delivered a Nancy Swifty: “‘Where’s the pineapple?’ Nancy asked dolefully.”
They leaned toward each other, groaning in unison.
“Not bad,” said Alice. “Not Shakespeare, but not bad. Now how about some Shakespeare?”
Lydia held her pizza in one hand and paged through the play with her other. “Here’s a sweet passage,” she said. “It could be about us.” She read in a voice that sounded very much like Miss Den Harmsel’s: “‘So we grew together, / Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition; / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; / So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.’”
“That’s between two women?”
“Indeed ’tis, madam, though I don’t think the whole speech is sweet.”
“Here’s one I like,” said Alice. “‘Lovers and madmen have such seething brains.’”
“Cool. Miss Den Harmsel liked that one too. How about this one? ‘A wise prince seeks a woman tall and fair’?” she said in a Miss Den Harmselian voice.
“Where’s that?”
Lydia had that look on her face, and then she couldn’t hold her laugh. Her cheeks bulged while her shoulders and breasts bounced.
“You made that up, didn’t you! Didn’t you!”
“Nevah nevah. From the pure of soul the pure of tongue.”
“Dos’t thy tongue betray thee, lady?”
“I’d smite it off, I would,” she said.
Alice held up a half slice of pizza and threatened her. Lydia held up a piece of her pizza in the same manner. “Aye, me lady,” she said, “woulds’t thou make of me a pizza face?”
“A 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.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” said Alice.
“Better than ‘ass and a beanpole.’”
“Not much,” said Alice.
“Who cares?” said Lydia. “They’re all jerks.”
Alice agreed, but she’d still have to look at them every day. “Barbie? Barbie?”
“Sorry,” 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.
“I hope I didn’t ruin your first day back at school,” said Lydia.
“This 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.
“Oh, my God,” she said. She squinted and folded her arms, each hand clutching the elbow of the other arm.
“Have we just changed the subject?”
“You 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.”
“Stop,” 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.
“You’ve got bad cramps, don’t you?” Lydia asked without a hint of humor in her voice.
“Really really really bad,” said Alice.
Alice saw in Lydia’s expression that she was absorbing the misery, maybe from her own memories of this pain, but now her big blue eyes were sending out a steady stream of empathy.
“I’d take half your pain if I could,” she said.
“I know,” said Alice. “I think you already have.”
They exited for the women’s room.
“Here’s a quarter,” said Lydia.
Lydia stood outside the booth to wait for Alice. A minute passed and then Lydia asked, “Are you all right in there?”
“I’m all right,” said Alice. “I just want to stay here for a while until the pain lets up a bit. Let’s read some Shakespeare.”
“You’re kidding.”
But Alice wasn’t kidding: she opened her Shakespeare book and laid it on the floor. She came to a passage that fit the moment. She pounded on the wall of her stall and read, “‘Thou wall, O wall, O Sweet and lovely wall, / Show me thy chink to blink through with mine eyne!’”
“You’re amazing,” said Lydia, “Where’s that?”
“Page eighteen.” Alice read another line: “‘O wicked wall, through whom
