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Alice feels inferior. It seems to her that she´s an ugly duckling, a kind of throwback, a misfit, a mistake and an outsider even of her own family. She´s sure that she´ll never be able to measure up to anyone´s expectations. Sometimes she tries to be someone else, someone important because she´s feeling rather unsettled. From time to time she catches herself trying to fit in and say and do the right things, be in the right place and wear what everybody else is wearing, like a robot. But Alice doesn´t want to be like a weak-willed machine. She tries to be strong and consistant. To be positive, cheerful and wealthy. Her biggest wishes are to be wanted, accepted, beautiful and popular. She wants to belong to someone but even in her family she feels to be an outcast, a drag on them. Alice is unsure about her parent´s love because they are always nagging at her and treating her like a little child, especially her mum. But in a certain way she wants to be like her one time.
Sibling rivalry with her brother Tim and her sister Alexandria is getting right out of control and that´s why she can´t decide if she loves them more than she hates them or the other way round. Her mother is always comparing her with her other two kids and that´s one of the things that really shatter Alice´s nerves.
She remembers being able to talk to her mother when she had troubles, but now she finds it difficult to talk about her thoughts and her emotions because at the moment it seems as if they are speaking different languages and the meanings don´t come across the right way. So the only close friend she can share her moods and tears with, the only one she can tell about her insecurity and her sense of being fed up with herself or feeling slobby is her diary. Well, until she gets to know Beth. The two girls talk about everything under the sun, for example sex. Beth is Jewish and for this reason she doesn´t care a lot about this topic because she has to stay a virgin until marriage. In Alice´s point of view sex is a strange, inconvenient and awkward thing. She can´t imagine it to be graceful She swears to die a virgin if she doesn´t come together with Roger, and so it seems to be tragic that her - as she calls it - one and only true love of her life is over when she´s only fifteen. Moreover Alice thinks that all of the boys are oversexed and that she is developing very slowly in this respect.
The first time she thinks about death is when her grandpa has a heart attack and is dying. She wonders if there is a life after death, but she hopes so. Alice knows that their souls will go back up to God, yet she can´t bear the thought of their bodies rotting and eaten by worms and maggots in the dark cold ground. One day when she will die she rather wants to be cremated.
"School is like a nightmare," she points out. Everything is dumb, old and dull. In her new school the teachers are idiots and drags and she doesn´t want the other children to stare at her in this curious and hostile way they do.
The traits of character that make her liable to addiction are her self-consciousness because of being a loner, her seclusion, her depressions and her qualities of being easily discouraged and always putting the blame on herself. Moreover it would be better if she had a contact, for example her mother or a good friend.
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