Patiently Alice by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Read Free Book Online

places Elizabeth would want to see most.
    I had hardly got into a pair of dry shorts when the Coyotes trooped in, looking for us. Mary and Josephine were in the lead, Mary holding Josephine’s hand, and were followed by Latisha,looking as belligerent as ever, then Estelle and Ruby and Kim. Kim was near tears because we hadn’t been there in the dining hall to escort them back to the cabin and they’d had to set out on their own. Kim clung to Gwen when she came in.
    “Where was you?” Latisha demanded. “You’re our counselors, and I’ll bet you been swimming!”
    “Right!” I said. “As a matter of fact, I got thrown into the water, and I’m just now drying off.”
    That shut them up in a hurry. They looked at us wide-eyed.
    “Who threw you in?” asked Mary.
    “Some of the guys,” I told her.
    “You gonna tell?” asked Ruby.
    “No.” Gwen laughed. “It was all in fun.”
    Kim still seemed on the verge of tears. “I don’t want anybody to throw me in,” she said.
    “I won’t let anyone do that to you, girl-baby,” Gwen purred. “And if somebody did, I’d be right there to pull you out, so don’t you worry.” She put both arms around Kim and held her close, and that just seemed to be the opening bell, because all the other girls edged in for a hug. Even Estelle. But Latisha watched with a jaundiced eye.
    “Bet one of ’em’s your boyfriend,” Latisha said to Gwen.
    “Yeah? Which one?” Gwen said.
    “I don’t know. Andy somebody?”
    “Nice guy,” said Gwen. “But what about Joe?”
    “Ohhhh! Jooooe!” the girls chorused.
    Latisha gave a hoot. “They’re gonna go off behind the cabins and kiiisss!” she said.
    Gwen just smiled at her and looked mysterious, but the girls were still giggling and grinning.
    “Well, are you?” Estelle asked.
    And when Gwen raised an eyebrow, Estelle said, in a hoity-toity voice, “Are you going to go behind the cabins and make love ?”
    Now the girls really hooted.
    “Joe is just a friend of mine, like all the other guys here are friends. We just met,” said Gwen.
    “She going to!” Latisha stage-whispered, and the girls went laughing and giggling to the showers.
    There was an incident Wednesday night that almost got Pamela’s cabin mate, Doris Bolden, dismissed from camp.
    She and Pamela had a particularly difficult girl in their cabin, a nine-year-old named Virginia, who was living in her third foster home, and had a vocabulary that would have shocked a sailor. When somebody displeased her, her first reaction was to clobber them on the head or the back, or make a quick jab with her elbow.
    Doris had warned her that there would beconsequences if she physically attacked another child again, but that night in the showers she knocked a girl down for using her towel, and when Doris grabbed her, she’d yelled, “Get your hands off me, nigger.”
    Pamela and Doris’s girls had come down early and showered with us, as the girls in cabins eight and ten had cleanup duty in the dining hall that evening. So Gwen and I saw the whole thing. Punishment had to be swift and sure.
    “Get dressed, Virginia,” Doris had said. “You and I are going for a walk.”
    Gwen and I didn’t think much about it. I thought that Pamela would probably get the other girls to bed, and then Doris would take Virginia for a “cool down” and discuss what had happened in the showers.
    Back in our own cabin we went through the nightly ritual of confiscating the food that Ruby and Mary—the usual culprits—had sneaked out of the dining hall in fists or pockets, promising that if they got hungry, the food would be right there in our metal lockbox waiting for them. They didn’t have to steal, only ask.
    Mary insisted that Josephine say her prayers at night, and Ruby and Estelle said theirs as well. I asked the other girls to keep a respectful silence while they prayed.
    Then we had a few stories while lying in our beds with the light off—made-up stories and tales about