Read Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales for Free Online Page A

bunches of hair—instant forest hot rollers. The ground was moist enough to mix a muddy concoction, and I rubbed it on my face like Trish McEvoy cover-up. I put leaves between my toes, weeds around my neck, and a dandelion behind one ear. I was Bigfoot and Nell’s child.
    I popped up from the grave like a stripper from a cake. At that precise moment two cars were driving by. The Volvo screeched to a halt, causing the VW bug to brake abruptly and careen to the side. Suddenly windows were down, and even a golden retriever was gawking. It was show time. I pranced around like a member of some esoteric Martha Graham dance troupe, occasionally berating a squirrel or pretending to seduce a birch tree. I was so committed to the role that I didn’t realize there was a traffic jam piling up on the road. As I broke character and absorbed the absurdity of my surroundings and the borderline psychotic lack of inhibition, I caught Sissy in my peripheral vision—she had fallen over. Laughing. I’d like to think it was my performance, which will never be seen by the Academy, but for her it was my complete abandonment of self-respect. The fact that I would sacrifice all dignity just to get home to the Friday TV lineup was unfathomable to her. Sissy laughed so hard she peed in her voluminous linen pants, which provided us with an even more compelling reason to go home.
    When we finally hobbled through the door, my mother and Fiona were eating scrambled eggs. My mother took Sissy to her room and changed and comforted her. Afterward, we all convened in the living room just in time to catch Marcia Brady receiving her corsage. Fiona was tying string around her legless doll, my mother brushed Sissy’s flaxen hair, and I sat mesmerized by a TV family of six children who lived a perfect suburban life, complete with a well-groomed dog and a wisecracking housekeeper who probably worked for free (just being part of the bunch was enough). They lived an ideal childhood with inconsequential hardships that were without fail resolved in twenty-two minutes. They didn’t have divorce or episodes of madness in a cemetery, and unless I missed that episode, none of those kids ever spent time on a morphine drip.

Chapter Five
     
    Girls, Interrupted
     
    F or generations in my family, when a child turned thirteen he or she was shipped off to boarding school. It wasn’t questioned, it wasn’t a choice, you just went. My parents went to boarding school, as did their parents and their parents’ parents—all the way back to the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims prepped by debating the Bible, freezing root vegetables, and bullying Indians.
    My older brother and sister were dispatched before me, and it seemed innocuous enough. As they weren’t around during their teenage years, there were no rooms that smelled like pot (except for school breaks), band practice in the garage, or make-out parties in the basement to corrupt me. However, my sister did get suspended from school for having beer in her room. She was sentenced to a week back home. I remember it being a crisis on par with Watergate, which we had just lived through. There were endless hushed discussions: “What should we do?” “Oh, God! How could this have happened”? I mean, it was an Amstel Light, not a human skull. But it did make prep school seem devious and exciting. So, naturally, I wanted in.
    I picked an all-girls school. First big mistake. The theory used as ultimate propaganda for single-sex schools is that boys won’t be around to distract the girls, and therefore they’ll perform better. Ever been on a diet? When you’re not near a bakery, you’ll crave chocolate-glazed doughnuts even more! You can’t take a few hundred teenage girls and lock them in a pretty white cashmere box for four years. They are hormonal, rebellious, and riddled with eating disorders.
    I showed up at my chosen prep school, tucked away in the suburbs of New England, in colored patchwork corduroy pants and an electric