by Karen Rivers
“I’m FINE,” yelled Seb.
They blasted by me in their matching Prescott hoodies. “Good luck!” I yelled.
Lex waved. Seb didn’t even turn around.
“Tink!” yelled Mom from the back deck. “You’re going to be late! I’m not driving you!”
“OK, OK,” I said. I took a big breath and held it for as long as I could, which was all the way down the driveway.
I walked the long way, past the 7-Eleven and ice cream shop, past the abandoned fall beach where garbage left over from summer was being tossed around by the wind. And then, just like that, I was on the steps of Cortez Junior, out of breath and as sweaty as a wet mop. Perf.
I sighed and looked around. It was so crowded! But I didn’t recognize anyone, except Wex Stromson-Funk.
“Yo, Plank!” he called.
“Freckle Peckle!” one of his buddies shouted.
I stopped dead in my tracks. NO. Not more than one bully! Was Wex contagious? I refused to take it!
I marched right up to Wex and said, “Look. I am rubber. You are glue. Anything you say bounces off of ME and sticks to you, geni.”
He stared at me, mouth agape. His face was completely blank. Wex was the T. rex of mankind. All mean and spastic, but with no brain and absurdly small arms. Except, obviously, he had normal-sized arms. If only he had tiny ones, he probably would have been a nicer person.
I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to wait until your lone, tiny brain circuit shorts out. I must go.”
“Uh,” he said. “Did you call me Jeanie?”106
And then I saw Kai. He was standing behind Wex, but close enough that they’d obviously been talking. Had HE been the one who called me “Freckle Peckle”? I refused to believe it, but, at the same time, was 100 percent sure it was true. My heart broke into a billion shards, which shot around my body in my veins and arteries, stabbing me everywhere at once, like a zillion bee stings.
“Kai,” I said. I worked hard at lacing each letter of his name with a layer of ice. I squinted at him. “Hello.”
Then I turned my back and walked away. I was scared he wasn’t going to answer. Or scared that if he did, he’d say something mean. Was he FRIENDS with Wex? My legs were shaking like wet dogs.
What had just happened? What?
I pushed my way through the crowd until I found a bathroom.107 I looked at myself in the mirror. Conclusion: a mess. I tried to twist my hair back into shape but it was hopeless. So I did what people do in movies, which was to splash a bunch of water on my face. Cold water.
In movies, apparently no one wears mascara. Normally I don’t either, but I did today because I thought it might make me look sophisto.
Which it did! Good news! But only if “sophisto” also means “looking like you’ve been punched in both eyes by someone with black paint on his small round fists.”
I cleaned myself up as well as I could with some very rough paper towel, which gave my face the look of having a bad windburn. Did I care? I did not.
Then I went back out into the fray to look for Freddie Blue. I can’t explain why, except to say that it was like Freddie Blue and I were wrapped up together in strands like cobwebs, and no matter how hard I pulled (or how hard she pushed) to get out of the web, I was still in the web. And the web wasn’t a bad thing; it was the web that I knew. And the web had been fun for my whole life! And I didn’t want things to be different. Just being back at school made me want to crawl right back in and get firmly stuck in the place where I belonged.
Which was with FB. Even if she was a bit spidery lately.
Then I saw her! She was waving her arm in the air and yelling, “Here! OVER HERE!”
Everything was going to be OK! Cue birds singing! Happy music! With ukuleles!
Except then when I got closer to her, I realized she wasn’t even talking to me. She looked right past me! Like I wasn’t even there!
I watched as she ran up to Stella Wilson-Rawley. She was talking in an extra-loud, fakey voice, but I still couldn’t make out what she was saying due to the ringing in my ears.
You know how they say that when you die, your whole life flashes in front of your eyes, like a fast-forwarded movie, all odd angles and random flashes of things you’ll never know again? It was almost like that, as I fell out of the web of us. I could see bright flashes of kidnapping Mr. Bigglesworth or knee-jumping on the trampoline or just all the times we lay on the Itchy Couch and ate raw cookie dough and laughed ourselves senseless about Hortense, or climbing the tree, or even the way she mooned around after Lex, and when she gave me her red balloon at her seventh birthday party after I accidentally let go of mine and it got tangled in the telephone wires.
Then I noticed that she and Stella were wearing matching outfits.
I gasped out loud, from shock and horror. It could only have been the stick-death purple shirts! They were hideously and truly malg.108 They looked like the kind of shirts that a teacher would wear, all collared and ruffled, if the teacher was ancient, partially blind, the owner of eight cats, and the star of an episode of Hoarders.
“My eyes, my eyes,” I murmured. “I am blind!”
“I bet you wish you were,” said Ruth, appearing next to me out of nowhere. “What are they wearing? They look like orchids on a wedding cake! Orchids with heads! And unsightly shoes!”
I looked down. Both FB and SWR were wearing bright pink kicks. They were so bright, that even after I looked away, the image of them was still burned into my retinas.
“You should have called me last night,” I said to Ruth. “We could have worn matching garbage bags and really set some serious trends.”
She snorted. “Yeah,” she said. “SORRY. Hey, do you want to go to Drop Mac after school? You’ve got to see the sail I made for my board! It is so fun, it’s ridic!”
“Yep,” I said. I was flooded with relief. FB was not talking to me and I was still OK.
Even so, I stared at her as she disappeared into the crowd. Maybe if we were in the second grade, matching would be acceptable. But now that we’re almost thirteen? NOT. I was glad not to be part of their little club! Exclamation mark! Even seeing them makes me feel embarrassed to be alive!109
I dragged myself through the rest of the day. After school, I waited by the front steps for Ruth, feeling sad and forlorn. I stared at my too-white shoes and tried to imagine what I had done to make FB ignore me. I mean, shouldn’t I be the one who was mad? Was she even mad? Or was she ignoring me because I just didn’t matter anymore?
Then I noticed that Kai was rolling toward me on his board. The ball-bearing sound on the pavement made my heart soar. And! He was smiling! And before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “Kai! Hi!”
He said, “Hey.” I could tell he was trying to sound casual, but he was also grinning. A lot.
I grinned back. “Want to come to Drop Mac with me and Ruth?” I said.
“Sure!” he said. Then he added, “So you’re, like, sort of famous now, I guess. I mean, I saw Everybody. My mom didn’t believe that I knew you. She thinks that magazine is just, like, celebs and stuff.”
“I’m a celeb,” I said, pretending to be affronted.
“Um,” he said.
“I’m kidding!” I said. There was an awkward silence. I tried to fill it by laughing, but it came out weird, like a tiny little “ha” in a cavern of silence. He fidgeted around with his board, finally dropping it and doing a couple of little flips on the stairs. Then, before I could stop myself or even think about it, I blurted, “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, after a second of staring at me. “I kind of figured you were famous now and that you wouldn’t . . . I mean, I did call you a couple of times, but when your brother said you were, like, too busy to talk to me, I thought you probably just . . .”
“My brother said that?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said.
And then it all made sense. Reader, if you don’t have a brother, do not get one. That i
s my best advice to you. Take it. You won’t regret it. Also, you will likely get all your calls.
“So, like, why weren’t you in the article?” he said. “That IS stupid. But you, um, looked pretty dope.”
“Thanks,” I said. I was smiling so hard, my face hurt.
“Are you OK?” he said.
“I’m good,” I assured him. “I’m totally good.” His eyes looked especially brownish-gold today.
“Hey,” I said. “Can I ask you something sort of personal?”
“Um,” he said. “I guess.” He squinted up at the sun. I could tell he was nervous.
“No!” I said. “It’s not like that. Like not really, really personal. I just . . . I wondered what your last name is.”
He looked at me and then laughed in a great gust of laughing that practically knocked me over.
“What?” I said. “I don’t know your last name!”
“OK,” he said. “It’s . . .”
“What?” I said.
“It’s Neck,” he said.
“NECK?” I said. “What kind of last name is Neck? I mean, OK. I’m sorry. That was totally . . .”
He shrugged. “Yeah,” he said. “People get a lot of laughs out of it. It’s just a name.” He scuffed his foot on the ground. “So.”
“I’m totally sorry,” I said. “I was just —”
“Don’t worry about it,” he interrupted.
Ruth rolled up behind him, smacking him on the head by mistake with her backpack. “Ohmigosh! I’m sorry!” she said. “Tink, are you ready? What a crazy day! I can’t believe how many new kids there are! Where did they come from? Did a gifted alien ship land on earth and dump them in Cortez?”
I laughed. “What?”
“Where did they go last year? It’s like they appeared out of nowhere! Look at that one!” She pointed to a girl going by who had green hair and seven piercings in her ear. “ALIEN.”
I laughed harder. “She is not! You’re crazy!”
Ruth dropped her board and did a perfect spin. “Don’t blame me when they suck you up into their ship, then. Let’s skate.”
And then they were gone, swooping down the hill on the music of ball bearings, and I was left standing there thinking, What? They left me! Alone!
“HEY, WAIT UP!” I yelled, running to catch up.
And you know what?
They did.110
See also BFF; Bullies; Cortez Junior; Kai; Quayle, Ruth.
Shoes
Protective outer coverings for feet, sometimes leather or plastic or canvas, usually with hard or bendy bottoms that save your feet from becoming ragged, bleeding stumps when you step on broken glass or live animals.
I have four pairs of shoes, but I prefer to wear flip-flops if I can get away with it, for comfort’s sake, although they suck when worn while on a skateboard.
My feet are so freakishly, hideously small that I usually have to buy my shoes in the kids’ department. I hope you are generally happy with your normal-sized feet. You should be.
Skiing
A sport that involves snow and skis, and whizzing down mountains dressed in glam outfits and goggles, swishing enthusiastically in giant S curves that throw sprays of pretty snow in the direction of passersby. Everyone knows this, but this is an encyclopedia so I have a responsibility to include important facts and related trivia. I do not know who invented skiing. Probably someone Swiss who lived near or on the Alps.
Skiing is popular among rich people all over the world, such as Prince X.
I am almost sure that I would be good at skiing, given half a chance, making it one of a million sports I would rather do than ballet, which tragically is about to start up again and I haven’t yet had the gumption to tell Mom that I’m out. That I’m done. That I, Tink Aaron-Martin, am quitting.
But I will.
Probably.
See also Ballet; Prince X.
Spanish
The second-most commonly spoken language in the world, or at least it was in 1976 when this encyclopedia that I’m reading was printed.
And my favorite language.
¿Hablas español?
Kai is also in my Spanish class. This is a huge coincidence that points to the intervention of fate. ¡Muy bueno!
This is a picture of a Spanish dish called “paella.” It looks delish. (And although the idea of beach shells in my meal is a teensy bit disgusting, they also look quite glam.)
Stealing
The act of taking something that you didn’t pay for and or ask for, or deserve for that matter, something that belongs to someone else. And keeping it.
I’m not a Moral Superstar Who Always Makes the Right Choice and Is Frequently Held Up as a Model of Respectability,111 but stealing anything, even the idea of it, makes my throat vibrate strangely in a way that suggests I’m about to be sick. Don’t tell Freddie Blue, but I went back to the department store at the Mega Mall the next day and paid for the food we ate, even though I didn’t have the exact amounts. I gave them $14, because it is all that I had, and I’m sure we did not eat $14 worth of candy.
I think they thought I was crazy because they hadn’t said we had to, but I think they just forgot to say it. It was pretty obvious to me.
Also, I’m scared of karma, as I believe I mentioned earlier, back in the K section that you should have been paying more attention to. Just kidding.
See also Karma; Mega Mall.
Stuck Yawn Syndrome
When your body feels like yawning, so you open your mouth to have a good, satisfying yawn, but instead of having that happen, the yawn refuses to come out and settles deep into your lungs instead, making you feel like you can’t breathe properly even though you obviously are breathing. If you weren’t breathing, you would be dead before long.
If this happens to you, you are not “nutso as a bag of nails,”112 (which FB actually said to me when I told her about it a long time ago), you have just accidentally hyperventilated and need to find a brown paper bag, stat. Only brown paper works. Breathing into any other color of paper bag is useless, so do not bother trying it.
See also School, First Day of.
Swooning
Swooning is just another name for fainting,113 except it sounds more graceful. Say “swooning” out loud right now. See? I can see why it isn’t used much anymore, as it’s silly to use such a graceful word to describe crashing to the ground in a dead faint, invariably knocking things over on your way down.
See also Boarding, Skate.
Teachers
People who opt to spend their working hours teaching instead of doing something fun, like writing books or sitting in the branches of a tree whose leaves are slowly turning gold and red or perfecting their ollie in an empty swimming pool.
I have no idea why anyone would want to be a teacher. But lots of people do, at least they must, because there always is a teacher at the front of every room in the school. I was actually going to write a list of all the teachers that I have this year, and then I realized that that would simply bore you clear out of your mind and straight into another book. I wouldn’t want to do that. What if something really good happens in the last seven letters of my alphabet?
Tipping, Chair
The act of tilting your chair backward while sitting on it and attempting to balance it on the back two legs without falling over and cracking your head open on the hardwood floor, i.e., an activity that boys seem to find endlessly entertaining and the best way to make Mom and/or Dad furiously angry in the space of 0.2 seconds.
Which is how it started at dinner, with the tipping.
Mom and Dad were already mad. I don’t know why, not exactly, but it had to do with Seb. He’d been sent home from school early for causing a disturbance with the fetal pigs they were meant to dissect in biology. I asked Lex what Seb did and all he said was, “Tink, you can’t set a pig free when it is dead and in a bucket of formaldehyde.”
Mom and Dad were eating in a way that suggested they were only barely ab
le to chew greenery in each other’s presence. This may not make sense to you, but I can always tell. It’s like Mom chews in a very determined way that makes her teeth click. And Dad very obviously smiles in a way that suggests that he’s not happy, but rather boiling inside like a cauldron of fury, his jaw bubbling back and forth.
Seb seemed fine. Just like he always is. He was drawing. He’s allowed to draw at the table, naturally, when the rest of us are not.
“How was school?” said Mom, helping herself to a big heaping bowl of broccoli. It had melty cheese on top, which improved it 100 percent, especially if you ate only the cheese and left the broccoli alone.
“Fine,” I lied. It was a lie on a lot of levels. Now that school was in full swing — which basically happened on the second day — it was a lot of work, for one thing. For another, I was feeling weird about Freddie Blue. And Kai had been so great, teaching me skateboarding stuff, but it’s not like he was my boyfriend. Not that I wanted him to be!
Yes, I did.
I wanted him to be my boyfriend!
I chewed my broccoli furiously.
“What did you do?” asked Dad.
“When?” I said. “Nothing!”
“Whoa,” he said. “Someone’s cranky.”
“I’m not cranky,” I said. “You should talk.”
“TINK,” said Mom. “Don’t be rude. I don’t know what is going on in this family.” She sighed and put her fork down. “Honestly,” she said. “What next?” She rubbed her temples.
“Whatever,” I said. “What was the question?”
“He asked what you did at school, dummy,” said Lex. “It’s not a hard question. Aren’t you supposed to be gifted or something?”
I glared at him. “I am gifted,” I said. “I didn’t answer because I didn’t want to baffle you with too much brilliance.” He snorted. “Anyway, nothing happened at school.” I rolled my eyes. “You know, school stuff. Classes. Lunch.”
