Alice in the Middle

Thanks to all my family and friends for their ongoing support and encouragement.

Thanks also to everyone at The O’Brien Press, especially my editor, Helen.

Thanks to all the great bookshops and libraries who organised readings and signings, and to all the readers who have written me such wonderful letters about Alice and Megan.

I
woke up and noticed that I was smiling, the way you do when you’ve been having a really fantastic dream. Then I realised that I hadn’t been dreaming, and I smiled even more. I stretched my arms over my head, banging my knuckles hard on the wall behind my bed. That should have hurt, but I didn’t feel any pain. I jumped out of bed, pulled back my curtains and looked outside. The sky was a dull grey, like the colour of Mum’s favourite porridge pot. Rain was beating hard against my bedroom window, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered today, I thought. This was going to be
the most wonderful day of my whole life.

I went in to the kitchen, where Mum was stirring a pot of porridge.

‘Excited?’ she said.

I nodded, almost afraid to speak. Then I sat down at the table, in my usual place.

‘We’re going to miss you,’ she said.

Suddenly the excitement got too much for me. I jumped up, raced over to Mum and hugged her hard. Then all the words I’d been afraid to say tumbled out of my mouth.

‘Mum, I’m so, so,
so
excited. I’m going to summer camp and Alice is coming too and it’s going to be so, so, so,
so
great and we’re going to do fun stuff every day and, and, and–’

‘–and you’re going to miss us too?’ asked Mum, wriggling free of my hug.

I shook my head, and then noticed how sad Mum looked.

‘Well,’ I said quickly, ‘I suppose I will miss you a bit at first.’

Mum smiled.

‘But not so much that you’ll be phoning for
Dad and me to come and take you home?’

I shook my head again.

‘No way.’

Mum smiled again, but somehow managed to look sad while she was smiling.

‘My little girl,’ she said. ‘All grown up and off to summer camp. Now sit down and eat your porridge, or you’re not going anywhere.’

I was too happy to argue with her. I sat down again, and Mum put a huge bowl of porridge in front of me. I ate quickly, trying not to grin as I thought of the twenty-one wonderful porridge-free days that stretched ahead of me.

As soon as breakfast was over, I went back into my bedroom and finished off my packing. By eleven o’clock I was all ready to go. I zipped up my rucksack and carried it into the hall where Mum was waiting for me wearing the same smiling-but-sad face.

‘I’m ready,’ I said. (Just in case she hadn’t noticed.)

Mum took a deep breath and started on her list.

‘Have you packed your toothbrush and
toothpaste?’

I nodded.

‘Have you got enough clean underwear?’

I nodded again. Was this conversation really necessary?

‘And the new top Auntie Mona sent you?’

I nodded again, though this was a lying nod. The top Auntie Mona had sent me was totally hideous – orange and pink with big scratchy frills. It looked like a cheerleader’s pom-pom gone wrong. When Mum wasn’t looking I’d hidden it under my mattress.

‘And plenty of warm jumpers?’

‘And a good book?’

‘And sunscreen?’

And a big sack of sweets and chocolate?

Mum didn’t say the last one of course. Only my dream-Mum, the normal one, would ever say something like that.

And on and on she went.

‘A sun hat?’

‘A raincoat?’

I looked at my watch impatiently. If Mum didn’t
hurry up, I’d miss the bus, and then it wouldn’t matter whether the five thousand things she’d mentioned were in my bag or not.

Just then the doorbell rang. Through the glass door, I could see the outline of a figure. I breathed a big sigh of relief when I realised that it was an Alice-shaped outline. Was I ever glad to see her!

I opened the door and my best friend stepped into the hallway.

‘All set?’ she asked. ‘Have you everything packed?’

‘Shhh,’ I whispered, ‘or you’ll start Mum off again.’

Then in a louder voice I said, ‘Can we go now?’

Mum nodded, with a worried look on her face. ‘I suppose so. If you’re sure you have everything?’

I pulled her by the arm.

‘I have, I promise. Now let’s go before we miss the bus.’

Dad and my little sister Rosie came downstairs, and we all climbed into our battered old car. Alice’s dad stood on their front doorstep and
waved goodbye.

Why couldn’t I get a sensible send-off like that?

Why did my whole family have to come to see me off?

Why did I always have to look like an escapee from a travelling circus?

I made a face at Alice, and she made one back at me. But then I smiled. I was going to summer camp for three whole weeks, and nothing else mattered – not even the fact that my parents are the least cool people in the history of the universe.

Half an hour later, the bus pulled away from the bus station. Dad and Rosie waved madly. Mum waved too, but I could see that she was crying. I felt kind of embarrassed, and sorry for her at the same time. Then I thought about the great time Alice and I were going to have, and I didn’t think about how Mum felt any more.

I still couldn’t understand how Mum had allowed me to go to camp. One afternoon, I’d just said, ‘Mum, can I go to summer camp in Cork
with Alice?’ I tried to say it all casual-like – as if I hadn’t been working up to it for days. As if I didn’t expect her to list a hundred reasons why summer camp would be bad for me. And then Mum totally surprised me by saying, ‘Of course you can, love.’

Maybe she was thinking about a crazy new plan for the vegetable garden. Or maybe her mind was gone fuzzy from eating too many sunflower seeds or something. I didn’t care though – she had said ‘yes’ and that was all that mattered.

Anyway, that was all weeks ago. Now I was safely on the bus to camp. Mum and Dad and Rosie were getting further away every second. At last I was free.

For the first time that morning I allowed myself to relax. It was going to be a fantastic three weeks – I just knew it. Alice and I had read the camp website about a million times, and we knew everything there was to know. There were going to be all kinds of games and sports, and treasure trails and cook-outs and on the second last night, a huge disco. That was the thing I was looking
forward to the most – I’d never been to a disco before. Even thinking about the disco made me feel all excited and jittery.

Alice and I settled into our seats on the bus. I pulled the camp brochure from my bag, and read it for the thousandth time.

‘Are we definitely going to do basketball as our main sport?’ I asked.

(The camp offered four sports – basketball, tennis, hockey and soccer. Whichever one you picked was your ‘main sport’ and you spent three hours at it each morning.)

Alice nodded.

‘Definitely,’ she said. ‘We agreed that ages ago. We both like it, and we’ll be doing it in September at our new school, so it will be nice to have had some extra coaching. You haven’t changed your mind, have you?’

‘No way,’ I said quickly. I’ve never played soccer or hockey, and I’m really bad at tennis, so I was glad that Alice wanted to do basketball too.

We read the brochure for a while, and then Alice said,

‘Pity Grace and Louise weren’t able to come in the end.’

I nodded, but I didn’t really agree with her. I was kind of glad that by the time Grace and Louise decided that they wanted to come with us, there were no places left in the camp. Grace and Louise are both really nice, and they were very kind to me earlier in the year when Alice was still living in Dublin, but in a way I was looking forward to having Alice all to myself for three whole weeks. I felt like we deserved it.

We’d both had a rough year. First Alice’s parents split up, and she had to move to Dublin for a while with her mother and her little brother Jamie. Then Alice lost it a bit, and came up with all these mad plans to get her parents back together. Anyway, that crazy stuff was all over now. Alice was back living in Limerick and the two of us were off to camp for three whole weeks of fun.

The journey to Cork took almost two hours, but it felt like about two minutes because Alice and I were chatting so much.

When we got off the bus, we were met by a man in a mini-bus, who drove us the last few miles to the camp, which was in a boarding school in a village a few miles outside the city. I wondered why Alice and I were the only ones on the bus, but was too shy to ask the driver.

We drove for about twenty minutes. Alice and I didn’t talk – we were much too excited by now. At last we turned a corner, and I saw a set of huge iron gates, and a sign –
Newpark College
. We drove up the gravel drive, and little flutters of excitement started deep down in my tummy. I pressed my nose up against the window, and watched as we approached the huge old, ivy-covered building. I felt like a girl in a book, or a film. I felt like Harry Potter on his first day at Hogwarts, or Darrell on her first day at Malory Towers.

I felt as if my real life was beginning at last.