by Karen Rivers
“We’re going to be famous,” I told her. She stared at me through slitted eyes. “Cats everywhere will want to be your friend,” I said. “They won’t really like you, though. They will just be using you because you’re in a magazine.” She licked her paw scornfully and blinked.
“Fine,” I said. “Be that way.”
The room was still and empty.
“I’m going out!” I shouted. No one answered. I left my empty smoothie glass on the kitchen table with the rest of the mess. Mom was going to have a fit when she saw that disaster area, and I know I should have tidied it up. I just . . . couldn’t. I could only hope that the fickle hand of Fate wasn’t actually going to punch me directly in the solar plexus.
I marched myself directly to Freddie Blue’s house. I didn’t have a choice. Even with the Kai situation bubbling and boiling in the background and twisting my stomach into knots, the truth was that I still needed FB. She would be able to help me. She might be the only one who would want to help me.
FB lives exactly eleven and a half blocks away, which is very close when you are in an air-conditioned car, but may as well be in outer Swaziland when you are walking in a heat wave. By the time I arrived, sweat had trickled into my inflamed zit, swelling it to the size of a piece of fruit, such as a cherry or even a kumquat. It stung. I would have cried, but I didn’t have enough moisture left to make tears.
Freddie Blue’s mom let me in. I pretended to not notice her noticing my nose, but I know she did. Her eyes were wide with shock. “Hello,” I said. “Excuse me.” I stomped past her and up to Freddie’s room, ready to have her make me laugh and feel better and pretend she didn’t notice the fruit-like growth on my nostril.
“Hey!” I said. “Check this thing out on my nose.”
Freddie Blue waved at me, with her now patented78 Swatting Away an Annoying Fly hand-flappy gesture.
“What are you doing?” I said. I may have gotten the signal wrong, I thought. Maybe she was choking on a fish bone, or worse! “Are you OK?” Then I noticed that she was on the phone, mostly because she started pointing at it frantically and mouthing “HANG ON” in this overly fake, weird way that would have been funny if it weren’t so rude.
I flopped down on Freddie Blue’s perfect bed to wait. Her bed was the most comfortable bed in the world, and the prettiest. It looked like a bed in a catalog and not like a real bed at all.
I closed my eyes and tried to not listen to what she was saying, which was impossible. I cracked my eyes open and looked at her. She was making more wild hand gestures, as if she were signaling that there was an earthquake coming and I should run for my life. I nodded politely and went back to closing my eyes and trying not to listen. She was rhapsodizing about a purple top that she saw in a store when she was shopping with her dad that was “totally to die for, like death on a stick gorgeous.”
I opened my eyes and rolled them at no one in particular. Death on a stick? What?
Finally, she hung up and went, “Now, Tink, what’s up?” As though I was just the next thing on her list. The way she was looking at me reminded me of how the school secretary, Mademoiselle Oiseaux, looked at me when I was sent to the office — a blank look that said, “I am a professional and you do not interest me, you teensy speck of human dust, and I am also French and very sophisticated!”
It hurt my feelings, I don’t mind telling you, both when Mademoiselle Oiseaux did it and then when Freddie Blue did it.
“I . . .” I started. “I don’t know. I guess I should go. I mean, it’s the photo shoot.” I shrugged, like it was every day that a national magazine popped over to take photos of me and my insane family, and not like I’d come all the way over here so she could help me how to figure out how to be and what to do.
“Oh, kiddo,” she said. “Don’t look so bummed out! We’ll make you look super glam and I know just the —”
Then her phone rang again. And she held up one finger — EXACTLY LIKE MADEMOISELLE OISEAUX WOULD — in a gesture that said, “Hang on, someone more important wishes to communicate with me regarding purple articles of clothing! Oooh la la! Je suis le best of le best!”
I got up from her bed, where I’d been sweating a dent into her perfect white comforter. I pulled it smooth a bit and then I turned and ran out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house.
She didn’t come after me. I waited just to see if she would. I mean, I thought she would.
And she didn’t.
It occurred to me that I was often running out of rooms, alone, and not being followed.
I started to run again, but I couldn’t run for very long because it was super sticky, icky hot and I didn’t want to actually die.79 Finally, I slowed to a walk. But instead of walking home, I went to Drop Mac Park.
I wished I had a board, but I didn’t. So I found a patch of shade and just listened to the soothing sounds of boards clattering up and down the ramps. Watching other people skating was almost as fun as doing it myself.
I wished Kai was there because I thought maybe he’d get it. He’d get why I was upset. Wouldn’t he?
I watched and listened until my heart stopped racing and I felt like I wasn’t breathing through a straw. I felt OK.
It was just a zit.
It was just how Freddie Blue is.
It was just a stupid photo that no one would see.
It was just.
I’m more scared of karma than I am of anything else. Maybe all this is happening because I deserve to have bad stuff happen to me. Maybe I did something really awful once, and I don’t even know what it was, and now it’s all coming back to me like a nicely wrapped Christmas parcel full of sadness.
You’d think I’d remember if I’d done something that terrible, though, wouldn’t you?
See also Anderson, Freddie Blue; BFF; Crush List; Drop Mac Park; Everybody Magazine; Kai.
King, Stephen
The author of many, many scary books that you should not read after dark when you are alone, unless you want to be so frightened that for the next fourteen years, you dream about man-eating strawberry pies.
See also Books; Dark.
Kissing
The act of pressing your mouth on someone else’s and squishing it around in a way that is a lot better than it sounds.
I have nothing to say about kissing that I haven’t already told you. You are obsessed with kissing! It’s none of my business, but you might have a problem.
See also Ice Cream Incident, The; Janowicky, Austin; Kai.
Knife
A sharp, bladed thing usually used to cut meat or cheese or to spread butter on toast or even to sharpen pencils in a pinch when the sharpener is lost, which pencil sharpeners always are. Also, the way in which we here at the sophisticated Aaron-Martin household start our car. Resulting in a frantic search each morning for the one specific knife that fits in Mom’s ignition, in addition to the usual frantic search for her glasses and her keys.
Koan
A koan is a riddle that you can’t solve. It’s a Buddhist word. My mom is a Buddhist, which I may or may not have mentioned before. What it means is that we have a statue in the garden of a very fat, nearly naked man with an unusual hairstyle, and she frequently mutters things under her breath about choosing not to suffer.
Until I met Kai, I did not know how a koan applied to real life. Now I think that I do. Here is the unsolvable riddle: Why do I sometimes like-like a boy with blue, tufty hair who in no way resembles Prince X, who I always thought was my true love? And why do I sometimes act weird around him and feel like all I want to do is get away from him?
It’s not really a riddle because there is no highly amusing answer that makes you gasp and clutch your sides, going, “Oh! I should have known! A NEWSPAPER! How hilair!”
In this case, the answer to the koan is ______. A Buddhist would find that funny. Because it’s an answer that is not an answer! Buddhists are very much into answering questions with blanks, I think, which may or may not make Lex the w
orld’s first accidental Buddhist.
I actually don’t understand Buddhism at all.
See also Kai.
Lame
A word meaning “worthless,” “weak,” or “otherwise awful.”
Things that are lame can sweep through your life like a bad weather system, raining lameness down on every single one of your lame surfaces until you are so soaked with lame that there is no hope of anything ever being unlame ever again.
Lame, lamer, lamest, and lamosity are all related words. When something is extra lame, it’s important to double the word: lame-lame. The lamosity of this entry is trumped only by the lame-lameness of my lame existence.
As in, “Wow, that photo shoot was lame-lame.” Or “Golly, that photo shoot was a swirling swamp of lamosity.” Or the like.
See also Everybody Magazine.
Leg Shaving
I started shaving my legs when I was pretty young, like eleven. This is not because I’d hit puberty, but because I am a very hairy person.
Shaving my legs is the first thing that I did before Freddie Blue did. She did not have bad enough leg hair to need to shave until this year.
The first time I shaved my legs, I cut them so badly I thought I’d have to go to the hospital for a transfusion, which is when they fill you up with bags of someone else’s blood to make up for all the blood you lost from your cut-up legs. Someone else’s blood equals someone else’s DNA. Then what? Do your own cells start to mutate?
Obviously, people have transfusions all the time and do not metamorphose into anyone else, but it would be much more interesting if they did. If that happened, I would immediately sign up for a transfusion from someone who had truly awesome hair, tall genes, and good karma.
See also Karma.
Lips, Phillip
Photographer for Everybody magazine, guaranteed to be unlike anyone you’ve ever met before in your life, unless the people in your life are all insanely theatrical, annoyingly ingratiating photographers from Seattle with comically overblown lips.
“CALL ME LIPS!” he said at least twenty times after he flung open the front door without knocking and marched himself directly into our living room, where I happened to be lying on the Itchy Couch, sweating and minding my own business, while all around upstairs, I could hear my family crashing around in a panic of “getting ready.”
“Uh,” I said. Which is all I could say. Because I couldn’t think of anything except his lips. He had the biggest lips in the world. They looked like a lip-shaped helium balloon that had randomly landed on his face and would float him upward into space if someone were to let go of the string.
“You are a gorgeous little thing!” he shouted in my face. “Kudos!”
“Um,” I said. “Thanks, I guess.”
“You should be a MODEL!” he shrieked. “Too short, what a shame! A shame! But kudos! The hair! KUDOS! Your eyes! LOVE them!”
“Uh,” I said.
“She could use some makeup,” said my mom, appearing gracefully out of thin air, looking as cool and unruffled as anyone who was just screaming, “WHERE ARE MY GLASSES? PUT THAT CAT IN THE BATHROOM AND LOCK THE DOOR!” can look.
“Not very chatty, is she?” he said to my mom, who nodded and smiled. She looked so glam, she could have been on the cover of the magazine and people would have bought it by the millions. He turned back to me. “Off you go, sweetie, go get changed! Angel here will help sort you out!”
Angel was in charge of the clothes, which made sense, because she was wearing about twelve layers of them. She smelled like lemons and moved and talked so fast, I could hardly keep up. She was a human hurricane! A gale force! I swear, I could feel the air whooshing around me!
I emerged from the whirlwind wearing a puffy shirt.
A puffy PIRATE shirt.
A puffy YELLOW PIRATE SHIRT.
Not that anyone would notice what I was wearing. Like Pip’s lips, it was impossible for anyone to look at anything that wasn’t the zit on my nose.
“Tink,” said my mom. “We HAVE to do something about that monster zit! Come to the bathroom with me.”
At that second, the phone rang.
“Hello?” I said.
“It’s me,” said Freddie. “Look, where did you go? I’m sorry I was on the phone. It was, like, super important.”
“What,” I said. “Ever.” Mom began gesturing wildly at my nose. I ignored her.
“Don’t be mad,” FB said. “I just had to tell Stella80 about this fabu glam purple shirt my dad is going to get me for Tuesday.”81
“Gosh, how terrific,” I said, with as much licorice-y sarcasm as I could muster. “I have to go because there is a photographer here from Everybody magazine waiting to take my picture.”
“Oh,” she said. “Great! I’m right outside your house. I’m coming in.”
“Don’t!” I said. But it was too late. There she was.
“Wow, Tink,” she said, peering at me so closely I could smell her minty breath. “That is a huge pimple.”
“I know,” I said frostily. “You should go, it’s family only. Um, a closed set. You know.”
“Don’t be silly, Tink!” Mom laughed. “Of course she can stay.”
“No, she cannot,” I said.
“She could be in the picture,” said Lips. “She’s very pretty. Kudos! Too bad she isn’t the sister!”
“NO!” I shouted.
“Why are you shouting?” said Lex, wandering in casually, looking like he was about to go strolling on a Caribbean beach. Why he got to wear sophisto clothes and I had to look like a buttercup-yellow pirate who was about to burst into a merry song was a mystery to me.
“Go away!” I said, to no one in particular.
“We have to shoot while the light is still good,” said Pip the Lips. “Outside, I think. Let’s go!”
“I can’t stay,” said Freddie Blue. “I’m meeting someone? Someone who is a boy.”
Lex laughed. “Nice work, Frank,” he said. Then for no reason that I could ascertain, he did an armpit fart. To her credit, Freddie Blue looked slightly disgusted.
“Aren’t you too young to date?” said my mom.
“Date?” I said.
“Oh, it’s not a date,” said Freddie Blue. “I’m just . . . it’s just Kai. See you.” And she was gone, slamming the door behind her.
My heart fell all the way through my body, out the soles of my feet, and through the floor to the basement, where it got on Dad’s Harley and rode away forever. I let Mom put seven layers of face paste onto my zit, effectively molding me a new nose out of foundation. I looked completely ridiculous but I no longer cared. I didn’t care about anything: the zit, the shirt, the world, Pip’s lips. Nothing.
I was too depressed.
Too depressed to even be amused when the camera appeared and Seb, who apparently can change his mind about more than one thing, said, “Cool, is that a Nikon blah blah blah 19238 XLDSL whatever?”
Because apparently, when I wasn’t looking, Dad promised to buy him his own incredibly expensive and fancy camera as a “reward” for putting up with the photo shoot, which the rest of us ALSO have to put up with, with no reward, because we don’t need rewarding, as we do not have autism.
Stab, stab, stab. That is the sound of me stabbing something painfully into something. I don’t even know what (or who) to stab in this instance. But I would like to say, for the record, that I would also like a fancy camera.
If anyone asks.
Which they won’t.
So then I spent the afternoon pretending to enjoy Frisbee and cold drinks with my family in oddly posed, frozen tableaus.
“FREEZE!” Lips shouted. “Oh, that’s perfect. Kudos! I’m just going to . . .” Then he would walk over and artfully rearrange every single person’s limbs. It was very trying for all of us, especially He Who Cannot Be Stressed.
That’s right. Seb.
So it was just a matter of time before Seb accidentally threw a Frisbee into Dad’s eye, hard
, and while Mom was bending over to see if he was OK, Dad dumped his pretend cold drink on her hair. But the pretend cold drink was made out of some kind of icky gel, which ruined Mom’s hair. Like, really ruined it. As in, she’ll probably have to cut that goo out of her hair with shears.
Then Seb started hopping around. “I’m done,” he said. “I’m done.”
“KUDOS!” shrieked Pip the Lips. “YOU ARE ALL SO FABU! Especially you boys! And Mom! And Dad!”
“Gee, thanks,” I mumbled, quietly on purpose so he couldn’t hear me.
“Gee, thanks,” Seb mimicked. Loudly.
“Don’t mimic me!” I said.
“Don’t mimic ME!” he said.
“Don’t mimic ME,” I yelled.
“Don’t yell at me!” he yelled back.
“Everyone calm down,” Mom said. “We have to enter into our stages.”
“Tink!” yelled my Dad. “You are the Peacemaker!”
“That’s so stupid, Dad!” I yelled. “I’m just a kid!”
And then I held my breath until I fell over.
“I’m done,” said Lips just as Seb decided to take off running somewhere. Nowhere. Anywhere. Who cares where? “Kudos to you all! Will send you proofs! Much love! Besos, besos!”82
Lex took off after Seb.
“Thanks so much for coming,” said Mom.
“Will my black eye be edited out?” said Dad. “I mean, if the shot you use was post-injury?” He laughed wryly as though to say, “This isn’t funny, but I’m such a good sport!” when I know he really was worried that he was finally going to be in Everybody, but looking like a victim of a terrible crime and not like a pseudo-movie star.