Reluctantly Alice Read Online Free PDF Page A

thrifty, and Dad says he hates to be preached at by a fortune cookie.
    Mine was about wisdom, and Lester’s was “A singing bird makes a merry heart.” It was Elizabeth’s and Pamela’s fortunes that started the trouble.
    Elizabeth takes things too seriously, anyway, and when she read hers aloud, her face turned as red as tomato soup: “A good friend will become a dear one,” she said in almost a whisper.
    Now if that had been anyone but Elizabeth, she would have named a few kids from school, considered the possibilities, and thrown the fortune away. Instead, she glanced sideways at Lester and blushed some more. As though Lester didn’t have enough woman problems as it was. I tried to rescue him by handing Pamela a cookie next. But when she read her fortune aloud, I wished I hadn’t: “One touch is worth a hundred words,” it said.
    The problem was that her knee happened to be touching Lester’s at that very moment, all of us sittingcross-legged around the coffee table. She and Elizabeth exchanged glances and then they both dissolved into giggles again. Lester didn’t even catch on.
    â€œSee?” he said. “That’s not a fortune, that’s a proverb. I want a fortune that says, ‘You will inherit a million dollars’ or even ‘Horrible things will happen on Wednesday.’”
    Pamela and Elizabeth were still erupting in embarrassed giggles, and Dad and Lester didn’t quite know what to do, so they started carrying dishes out to the kitchen and I herded the girls upstairs.
    Elizabeth took the bed, Pamela got the cot, and I got Lester’s smelly sleeping bag on the floor. We had Lester’s portable TV for the evening, so we watched for a while, then looked through the Seventeen magazine that Elizabeth had brought over, but it wasn’t long before I discovered that there was only one thing Pamela and Elizabeth wanted to talk about: Lester.
    â€œHe’s really cute, Alice,” Pamela said.
    â€œLester?” I said, disbelieving.
    â€œI love his mustache,” said Elizabeth dreamily. “I forget. Is his hair brown or black?”
    I looked from Pamela to Elizabeth. But before I could answer, they heard Lester coming upstairs. Pamela ran to the door to peek out, then shut it in a hurry, racedback to the cot, and had another giggling fit. When Lester came out of his room again, Elizabeth peeked out and then banged the door hard and collapsed on the bed in embarrassment.
    â€œHe was going into the bathroom !” she said. “Oh, Alice, and he saw me looking.”
    â€œThat’s okay,” I said. “He knows you know that he goes to the bathroom.”
    â€œI could just die,” said Elizabeth.
    I wondered if this is what happens to girls when they’re twelve—they go bonkers over “older men.” It was only a few weeks ago that Elizabeth was going to become a nun and Pamela had broken up with Mark Stedmeister, and here they were, losing their minds over Lester. Lester! I decided that if they didn’t calm down, I was going to dig up his socks from the hamper and give one to each of them, to shock them back to their senses.
    â€œDoes he have a girlfriend?” Pamela asked, as the sound of Lester’s electric razor came from the bathroom.
    â€œYes,” I told them. “Two of them. And he’s probably going to marry one.”
    Their faces dropped. “Is he engaged?” asked Elizabeth.
    â€œWell . . . not yet,” I said, and they were off again, like two horses at the starting gate. They made me turnout the light, and then they opened the door a crack and stood there watching as Lester came out of the bathroom buttoning his shirt and went into his room to put on some aftershave.
    â€œOhhh!” Elizabeth said weakly. “He smells won derful!”
    They wanted to follow his every move, and even after he went downstairs on his way over to Marilyn’s, they