Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) Read Online Free PDF Page B

YouTube favorites and gossip. To tell the truth, it was a relief when everybody else had gone and just us girls headed over to Liz’s house, closing her bedroom door behind us.
    “Whew!” she said, hugging us all over again. “Oh, man, I have missed you guys!” Texting, we all agreed, could never compete with this.
    She looked great too. Pamela was the scrawny one now, but she didn’t deprive herself of any of the snacks Mrs. Price had made for us. We sprawled across the beds in Elizabeth’s room just like we used to, the twin beds with their same ruffled white bedspreads, and talked about our lives—classes, subjects, grades, professors, fun. . . .
    Gwen told us about going to a sign-language poetry festival I’d seen advertised on campus but hadn’t attended, where deaf students expressed themselves visually, and for the millionth time I thought, This is another cool thing we didn’t see back in high school .
    Liz was into contact improv and demonstrated with Pamelaon the rug. She put on a CD of Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun , and as each of them began moving her limbs in slow, rhythmic motion to the music, they gradually touched, curved together, rolled, separated. . . .
    “What’s it supposed to be? Modern dance? Wrestling? Orgiastic? What? ” asked Gwen.
    “Just bodily expression,” Liz explained after their brief demonstration. Pamela had already been introduced to it earlier in the fall at her school, but it was new and wonderful to Elizabeth.
    “I could sure use some dancing,” I said. “I’ve gained six pounds.”
    “Awwk, tell me about it! The Attack of the Freshman Fifteen! I’ve gained seven,” said Gwen, who still had eleven years of school ahead of her.
    “So what do premed students do for fun, Gwen?” Pamela asked.
    Gwen stretched out full on the bed and propped more pillows behind her.
    “Well,” she said, “the first day I walked into our residence house, some of the freshmen had gathered there in the living room. There was a huge box of LEGOs on a coffee table, and while we were talking, one of the older students put one in her mouth and started chewing. There was a loud crunch, but it didn’t seem to faze her. I was like, Whoa! And then I realized they were edible LEGOs.”
    We laughed. And she said, “It’s like we’re always starving! And get this—every year, they tell me, one of the upperclassmenis selected to be our scout, and he has to keep track of every reception being held on campus—a promotion, a secretary’s birthday, parents of incoming freshmen, retirement party, whatever. And then he assigns one of us to sign up as a server if possible, or simply be a drop-in, and to come back with pockets loaded. And birthdays . . . We’ve got a cupboard full of cake mixes, and whenever someone’s hungry, we think of a birthday to celebrate if we’re not having one ourselves. A couple weeks ago we had a birthday celebration for Trotsky—”
    “Trotsky?” asked Pamela.
    “Yeah. Born on November 7, 1879. We had a red cake, and someone made a pin-the-axe-on-the-Trotsky game out of cardboard. The month before that, we even had a celebration for Donald Duck.”
    “Oh, man. I’m in the wrong dorm!” I said. “Maybe I’ll change my major to podiatry. That’s feet, isn’t it? I think I could handle feet.”
    “You ought to visit me next Halloween,” Pamela chimed in. She was sitting cross-legged now on the other bed, a long turquoise scarf wrapped twice around her neck, a royal-blue streak in her blond hair that now almost reached her shoulders. “Practically the entire school joins the Halloween parade in the Village.”
    “How did you dress?” Liz asked.
    “The pope,” said Pamela.
    “The pope?” I cried. “You?”
    “And I was escorted by two nuns, both guys,” she said. Wescreamed with laughter. “You should have seen us. One of my friends was a grasshopper. We drew our characters’ names from a hat, and had to judge each other on how well