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Informationen zum Autor Phyllis Reynolds Naylor has written more than 135 books, including the Newbery Award-winning Shiloh and its sequels, the Alice series, Roxie and the Hooligans, and Roxie and the Hooligans at Buzzard's Roost. She lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. To hear from Phyllis and find out more about Alice, visit AliceMcKinley.com.Chapter 1 Starting Over It was impossible to start school without remembering him. Some kids, of course, had been on vacation when it happened and hadn’t seen the news in the paper. Some hadn’t even known Mark Stedmeister. But we’d known him. We’d laughed with him, danced with him, argued with him, swum with him, and then . . . said our good-byes to him when he was buried. There was the usual safety assembly the first day of school. But the principal opened it with announcements of the two deaths over the summer: a girl who drowned at a family picnic, and Mark, killed in a traffic accident. Mr. Beck asked for two minutes of silence to remember them, and then a guy from band played “Amazing Grace” on the trumpet. Gwen and Pam and Liz and I held hands during the playing, marveling that we had any tears left after the last awful weeks and the day Liz had phoned me, crying, “He was just sitting there, Alice! He wasn’t doing anything ! And a truck ran into him from behind.” It helps to have friends. When you can spread the sadness around, there’s a little less, somehow, for each person to bear. As we left the auditorium later, teachers handed out plastic bracelets we could wear for the day—blue for Mark, yellow for the freshman who had drowned—and as we went from class to class, we’d look for the blue bracelets and lock eyes for a moment. “So how did it go today?” Sylvia asked when she got home that afternoon. And without waiting for an answer, she gave me a long hug. “Different,” I said, when we disentangled. “It will always seem different without Mark around.” “I know,” she said. “But life does have a way of filling that empty space, whether you want it to or not.” She was right about that. Lester’s twenty-fifth birthday, for one. I’d bought him a tie from the Melody Inn. The pattern was little brown figures against a bright yellow background, and if you studied them closely, you saw they were tiny eighth notes forming a grid. I could tell by Lester’s expression that he liked it. “Good choice, Al!” he said, obviously surprised at my excellent taste. “So how’s it going? First day of your last year of high school, huh?” “No, Les, you’re supposed to say, ‘This is the first day of the rest of your life,’” I told him. “Oh. Well then, this is the first minute of the first hour of the first day of the rest of your life. Even more exciting.” We did the usual birthday thing: Lester’s favorite meal—steak and potatoes—the cake, the candles, the ice cream. After Dad asked him how his master’s thesis was coming and they had a long discussion, Les asked if I had any ideas for feature articles I’d be doing for The Edge. “Maybe ‘The Secret Lives of Brothers’?” I suggested. “Boring. Eat, sleep, study. Definitely boring,” he said. From her end of the table, Sylvia paused a moment as she gathered up the dessert plates. “Weren’t you working on a special tribute to Mark?” she asked. Now that I was features editor of our school paper, everyone had suggestions. “I am, but it just hasn’t jelled yet,” I said. “I want it to be special. Right now I’ve got other stuff to do, and I haven’t even started my college applications.” “First priority,” Dad said. “Yeah, right,” I told him. “Do you realize that every teacher seems to think his subject comes first? It’s the truth! ‘Could anything be more important than learning to express yourselves?’ Zusammenfassung Senior year is a big deal! and it’s full of ...
