Alice
Alice does not have a mother. Alice gets a new teacher in seventh grade who will eventually—spoiler alert—become her stepmother. But this is really unnecessary because Alice has already taken on the maternal role, symbolically speaking. Among her little gang of four girlfriends, Alice is the glue that holds everything together and she also provides caretaker status to her father and brother.
Breast Size
In elementary school, everybody’s breast size is pretty much the same—including boys'. By middle school, all that starts to change and pretty quickly, too. Suddenly, all the girls don’t look alike below the face anymore. Even Alice is taken aback when she sees naked breasts for the first time. Breasts—and their relative sizes and course of development—instantly become the symbol of girlish maturity.
Denise
Denise Whitlock is the bully who becomes the biggest obstacle to Alice’s intentions for seventh grade: to become the most likable student in school. The best laid plans of mice and Alices must always deal with the seemingly random fickleness of the finger of fate. And Denise symbolizes that seeming randomness.
The “Bubbles” Picture
The picture of Alice, Elizabeth, and Pamela covered in bubbles in a tub together with only their shoulders bare to see becomes a symbol of the difficulty of adolescence and puberty. The photo had been playfully snapped during a sleepover the summer before as exactly the sort of goofy antic that pre-pubescent girls do. But once the photos become available for boys to see, the situation instantly becomes more complicated to the point that both Alice’s friendships with both Pamela and Elizabeth are briefly threatened, not altogether seriously.
SGSD
SGSD is a very odd sort of bullying ritual involving the ability of students in the upper grades being allowed to force any seventh grader to stop on command and sing the school song or face the consequential punishment of refusing: a swirly in one of the school toilets. It would appear that either the adults in the school are unaware of this ritual or—more likely—simply choose to ignore the consequential punishment and focus on the relatively inoffensive initiator. Either way, SGSD—“Seventh-Grade Sing Day”—is symbolic of all the bullying that goes on schoolgrounds with either the tacit approval of adults or the their ignorance of its existence.
