Outrageously Alice Read Online Free PDF Page A

Halloween.”
    That figured, because Marilyn is sort of the barefoot type, and if she ever marries Lester, it will probably be in a white cotton dress, standing in a field of daisies.
    “I haven’t decided yet,” I told her. “Something that’s about as far away from ‘Alice’ as I can get.”
    “What’s wrong with being Alice?”
    “You don’t have to live with her; I do,” I said.
    Janice Sherman, the assistant manager, came over to ask me to help out in the sheet music department when I was through, and I asked Janice what she used to wear to Halloween parties when she was my age. To tell the truth, I can’t even imagine Janice Sherman my age. I’ll bet she was wearing glasses with a chain attached when she was three years old.
    She surprised me, though.
    “A hobo,” she said. “Mother sewed patches on our clothes, and my sister and I went trick-or-treating as hoboes.”You can’t always tell about a person just by looking.
    By the time I went home at noon, I had decided to go as a showgirl. Elizabeth, with her long dark hair, was going as Morticia from The Addams Family , and Pamela wore the cat costume she’d bought once for a dance recital, only she wore black tights instead of net stockings, and said I could wear the stockings.
    So here’s how I looked on Halloween: black suede platform shoes from Elizabeth’s mother; black net stockings from Pamela; a black nylon sarong-type skirt from my cousin Carol in Chicago, which I found in a box of bathing suits she’d sent last summer; an orange jersey top from Pamela’s mother; and some kind of peacock feather headdress that Mrs. Jones wore once for Mardi Gras. Weird, I guess, was the only way to describe me, but I sure didn’t look like the cupcake I’d been at Crystal’s shower.
    After I’d dressed, I slipped into my chair at the table for a quick bite before I left. Lester looked up, then did a double take.
    “Hello, have we met?” he asked.
    Dad just raised his eyebrows.
    “It’s the new me,” I said.
    “You look like a vamp,” said Dad. He has a vocabulary right out of the Middle Ages.
    “A hooker,” Lester interpreted. “You’re not actually going out like that, are you?”
    “It’s Halloween!” I said. “Besides, I can’t believe this is the same guy who asked Marilyn Rawley to cook his birthday dinner wearing only boots and a bikini.”
    “That’s because I know Marilyn can behave herself. I’m not so sure about you,” he said.
    “Thank you, Lester, for your confidence in me,” I told him, scarfing down another bite of pizza, and then I ran back upstairs to brush my teeth before I went across the street to ride with Elizabeth.
    Mr. Price picked up Pamela and then Patrick on the way—Patrick was dressed like a zombie—and drove us to the school.
    “Wow!” Patrick said when he saw me.
    “You’re pretty cool yourself,” I said.
    The gym looked really creepy. The pumpkin I’d carved a week too early had begun to rot, so it was just perfect to set by the ticket window, with strings of decay oozing out its eyes and nose. Someone said that a couple of smaller kids had taken one look at the pumpkin and decided they’d seen enough, but still the line of children went all the way out the front door and around to the driveway, and more kept coming all the time.
    We’d figured on about two hundred kids, at a buck fifty each, which would mean three hundred dollars for our school library. The whole gym had been partitioned off into a long winding passageway, and we took turns escorting kids through it one by one. They had to stick their hands in a bowl of peeled grapes, of course, for eyeballs, and another bowl of cooked lasagna noodles, which we told them were guts, and all along the way ghosts wailed and zombies moaned and witches cackled.
    Things leaped out at them, lights flashed, doors groaned, cobwebs swished, and when the kids reached the very end—or what they thought was the end—my job was to take each kid, one