The Encyclopedia of Me

by Karen Rivers

  See also Aaron-Martin, Sasha Alexei (Lex).

  Adventure

  As an alternative to peppering your life with terrifying things you must force yourself to do, you can have a small boring life in which nothing happens and you end up sitting on a park bench, shouting bitter insults at passing kids.

  Yawn.

  I, Tink Aaron-Martin, choose ADVENTURE! This is at least partly because I want to be a writer and I read somewhere that if you never do anything, you’ll never have anything to write about, and your book will bore people to sleep.

  In the interest of research, I just called Freddie Blue and asked what she thought of when she heard the word “adventure.”

  “Hmmm,” she said. “I don’t know,” she said. “Adventure. Adventureadventureadventure. Ad. Ven. Churrrrrrrr.”

  “Freddie Blue,” I said. “Please. Just answer.”

  “OK,” she said. “Why are you asking me this? It feels like homework. And I’m pretty sure we’re on summer break?”

  “I’m doing research,” I say. “For a book. I’m writing an encyclopedia.”

  “Tink,” she said. “Tink. Don’t get weird on me again, kiddo.” She calls me “kiddo” as though she is my elderly ­maiden aunt from Ohio. It’s bothersome, but I let it go because she’s my BFF. Sometimes you make allowances.

  “You are not my elderly maiden aunt from Ohio,” I said.

  “Oh, you’re so funny,” she said. “I didn’t say I was! Don’t be ridic.”

  “It was implied,” I said.

  “Was not,” she said.

  “Just answer the question,” I said. “Like the first two things that come into your head when I say ‘adventure.’”

  “OK, fine.” There was a long pause. I could hear her chewing. It was quite nauseating.12 “So,” she said. “I consider it adventurous to either go to see a horror movie at the Cineplex after paying to see an animated thing about robots and then being so scared we have to stay up all night watching YouTube videos about pranks that go wrong so we can try to forget the awfulness of the movie. We should do that tonight, by the way. Can you sneak out? Or . . .” There was another pause and more slimy-sounding chewing. I gagged and pretended I was just coughing. “Climbing Mount Everest!” she said dramatically. “IN HIGH HEELS.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll let you get back to your eating and vigorous chewing now.”

  Freddie Blue is a very adventurous person. She is the Queen Bee of All Things Adventurous. Like last week. It’s not Freddie Blue’s fault that my mom overreacted so massively to the fact that Freddie Blue’s mom called the police to report us missing. We weren’t missing! We were merely innocently playing on the trampoline in her neighbor’s yard!

  We had been in the tent, it’s true, but the ground was wet, which made sleeping impossible and cold. We were shivering! We needed to move around to ward off hypothermia! The trampoline was springy and dry and completely free for us to use.13 We didn’t know that when FB’s mom looked outside, she saw the open flap of the tent with no one inside and panicked. We didn’t hear her shouting our names. How could we have? We were listening to iPods at top volume while competing to see who could jump the highest with our legs awkwardly (and painfully) bent and stuffed up into our pants!

  I don’t really see why this was a grounding-level offense. The swelling in my knees has almost gone away completely, and dancing is on a hiatus for summer break, so it’s not like my knees were in hot demand for ballet, which I hate anyway. And, more important, we weren’t kidnapped. Our parents should be having a party in celebration of our safety! They should not be sighing and then forgetting it happened altogether (like FB’s mom) or grounding me for life in a fury (like mine). (Of the two options, I definitely got the worse one.)

  The happy ending is that I will possibly become wealthy from the proceeds of this encyclopedia that I write about my lonely life spent unjustifiably indoors without friends or sunlight, so it all works out for the best at the end. Then I shall win a Nobel Prize. And an Oscar.14 And happiness will abound!

  As if.

  Or, more likely, I may have destroyed my knee permanently and will spend a few years limping around on crutches, unable to pirouette or even plié. Which, come to think of it, wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world at all.

  Afro

  A hairstyle in which instead of growing like NORMAL HAIR in a NORMAL WAY, hair grows up and out such that your head resembles a dandelion clock, or worse, a wool pom-pom that has accidentally been put into the dryer.

  When spotting an Afro in the wild, people will stare and then coo, “I loooove your hair! You are sooooo lucky!” What they mean is “Thank goodness that ball of unruly corkscrews is on your head and not mine.”

  Freddie Blue once straightened my hair, which we totally thought would make me look celeb. She used olive oil as a “smoother,” which she claims (i.e., lied) that she read about in Seventeen magazine. But actually what happened was that the flat iron burned the olive oil, so everyone had to stand a hundred feet from me so that the stench did not cause their lungs to fail and result in their instant and painful deaths. Worse, my head looked tiny and sad, like a mostly sucked lollipop on a weird-shaped stick, leading me to the upsetting conclusion that an Afro actually suits me. Freddie Blue says I should embrace it and let it grow to be huge and glamorous, but that is because Freddie Blue does not have the option of doing that herself. Also, it would probably look good on her. Everything does.

  I do not have the panache to pull it off. Believe me.

  Alaska

  I include the mighty state of Alaska because all encyclopedias need to contain geographical references to look legit. I do not know anything about Alaska, except where it is, which is guaranteed to be north of wherever you are right now.15 Many types of bears live in Alaska, most of whom would eat you as soon as look at you. Killer whales go there in the summer to eat herring during herring blooms.16

  This bear is saying, “Welcome to Alaska!” What he likely means is, “Welcome to my stomach, tourist!” (I don’t speak bear, so I don’t know for sure.)

  There are also a lot of men in Alaska, and almost no women, making it a hot spot for old people who are single and can’t believe they forgot to get married and need to find someone ASAP or else risk never being photographed in an unflattering white gown.

  I’ve forgotten where I read that about the glut of single men. It’s possible I made it up. If you are using this encyclopedia as a reference to write your school report about Alaska, congratulations! You just got an F.

  Anderson, Freddie Blue

  My best friend, age thirteen (OK, almost thirteen). Her birthday is the day before mine, which fits because she is also smarter and prettier and funnier, as though she grabbed up all the “smart,” “pretty,” and “funny” that was available during that particular batch of baby births. I don’t mind, though. She deserves it all. We are both Virgos, which matters if you believe in astrology, which I do when it is favorable but disregard when it sounds like bad news.

  Freddie Blue is short for Frederique Blue. Frederique is not a Swedish name, although FB is “of Swedish descent.”17 She is tall and willowy, with smooth hair that has expensive gold streaks in it. She used to say these were “natural,” but then I went with her to her hairdresser one day, where I was shocked to find out that they were as “natural” as “hair dye painted on individual strands of hair and layered in a million pieces of tinfoil and stuck under a heat lamp for three hours” can be. Still, her hair is shiny and as long as her waist and moves like seaweed underwater, if seaweed were unbelievably gorgo18 and the consistency of hair. She is the prettiest girl in school, in town, and possibly on planet Earth.

  Freddie has a lot of other noteworthy qualities, beginning with “she wears a bra.” If you guessed that I am jealous about this, you would be mostly wrong but with a tiny dollop of right. She is also very fashionable and is trying to teach me to appreciate clothes in the same way that she does, but witho
ut copying her because copying makes her as “mad as monkeys.” She says that her mother is “in fashion,” so she comes by her styliciousness naturally. (Her mom owns a shop that sells used vintage clothes designs.)

  Freddie Blue has a crush on Lex, even though he’s fifteen and calls her “Frank” because he says “Freddie” is too hard to remember. She says he has gorgo eyes.19

  Sometimes when Freddie Blue laughs really hard, she accidentally pees her pants. She doesn’t get upset about it; it just makes her laugh harder. I admire that kind of ­bravado. If that happened to me with any sort of regularity, I’d move to Switzerland, change my name to Priscilla Von Spats, and devote my entire life to the avoidance of all things funny.

  We are slightly competitive, but not really, because in any and all competitions, Freddie Blue wins. She’s just that kind of person. A winner. A funny, nice, hilariously crazy winner. Which makes me only a bit jealous, but I pretend it doesn’t. Because I would suck if I was jealous of my BFF. And I don’t want to suck.

  Freddie Blue would never in a million years be secretly competing with me to get a boyfriend first. She would never in a billion years think something bad about me.

  Freddie Blue is my favorite person on the entire planet, with the exception of one specific European prince. I can’t really explain her except to say that FB is the sparkly rainbow decoration in my white box of a life. We will probably be BFFs forever, unless she grows up and marries my brother, in which case I will lose all respect for her and start referring to her as Mrs. Armpit Fart and making jokes at her expense.

  See also Adventure.

  Apple

  A round fruit that grows on trees. Crunchy. Good with cheese.

  It is impossible to think of the letter A without thinking of apples. It must be a very dark time in a kid’s life when they realize that A is also the first letter in, say, “ambulance” or “asphalt.” It is obviously SO confusing and painful that no one remembers it.

  My grandma once built me a tree house in an apple tree. I loved it, but in the spring it would be all full of these little green inchworms that crawled out of my hair at inopportune times, such as during class, causing classmates to scream, “TINK HAS WORMS IN HER ’FRO!” I hated that apple tree at those times, and the word “Afro,” but mostly I loved the tree and my grandma, who is now dead. My love for the apple tree probably explains a lot about why I’m happiest when I’m in the Tree of Unknown Species.

  Apple seeds contain arsenic, which is poison. Don’t eat the seeds.

  That’s some useful advice for you. This isn’t just entertainment, you know.

  See also Afro.

  Arms

  Useful limbs that attach at the shoulders and act as levers for the hands, which can then be used for good.

  For example, earlier this summer, I used my arms to dognap Mrs. O’Malley’s20 miniature pugapoo, Mr. Bigglesworth, out of her big gnarly plastic purse, as commanded by Lieutenant Commander In-Charge-of-Me, Freddie Blue Anderson. The handbag also contained a rumpled romance novel with a shirtless, long-haired man on the cover, four chocolate bars that looked so old I didn’t even recognize the wrappers, a stuffed bird (!), and a fat wallet. If you’re going to carry a dog in a purse, at least dedicate a purse to the animal, don’t just cruelly throw it in your regular bag with all your junk. If Mr. B. hadn’t ferociously bitten my finger and caused me to scream, he would now be free of his vinyl prison and in no danger of accidentally eating chocolate and going into liver failure. I’m surprised he was so ungrateful. Obviously, he has Stockholm syndrome21 and will need more encouragement before he is ready to be truly free. (Coincidentally, number twelve on my life-goal list is to free all wrongfully imprisoned animals.)

  Yes, I just wanted to tell you about the Mr. Bigglesworth Incident, and not actually about my arms. I didn’t want to make you wait for the Bs. Also, this is the first encyclopedia I’ve ever written, and it’s harder than it looks.

  See also Adventure.

  Autism

  Autism is not a disease, but rather a syndrome. Do not confuse them for fear of having everyone in your family screech at you simultaneously like a parliament of angry owls.22

  Dad says that Seb’s autism just makes Seb more human than most humans, but Dad often says things that make no sense in such a way as to suggest they are nothing but 100 percent pure, fresh-squeezed, not-from-concentrate fact.

  The definition of autism is elusive, which means that no one can say exactly what it is in one sentence, but they are more than happy to write a book about it and sell millions of copies by writing very long paragraphs about how autism is different for everyone who has it, which is a nice way of saying, “We have no idea either!” and which is why we have two thousand books about autism on our bookshelf. My mom is working on writing one of these dreaded books in her spare time. The fact she has no spare time makes me hope we will never have to read it.

  I think that everyone is overthinking it. It’s just a way that some people are. People are all different: People with autism are all different, and so are people without it. So, seriously, what is the big deal about that?

  Autism has made my mom famous-ish. Being the head of Autism Abounds! she’s on the radio a lot, and also she blogs about it, which Dad hates because he says it’s too personal. They fight about the blog all the time, which is why I didn’t bring it up before. I just don’t want to get pulled in the whirlpool of crazy that I feel when Mom and Dad start bickering, shouting, and then storming out of the house.23

  The storming gives me a headache.

  Much like Seb gives me a headache.

  And Lex gives me a headache.

  When people find out that I have an autistic brother, they sometimes look at me differently, apparently waiting for me to do something inexplicable so they can nudge each other and stage-whisper, “She’s got it too.”

  Autism is not contagious. These people are idiots.

  Talking about autism makes me feel as though I’m being forced to listen to someone slowly dragging their nails along a chalkboard while chewing Styrofoam and tinfoil simultaneously. It’s like I’m so bored of autism-talk, I can’t stand it, but I have to care about it because I love Seb in the way you are forced by biology to love your siblings, even when they tend to spit in your hair when you aren’t looking.

  A lot of people have autism.

  It’s really not that big of an issue. Except when it is.

  See also Aaron-Martin, Sebastian (Seb).

  Ballet

  The art of tippy-toeing painfully around a room in a tight pink dress with a ridiculous froufy skirt in pretty slippers to boring classical music while someone shouts at you to stand up straighter.

  My mom is a former ballerina ballet teacher, the result of which is that since the very second I was able to toddle across the room in an effort to escape from my brothers, BAM, I was put into ribbony slippers and forced to plié and arabesque my way through my days. Some people are designed to bend and twirl and stand very straight while their hair is compressed into a bun so tight that their eyes can’t blink, and some people are not.

  I am not.

  As a result of all that dancing, I now walk with my toes out, like a duck. Thanks, fifth position!

  I am currently seeking a new activity that my mom never did and so she can’t endlessly make remarks about “hard work” and “sweat and sacrifice” that make me want to scrape out my brain with a plastic fork and throw it out the window at high velocity.

  I will likely never mention the ballet again in this encyclopedia as it is a part of my life that gives me a tiny, throbbing pain inside of my head, just above my left eye.

  Barbie Dolls

  Oddly curvaceous blond dolls with bent feet and vacant expressions, usually dressed in something that sparkles or is so blindingly bright it can be used as a flashlight when the power goes out.

  Obviously, at my age, I think Barbies are pointless, but I never liked them. As a child, I would rather have eaten four
pounds of liver24 than been subjected to hours of Barbie games. I think you’re either a person who loved Barbies, or you are a person who used to cut off their hair, encouraged them to choose a life that didn’t involve wearing glittery bikinis for a living, and painted their creepy white plastic skin a more flattering warm, brownish shade. I’m more of the second type.

  Freddie Blue is the first.

  Sometimes I think our friendship is doomed.

  See also Anderson, Freddie Blue.

  BFF

  Best Friends Forever.

  See also Anderson, Freddie Blue.

  Boarding, Skate

  The sport of standing on a rolling board and doing impressive things at high speed without accidentally mortally wounding yourself, all the while maintaining an expression of genuine aloofness. People who skateboard are automatically cool by default, due to I’m-not-sure-what. Automatic coolness is rare and is making me consider skateboarding as a hobby. That, and the fact that I think I’d be good at it. Certainly better than I am at ballet.

  “Freddie Blue,” I said. “Have you ever skateboarded? Do you think skateboarding is (a) totally hip or (b) only cool for boys?”

  “I don’t think that ‘skateboarding’ is a word,” said Freddie Blue from her position on the floor, where she was systematically flipping through my dad’s entire collection of Everybody mags, looking for a hairstyle to try. “It sounds better to just say ‘boarding.’ I’d probably be good at it,” she said. “I was, like, really good at snowboarding, remember?” She sat up, looking all excited, awash in her happy memory.