The Encyclopedia of Me (5 page)

My
head
!

“OMG,” said Freddie Blue, jogging to a stop beside me. I noticed she was not using her skateboard. Typical. “You're bleeding! That's so gross! Call the paramedics! 911! 911! Why didn't you put on this helmet?” She thrust an olive green helmet on my head. I took it off. “Pretend you were wearing it, OK? It might be illegal not to! You'll go to jail!”

“Holy cow, are you OK? Did you, like, steal my boards and stuff?” said a boy. I was dizzy. I couldn't really see his face, but his hair was blue. “Like, you've got brutal road rash on your arms.” I hate people who start their sentences with the word “like.”

I said, “I'm perfectly fine, thank you. Those happen to be the scratches of a hairless cat.” I added, “And we just borrowed them.”

Then I stood up and immediately fainted dead away. Fainting is kind of my thing, so I'm pretty good at it.
30
But this was a real, big, and different sort of faint: a grayed out, nauseating one. It was the mother of all faints! The Big Kahuna!

It was an embarrassingly awful wet-your-pants one.

It was a seriously catastrophic may-the-world-open-up-right-now-and-swallow-me-whole one.

When I came to, I immediately wished I hadn't. I felt like one of those vacuum-sealed bags that had just had all the air sucked out of it in a violent rush. I closed my eyes and prayed for instant death, in the form of a sewer alligator suddenly appearing and dragging me under the road for lunch.

“You swooned!” cried Freddie Blue, quickly shielding my wet parts with the helmet that I was still holding. At least it was good for something.

“I fainted,” I said. “It's different.” My head felt funny and my heart felt like it was tripping on stairs. I tried to breathe slowly.

“Is not,” said FB, hauling me to my feet. She began steering me up the hill, which was whooshing around and bucking under my feet. It was like trying to ride a pony
31
by standing on the saddle.

I stumbled. The blue-haired boy grabbed my arm. His hand felt cold and strange, like a dead fish landing on my skin.

“Hey,” I said. “Don't touch me.” I wasn't very friendly, I'll admit, but I wasn't feeling friendly. I was feeling angry. With him. With FB. With everyone. Especially with the alligator, for not showing up on cue.

The walk home took about seven hours or twenty minutes, I have no idea. FB half dragged, half carried me all the way up the gravelly driveway to my house, still holding on to the helmet over my crotch.

In that moment, I truly loved her.

I did not invite the blue-haired boy to come inside. He must have waited outside on the porch, because when FB left, I could hear them talking. At first I thought,
Oh, that was sort of sweet of that boy to make sure I was OK.
But then I heard FB doing that fake laugh again and then the lower, more rumbly sound of his voice. He had a very low voice. And then enough fake laughing to make me feel like crawling out of my own skin and into the nearest swamp.

Giggle rumble giggle rumble.

Was FB getting a boyfriend? Without telling me? What was she doing?

Now I probably had a brain injury AND she was going to beat me in the Boyfriend Race she didn't even know she was running.

“Unfair,” I moaned.

“It isn't unfair,” said Mom. She was still in her hospital scrubs, having rushed home to be with me. I was confused about how that went down, really. Did FB call her? I wish she hadn't. It would be more peaceful to be alone. “It was a silly thing to do and now you're injured because you made a dumb mistake. ‘Fair' has nothing to do with it.”

“That's not what I was talking about,” I mumbled.

“You could have been seriously hurt!” she said. “I'm so . . .”She stopped. “Disappointed.”

“Fine,” I said. “I know. OK?”

She frowned.

“Maybe you could yell at me some more when my head stops hurting,” I said helpfully.

“Tink,” she said. “Don't be rude.” But she went out of the room and closed the door gently behind her.

I spent the rest of the day alternating between lying on my bed and lying on the Itchy Couch with ice packs on my head while my mom shone beams of Angry and Disappointed out of her eyes and in my direction. I hoped Freddie Blue and the blue-haired boy had a nice afternoon! If by “nice afternoon,” I mean “I hope a wild orca leaped out of the ocean and dragged them both to a watery grave.”

You know what a book is, right? Pages? With writing on them? Between covers? So why is this entry here?

Because
B
is for “Book.” That is why. You know, like
A
is for “Apple.”

I like books. If I was going to make a top-ten list of everything good in my life, I'm almost sure that “Books” would feature, but if not, I'll give them an honorable mention
32
because books are mostly awesome, except the ones that are stupid and don't bear mentioning or even reading for that matter, and why yes, I am talking about
The Hobbit
.

One day, I will write a book that will be as brilliant and amazing as my favorite book of all time, which is called
I Capture the Castle
, by Dodie Smith. If you have not read it, drop this book right now and go find a copy. Your mom probably has one. It's an old book.

I do not know anything about the Blue-Haired Boy Who Just Moved in Next Door, except that he is a boy. And he lives next door. And he owns MY tree. And his hair is blue. And he has skateboards that he leaves on his front porch, completely unsecured.

His hair is bigger than mine, the biggest hair I have ever seen. It has big fat curls, like you'd see on a kid competing in a beauty pageant whose mother has labored over that hair for six hours with a curling iron. It is long and thick, like a shiny, loose, soft, white-kid Afro. It is mostly dark brown but then has blobs of blue in it, such that it looks like a flock of angry birds who have been dining exclusively on blueberries have recently flown over his head.

If you guessed that this boy is the boy from the entry
Boarding, Skate
, you would be 100 percent correct, and you have won a beach towel and a year's supply of charcoal briquettes! Congratulations!

Freddie Blue told me that his name is Kai. When I say “Kai” out loud, it sounds like the barking sound that harbor seals make while they beg for fish down at the wharf. “Kai, Kai, Kai,” she said. “Kai this and Kai that and Kai this and blah blah blah.”

She said Kai is as “cute as a cracker” and will also be going to Cortez next year, even though he does not look very “gifted”
33
from a distance or even up close. Not that I have seen him up close, except that one time when I was only half-conscious on the road.

I do not know if Kai is cute or not cute. He may be as cute as toast or even a Pop-Tart, for all I know.

I thought
skate
boarding kids were supposed to be cool and aloof and inaccessible to the likes of me, but whenever this “Kai” sees me, he waves in a way that reminds me of a small dog who wants to climb up your leg while slobbering on your shoes. I do the only thing that I can do when this happens, which is to hide, usually in
his
tree. This is probably ironic.

Freddie Blue says that Kai is probably going to be my first real boyfriend because in after-school TV shows, boys who live next door are always sweet and kind and give people their first kisses. They are never bad boys at all, and while she herself prefers “bad boys,” she thinks that I should have a “sweet and kind” boyfriend because I am not “streetwise.” Freddie Blue apparently equates “streetwisery” with “talking to her BFF like she is idio.”
34

Kai will not be my boyfriend. My first boyfriend is required by law to have lovely, smooth, straight, blond hair; blackish eyes; to be from a small European nation; and also to be a prince. Freddie Blue finds my crush on Prince X “hilarious to the max.” She won't be laughing when he takes me to the Zetroc Prom, will she?

No, she will not.

See also
Afro; Boarding, Skate.

A race between me and Freddie Blue Anderson, which she does not know she is running, to be the first to possess true boyfriend-dom.

She would die and/or kill me if she knew. AND then she'd win because when you have long legs like she does, you can run pretty fast. Really, my only chance of winning comes from her not knowing that she's playing.

Whose dumb idea was this anyway?

Oh, right.

Freddie Blue and I have agreed that any boy who is not actively on our Crush Lists is automatically on our Boys We Wouldn't Touch with a Ten-Foot Pole List, which is not actually written down, it just exists in our heads.

If there was a prize for most disgusting boy ever, all the boys in our class would be winning. One of these days, one of them will fart their way to the top. His farts will be used to propel him in a giant weather balloon into outer space, and no one will miss him even slightly, except maybe his parents.

An undergarment used to support breasts if you have them, or to invite bullying if you don't.

Freddie Blue gets her bra strap pulled constantly, which is so far beyond rude, I can't even classify it. What's worse is having the bullies reach for your bra strap and finding nothing there.

I may just buy a bra and stuff it with Play-Doh. I've heard that this works into fooling people that you have breasts. The Play-Doh sort of sticks, so you don't accidentally drop your (fake) boob out of the bottom of your shirt at an inopportune moment.
35
I'm not sure that the smell wouldn't give it away, though.

Sometimes I write things that are so embarrassing that even my fingers blush and wish they could run away to a forest to hide without the rest of my embarrassing self. I don't blame them. I'm about ready to do the same.

See also
Aa; Anderson, Freddie Blue.

People who derive pleasure out of being jerks and saying horrible things to other people. They are probably deeply insecure themselves, but I can't say that I care too much about a bully's feelings.

I have been bullied since the very second I set foot in the schoolyard in kindergarten and Wex Stromson-Funk came running up behind me, lifted me off the ground, and hurled me across the grass like I was a shot put. It knocked the wind out of me and I thought I was going to die right there, with a face full of dirt. He has bullied me relentlessly ever since, like it is my fault that he nearly drowned me in soil.
36
Luckily, he no longer throws me around, but instead makes idiotic comments in a kind of spasmodic reflex whenever I walk by.

Worse than Wex is Stella Wilson-Rawley,
37
who regularly writes mean things about me on the wall of the basement bathroom with a Sharpie, next to crudely drawn stick figures with large Afros.

Freddie Blue says I don't get picked on much anymore because now I'm pretty, but I believe it's actually because I'm BFFs with Freddie Blue and SHE is pretty. All the boys want to stay on her good side in case she bestows upon them a smile or a handwritten note. She always used to say that Wex like-likes me, which is so funny that I forgot to laugh. Now she admits that he clearly loathes me for unknown reasons, likely to do with his unhappy childhood.

Stella Wilson-Rawley doesn't care about being on Freddie Blue's good side and so is free to stare condescendingly at my hair with reckless abandon, uttering such brilliant wisecracks as “OMG, you could, like, rent space to birds in there for nesting!” Oh, she's so hilair. If by that, I mean “not even slightly funny and really pretty horrible.”

The act of pitching a tent in the woods and sleeping in it, while outside a campfire crackles merrily and frightens away all man-eating wildlife.

When he was younger, Seb loved camping more than anything in the world. Until he was fourteen or so, every single weekend he would beg and beg until my dad took him and Lex camping. I guess Lex liked it too. Then! Suddenly! After an “incident” involving Lex accidentally dropping an Italian wall lizard into the fire, Seb decided that he would no longer be participating. That nicely put an end to that, as I'm sure you can imagine.

I want really, really badly to go camping. But Mom hates camping. And it's not like I'd go alone with Dad and Seb and Lex, even if they still went. Ew. And Freddie Blue says she'd rather set herself on fire and hurl her burning body into a pool filled with wood before she'd ever camp. Ergo,
38
I never have to (or get to) camp. So I guess I will never know if I'm a fun, outdoorsy girl who loves to commune with nature in the woods or a girly-girl who shrieks at the sight of a mosquito.