The Encyclopedia of Me

by Karen Rivers

  12 I have a number of phobias and one of them is saliva. I know that’s weird, but I can’t help it. I am ENTIRELY WIGGED OUT by the idea of ever properly kissing anyone because, think about it. SPIT EXCHANGE. Now, excuse me while I go and vomit.

  13 FB’s neighbors, the Beadles, were on vacation in Mason, Ohio, fulfilling part of their life dream of riding all of the World’s Tallest Wooden Roller Coasters.

  14 It is impossible to believe that once the book comes out, movie rights won’t be snapped up immediately. I wonder who will play the part of me? Goodness, I can hardly wait! Exciting!

  15 Unless you are actually IN Alaska, in which case you already know all there is to know about it and can go ahead and skip this entry.

  16 I do watch the Discovery Channel, so I’m not a total imbecile when it come to actual facts.

  17 Yes, that is how she talks.

  18 Short for “gorgeous” and one of many words that Freddie Blue and I have created together to help improve the English language, which I’m sure you know could stand some jazzing up.

  19 I don’t have a crush on anyone. If only the boys I know weren’t such total drips, it would help. If I’m going to grow up to become a famous writer and celebrity personality, I’ll need to experience a lot of heartbreak. And soon.

  20 Mrs. O’Malley — although she has the name of a queen-sized, happy, Irish lady — is actually a thin, nasty local woman who sits on a bench exactly halfway between my house and Freddie Blue’s house and says things to us that are blatantly rude. For example, she might say “You girls are trouble!” or, my favorite, “Better seen, not heard!” — you know, the kind of witty gems that elderly people like to embroider onto throw cushions. Mrs. O’Malley could stand to do a bit more embroidery and a bit less shouting.

  21 Weird phenomenon wherein you fall in love with your evil kidnapper and forget that she is keeping you prisoner in an ugly purse, and instead believe that she is your BFF and doing you a favor by carrying you around all day to the point where your legs probably don’t work anymore anyway.

  22 That is really what a group of owls is called — look it up if you don’t believe me. I almost used “murder of crows” because that is also cool, but they really do sound more like owls.

  23 The storming is definitely a Peacekeeper Fail.

  24 Did you know that the liver is just basically a giant filter that animals use to separate gross waste from useful stuff? IT’S A GARBAGE FILTER. You would eat a garbage filter? THINK ABOUT IT.

  25 As in “hilarious.” Here is a fun tip from me to you: If you want to be cooler than you are, you should always abbreviate words, unless it sounds stupid when you do it. Like you’d never say “soop stoop” instead of “super stupid.” But “hilair” is made of win and makes you seem super sophisto.

  26 A made-up word, just an example of the many words we have created.

  27 Pops = popular. As in, “All Freddie Blue Anderson wanted out of life was to be totes pops.”

  28 There are three: Disapproval, Disdain, and Disgust. They are pretty similar but slightly different, especially around the eyebrows.

  29 Her laugh was weird. I shouldn’t probably say this, but it made me think of the laugh that girls sometimes have that I call the OMG LOOK AT ME I’M SO PRETTY laugh. I’d never before heard FB do this laugh.

  30 This is due to the breath holding I do in my unwanted role of Peacekeeper.

  31 Not that I’ve ever ridden a pony, due to Dad’s allergies, Mom’s busyness, and Lex’s and Seb’s hatred of horses, ergo, my unfulfilled dreams, but I could imagine.

  32 Instead of ever winning anything, I am always getting “honorable mentions,” which are really a nice way of saying, “You didn’t win, but you didn’t come last either! So, way to not totally lose.” I do not like honorable mentions. I really prefer to win. Or at least, I’m sure I would, if I ever won anything.

  33 Although it is true that Cortez has a pretty elastic definition of “gifted,” which can mean you are good at art or music OR that you are smart. I think it should just mean “smart,” which would weed out most of the annoying people in our school. I actually think Cortez uses the word “gifted” to mean, “gifted with parents who make enough money to afford to send their kids to Cortez.”

  34 Can be short for “idiot” or “idiotic,” depending on the rest of the sentence.

  35 Which is really at any moment, because there is probably not ever an opportune moment for this to happen. If you can think of one, please write to me immediately and you will win a prize, the prize being the satisfaction of knowing you are the only person who could come up with a good time for your boob to fall off.

  36 And/or he is just angry that I survived, after all.

  37 Both the people who bully me the most have hyphenated last names. But! SO DO I! Are people with hyphenated last names meaner than regular people? (Am I meaner than regular people without even knowing it?) Is it a thing? Like how serial killers always have triple names? Or is it just coincidence? Feel free to use that question as the basis for your next essay assignment. Good luck!

  38 “Ergo” is a word that means the same as “so,” basically, but it also makes you sound smart and intimidating. Try it!

  39 Seb used his phone to call National Geographic magazine to correct something they’d written about pygmy tarantulas. It turned out that Seb was wrong, but he’d never admit that. He does not believe that it’s possible for him to make mistakes. His phone did not have a long-distance plan, so the call cost $102.37. MISTAKE.

  40 When your work is delivering babies, your hours are not “normal.” Most babies seem to present themselves in the middle of the night, hence we never know when Mom will or will not be home, arriving home, or just leaving.

  41 No one uses the laptop except me, as the fact that it is not hooked up to the Internet renders it 92 percent useless. Which means they have no compunction about kicking it under the couch if it happens to be in their way.

  42 Ironically, now that I’m allowed to go out, I really don’t want to, although it is likely I will take the laptop up my fave tree and work up there until the battery runs out. I’m pretty excited about it, to be honest. When I get famous and people say, “Where were you when you wrote this book?” I can say, “I was up a tree.” They’ll be all, “Oooooh, brilliant. So unique! So creative!” Right?

  43 I do not know what any skateboarding or longboarding or whatever words are. Note to self: Learn the words! How can I be a cool boarder girl if I don’t know what anything is called? Embarrassing.

  44 I was mostly just shocked that he said what he was thinking, not just that he was thinking I was awesome. I couldn’t imagine just going up to someone and saying, “Hey, I like you. What’s up?” But I bet he could. I bet he did it all the time. Actually, he probably had a whole herd of girls he thought were awesome. I was probably no one special to him. Just one of a lot. Or maybe he just had really low standards.

  45 We talked about music, boarding, school, his old hometown, his parents, and just . . . everything. I felt like I was talking to myself, except not in a crazy way. I guess I mean I felt like he got my jokes. He laughed quite a lot. It was pretty amazing.

  46 “Conquistador” may be the best word in the entire history of words ever spoken. Try saying it out loud! You won’t regret it. Con-KEEEES-ta-dor!

  47 This means “I think therefore I am.” I would argue that even if you never think (see: Lex), you still ARE, but Lex did not go to Cortez.

  48 Feces! Do you know what “feces” means? DO YOU? Well, everyone else does. Trust me.

  49 The way she said it said, “I know you like him but I don’t care.” Or that’s what I thought it said. Reading between the lines.

  50 Freddie Blue told him in the age-old way that disloyal best friends tell boys about their best friends’ feelings. That is, she wrote him a note with check boxes: “Do you like Tink? Yes No.” Guess what he said? That’s right. Even writing this is making me die a little on the inside.


  51 Unlikely.

  52 Even more unlikely.

  53 I promised FB I would stop saying “awesomesauce” because it reminded her of “applesauce” and she believes she is allergic to applesauce and claims — which I’m a tiny bit skeptical about — that if I say “awesomesauce” in her presence, she will break out in head-to-toe hives. But I doubt FB will read this book, so I’m not worried! Oh, hi, FB! SORRY ABOUT THOSE HIVES, MY BAD.

  54 Oh, yeah, I should have mentioned that. I was in the tree. I’ve decided it’s the best place in the world to write an encyclopedia, way up high, your legs dangling over the green lawn fifteen feet down, where no one bugs you, and by “no one,” I mean “Hortense doesn’t hurl her skin sack of a body against your keyboard, accidentally erasing your genius entry about ‘dogma,’ which you’ve now forgotten and can’t re-create.”

  55 Before Seb was diagnosed, my parents thought he had a behavioral problem and tried to hook him into any hobby they could think of. As a result, we have a million pieces of sporting equipment and art supplies and stuff, none of which he ever touched again after the first time. BUT just because he doesn’t want to use them, doesn’t mean that anyone else is ever allowed to touch them. So I’m risking my life! Sort of! Or at least risking the wrath of Seb, which is pretty huge! And scary. I must really really want this.

  56 Although he somehow also manages not to be a vegetarian, and I’m going to guess that he knows that “meat” is just a fancy word for “dead animal.”

  57 The hilarious thing is that there is no basement exit. I don’t know how he’s going to get it out of there. Really, it’s kind of funny when you think about it. Will he carry it up the stairs? How much do those things weigh? Will it be stuck in the basement forever? Only time will tell.

  58 I dreaded hearing it. I get all weird when someone starts telling me something I know they want me to be all jump-up-and-down-OMG-wow! excited about. I just can’t do it. I freeze up inside, like their words are liquid nitrogen, and my reactions are a giant wart.

  59 I know this sounds crazy, but sometimes I think something, and no matter how far-fetched my dumb thought is, it’s like as soon as I THINK it, I instantly believe it. There is probably a name for that. If you find out what it is, let me know, but in the meantime, I call it “thoughtasthesia.” Please note that “thoughtasthesia” is not a real word so if you use it in conversation, people will almost certainly point and laugh. AVOID.

  60 This is going to sound crazy to you if you don’t also have an autistic brother, but one day, out of the blue, he said, “I’ve changed my mind about flagellated worms. I think they’re pretty interesting.” Up until that point, he’d have a fit if he even saw a picture of a flagellated worm. He thought they were the most disgusting thing ever. So if he can change his mind about a flagellated worm, I guess he can change his mind about any old thing. Why not?

  61 Or they are dead. Everybody magazine always has some story in it about someone who was killed in a terrifying way. Frankly, I could live without that article. I find it very jarring to be reading about a star’s close relationship with her hairstylist and then turning the page to find an article about a corpse found in someone’s backyard while they were digging up their tomato plants.

  62 “Humiliating.”

  63 There is no prize for being right in this instance because the answer was obvious. But you DO have the satisfaction of knowing you were right, and that’s better than being wrong! Right? Right. See? SATISFYING.

  64 Yes, that is sarcasm.

  65 Words I can think of but have no bearing on my life whatsoever: gravel, gristle, gravy, Google, Greece, gravity. I will work hard at endeavoring to somehow become involved with any or all of these things for future editions. Encyclopedias — in case you don’t know this — always have lots of editions, so I could theoretically update this book every year for my ENTIRE LIFE. Except I won’t, because that seems like way too much work, and also I already have a really great idea for a Dictionary of Disasters that I’d rather write than rewriting this.

  66 It’s the fringe-covered gypsy lamp that Mom bought in Paris when she was traveling with a dance troupe. It’s truly the ugliest lamp in the world and is not (unlike what she believes) beautiful just by virtue of being French. No one bothered to pick it up.

  67 See?

  68 I inherited my fear of heights from my mom, who is so afraid of heights that she once froze on top of a stepladder while changing a lightbulb, and I had to call Dad at work to come home and help me to get her down. True story. Ask him. Don’t ask Mom because she’ll say it didn’t happen, but it DID.

  69 Ruth Quayle was friends with SWR? How was that possible? I was shocked to my core. Not that RQ and I were BFFs or anything; obviously FB had that job forever and always in my heart, but I did feel a bit sick and, honestly, betrayed. Even though it didn’t make sense. Feelings rarely do, or so I’m learning.

  70 Anaphylactic shock is when you get a bee sting or eat peanut butter and you are super allergic, SO allergic that you have to stab yourself in the leg with a needle that looks like a pen. In case you didn’t know this, I can tell you that the main symptom is that your lips and tongue get all tingly, which I know because my dad gets that if someone’s wayward dog licks him at the park and then he has to stab his thigh with his pen-needle, which is really pretty cool if it also didn’t involve having to have a dramatic-near-death experience from a puppy’s smooch. The people who own the dogs in question always feel super bad when Dad does that in front of them, and they should. Those friendly dogs are like loaded pistols!

  71 Gone with the Wind is another one of my favorite books. Read it. Do not be fooled by the ridiculous cover. There are lots of different covers because it’s been printed a billion times, so pick one without a sunset picture of a man kissing a woman. That’s the worst one. The book looks and sounds boring, but I promise it isn’t and you will love it. However, if you do not love it, it is not my fault, it just means you have poor taste in reading material, and I cannot be blamed for your shortcomings.

  72 Well, not actually writing, but “thinking obsessively about Kai and the kiss,” which is really part of the writing process. Thinking about your own life, I mean, not necessarily thinking about Kai specifically.

  73 In my experience, there are only three occasions that cause hand shaking: 1. Cold, 2. Anger, and 3. Totally Out-of-Control Crushes on the boy next door.

  74 NOT that he is MY BOYFRIEND. I get that. I know he kissed me for a reason and not because he liked me. I just thought maybe he did like me, after all, and that maybe he kissed me because he wanted to, but maybe I’m just making up a big story around something that didn’t mean anything to anyone and I don’t even know why I’m still talking about it and I’m going to stop NOW. I promise.

  75 I read somewhere that if you don’t know what color someone’s eyes are, then you don’t love them. Not if you just can’t tell, but if you say, “Oh, I LOVE so-and-so” and someone else says — and no, I don’t know why they would, but just say hypothetically that they do — “What color are his/her eyes?” and if you don’t KNOW, then you aren’t really in love. Also, you look like a total doofus going, “Actually, I have no idea! Maybe blue! Or brown! Probably one or the other, or possibly green!” I do know that Kai’s eyes are brown. That’s something I know for sure. Which doesn’t mean that I love him! It just means that I am very observant, which is a good skill for a writer to have.

  76 Yes, OK, fine, this did happen to me. But the car belonged to Mrs. O’Malley. As I’m sure you understand, my instinct was not to ring her doorbell and explain the situation. Rather, it was to pedal away quickly. My nose still has a scar if you look at it in certain lights.

  77 That crack between your nostril and the rest of your face, otherwise called Nostril Valley.

  78 It’s only patented because she keeps doing it to the point where it has become her signature gesture. I do not know if she is aware of this or not, but I’m sure she is. Actually, I
’m pretty sure she practices it in the mirror. It is getting very refined for an offhand gesture.

  79 Don’t take this the wrong way, but I am super curious about what happens when you die. I don’t want you to think I am suicidal, because I’m not, but I’d like to try dying for, say, ten seconds, just to see if it’s like a LIGHT or HEAVEN or just a bunch of nothingness that’s like a bog of black paste, sucking you in and down into a void where you lie, bored senseless, for eternity.

  80 Yes, THAT Stella. Please rate the relative horribleness of your BFF striking up a friendship with your WEE (Worst Enemy Ever) on a scale of one to ten. If you said TEN, you win a lovely parting gift. If you said anything OTHER than ten, go take this book immediately to the recycling or delete it, if you happen to be reading it on an e-reader, because YOU DO NOT GET IT OR UNDERSTAND ME IN ANY WAY and so you are wasting your time. Thank you.

  81 Tuesday, in case you are keeping track, is our first day back at school.

  82 Spanish word for “kisses,” which I know because I love Spanish. If you are looking for a language to learn, try it! It’s the best. If only I could speak Spanish all the time, I think my life would be a lot prettier and more romantic.