Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales by Ali Wentworth Read Free Book Online

girls would swarm him (testosterone and pepperoni? Be still my heart!), and the trust fund babies would shell out an enormous tip. After pizza I would fall asleep to the sounds of my neighbor forcing herself to throw up down the hall. She was from Tallahassee, where it’s imperative to be skinny and tan all year round. From what I understand, she runs the Orlando Hooters now.
    I t was around this time that Lucy started spending more and more time in the infirmary, a building with six rooms, painted a variety of repulsive pastel colors like crème de menthe and eggnog, with two iron beds in each. I don’t remember being sick there, just faking it to get some extra sleep. All I wanted to do was eat cheese out of a can and sleep sixteen hours a day. The nurse always gave us pills, lots of (sugar) pills. I would take them with ginger ale and slide into a coma. And that was as close to a break as I got for four years.
    I never knew what exactly Lucy was sick with. Whenever she came back, she had no discernible symptoms; she was just a bit pallid and less animated. It was a Monday afternoon before Christmas vacation when the ambulance pulled up in front of the dorm. I was walking back from art class and saw two technicians get out and greet the headmistress. Then everyone walked somberly into the building. I was told to wait downstairs. I sat quietly on the mustard-colored sofa in the waiting area. Usually this space was used for storing lacrosse sticks or collecting mail. I had never actually been stationary in the room before. I looked up to see white shoes descending the stairs backward, then some Keds flailing, and then another pair of white sneakers. It was Lucy. She had a white canvas straitjacket tied around her middle, and she was thrashing like a marlin begging to be thrown back. She was placed in the ambulance, and then, in the blink of an eye, it drove away. I sat on the sofa and watched the sky turn a deep aubergine. Dusk seemed to close the curtains on the event. Nothing had to be explained to me; I knew everything was different.
    I got permission to visit Lucy twice at McLean Hospital. She was always simultaneously crying and smiling while chain-smoking. I got the impression she didn’t know where she was or what had happened, so I kept our conversations to simple categories like field hockey scores and who had cheated on their midterms. I would sit on her roommate’s bed across from her and nod and smile and try not to run screaming though the glass security doors. She kept repeating, “We can smoke in here, so that’s good, no butt room!” and she’d stamp out another cigarette into a makeshift aluminum foil ashtray. After the second visit I never went back. The thing about mental hospitals is—they make you feel crazy!
    I never got a new roommate that year; I think the school felt I could use the mending period before assigning me another unstable adolescent. I did befriend two other girls who were on my floor. There was Bella, a former toddler pageant winner from Atlanta, and Lulu, a hippie from Marin County, California. Bella had plastered the whole wall with magazine cutouts of beautiful clothed and unclothed models. It looked like the creepy inner sanctum of a serial killer, minus the newspaper clippings circled in red lipstick. But a shrine to obsession nonetheless.
    Every night Bella would lay out her outfit for the next day, down to the hair clip, belt, earrings, and lip gloss shade. I found this extraordinary, considering most girls wore their pajamas to class, or the nearest thing they could pull off the floor. She even had a skin regimen, a nighttime ritual that involved five different jars. This was my introduction to astringents and exfoliators. Sea Breeze and a cotton ball were no longer sufficient; apparently my skin was in desperate need of cleansers found only on the first floor of Neiman Marcus. If there was a feminine component missing in my education, I had found it in the shape of a