The Fall of Alice K. by Jim Heynen

pizza in the same manner. “Aye, me lady,” she said, “woulds’t thou make of me a pizza face?”
    â€œA face of many colors,” said Alice. Lydia guffawed. Alice guffawed. Now many faces from other tables turned toward them as if surprised to hear something unexpected from the honor students’ table: food fights or any kind of bad behavior.
    Lydia did one of her quick mood changes and looked at Alice seriously: “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” she said. “Better from me than from someone else. Word is out there that you’re not doing any sports this year. The jocks are pissed, so they’re calling you ‘Barbie Doll.’”
    They united in a mocking, sneering laugh.
    â€œI wish you hadn’t told me that,” said Alice.
    â€œBetter than ‘ass and a beanpole.’”
    â€œNot much,” said Alice.
    â€œWho cares?” said Lydia. “They’re all jerks.”
    Alice agreed, but she’d still have to look at them every day. “Barbie? Barbie?”
    â€œSorry,” said Lydia.
    Alice knew it had to be something other than her physical dimensions that invited the Barbie label. For one thing, she was too tall to fit into a Barbie box, and her biggest bulges were on her biceps and buttocks,
not her chest. The tall skinny girl with muscles and buns, that was Alice. Hardly the profile of a Barbie Doll!
    So Alice knew the jocks didn’t call her Barbie because she looked like Barbie, and they didn’t call her Barbie just because she wasn’t going out for sports. They called her Barbie because they were scared of her, and they were scared of her because they knew she was both smarter than they were and more than their match in the sports department if she wanted to be. What really got to them was that they knew she did not like or respect them one bit. There were times when she and Lydia would hear them talking in the hallways and chuckled at—correction: mocked—their “I done’s” and “We was’s.” In the case of the jocks, fear transformed into profound dislike. Alice skipped over the fear factor and went straight for the profound dislike: she thought they were lamebrains, and she didn’t need to be scared of them to feel that way. Some truths were self-evident. But she had always kept her feelings to herself and didn’t call them names behind their backs. Barbie. How dare they, really! Actually, if even one of them had reminded Alice of Ken, she might have smiled at him and asked him if he’d like to play a game of Scrabble.
    â€œI hope I didn’t ruin your first day back at school,” said Lydia.
    â€œThis isn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but, really, it’s not your fault.”
    Alice had known from her dull headache earlier in the day that her period might be starting soon. Now the evidence collected in her abdomen, a slight ache that quickly transformed into a wrenching pain, what Alice imagined as two snakes wrapping themselves together and trying to squeeze the life out of each other.
    â€œOh, my God,” she said. She squinted and folded her arms, each hand clutching the elbow of the other arm.
    â€œHave we just changed the subject?”
    â€œYou might say that,” Alice groaned. “Have you got a quarter?”
    Of all times for a Nancy Swifty, Lydia had one: “‘Is that a period I see?’ Nancy questioned.”
    â€œStop,” said Alice. “This really hurts. Don’t make me laugh.”
    Lydia stared at her and winced too. One of the beauties of her friendship with Lydia was that Lydia knew when it was time for the humor to
stop and when the quick exchanges of their minds needed to give way to the greater needs of the moment.
    â€œYou’ve got bad cramps, don’t you?” Lydia asked without a hint of humor in her voice.
    â€œReally really really bad,” said Alice.
    Alice saw