The Odd 1s Out

by James Rallison

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by James Rallison

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Tarcher and Perigee are registered trademarks, and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Rallison, James, author.

  Title: The odd 1s out : how to be cool and other things I definitely learned from growing up / James Rallison. Other titles: Odd ones out

  Description: New York : TarcherPerigee, 2018. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018003414 (print) | LCCN 2018006569 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705657 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131809 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Conduct of life. | Self-realization. | Adulthood.

  Classification: LCC BJ1589 (ebook) | LCC BJ1589 .R35 2018 (print) | DDC 818/.602—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003414

  Cover design and art: James Rallison

  Version_1

  For my odd family who supplied me with

  hundreds of stories to monetize.

  And a special shout-out to my mom,

  who read every single one of my scripts and was responsible for birthing me.

  This is also dedicated to me.

  I made the book, so it seems fair.

  That’s all the dedications.

  Read the book now.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Why I’m Bad at Art (and Why Being Bad at Something Shouldn’t Stop You)

  Chapter 2: Harry the Moth

  Chapter 3: How to Be Cool (in Seventh Grade)

  Chapter 4: Perks of Being the Younger Brother

  Chapter 5: Freshman Year: Accidentally Dating My Sister (Not Clickbait)

  Chapter 6: PE

  Chapter 7: Laser Tag

  Chapter 8: Science Fair

  Chapter 9: Son, It’s Time We Talk About the Crickets and the Worms

  Chapter 10: Georgie vs. the Chihuahua

  Chapter 11: My Haunting Haunted House Hour

  Chapter 12: Job Interviews: A Traumatic Rite of Passage

  Chapter 13: Things I Do That Adults Probably Don’t Do

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Why I’m Bad at Art

  (and Why Being Bad at Something Shouldn’t Stop You)

  Everyone starts out as a bad artist. And some people stay that way. Fortunately, others improve. No one likes to hear this, but improvement is mostly the result of several hundreds of hours of practice. If adults told children how much work it takes to become an artist, they would all abandon their dreams and make other plans somewhere in the middle of kindergarten. This is why adults always tell little kids that they’re great artists, even if they’re actually terrible.

  If you looked at my early drawings, you wouldn’t think I would grow up to be an artist. My pictures were never the sort that ended up being proudly displayed on the fridge. Most of the fridge space went to my twin sister, Faith. She was such a natural at drawing that you could actually tell what her pictures were.

  One time in an elementary school art class, I painted a beautiful portrait of a person. I don’t have the exact copy anymore, but I will try to re-create it here:

  If you can’t tell, this is what I was going for:

  For some reason, though, the teacher didn’t understand my artistic vision. When it came time to hang everyone’s pictures on the wall, she hung mine upside down.

  I don’t know about you, but I think this picture makes absolutely no sense upside down.

  Faith, on the other hand, showed so much artistic talent that when we were both in third grade, my mom enrolled her in after-school art programs. I wanted to come too, for whatever reason, so my mom signed me up as well. While Faith drew pictures of realistic-looking cats, dogs, and other animals, I drew pictures of Chicken Godzilla.

  Look, Chicken Godzilla is as tall as an airplane’s flight path and can shoot fire and eggs. That’s art.

  After that class ended, I didn’t draw very much. The fridge space still belonged to Faith. I don’t remember if any of the art teachers at school encouraged me, but if they did, they were probably only being polite.

  But then junior high happened, and I drew a comic to impress a girl. She was a fan of Twilight and so I made a comic strip about people watching the movie. It wasn’t funny and it wasn’t well drawn, but it was a milestone.

  This isn’t the original comic, by the way. I gave that to the girl. I don’t know whether she appreciated or kept it, but since I had so much fun drawing the comic, I redrew it and showed it to my friends. I don’t know if they appreciated it either, but I decided to keep doing comic strips.

  I began drawing six strips a week and passing them around to my friends, who would read them while they were supposed to be listening to our teachers.

  My friends loved this pastime. My teachers not so much. I once had a teacher crumple up a page full of my strips because he claimed they were distracting the class. I consider this my first positive review, since it proved that people would rather read my comics than listen to a teacher. (Of course, that contest isn’t too hard to win . . . )

  At any rate, I became known as the “comic guy,” which, relatively speaking, isn’t the worst name you can be called in high school.

  Eventually I wanted to take my comics to the next level. In fact, I wanted to make them my career. There’s never a prouder moment in parents’ lives than when their son tells them he wants to be a cartoonist.

  They were completely supportive.

  Five years later, my hard work is proof that talent is 90 percent determination, 10 percent dumb luck, and 3 percent not paying attention. I kept practicing. And now while Faith draws stunning nature landscapes, I draw pale, bald characters. You’d still probably prefer her art on your fridge, but my drawings are all over the internet. So I guess it all worked out.

  Chapter 2

  Harry the Moth

  My grandmother’s nickname for me is Cricket. I don’t know how she came up with the name, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the next story except that they both deal with bugs.

  I’m not really an insect fan. Ladybugs are okay, I guess. (Gentlemanbugs, not so much.) If you asked most people what their favorite bug is, more often than not, they’ll tell you that it’s butterflies. Which is weird, since butterflies are basically just colorful moths. But for some reason, everybody thinks butterflies are better than moths.

  We make children’s books about butterflies: We use them as metaphors of change, we go out into fields and frolic around trying to catch them with nets, and some people even collect them. Granted, those people then impale the butterflies onto boards for display, but whatever, it’s still a compliment. How many other insects can say they get that much affection? Imagine if we loved cockroaches this much.

  Moths, on the other hand, are like the white trash version of butterflies.

  Even though moths and butterflies are practically the same creatures, we give moths a bad rap. We laugh at them for flying i
nto lightbulbs, even though butterflies would do that too if they weren’t asleep at night. Moths are so attracted to bright light that they’ll follow one even if it kills them. You might think that this sort of behavior makes them stupid, but I prefer to think it shows how dedicated they can be.

  We even get mad at moths for eating our clothes, but if butterflies liked the taste of our clothing, you know they wouldn’t hesitate to chomp down on our laundry. Actually, butterflies probably think they’re too good for your clothing. They enjoy only the finer things in life, like flowers. You hear that? Butterflies think they’re too good for you and your T-shirts.

  In Arizona we have your normal, run-of-the-mill moths. You know the type I’m talking about. Small, gray, and they look sort of like somebody’s bad paper airplane design. But we also have something called a white-lined sphinx moth. And these moths are like the Godzillas of the moth world.

  Actually, I think there is a giant moth in the Godzilla universe. Mothra. This is how much we don’t like moths; we turn them into city-destroying monsters. When will the hate end?

  I’m sure when they filmed Mothra, they didn’t have to use any special effects. They just used a white-lined sphinx moth. Those things could beat up hummingbirds if they wanted.

  One night when I was five years old, one of these big boys was chillin’ at our porch light. Just hanging out because it loved lights and it was a very dedicated creature. Try finding a butterfly that wants to hang out on your doorstep. Not gonna happen.

  Then I guess someone opened the door, and he got inside the house.

  The moth’s fate was sealed as soon as it crossed the threshold.

  I don’t know what the moth did once he was inside our house . . .

  but whatever the moth was doing, it sure tired him out. The next morning my sister and I found him on the kitchen windowsill just lying there—probably thinking about being outside again and trying to escape.

  He’d pretty much given up, or maybe he was asleep, because we just scooped him up and put him into a jar, and he became our new pet.

  Faith decided to call him Harry. This moth wasn’t hairy at all so that name didn’t make sense, but we were five, so it didn’t have to.

  (Around the same time, we adopted a stray calico cat. We called her Calico. Really Harry should have been thankful he didn’t end up with the name Moth.)

  We put leaves in his jar, which might have been a good idea if he was still a caterpillar, but we were sure we were taking good care of him. We probably should have just fed him T-shirts.

  My mom wasn’t as thrilled as we were to have a new pet moth.

  “I have a good idea,” she said. “Why don’t you take Harry to kindergarten tomorrow and, I dunno, maybe he can be the class pet there?”

  This was back when I thought my mom had good ideas.

  So we decided to take Harry to school, because how cool would it be to bring the class a pet you’d captured and enslaved yourself?

  My teacher realized pretty quickly that having a class pet whose lifespan was shorter than the school year wasn’t a smart idea. Instead of keeping Harry and studying nature in an educational sort of way, or at least watching him grow lethargic and despondent, drink in hand, watching his stories on the TV,

  she decided we could learn about nature by taking Harry out at recess and releasing him. It seemed like a good idea to us, but we were five. This was back when I thought my teacher had good ideas.

  A lot of kids’ movies have talking animals in them, and usually these animals don’t like to be captured. They want to be free and live out in the wild: think Finding Nemo, Spirit, and Happy Feet. It’s common knowledge to five-year-olds that every creature walking this earth wants to live in the wild.

  The teacher probably suggested releasing him so she wouldn’t have to come to school one day and explain to a roomful of horrified five-year-olds why the class pet was lying on its back with his legs stiffly pointing in the air.

  (Speaking of setting pets free: My family adopted a lot of stray cats. My mother used to quote the movie Spirit as she put them outside at night, and say things like, “Go and run free! Win back your freedom! Don’t worry about us; we’ll carry on without you!” Unsurprisingly, the cats enjoyed their captivity and always came back in the morning. Probably because of the free food.)

  Anyway, we all trooped out during recess, excited to be part of the school’s newly instituted catch-and-release moth program. We were like those people who put beached whales back in the ocean, except in this metaphor the whale was already in the ocean minding its own business and two dumb kindergartners shoved it in a fishbowl and moved it miles away from its home.

  This was supposed to be a happy kids’-movie moment, seeing the moth get rehabilitated into moth society . . .

  But what actually happened was quite different. We gathered around the teacher, she opened the jar, and then she had to shake Harry out of the jar because, well, we’ve already established that Harry wasn’t all that smart.

  Eventually, he understood that he was free, that the whole sky was waiting there above him. All that light! He flew upward, wings fluttering, ready to reclaim his moth life.

  Well, it turns out there’s a good reason giant moths only come out at night, and that’s mostly because of camouflage and the fact that their predators are asleep. Harry had neither of those advantages at our playground in the middle of the day.

  Not ten seconds went by when a bird from a neighboring tree swooped down and grabbed Harry in its beak. Harry had been a free moth for a good ten seconds before his painful, inevitable death.

  Immediately, the entire kindergarten class began screaming. My sister ran after the bird, demanding that he release Harry. Unfortunately, birds don’t listen to demands from shrieking five-year-olds. So then the teacher had to give us the talk about how nature is a lot scarier than it’s portrayed in the movies.

  Basically, the circle of life involves a lot of death.

  But on the bright side, we totally made that bird’s day.

  He was just sitting in a tree, probably wishing Arizona had more worms, and then—boom—free meal. For all we know, that could have been the bird’s first time eating a moth. I’m sure that bird told all of his bird friends and they totally didn’t believe him. He probably said something like, “Dude, I just caught a moth, like, one of those big ones . . . yeah, in the middle of the day. It was just flying around. No, I’m telling the truth. Dude, there were, like, thirty children who all saw me. Ask any one of them. They’ll tell you I caught that moth.”

  I don’t remember what happened for the rest of the day during school, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t get much done.

  When we got home, my sister tearfully told my mom about how Harry had met his doom. Mom got really “emotional” about it. She said she was trying not to cry, but I’m not so sure about that. I think she was trying not to laugh.

  And that’s how we scarred our entire kindergarten class.

  Like Aesop, I think I should end my stories with morals. So if this story were to have a moral, it would be that sometimes the late bird gets the moth. Also, if you want to have a pet, make sure you get one that’s not easily edible.

  Chapter 3

  How to Be Cool

  (in Seventh Grade)

  Seventh grade is a time of change. When I say “change,” I mean bad things happen to you a lot. If I were to get metaphorical, I’d say seventh grade is that awkward, halfway-in-between time of a frog’s life cycle when you’ve got arm-buds and you haven’t lost your tail yet.

  You’re pretty much a mess.

  In seventh grade, you’re done with elementary school and kid stuff, but you’re not anywhere near being an adult. You can’t drive anywhere, although there’s always that one kid who brags that he can. You have no money. You can’t get a job. And you’re still living with your parents. Basical
ly, you’re a loser.

  Elementary school had structure. You had the same teacher and were in class with the same kids all day. You were pretty much forced to be friends with them. Being cool was so much easier. All you had to do was be the fastest runner in your class. Simple.

  In junior high, you have to deal with multiple teachers. Just figuring out their quirks, systems, and general neuroses is a job all by itself. And you have different people in most of your classes. So this is also when you get to find out if you have social anxiety or not.

  At the beginning of junior high, I was still pretty much in elementary school mode. I just thought about doing things the easiest way possible and didn’t care what people thought. I was happy. And clueless.

  Like most people, I took PE as an elective class. That was a mistake. I obviously should have taken band. Cool people do band.

  In PE, when I wasn’t getting hit in the face with a dodgeball, I was sitting by myself trying to fit in with the other seventh graders.

  One day in PE while I was looking at everyone talking to each other and not me, I had a stunning realization.

  “Gee willikers, people judge me by the clothes I wear. I know this because I’m judging people by the clothes they wear.”