Alice in Wonderland High

To Denise,

For being my first critique partner and for still being the first person I send my drafts to today.

If there was one thing I'd learned so far in high school, it was this: good girls are just bad girls who don't get caught. I'd avoided detection for almost three years, perfecting my goody-two-shoes image so my classmates—and the law—would forget all about my unconventional hobby, a social killer best kept hidden, like an STD.

And maybe if I'd kept up the façade I wouldn't be faced with words that never used to be in my vocabulary:
expulsion
,
ecotage
,
vigilante
.
Prison
.

But the thing is, if I had to do it all over again? I wouldn't change a thing. (Okay, maybe I'd skip the part where I accidentally wore see-through pajamas in front a boy who was not my boyfriend.) What was a little blemish on my high-school transcript when it might save people? Save my friends? I had to keep reminding myself of that as I waited for the verdict on all my crimes. Or as I liked to refer to them, my missions.

On the day of the first mission, I crouched in the empty school hallway right outside the teachers' lounge, wishing my bones were made of titanium steel to give me a little more reinforcement in the courage department.

“I still can't believe you talked me into this, Alice,” my best friend Dinah Tenniel said. She was talking to me but looking at Dru Tweedle, my other . . . friend. The extracurricular activities had let out early and the teachers were all in a “meeting” in the gym, leaving the school open and vulnerable. Rumors had been flying that the meeting was actually a staff party, complete with an open bar and a hypnotist. If only we could hypnotize the teachers permanently.

“And I can't believe, after all my begging, all it took was a promise to be the school mascot with you.” I pressed my ear to the door of the lounge and listened for any sounds coming from within. To get them to
finally
agree to help me take action, I hadn't just promised to wear the itchy uniform; I'd sworn to be the tail end. It was a two-part stallion costume, and someone had to be the butt of the joke, so to speak. It was Di's brilliant plan to get close to the football team and have an excuse to talk to them. But hey, wasn't that what friends were for? Having a companion for the embarrassing things. If anyone caught me breaking into the teachers' lounge, stealing the school's supply of letterhead, and donating it to the recycle center alone, my reputation would be as endangered as the rainforests.

“All your other mission suggestions were lame. But this one?” Dru nodded at the teachers' lounge, her rope-colored hair swinging with the movement. “It might even get the attention of—” She met my eyes and snapped her mouth shut. “No one.”

“That's right, because no one can know it's us,” I said. “Think unsolved mystery.” I tried to ignore the ache in my chest at the brief exchange that flitted between Di and Dru. Ever since Di had brought Dru into our duo over the summer, I seemed to be more on the
side
of the in
side
jokes. They'd even started dressing the same, both currently decked out in unfortunate white pants and even more unfortunate hot-pink shirts. I was of the belief that if your school didn't require a uniform, you didn't create one yourself. Hence my nonconformist jeans and white T-shirt.

I pushed myself into a standing position and faced a row of red lockers opposite the door. “I don't hear any noises. I think it's safe.”
That would be your cue to open the door
, I coached myself even though my arms dangled at my sides like useless pendulums.

“‘I think it's safe,'” Dru mocked in a high-pitched voice, complete with a giggle. “That sounds like a line a boy says when he doesn't have a condom.” She made no effort to open the door. Di echoed the giggle only a beat too late.

“I'll check it out first.” My voice came out steady even though my fingers shook as they wrapped around the cold metal of the doorknob. I stuck out my chest in hopes it might fool my brain into thinking I was brave. As soon as the door opened, the sound of another door slamming made me let out a tiny yelp and stumble inside the room. The girls screamed and pushed the door shut behind me, sealing me inside the lounge alone. My pulse segued from lazy to marathon. I squeezed my eyes closed, waiting to get caught.

When a year of silence passed by, or at least what felt like one, I crept forward. My sneakers squeaked in a desperate attempt to announce my presence. Traitors. Aside from being packed with paper, the room was otherwise empty. Awesome. My imagination went straight from playing by the rules to hearing things. Or maybe the sound had come from the door on the opposite side of the room. Since no one stood in front of the coffee maker ready to bust me, a teacher had probably left the door ajar and the wind from the open window had blown it shut.

I repeated a new mantra in my head:
paranoia is for wimps and potheads.

I strode back to the door and poked my head outside. The girls huddled in a corner, whispering, and I let out a relieved breath that they hadn't abandoned me completely. “Come on,” I waved them forward. “Coast's clear.”

I headed to the copy machines along the far wall, next to the phantom-like door. A metal shelf leaned beside them, where about twenty cases of letterhead-paper reams sat like pirate's treasure waiting to be conquered.

Dru rolled her eyes at the cases of paper. “I know what you're thinking, but there's no way we can carry those out.” She shook her head. “No how.”

Di nodded. “If it was possible, I'd totally help. But it isn't. Otherwise it would already be done. That's logic.”

Nonsensical logic. “There's three of us. We can each take a few reams.” I injected my voice with a heavy dose of cheerleader pep. Quite a stretch, because perkiness didn't exactly come naturally to me, not when there was so much to be pessimistic about. “Here, get the other end.” I slid a case halfway off the shelf.

“I'm not carrying anything.” Dru plopped onto one of the round, gray tables in the center of the room.

Di glanced at her, then at me, before dropping into a seat at the table. “Contrariwise, I can probably only lug one of those. I thought you had a plan?”

“Love that word,” Dru said. She'd been encouraging Di's obsessive usage of
contrariwise
after they discovered it in English class. I didn't get what was so hilarious about it. “And anyway, Di's right. This is dumb. Recycling all that paper?” Dru lounged on the table like she was on a throne, talking down at her royal subjects. “Let's each grab a ream and use it to exchange notes during class.”

Di's face lit up. “Yeah, it'll be like an inside joke.”

Oh great. Another one. “Guys, please,” I pleaded in a small voice. “I really want to do this. The school's wasting paper by ordering such fancy letterhead instead of buying recycled.” I knew my friends were only helping for the thrill of pulling a prank on the school. Teenage rebellion and whatnot. And since sewing a spandex superhero uniform and crusading all night to save innocent trees only worked in comic books, I'd take any help I could get. Especially when I knew my friends were my only hope.

The thought of failing again made my throat tighten. The petition I'd created freshman year to get a farmers' market started had received more snickers than signatures. And my classmates had never forgotten the time my parents got arrested after chaining themselves to a tree in front of the school—wearing only Adam-and-Eve-inspired leaves—and chanting, “Protect Alice, protect all of us,” when all they really meant to do was prevent the school's expansion into the forest. Even today, some people still watched me as if waiting for me to strip down to foliage and prove craziness was hereditary. My parents had left behind a legacy of unfinished missions when they died, and if I didn't complete them, no one would. I'd disappointed them so much in their lives; I couldn't do it after their deaths, too.

“Please. This is important to me.” My voice cracked. “It may not change anything, but it could get the administrators thinking.”

“About how awesome we are.” Dru studied her sparkly-pink nail polish.

“ 'Bout time they knew,” Di added.

“So you're still in?” I jumped up and down in excitement, though I wasn't sure why they'd suddenly had a change of heart. “We'll find something to make it easier to carry this out. Like a rolling chair or something.” My eyes roamed over the kitchen area, messy with exploding-lunch residue. Unless we planned to shred twenty cases of paper with the paper cutter, we had to find another way to smuggle them out of the room. I backed up to lean against the wall when something hard stuck into my spine. I turned around to find the other door. “Let me check in here.”

As soon as I entered the room, I exhaled sharply. A teacher stood in front of a large, metal shelf, slipping some colored markers into her messenger bag. She snapped her head toward me and the ends of the white scarf that was tied around her head flopped over like bunny ears. Her icy-blue eyes pierced mine just before her lips curled into a smirk, and I realized she wasn't a teacher at all but a fellow classmate. Whitney Lapin, the girl who was never prepared for class was . . . making a grand attempt at change? Perhaps
attempt
wasn't the right word to follow
grand
; more like
larceny
.

“I, uh—” I bit my lip and backed up a step. The amount of sweat that had pooled in my armpits made my white T-shirt illegal according to the school's banned clothing list.

Whitney waved her palm in the air in a
whatever
gesture. She hopped behind the shelf she was perusing and rolled a TV cart from behind it. “I believe this is what you're looking for.”

I blinked at her.

“I assume your silence means your lips are sealed about this.” She pointed from herself to me.

I coughed to free my wimpy voice. “What are you doing? In here.”

“Waiting for you.”

I tilted my head, confused.

“To leave,” she added after a moment.

“Why?” I strode forward and grabbed the cart.

“Seems sneaking into the teachers' lounge is trending right now.”

That second door slam I'd heard. It was Whitney rushing in here to hide. I glanced back at the closed door. “I'll distract them so you can slip out.”

“Don't waste time. I can take care of myself.” She slid a few graphing calculators into her bag. “Besides, I'm kind of curious to see if you can pull this off.”

“That makes two of us.” A frantic aching began in my chest, and even though it probably indicated my fear of failure, I straightened with the realization that maybe it was a desperate need for success. I wanted to prove to Whitney, to myself, that I could do this. With my posture a little bit straighter, I inched the cart toward the door. “Thanks, by the way.”

She waited until I was almost out the door before she whispered, “Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.”

What the . . .

Back in the main room, the girls stopped chatting when I dragged the cart through the door. They looked up with wide eyes, like they'd just been caught in the act. What act, I didn't know.

I pasted a smile on my face even though gravity tried to weigh down my lips.

“Oh, good call on the cart.” Di hopped off her chair, then caught herself and twisted back to Dru. “I mean, if we were going to go through with it and all.”

Dru let out a big sigh. “Might as well. But this prank better go viral.”

We learned pretty quickly that the cases wouldn't fit within the metal frame of the narrow TV cart. Each tick of the clock increased the tempo of my heart. The meeting a.k.a. teachers-behaving-badly fest wouldn't last much longer. Dru ripped open the cases with a pair of scissors while Di and I stacked the reams of paper in a Jenga-formation on the cart. Each time the wheels rolled forward, the reams jiggled.