Alice in Rapture, Sort Of by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Author:Phyllis Reynolds Naylor [Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

LESTER’S SURPRISE

SOMETIMES I LOOK AT LESTER AND WONDER if he was left on our doorstep as a baby. I actually asked Dad once if Lester was related to us. What was he like as a little kid, I wanted to know. Dad said the thing about Lester was that whatever you asked him to do, he did the opposite. He said that if Mama wanted him to come in for dinner, she’d have to tell him he couldn’t come in the house until bedtime, and right away he’d be banging on the back door. If she wanted him to play outside, she’d tell him he couldn’t go out. The way they raised Lester, I guess, was to talk to him backward.

It’s not that Lester’s mean to me or anything. He just doesn’t think. Or if he thinks, it’s the wrong thing. Like sending Patrick upstairs right after I got a perm. I remember the week before my eighth birthday, when Lester told me he got a really nice present for me. A bike? I wondered. A dollhouse with real chandeliers? I was trying to guess, and that’s when Lester told me that it was alive. Then I was really excited. A pony? A dog? On the day of my birthday Lester gave me this big box and told me to open it gently. Kittens, I thought, because it was so quiet. You know what I found in the box? A cactus—because I’d hardly ever have to water it, he said. I cried.

“I thought it was something that moves!” I told Lester.

You know what he gave me for my ninth birthday to make up for it? A hermit crab. Even though I took good care of it, it only lived for about a year and then it dried up and its legs fell off. You can never tell about Lester.

So on Saturday morning at the ocean, a day before we left for home, I wasn’t surprised to see Lester coming across the beach toward us. I was sitting there in my gorgeous new green and silver swimsuit with Pamela, who was trying to stick on the little metal butterflies that kept falling off her toenails and still keep on her hat and shirt and sunglasses so the boys wouldn’t know who she was if they came around again. We were all listening to Elizabeth’s radio and wondering what the guys were doing back home.

To tell the truth, I think we were all a little homesick. Now that we’d had a week to ourselves, we wanted to see the boys again, to be back in our own neighborhood to finish out the summer. The plan, though, was for Lester to come down Saturday and bring Crystal. She was going to sleep in the fourth bunk bed in our room, and I was secretly hoping that somehow I would get to see her big breasts. Without any clothes on, I mean. Not having a mother, I’d never really seen live breasts up close. So I wondered why Lester was there without Crystal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.