al. Stuff you down between the engine and the radiator,” said Lester.
“So who’s moving and who’s poor?” asked Dad.
“Sara,” I said. “They had to leave because they couldn’t pay their rent. Donald thinks maybe they’re living in a tent or even their car.”
“Well, I hope not!” said Dad. “There are places they can go for help, though.”
But why hadn’t Sara asked me for help? I wondered. I would have given her all my money. I would have even gone around and collected money from neighbors, just so Sara could keep coming to our school.
I lay in bed that night thinking about her. About the way at first nobody liked the skinny girl who chewed with her mouth open and never washed her hair.
Then Rosalind and I invited her for a sleepover at my house, and we called it a shampoo party. We all washed our hair and brushed Sara’s to show her how great it looked when it was clean, and we pretended we were rich ladies having tea at the Plaza, chewing our dainty sandwiches with our lips closed.
I wanted her back so I could tell her how funny she was, how smart she was, how many times she had made me laugh. Like the time I took a picture of her with coat hangers draped over her ears. And then she put two big buttons over her eyes and scrunched up her face to hold them there. I wanted her to know I loved her stories. Sara made up the scariest stories! Especially the one about a girl’s mother who turns into a praying mantis and her arms drop off and she gets this long bony face with huge eyes and jaws! I wanted to tell her how much fun I’d had at her house once, playing in big boxes out in the yard and helping myself to whatever I wanted in the refrigerator for lunch.
Maybe Rosalind and I could go looking for her. If she was in a tent, maybe we’d find it. If she was sleeping in her family’s car, maybe we’d see her there. I felt my mattress jiggle as Oatmeal, my gray and white cat, jumped up on my bed to sleep with me. I reached out and scratched her behind the ears in the darkness. She licked my hand, but she didn’t purr. I didn’t feel like purring either.
PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR includes many of her own life experiences in the Alice books. She writes for both children and adults, and is the author of more than one hundred and thirty-five books, including the Alice series, which Entertainment Weekly has called “tender” and “wonderful.” In 1992 her novel Shiloh won the Newbery Medal. She lives with her husband, Rex, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of Sophia, Tressa, Garrett, and Beckett.
COVER ILLUSTRATION COPYRIGHT © 2012 BY JULIA DENOS
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUR READERS
SIMON & SCHUSTER • NEW YORK
AGES 7-12
Meet the author,
watch videos, and get extras at
KIDS.SimonandSchuster.com
BOOKS BY PHYLLIS REYNOLDS NAYLOR
Shiloh Books
Shiloh
Shiloh Season
Saving Shiloh
The Alice Books
Starting with Alice
Alice in Blunderland
Lovingly Alice
The Agony of Alice
Alice in Rapture, Sort Of
Reluctantly Alice
All But Alice
Alice in April
Alice In-Between
Alice in Lace
Outrageously Alice
Achingly Alice
Alice on the Outside
The Grooming of Alice
Alice Alone
Simply Alice
Patiently Alice
Including Alice
Alice on Her Way
Alice in the Know
Dangerously Alice
Almost Alice
Intensely Alice
Alice in Charge
Incredibly Alice
Alice on Board
Alice Collections
I Like Him, He Likes Her
It’s Not Like I Planned It This Way
Please Don’t Be True
The Bernie Magruder Books
Bernie Magruder and the Case of the Big Stink
Bernie Magruder and the Disappearing Bodies
Bernie Magruder and the Haunted Hotel
Bernie Magruder and the Drive-thru Funeral Parlor
Bernie Magruder and the Bus Station Blowup
Bernie Magruder and the Pirate’s Treasure
Bernie Magruder and the Parachute Peril
Bernie Magruder and the Bats in the Belfry
The Cat Pack Books
The Grand Escape
The Healing of Texas Jake
Carlotta’s Kittens and the Club of Mysteries
Polo’s Mother
The York Trilogy
Shadows on the Wall
Footprints at the Window
The Witch Books
Witch’s Sister
Witch Water
The Witch Herself
The Witch’s Eye
Witch Weed
The Witch Returns
Picture Books
King of the Playground
The Boy with the Helium Head
Old Sadie and the Christmas Bear
Keeping a Christmas Secret
Ducks Disappearing
I Can’t Take You Anywhere
Sweet Strawberries
Please DO Feed the Bears
Books for Young Readers
Josie’s Troubles
How Lazy Can You Get?
All Because I’m Older
Maudie in the Middle
One of the Third-Grade Thonkers
Roxie and the Hooligans
Books for Middle Readers
Walking Through the Dark
How I Came to Be a Writer
Eddie, Incorporated
The Solomon System
The Keeper
Beetles, Lightly Toasted
The Fear Place
Being Danny’s Dog
Danny’s Desert Rats
Walker’s Crossing
Books for Older Readers
A String of Chances
The Dark of the Tunnel
The Year of the Gopher
Send No Blessings
Ice
Sang Spell
Jade Green
Blizzard’s Wake
Cricket Man
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 20
03 by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
ATHENEUM BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a registered trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Atheneum logo is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition
Book design by Mike Rosamilia
The text for this book is set in Berkeley Old Style Book.
This Atheneum Books for Young Readers paperback edition September 2012
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds.
Alice in Blunderland / Phyllis Reynolds Naylor.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Fourth-grader Alice tries unsuccessfully to avoid embarrassing mistakes and to establish better relations with her older brother Lester.
ISBN 978-0-689-84397-6 (hardcover)
[1. Embarrassment—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 3. Single-parent families—Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Schools—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7 .N24Akd 2003
[Fic]—dc21 2002154700
ISBN 978-1-4424-4643-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-4424-4644-1 (eBook)