The Fall of Alice K. by Jim Heynen Page B

shocked. I knew you were seeing somebody, but I had no idea you were heading in that direction. Who is it?”
    â€œRandy Ver Sloot.”
    â€œDo your folks know?”
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œAre you going to tell them?”

    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œWhat if your mom finds the pills?”
    â€œMy mom doesn’t snoop in my room.”
    â€œWhat if you forget to take one?”
    â€œI won’t,” she said.
    â€œWhew,” said Alice. “This is a big one.”
    â€œYou’re not going to disown me, are you?”
    â€œI just wasn’t expecting anything like this while you were still in high school. And with this guy Ralph.”
    â€œRandy. Would you rather I hadn’t told you?”
    â€œIs he a Christian?”
    â€œYes,” she said. “He didn’t go to Christian schools, but he was raised American Reformed.”
    â€œAt least he’s allowed to go to movies on Sundays,” said Alice.
    â€œYou’ve heard of Marvin Ver Sloot, right?”
    â€œYes,” said Alice. “Implement business, right?”
    â€œThat’s Randy’s dad.”
    Alice didn’t know what more to say to the person who had been her best friend since grade school. Alice always assumed Lydia would go on to become something great. A doctor. A college professor. A lawyer or business executive or something. One of her fantasies was that Lydia would one day run for governor and Alice would be her main lawyer / adviser. She couldn’t think of Randy as a step in the direction of that future. Going to a vocational college. To be what? The idea of Lydia with Randy made Alice feel nauseated, and it wasn’t a menstrual nausea. She had lost her. She had lost Lydia.
    â€œTwo lovely berries moulded on one stem?”
    Her friendship with Lydia really had been like that, the core of them joined more deeply than anyone else could possibly understand. Their friendship had stood outside the calluses on her farm-girl hands, outside the stench of the cattle and hog feedlots, outside the cold water of the bathroom at home, outside her mother’s criticism, even outside the constant needs of her sister Aldah. The way they could laugh together. The way they could challenge each other in playful word games or in understanding difficult passages in literature. Together, each of them was a bigger person than when they were by themselves.

    Lydia’s announcement made Alice feel as if everything they had given to each other with their friendship might be gone forever. If Lydia was a lovely berry hanging next to Alice on the same stem, one of them had just ripened and fallen to the ground. Her best friend was having sex with somebody who was learning how to fix lawn mowers!
    â€œTell me again what those two books were that Miss Den Harmsel assigned you for the summer,” said Alice.
    â€œHistory stuff,” said Lydia. “I think they’d bore you.”
    â€œI could lend you Beloved and The Grapes of Wrath, ” said Alice.
    â€œNo, that’s all right,” said Lydia. “I’ve already read them.”

12
    Alice wandered into the old redbrick core of the school after lunch, past Miss Den Harmsel’s room and down the granite-floored corridors and along the walls that still had the original dark-wood moldings and down the narrower marble stairways with the wooden handrails that were dark and smooth from hands passing over them for almost a hundred years. The old section of the school did not give her the comfort of the haymow, or even of the cab of the 150, but it always felt like a good place to put herself together and to get grounded when the ground was shifting beneath her.
    The old section with its old classrooms was where the most serious classes were taught—advanced calc, AP English, and senior chem. To leave the old section was to enter the more raucous wider hallways with their slamming steel locker doors and