Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Read Free Book Online Page B

and disappeared behind a line of trees. I parked and got out, studying the five men drinking water from a cooler on the back of a pickup. I was supposed to check in with someone named Ed, so I went up to a guy holding a clipboard. “Are you Ed?” I asked. “I’m the flag girl today.”
    The men stopped talking and looked around. “No,” said the man, peering at me over the rim of his safety goggles. He nodded toward the guy in a faded baseball cap, so I went up to him.
    “Ed?”
    “No, that would be the man over there in the checked shirt,” he answered.
    The men exchanged smiles, and I looked about suspiciously, but I was a good sport, so I turned to the man in the checked shirt, and he said, “If you’re looking for Ed, he’s—”
    “No,” I said, “I’m looking for the boss.”
    “In that case, it’s me,” said a guy with a tattoo on his bare shoulder.
    “Nah, that’s me,” said the guy with the clipboard.
    By now, though, they were all laughing, and I laughed with them.
    “Sorry, we’re just having a little fun with you,” the clipboard guy said. “I’m Ed Crawley, and these SOBs are your partners for the day.”
    “I’m Alice,” I said, and the other men called out their names, grinning broadly.
    The men were repairing a sewer line that led to the houses farther out. The left lane of the curving road had already been blocked off.
    Ed explained my job, which could hardly be more simple: I was to stand at one end of the long stretch of construction with a sign on a pole that said SLOW on one side and STOP on the other. Shorty, the guy with the tattooed arm, was at the other end of the broken pavement with his own sign. When Shorty turned his sign to SLOW for oncoming traffic on his side of the road, I turned mine to STOP , and vice versa. Shorty called theshots. If my attention wandered and I didn’t respond, he’d give a loud whistle and I’d go into action.
    The only thing I could say for the job was that it got me outdoors. There was more physical action for me at a filing cabinet than there was out here on a country road.
    As the morning heated up, I edged more and more to the right to keep in the shade, until finally there was no shade at all. The trickles of perspiration running down my legs and back were maddening.
    I’d been standing there for five hours when I realized I had to pee.
    A Porta-John sat somewhat precariously back near the pickup truck, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it would tilt if I went inside, but I had no choice. I couldn’t just put down my sign and walk off, however. I tried to get the attention of one of the men, but a jackhammer was going, and no one could hear me. I must not have been able to get Shorty’s attention, because he kept waving his line of cars on through. The next and the next and the next . . .
    When someone saw me at last and took my place, I ran for the Porta-John. I barely made it. I pulled the door closed behind me and tried not to look down the hole, managing to hold my breath most of the time until I escaped back into fresh air. I even thought about going without water so I wouldn’t have to use the john again, but that wasn’t a good idea.
    At twelve we opened the lane back up temporarily and sat down under a single tree beyond the truck. When I unwrappedthe sandwich I’d thrown together that morning, though, it was disgusting. The bologna was warm, the cheese had melted, and the whole thing drooped. I was holding it between two fingers when Ed noticed.
    “Don’t eat that,” he said. “Here.” He handed me half a beef sandwich, the meat a quarter inch thick between the bread slices, all of it still chilled from the cold pack in his bucket.
    “I can’t eat yours,” I protested.
    “Yes, you can. I’ve got another to go with it, and a piece of cake.”
    “Now what’s she up to? Takin’ our lunch?” called the guy in the bandana, who had been working down in the trench. “Here, skinny gal, have some chips.” And