I’ll admit that seventh grade was only one day old, but suddenly I had this new goal: to go the whole year with everyone liking me. I don’t mean be “most popular girl” or anything; I just wanted teachers to smile when they said “Alice McKinley” and the other kids to say, “Alice? Yeah, she’s okay. She’s neat.”
In the long-running series of novels chronicling practically every moment of Alice McKinley’s life from first day of sixth grade to adulthood, this entry covers the first half of seventh grade. And Alice has a mission in sight for what she hopes to accomplish this year: to become Alice the Likable. Not that she was ever a particularly unlikable sort or the type of protagonist who would wind up being the nemesis in the story of another person, understand. And even the mission itself is not an exercise in hyperbolic narcissism. She is not directing herself to becoming the most popular student or even the most popular girl in school. Or even the most likable, for that matter. It’s a personal spectrum, not one gunning for placement on a universal collective. Still, being likable is not the easiest thing in the world.
“SGSD”
Or, as Alice’s brother terms her, “Mack-Truck” Whitlock. It is not a politically correct insult since it is based on body shaming to a point, but there is also something about Denise Whitlock that would make the nickname appropriate even if she didn’t share the same basic build. The path to universal likability is primarily obstructed for Alice by Denise and her gang of four whose mission in life—or at least the middle school part of it—is to make life as unbearable as possible for those they don’t take a liking to. And they don’t take a liking to the girl who is aiming to end the year as Alice the Likable.
The cryptic quote above is delivered with appropriately cryptic intent. After saying it and recognizing that it had the intended effect of confusing Alice beyond all hope, Denise and her buddies merely laugh and go about their way. What does it mean? Well, of course, that would not be very fair to the author to spoil it here, would it? Let’s just say that it is a threat which, actually, Denise is kind enough to deliver as a warning before the fact. At least this with the warning, Alice can prepare beforehand in an effort to avoid a potential introduction of her face to toilet water…and not the perfume kind of toilet water, either.
“People who try to please everybody all the time turn out like oatmeal…They become so bland, so boring, that no one can get very interested in them…What you have to do first of all is be true to Alice McKinley. And if you’re the best Alice you can be, you’ll just naturally respect the right of other people to be themselves.”
Of course, this quote is from Alice’s father. It is the kind of thing that only a parent—or a guardian type filling the role of a parent—would give to a child who has just been pressing the issue of how to get everybody to like them for just one single rotten school year. Alice’s intention to become Alice the Likable is a journey that has faced some waters much more treacherous than she expected. And not just in the form of the tidal wave that is the Mack-Truck always on the lookout for the perfect opportunity to commit hit-and-run. It may be a pocketful of cliches, but that doesn’t mean dear old dad’s advice is not spot-on. The problem, of course, is implementation. How are you supposed to respect the best that other people can be when it seems that the best they can be is so rotten that even being bland ticks them off?
