The Encyclopedia of Me

by Karen Rivers

  “Freddie Blue?” I said. “Are you OK? You’re being totally weird.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just that . . .”

  “What?” I said. I thought she was going to say Kai, so I interrupted. “Look, if it’s about Kai, you can have him. I don’t even like him!”

  She giggled. “Tink,” she said. “I know I can have him. If I want him. I haven’t just quite decided yet. It’s hard to know what to do. We haven’t been back to school yet. What if I say yes to Kai and then it turns out he isn’t pops? I can’t have an unpops BF!”

  “Unpops?” I said. “Um, is that a word?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Yeah, I’ve been hearing it from some of my other friends.”

  Other friends?

  “Like who?” I said.

  She giggled again. “You sound jealous or something. Don’t be idio, Tink. When I’m at Dad’s, you know, I don’t just sit and stare at the dead fish floating around in his fish tank.”

  “That’s so grot,” I said. “Why doesn’t he flush them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “They’re falling apart now anyway. Fish corpses disintegrate really fast. The other fish have practically eaten the dead ones clean away.”

  It was only when I hung up that I realized we spent more time talking about fish than about Everybody. And isn’t Everybody bigger news?

  Doesn’t fame count for more than dead fish?

  And who are these other friends?

  Everything that is happening to me lately feels like a dream, and it’s not really a good one, more like one that isn’t quite good but isn’t bad enough to wake you up either. I keep hoping for some sort of reprieve that involves realizing that I have been in a coma since the Boarding Incident, and it will all go away when I finally wake up. (Except the good bits, of course.)

  Feel free to pinch me. Not that a coma sufferer in the history of comas has ever been woken by a pinch before, but maybe that’s just because no one’s ever tried.

  See also BFF; Celebrities; Everybody Magazine.

  Fickle

  People who are fickle are people who change their minds all the time about everything, like maybe one day they like chocolate ice cream the best and the next they like only mint chocolate chip; or one day they have a crush on their neighbor, and the next, poof! GONE.

  (Almost.)

  (Due to circumstances — and BFFs — outside of their control.)

  Everyone is sometimes a little bit fickle, I suppose.

  See also BFF; Crush List.

  Fish

  Slimy animals that live in the sea and breathe through the cracks that run along the side of their heads.

  I have a recurring nightmare that one day I’ll be swimming and a teeny-tiny mini fish will nibble on my arm or hair or any part of me and I’ll have a heart attack and drown. I am more afraid of decorative, dime-sized tropical fish, like in Finding Nemo, than I am of man-eating sharks. True fact.

  My wrists are starting to cramp up from typing this. I hope I don’t get carpal tunnel syndrome, which afflicts people who type too much, and renders them unable to record their own histories such that they die alone and unrecognized and poor and then they have to lie in their unmarked grave forever, knowing no one knows anything about them. Or, worse, their bodies are thrown into the sea and eaten by small, carnivorous fish!

  There. You thought I forgot this entry was about “fish,” but I didn’t.

  Now you are scared too. And if you aren’t, you have to ask yourself, “Why NOT?”

  Freckles

  A freckle is a buildup of melanin in your skin, which makes it appear to be dotted with a marker. See how enriching it is to read my encyclopedia? Probably you can go ahead and drop out of school now, because this book is enough to educate you for life.

  My mom says that sometimes freckles go away when a person hits puberty. I hope this is true with every cell in my whole body. Please, please, please let it be true! On the other hand, surely people will notice when my freckles suddenly vanish overnight, and I’m not entirely sure I want the whole world to know the exact second that I hit puberty. Humilio!62

  See also Aaron-Martin, Isadora (Tink).

  Friend

  A friend is someone who you can count on, no matter what. Friends are better than family because family can’t always be counted on to have your back, yet you continue to be stuck with them, regardless. Your friends can be counted on because if they don’t have your back, you can shout at them and never speak to them again.

  Even though sometimes shouting at your friends is impossible, and you don’t want to never speak to them again.

  Not that I am talking about anyone in particular or about anything that has happened.

  I’m not.

  Or maybe I am, just a little bit.

  See also Anderson, Freddie Blue.

  Gadzooks

  “Gadzooks” is the only swearword that we’re allowed to use at home. Basically, I live in a cartoon. I thought Freddie Blue was going to choke to death from laughing last time she was over and Dad dropped the spatula on his foot and screamed, “GADZOOK IT!”

  The exception to this family rule being, guess who? You are right! Ding ding ding!63 Seb swears his head off all the time, and we can’t get him to stop. So there the rest of us are, all “gadzooks” this and “gadzooks” that, and he is properly using all the four-letter words available to mankind.

  Apparently, when I fell off the skateboard on the train track, I screamed, “Gadzooooks!” right before I hit the ground. I hope Kai didn’t hear it, or if he did, that he’s now had it wiped out of his memory by passing aliens on a UFO.

  See also Autism; Boarding, Skate.

  Ginger

  In Great Britain, according to my dad, “ginger” is the word used to describe people with red hair. For some reason this is also a terrible insult. I’m not sure why. When Dad is teasing Mom, he tells her she is ginger, although she isn’t really even a redhead. Her hair is actually a very glam, slightly reddish blond color.

  Prince X is not a ginger. But I would probably still love him, even if he was.

  I wonder if Prince X reads Everybody magazine?

  I bet he does. Will Prince X see a picture of . . . me?

  OMG.

  Girls

  Girls are people who are . . . not boys.

  I am a girl. Obviously.

  But what I mean to write about are the girls at school. The groups of girls. The gaggles of girls. The clubs I don’t feel I get to join because me and Freddie Blue, we’ve always just been kind of on the outside.

  It never bothered me, but it always bugged her. The thing is that girls — at least the ones at school — don’t like me. I don’t know why not. I’m pretty likable once you get to know me.

  Even Seb has more girls who are friends than I do. He used to blurt out things that most people consider rude, but he considered factual, such as “You look really fat in those pants!” Boys didn’t care, but girls did. Now he doesn’t do that much anymore and he’s cute and smart, so girls are drawn to him.

  Next year at school, Freddie Blue and I had planned to reinvent ourselves and be super friendly to all the girls all the time, not in an annoying way, but a way that would make us pops. I had been sort of looking forward to roaming the school in a glam pack of girly-girls, friendlily tossing our hair and laughing, less popular kids trailing in our wake and hoping we grace them with a smile or a piece of sugarless gum.

  Now that I think about it, though, I might prefer to stay on the outside, looking in. I don’t even like chewing gum. It’s much too spitty for my tastes.

  See also Cortez Junior.

  Glam

  Word meaning “spectacularly fab!” Short for “glamorous.”

  Sometime last year, Freddie Blue and I made a pact to start using a word that no one ever uses and to use it all the time to see how many people copied us. “Glam” was our first. I’ve noticed a lot of people are using it now. So, success is ours! I
am currently campaigning to make our next word “scintillating,” as in “Gosh, what you are saying about Mexican iguana frogs is so scintillating!”64 but Freddie Blue says that being obnoxiously smart just makes people want to stuff you into confined spaces, such as refrigerators or old wells.

  Still, I think it’s a great word, especially — only — if used in the properly sarcastic tone.

  See also Anderson, Freddie Blue; Bullies.

  Grabs and Grinds

  Grabs are when you are boarding and you reach down and grab your board. Grinds are when you slide down something on your board, but you don’t slide on the deck or the wheels, but actually on that metal bit that goes between the wheels.

  Kai taught me that. At Drop Mac Park.

  What happened was that I went to DMP looking for Ruth. And she wasn’t there. But Kai was there with about eight other boys.

  I didn’t know what to do, really. I didn’t want to march up and start talking to him. (Actually, I did, but I was too shy.) So I just started doing the only thing I knew how to do, which was to swoop back and forth on the curvy ramp.

  After a while, I forgot he was there, to tell you the truth. I just got into the feeling of swooping back and forth. I even tried it with my eyes closed.

  And then when I opened them, there was Kai, staring at me.

  “Dude,” he said. “You’re pretty good.”

  I laughed. “No, I’m not!” I said. “This is my second time ever. I mean, third. But the first time doesn’t count because . . .”I trailed off, because I was embarrassed. I hoped he’d forgotten. He grinned.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Wow. It’s your second time? That’s, like, rad.” He dropped his board and started tipping around on it. “I could show you some stuff.” He shrugged. “If you want.”

  “Yes!” I said. Then I felt like an idio because I sounded so eager, so I said, “You know, I don’t have a lot of time, so just for a second.”

  “OK,” he said. “Um, well. You gotta start with a grab. You grab your deck like this when you jump.” He demonstrated.

  “I can’t jump!” I said. “I can just . . . swoop.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, swooping is good.” He grinned again. “Swooping! But it’s not as good as grinding.”

  He threw his board up on the railing and then there was this horrible metal-on-metal sound, and he stood up on it and slid down. That’s when I figured it out.

  He wasn’t teaching me stuff, he was showing off.

  Almost like he was trying to get me to like him or something.

  But that can’t be right, because he’s Freddie Blue’s. Or at least, he will be soon enough.

  “Try this,” he said, and he put his hand on the part of my shoulder where my T-shirt sleeve was rolled up, to show me how to stand. All the blood in my whole body ran to where his hand was, all at once, and I got light-headed and jumpy all at once. I flinched without really meaning to.

  “Um, sorry,” he said, and moved his hand.

  He showed me a bunch more stuff, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I was just thinking about how he touched my shoulder and how it felt. Nothing like a dead fish. Which is weird, because I remember when he held my arm after I fell, which feels like a billion years ago, how cold and grot it was.

  “Um,” I said.

  “What?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. I started rolling again on the board. I wasn’t sure what to do, exactly, but somehow I managed to bend over and grab the board and do a lame sort of a hop.

  Then I ran over my own finger.

  “OH, MAN! Are you OK?” he yelled.

  “I’m FINE,” I yelled back.

  I don’t know why we were yelling, as we were only four feet away from each other. Then we looked at each other and started laughing. I laughed so hard I had to get off my board and hold my stomach. It just got funnier. I kept thinking, “Stop laughing!” which made me laugh harder, but he was laughing just as hard! I’d never met a boy who laughed like me, laughed like he couldn’t stop.

  It was pretty great.

  So: “grab” and “grind.” The only real boarding words I know.

  See also Boarding, Skate.

  Grandma

  The great Isabella Martin lived for eighty-three fantastic years, which was just not enough. Grandma was born on the side of a road in New York City. True story. Her mom was out shopping and BOOM, there was Grandma, right on the sidewalk in Times Square. Who is born in Times Square? What could be cooler? Grandma was so glam. She liked to refer to herself as “constantly surprising, right from birth.” Which she was.

  When Seb was being diagnosed with autism, it was a strange time on Planet Aaron-Martin, i.e., at home. He had always acted different and it wasn’t until I was six that Mom and Dad decided that maybe there was a capital-I Issue. Seb was eight. (That’s late for an autism diagnosis, FYI.) What happened was that he started going under his desk at school and barking, and they were forced by the school to have him tested. It was like that. They had just thought he was “willful” and “unique” due to his brilliance.

  While all this went on, I became invisible at home. This is because I was small and polite and not howling at the moon. Grandma was the only one who could see me. She always took me seriously and let me talk about how sometimes I was scared of Seb, even though if I showed that I was scared, Lex got mad. It was a mess, but that was nothing to do with Grandma.

  Grandma is the only person who insisted on calling me Isadora. I liked it when she did it. She said “Tink” sounded like someone hitting the side of a glass with a spoon, which she enjoyed at weddings, but not as a name for her grand­daughter. Her house up the street always smelled like perfume and meat loaf. It sounds gross, but it was a very comfortable scent. Grandma was the best. I’m crying now just writing this. I can’t believe she died! She wasn’t even very old. She died ­during an operation to replace her knee. She had thought she was ­going to wake up as the bionic woman, and instead she didn’t wake up at all. I was ten. I shake my fist at the heavens when I think about how she’s dead and how many much more unpleasant people are still alive.

  Grandma was my best friend and best family combined, which just made her the best.

  See also Apple.

  Grounded

  I do not have to tell you what it means to be grounded. I only mention it because I am struggling to come up with G words that are captivating enough to warrant a mention in the Encyclopedia of Me.65

  I have been grounded more times than I can count, from crimes ranging from Not Actually Crimes (e.g., the rescue of Mr. Bigglesworth) to things that may, in fact, BE crimes, such as sneaking into movies that are for mature audiences, or stealing the Aardie costume and putting it in FB’s mom’s bed with her, so that when she woke up in the morning and stared right at it, she screamed for forty-five minutes and then called the police.

  Really, FB’s mom should not be allowed to call the police.She does it with the kind of reckless abandon that ties up the police force and distracts them from whatever real crimes might be happening in this city. If you think about it, she’s the one who should be punished, not me.

  Besides, everything is usually Freddie Blue’s idea. I just go along for moral support. Because that’s what BFFs do, right?

  See also Aardvark; Anderson, Freddie Blue; BFF; Couch, Itchy.

  Growing up

  One of the steps on the road between being born and getting old and dying. The part that includes all the “responsibility” and things like “jobs” and “bills.”

  Sometimes at night when I’m supposed to be asleep, I hear Mom and Dad worrying and/or arguing about what will happen to Seb when he graduates from high school (if he graduates) and grows up. How will he go to college? How will he get a proper job? My parents are unable to imagine a future for any of us that does not include college, which is funny because Mom only recently went back to school and Dad never did.

  Dad says, “Let’s take it one day at a time.” Which
is fine for Seb apparently, but he’ll often give me a bad time about what I’m going to be when I grow up, which is a writer, which Mom and Dad say is not a “real job” so I need to have “a backup plan.” My “backup plan” is to marry Prince X, which I would never be dumb enough to tell Mom and Dad! So instead I lie and say that I plan to go to law school. Everyone in the world thinks that “law school” sounds impressive, but I think it sounds painfully dull and horrific and therefore is parent-approved and a good answer. If you are looking for an answer to supply to your own parents, please feel free to steal mine.

  See also Aaron-Martin, Sebastian (Seb).

  Hairless Cats

  Cats. With no hair.

  I don’t know that much about hairless cats, but I can’t leave out Hortense, our family pet, who you already know a lot about. Hairless cats are sometimes also called “Canadian Skinless Cats.” I’m not making that up. It’s true. Being Canadian ought to make Hortense extra polite, but I do not believe that is the case. Hortense can be very ornery.

  This photo of a hairless cat looks exactly like Hortense (or a handbag) but it is not Hortense (or a handbag).

  I can tell you that — unlike regular old cats — hairless cats like baths. Hortense takes a bath once a week. Well, when I say she “takes a bath” that implies that she just hops into the tub and washes herself, when in fact it is my job to do it. I don’t mind, though, because she likes it so much. If you put a regular cat into the bathtub and started washing her, she’d as likely as not scratch your eyes out with her razor-sharp claws. Hortense lies back like she’s having a day at the spa. And she purrs.

  Hortense is just not a regular cat, although she does have razor-sharp claws that she uses more frequently than she should, just never in conjunction with a bath.