Alice Magnaye

Character Analysis

Alice makes up one-third of the Zach, Poppy, Alice trio, and in addition to being a middle school student, she is a loyal friend and a budding actress. Her best friend is Poppy, with whom she fights bitterly throughout the book, and she's also close with Zach, although their friendship might be turning into something more… if only he'll notice that she has a crush on him. In the meantime, other boys definitely notice Alice:

Boys had been hassling her ever since she'd hit ten, gotten curves, and started looking a lot older than she was. (1.23)

This doesn't make life easy for Alice, to say the least. Plus her parents died when she was very young and she lives with her "superparanoid" (1.43) grandmother, Mrs. Magnaye, who:

[…] grew up in the Philippines and was fond of telling anyone who would listen how different things were over there. According to her, Filipino teenagers worked hard, never talked back, and didn't draw on their hands with pens or want to be actresses, like Alice did. (1.44)

So when she's out of her house, Alice is ogled by older guys, and when she's home, she's nagged and told how she doesn't measure up by her grandma. Good times (not). Poor Alice struggles under her strict rules, longing for the freedom that Poppy has.

Alice's Alter Egos

Like her friends (a.k.a. Zach and Poppy), Alice explores different sides of her identity through play. Her first alter ego was an orphan, just like her:

Before Lady Jaye, Alice's favorite character had been a Barbie named Aurora who had been raised by a herd of carnivorous horses. But one Monday morning on the walk to school, Alice explained that she'd repainted an action figure from a thrift store over the weekend. She wanted to play somebody new. (4.21)

Having worked through whatever she needed to on the orphan front, Alice morphs into Lady Jaye, someone who's crazy and reckless, a thief who "didn't care about anything except for what she could steal and what fun she could have along the way" (4.22). Lady Jaye, then, lets Alice run wild, even if it's only in her imagination.

When Alice sets off with Zach and Poppy for East Liverpool, she has the opportunity to explore her wild side in real life. As the quest wears on, she takes more risks—she's the one who breaks her friends into the library, for instance, as well as the one who engineers their escape. Toward the end of the book, Zach notices that Alice has become a real-life Lady Jaye:

Alice's voice, from the dark, was eerily changed. It was like he was talking to Alice and the character she played at the same time. (13.78)

We don't know what's next for Alice when the book ends, but it seems pretty likely that her good girl days are over. Bring on some good old-fashioned adolescent disobedience.