The Encyclopedia of Me (14 page)

The boy next door. Blue-haired. Boarder.

In trying to write this entry, I've realized that I don't know his last name.

How could I have a crush on someone when I don't know his last name?
75

Obviously, I don't have a crush on him at all and so it's perfectly OK that Kai is Freddie Blue's number one crush, and so he can't be mine.

There is nothing else I can say about Kai that you do not already know, as everything I know about him I have already written in this encyclopedia, thus guaranteeing that I will never let anyone read it, ever.

Seriously, did I say
you
could read this?

STOP RIGHT NOW.

See also
Boy, Blue-Haired, Who Just Moved in Next Door; Copwell Beach; Crush List; Ice Cream Incident, The.

The sport of kicking wood and/or other people and breaking it/him/her.

My brothers have both taken karate, and as a result, Lex can chop a piece of wood in two with the side of his hand. Seb sometimes karate kicks the door when he's mad. Once he put a hole in the wall with his foot, then got stuck there.

Neither of my brothers still takes karate, and there is still a gaping hole in the drywall downstairs to remind us of why this is the case.

Karma is when you do something unforgivable to someone else and then something rotten happens to you. Maybe you are riding your bike and you accidentally scrape the side of someone's car with your handlebars and you don't stop. Karma will fix you by inserting a pothole into the road in front of you, causing you to fall over your handlebars and scrape your nose on the pavement,
76
regardless of the fact that the owner of the car probably deserved to have it scraped. Karma is probably also at work when you steal your BFF's crush and destroy her completely, whether you mean to or not. I mean, who knows what karma has in store for someone like
that
?

I have obviously stacked up some bad karma because today is the
Everybody
photo shoot and I have a pimple in my nose cleavage
77
that is the same size as my right nostril, but because of where it is located, it is actually pushing my nostril over, giving me one normal nostril, one half nostril, and one giant boil. That's right. A nostril-sized pimple.

“Impossible!” you say. And you are wrong. It is possible.

It is so large, it hurts. I think it might have its own heart because I can feel it pulsing. A nostril-sized boil is a perfect beginning to any day, especially a day when you are going to be photographed for a national magazine. Glam!

“Thank you, O Mighty Fate!” I said out loud after I finished examining my nose in the mirror. I should add that Fate is in charge of Karma, and tempting it is stupidly asking for capital-
T
Trouble. I stomped down the stairs for breakfast.
Stomp, stomp, stomp.
No one was still at the table, which was littered with filthy dishes covered with egg smears and toast crusts. Gross. I made a smoothie and drank it on the Itchy Couch, with only Hortense for company.

“We're going to be famous,” I told her. She stared at me through slitted eyes. “Cats everywhere will want to be your friend,” I said. “They won't really like you, though. They will just be using you because you're in a magazine.” She licked her paw scornfully and blinked.

“Fine,” I said. “Be that way.”

The room was still and empty.

“I'm going out!” I shouted. No one answered. I left my empty smoothie glass on the kitchen table with the rest of the mess. Mom was going to have a fit when she saw that disaster area, and I know I should have tidied it up. I just . . . couldn't. I could only hope that the fickle hand of Fate wasn't actually going to punch me directly in the solar plexus.

I marched myself directly to Freddie Blue's house. I didn't have a choice. Even with the Kai situation bubbling and boiling in the background and twisting my stomach into knots, the truth was that I still needed FB. She would be able to help me. She might be the only one who would
want
to help me.

FB lives exactly eleven and a half blocks away, which is very close when you are in an air-conditioned car, but may as well be in outer Swaziland when you are walking in a heat wave. By the time I arrived, sweat had trickled into my inflamed zit, swelling it to the size of a piece of fruit, such as a cherry or even a kumquat. It stung. I would have cried, but I didn't have enough moisture left to make tears.

Freddie Blue's mom let me in. I pretended to not notice her noticing my nose, but I know she did. Her eyes were wide with shock. “Hello,” I said. “Excuse me.” I stomped past her and up to Freddie's room, ready to have her make me laugh and feel better and pretend she didn't notice the fruit-like growth on my nostril.

“Hey!” I said. “Check this thing out on my nose.”

Freddie Blue waved at me, with her now patented
78
Swatting Away an Annoying Fly hand-flappy gesture.

“What are you doing?” I said. I may have gotten the signal wrong, I thought. Maybe she was choking on a fish bone, or worse! “Are you OK?” Then I noticed that she was on the phone, mostly because she started pointing at it frantically and mouthing “HANG ON” in this overly fake, weird way that would have been funny if it weren't so rude.

I flopped down on Freddie Blue's perfect bed to wait. Her bed was the most comfortable bed in the world, and the prettiest. It looked like a bed in a catalog and not like a real bed at all.

I closed my eyes and tried to not listen to what she was saying, which was impossible. I cracked my eyes open and looked at her. She was making more wild hand gestures, as if she were signaling that there was an earthquake coming and I should run for my life. I nodded politely and went back to closing my eyes and trying not to listen. She was rhapsodizing about a purple top that she saw in a store when she was shopping with her dad that was “totally to die for, like death on a stick gorgeous.”

I opened my eyes and rolled them at no one in particular. Death on a stick? What?

Finally, she hung up and went, “Now, Tink, what's up?” As though I was just the next thing on her list. The way she was looking at me reminded me of how the school secretary, Mademoiselle Oiseaux, looked at me when I was sent to the ­office — a blank look that said, “I am a professional and you do not interest me, you teensy speck of human dust, and I am also French and very sophisticated!”

It hurt my feelings, I don't mind telling you, both when Mademoiselle Oiseaux did it and then when Freddie Blue did it.

“I . . .” I started. “I don't know. I guess I should go. I mean, it's the photo shoot.” I shrugged, like it was every day that a national magazine popped over to take photos of me and my insane family, and not like I'd come all the way over here so she could help me how to figure out how to
be
and what to do.

“Oh, kiddo,” she said. “Don't look so bummed out! We'll make you look super glam and I know just the —”

Then her phone rang again. And she held up one finger — EXACTLY LIKE MADEMOISELLE OISEAUX WOULD — in a gesture that said, “Hang on, someone more important wishes to communicate with me regarding purple articles of clothing! Oooh la la!
Je suis le
best of
le
best!”

I got up from her bed, where I'd been sweating a dent into her perfect white comforter. I pulled it smooth a bit and then I turned and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house.

She didn't come after me. I waited just to see if she would. I mean, I thought she would.

And she didn't.

It occurred to me that I was often running out of rooms, alone, and not being followed.

I started to run again, but I couldn't run for very long because it was super sticky, icky hot and I didn't want to actually die.
79
Finally, I slowed to a walk. But instead of walking home, I went to Drop Mac Park.

I wished I had a board, but I didn't. So I found a patch of shade and just listened to the soothing sounds of boards clattering up and down the ramps. Watching other people skating was almost as fun as doing it myself.

I wished Kai was there because I thought maybe he'd get it. He'd get why I was upset. Wouldn't he?

I watched and listened until my heart stopped racing and I felt like I wasn't breathing through a straw. I felt OK.

It was just a zit.

It was just how Freddie Blue is.

It was just a stupid photo that no one would see.

It was
just
.

I'm more scared of karma than I am of anything else. Maybe all this is happening because I deserve to have bad stuff happen to me. Maybe I did something really awful once, and I don't even know what it was, and now it's all coming back to me like a nicely wrapped Christmas parcel full of sadness.

You'd think I'd remember if I'd done something that terrible, though, wouldn't you?

See also
Anderson, Freddie Blue; BFF; Crush List; Drop Mac Park;
Everybody
Magazine; Kai.

The author of many, many scary books that you should not read after dark when you are alone, unless you want to be so frightened that for the next fourteen years, you dream about man-eating strawberry pies.

See also
Books; Dark.

The act of pressing your mouth on someone else's and squishing it around in a way that is a lot better than it sounds.

I have nothing to say about kissing that I haven't already told you. You are obsessed with kissing! It's none of my business, but you might have a problem.

See also
Ice Cream Incident, The; Janowicky, Austin; Kai.

A sharp, bladed thing usually used to cut meat or cheese or to spread butter on toast or even to sharpen pencils in a pinch when the sharpener is lost, which pencil sharpeners always are. Also, the way in which we here at the sophisticated Aaron-Martin household start our car. Resulting in a frantic search each morning for the one specific knife that fits in Mom's ignition, in addition to the usual frantic search for her glasses and her keys.

A koan is a riddle that you can't solve. It's a Buddhist word. My mom is a Buddhist, which I may or may not have mentioned before. What it means is that we have a statue in the garden of a very fat, nearly naked man with an unusual hairstyle, and she frequently mutters things under her breath about choosing not to suffer.

Until I met Kai, I did not know how a koan applied to real life. Now I think that I do. Here is the unsolvable riddle: Why do I sometimes like-like a boy with blue, tufty hair who in no way resembles Prince X, who I always thought was my true love? And why do I sometimes act weird around him and feel like all I want to do is get away from him?

It's not really a riddle because there is no highly amusing answer that makes you gasp and clutch your sides, going, “Oh! I should have known! A NEWSPAPER! How hilair!”

In this case, the answer to the koan is ______. A Buddhist would find that funny. Because it's an answer that is not an answer! Buddhists are very much into answering questions with blanks, I think, which may or may not make Lex the world's first accidental Buddhist.

I actually don't understand Buddhism at all.

See also
Kai.

A word meaning “worthless,” “weak,” or “otherwise awful.”

Things that are lame can sweep through your life like a bad weather system, raining lameness down on every single one of your lame surfaces until you are so soaked with lame that there is no hope of anything ever being unlame ever again.

Lame, lamer, lamest, and lamosity are all related words. When something is extra lame, it's important to double the word: lame-lame. The lamosity of this entry is trumped only by the lame-lameness of my lame existence.

As in, “Wow, that photo shoot was lame-lame.” Or “Golly, that photo shoot was a swirling swamp of lamosity.” Or the like.

See also
Everybody
Magazine.

I started shaving my legs when I was pretty young, like eleven. This is not because I'd hit puberty, but because I am a very hairy person.

Shaving my legs is the first thing that I did before Freddie Blue did. She did not have bad enough leg hair to need to shave until this year.

The first time I shaved my legs, I cut them so badly I thought I'd have to go to the hospital for a transfusion, which is when they fill you up with bags of someone else's blood to make up for all the blood you lost from your cut-up legs. Someone else's blood equals someone else's DNA. Then what? Do your own cells start to mutate?

Obviously, people have transfusions all the time and do not metamorphose into anyone else, but it would be much more interesting if they did. If that happened, I would immediately sign up for a transfusion from someone who had truly awesome hair, tall genes, and good karma.