Alicia McBride
Age 7 - October 1937, South Bend, Indiana
It was Wrong to tell a lie. Alicia knew that. But it was wrong for Mike to abandon her, and completely forget their Satrday morning routine, just because he liked some stupid girl from his stupid middle school, too, wasn't it? So if she had to tell a lie, or two, or, well, a lot of them so she could follow him, that wasn't so bad, was it?
She told her mother she was going to play over at Rebecca Maitland's house, three blocks over. Alicia knew that her mother didn't know Mrs. Maitland very well, and she probably wouldn't call over there to check, so she'd never know that Alicia wasn't there. She told the bus driver that she had to ride the bus alone to go downtown and pick up the medicine for her mother, who was sick, and it had to be her because her father and brother were up at the stadium watching the Irish play. She told the usher at the movie theater that her father was outside waiting in the car, and she just had to run in for a minute to fetch her brother so could she please go in without a ticket. And she told the stupid girl her brother liked (waiting until she was alone, when Mike had gone to get popcorn for them) that she knew that Mike really liked another girl in his class, and he was only going with the stupid girl on a dare from one of his friends.
When Mike got back to the seat, and saw that the stupid girl was gone, Alicia didn't tell a lie at all; she told the absolute truth, that she had missed him, and took the bus downtown all by herself just to spend Saturday with him like they always did. Mike wondered for five minutes where the stupid girl had gone, but then he forgot about her, and Alicia had him all to herself.
And, thinking about her big adventure, and how it had all turned out so well, Alicia decided that, maybe, telling lies wasn't so Wrong after all.
Age 14 - December, 1944, South Bend, Indiana
The only thing missing from the day was her brother. Her parents were in the audience, and all her friends, and most of her neighbors. She'd been disappointed, at first, that she hadn't won the role she originally auditioned for, the Katharine Hepburn role. But she had to admit that the Ruth Hussey role ("Ms. Imbrie! I told you, call me Ms. Imbrie! It helps me get into character!") suited her better. Sneaking and lying her way into a big society wedding was much more her style than playing the big society matron. Besides, while in real life she would have picked Cary Grant over Jimmy Stewart any day of the week, the boy playing the Grant role was nowhere near as handsome as the one playing Stewart's role...
...two hours later, the South Bend Central High School production of "The Philadelphia Story" was over, an unqualified success. Alicia was, according to everyone, the big star, and modesty didn't prevent her from agreeing. She clearly outshone poor Grace Campbell, who tried really hard but couldn't pull off a convincing Tracy Lord. But Alicia just disappeared into the role, and that's exactly how it had felt to her. For those two hours, she really was Elizabeth Imbrie, and there wasn't a single person in the audience who could disagree.
