Marvin Ver Sloot, right?”
“Yes,” said Alice. “Implement business, right?”
“That’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.
“Two 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!
“Tell me again what those two books were that Miss Den Harmsel assigned you for the summer,” said Alice.
“History stuff,” said Lydia. “I think they’d bore you.”
“I could lend you Beloved and The Grapes of Wrath,” said Alice.
“No, 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 loudmouthed students. As she wound her way through the noisier hallways, she saw a few of the jocks, but they couldn’t keep eye contact with her—that shifting unease in their whole body, their feigned attention to something else, anything else. They really were scared of her. Losing them was no loss at all. But Lydia. First Aldah, and now Lydia.
In the noisy hallways after sixth period Alice saw the dark hair of Nickson bobbing at shoulder-level of the students around him. She did not see his face, whether it said he was scared, carefree, angry, or totally content. It was hard to imagine contentment for him: the only bird of a feather he might find at Midwest was the adopted Korean girl named Sarah Vande Kamp. Alice tried to imagine a day when half the students at Midwest would have dark hair and tan skin and when a rainbow sea of sounds and colors would obliterate the bigotry of Dutch Center—and probably of her own parents. By that time she would already be gone, away from Dutch Center and swimming in her own sea of many colors.
As she walked alone toward the 150 after school, she saw Nickson again. He was talking to the notorious bad boys of Midwest. It looked as if the dopers were reaching out to Nickson. Even worse, he grinned and swayed with them in a little brotherhood circle. These guys were worse than the jocks. They were a little gang that Lydia and Alice had labeled “the Slouchers.”
“Hey, Nickson!” Alice yelled.
He stepped away from the Slouchers and walked toward her, the seat of his pants hanging loose as an old sow’s jowls.
Alice felt a tantalizing warmth as he walked toward her. She felt as if she was protecting the vulnerable, even though he looked confident in his easy swaying steps. And he looked so different from all the blond hair and white faces swarming out of the swinging front doors of Midwest.
“Sorry I couldn’t talk longer after church,” said Alice.
“That’s all right,” he said. “Your folks were waiting.”
“Want a ride home?”
The question made his eyebrows jump in surprise, but he said, “Sure.” His eyes lit at the sight of the 150: “Yo,” he said, “nice wheels,” and got in.
“Your Toyota station wagon looks like a good vehicle,” said Alice.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Sits low compared to this baby.”
Alice could see his profile in her peripheral vision as she drove. He was looking straight ahead, though he may have had peripheral vision too. Alice glanced down at her knees as she drove and wondered what they looked like from his position. She put her right hand down on the seat between them and turned a corner using only her left hand to steer. She knew she was trying to show off just a bit, though she couldn’t tell if he was impressed with her casual driving skill.
A few minutes later Alice pulled up behind the Vangs’ Toyota station wagon. She thought she saw an apparition. She refocused her eyes. It was no apparition. Someone had put that awful bumper sticker on the rear bumper of the Vangs’ station wagon: “If You’re Not Dutch, You’re Not Much.”
Alice looked over at Nickson, but he just smiled.
“I know it’s not funny,” said Alice.
“It’s pretty lame,” he said, but he was still smiling.
They both stepped out. Alice walked around to the front of the pickup, but Nickson walked toward the house.
Feeling her temper rise at a time like this felt perfectly right. She felt righteous indignation and a justifiable feeling that somebody should be punished. She didn’t touch the bumper sticker. The police would need it for evidence.
“Alice!” It was Mai, standing on the front steps of their house.
“Mai.” Alice pointed at the bumper sticker. “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “I apologize for whatever jerk did this.”
Mai walked toward the evidence. “Oh that?” she said. She was wearing jeans, an oversized gray T-shirt, and flip-flops. Strands of dark hair swirled around her bright face. Everything about her was animated.
The blue-and-white bumper sticker glistened. This time Alice did not stand in front of the evidence, and she didn’t rip it off.
“I’m going to get them for doing this,” she said. Her lips tightened. She was on the basketball court with nobody to elbow.
“Oh, you don’t like it?” said Mai.
“Don’t like it?”
“I put it on yesterday before driving to campus,” she said. “What a hoot.”
“You put that bumper sticker on your own station wagon?”
“Yep,” she said. “Now all the minority students at Redemption want one—but I’m the only one with a bumper to put it on. Most are putting one on their dorm room doors or wrapping them around their backpacks. They only cost three dollars, two for five.”
This was a turnaround Alice wasn’t expecting, and she was getting an education in