Just Another Day in My Insanely Real Life

by Barbara Dee

  So, when I got home from school that day, I went straight to my desk. I opened my regulation two-hundred-page college-lined spiral notebook, uncapped my black extra-fine-point Rolling Writer, and got to work:

  Top Ten Stupidest Things Miranda Ever Said

  1–Omigod!

  2–Oh. My. God.

  3–This is what girls do–

  Then I stopped. No. However stupid this journal was going to be from now on, it was mine, not Miranda’s. Let her fill up her own stupid journal with her own stupid words. I tore out the page and tossed it into my overflowing garbage can. Then I stared at my insanely messy desk. Suddenly I had an idea. I’d use the garbage on my desk for inspiration. Garbage to create garbage.

  A Virtual Tour of My Insanely Messy Desk

  When you want to write, it’s important to have a clean desk. So first, throw out all the random thingies on your workspace. This includes: old gum wrappers, dustballs, leaky pens, dried—up markers, pencils that are too short, pencils that have dirty erasers, pencils that have no erasers, old Post-its that don’t stick, old Post-its that have writing, old Post-its in weird colors, reinforcements (because who actually uses them?), rulers (because ditto), rubber bands (distracting), dirty tissues (disgusting), staplers (dangerous). Also throw out calendars. Calendars on your desk just add pressure, and who needs that?

  I read over my work. Perfect. It took me exactly two and a half minutes to write this no-brain garbage, and with my newly big handwriting, I’d already filled almost half a page. Yessir, I thought. I was definitely getting the hang of it.

  I went into the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed. I opened it: empty as usual. This morning Mom had written out a shopping list for Miranda, who, guess what, was late again. Fine, I thought, great Thank you, Miranda Baldwin. I went back to my room, got my journal, brought it to the kitchen, reopened the refrigerator, and wrote:

  A Virtual Tour of My Empty Refrigerator

  Due to Circumstances beyond my control, namely my hopeless, irresponsible, selfish big sister, our refrigerator is empty. Well, not exactly empty. We do have:

  1. Spicy brown mustard,

  2. Honey mustard,

  3. Tarragon mustard,

  4. Weird green cat-barf-looking mustard,

  5. Country mustard (in what sense? Is it from this country? Does it taste like the country? A scary thought!),

  6. Dijon mustard (what does that mean? Do they eat a lot of mustard in Dijon? If so, why?),

  7. A charity orange,

  8. Five apples (one charity),

  9. A half-gone pint of charity Cream cheese,

  10. A half-gone gallon of charity milk

  11. An Open can of Friskies Turkey & Giblets (What exactly are giblets? They sound kind of Cute!),

  12. And a half-gone liter of Diet Coke.

  Maybe not the best-stocked refrigerator in Emerson, but hey. At least there’s no tofu!

  Just then, Fuzzy jumped into my lap. He only did that when he wanted to be fed, or stroked, or complimented, which was always. So I rubbed my face in his warm fur and told him he was a good boy, a great boy, a beautiful boy. This gave me an idea. Another virtual tour? Well, maybe not.

  Cats Rule, Dogs Drool

  Cats are great. Some people prefer dogs, but what do they know? Cats are better in every way. First of all, cats purr, which is a great sound to hear when you’re feeling psycho. Also, purring puts you to sleep, which is helpful when you’re up late at night stressing out about some stupid, mindless, pointless assignment for school. (Like what, I wonder?) Cats also prewarm your bed, which is better than using an electric blanket, because cats have rarely been known to electrocute anyone. They chase dustballs under the bed, which means you don’t have to bother vacuuming. (Not that you would.) And they groom themselves just for fun, which is always amusing. Of course, when my sister grooms herself just for fun, it’s stupid and pathetic, but that’s another story.

  The phone rang. “Hello, this is Pauletta Rivera, may I speak to Anne Baldwin, please?”

  Jackson’s teacher! “I’m sorry, she’s not available right now,” I recited, just like Mom taught us to say when she was at work. But then I had a thought. “This is Cassie Baldwin. Jackson’s sister. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” Mrs. Rivera said, sounding surprised. “And you?”

  “Great. Actually, Mrs. Rivera, my mother did mention that she wanted to speak with you. Something about Jackson’s reading, I don’t remember what, exactly. Something about how concerned she was that maybe Jackson had a learning disability or something. I think she said she wanted to have him tested.”

  “Oh! Really!” she said. “Well, I should certainly speak to her, then. What time will she be home?”

  Later. “Any minute, but would you like to try her at work? I can give you her work number.”

  “Thank you, but I already have it. I’ll just call her there, since this is important.” Mrs. Rivera thanked me, and then I speed-dialed Mom to warn her, but I just got her voice mail. So would Mrs. Rivera, I thought, but at least it was a start.

  The door opened. I could hear Miranda and someone else.

  “CASSIE? YOU HOME?”

  I raced to my desk. “JUST DOING HOMEWORK!” I yelled down the hall.

  Cats 300m around the house for no reason, which is always good for a laugh.

  She popped her head into my doorway. “Hey, Casshead, I want you to meet my darling amiga, Madison.”

  She shoved Madison Avenue into my room. Madison was wearing a black warm-up jacket that made her look sort of athletic, except her hair had streaky blond highlights and she stank like perfume.

  “HI!” she exclaimed, then ran out, giggling. “Why did you DO that?” she shrieked at my sister.

  I liked her already.

  Also, cats are conveniently droppable on your sister’s head.

  I heard them banging doors in the kitchen. “CASSIE, WHERE’S ALL THE RING DINGS?” Miranda shouted down the hall.

  “WE ATE THEM LAST NIGHT, REMEMBER?”

  “ALL OF THEM?”

  “YUP.”

  Loud foraging.

  Cats are (mostly) quiet.

  “WHY IS THERE NEVER ANYTHING TO EAT IN THIS HOUSE?”

  Uh, Miranda? Is this, like, Rhetorical Questions for Dummies or something? If I answer it, will you tell me to get a life, or chill out, or something equally stupid and insulting?

  They are sensitive to your needs.

  “MAYBE YOU SHOULD DO THE SHOPPING!”

  “YEAH, MAYBE! LISTEN, WE’RE GOING TO MAD’S. YOUR TURN TO COOK SUPPER, CASS!”

  “GREAT! OKAY, THEN, BYE!”

  Cats keep you company.

  The front door slammed. It wasn’t until they were gone that I realized she hadn’t even checked in on Jackson. Wonderful, I thought. Here she was acting like I was this no-life loser who didn’t know a single thing about my little brother while she was the one who understood him so incredibly well. But she didn’t even bother knocking on his door before she went over to Madison’s to sit by the phone and stuff her face with Ring Dings. She might as well have been going to Kraków or Florida or Mount Doom for all the attention she was paying! So I got up from my desk, went into Jackson’s room, and crawled under his blanket, where the air was hot and slightly farty, and Jackson and I played Power Rangers until it was time for me to nuke something for dinner.

  Mr. Mullaney spent the whole period going over his insanely evil grammar quiz, but what did I care? I got a 68, the worst grade I’d ever gotten in English in my whole life, but so what? So what? I just kept writing in my journal the whole stupid period, filling up page after page after page:

  The Many Uses of Rubber Bands

  Rubber bands are very useful. They make excellent “worms” for psycho cats. They’re also necessary for slingshotting Chiclets across the room. You can chew on rubber bands if you want some no—carb chewing gum (no cavities, too!). They make great doorknob decorators. You can twang them in your mouth, if yo
u wear braces. You can snap them On people’s knees when you want to annoy them. Rubber bands also make great fidget toys during Math, when the teacher is telling you how to divide fractions for the ten millionth time, and you’re not allowed to scream. They make delightful go-with-everything bracelets for the fashion-impaired. And they’re always useful for holding your shoes together, if you’re short of cash.

  I crossed out that last bit—none of Sir Mullvo’s business. But those three nasty words, “short of cash,” reminded me that I’d never sent a thank-you to Mrs. Langley. Fine. No problem. I’d do it now.

  Dear Mrs. Langley,

  Thank you for the lovely gift basket. It was so nice of you to give us those delicious treats! We really enjoyed them all. Hope to see you soon.

  Love,

  The Baldwin family

  Dear Mrs. Langley,

  Thank, you for the care package. It was incredibly tactless of you to remind us that we’re “short of cash.” In case you were wondering, we practically choked on the” scrumptious blueberry muffins. Does this make you feel superior?

  Ungratefully,

  The Baldwin family

  Yo, Jojo,

  Just because you let your two stupid dogs pee on our grass (when we had grass), does this make you think, you need to feed us? Next time, just buy your stupid dogs some diapers and skip the muffins. We’ll be fine.

  Don’t write back

  What’s left of

  The Baldwin family

  “Cassie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll ask again: Is the correct answer ‘the slobbering ogress who,’ or ‘the slobbering ogress whom’?”

  “Whom?” I guessed.

  Dead silence. Then I could hear Brianna giggling.

  “Wrong,” Mr. Mullaney sneered.

  “Oh, right! Who?”

  “Wrong again.”

  “What? How can they both be wrong?” I spluttered.

  “They can both be wrong, Cassie, because there is no ogress, slobbering or otherwise. I just threw that at you to see if you were paying attention. Which clearly you were not.”

  Then Zachary Hogan, the smirky little hairball, raised his hand. “Mr. Mullaney, isn’t ’which clearly you were not’ a sentence fragment?”

  “Yes, of course, Zachary. Excellent.”

  Zachary beamed.

  Mr. Mullaney didn’t beam. He looked at me like he was pointing a dragonfire arrow.

  “Therefore, Cassie, I am issuing a warning. One more episode of inattentiveness, one more unauthorized trip to fantasyland, and I will need to contact your parents.”

  “Good luck,” I muttered.

  There’s an art to lunchroom dining. You fill your tray (today, chicken nuggets, fries, gloppy yogurt), then process your card (now mine was under by sixteen dollars and seventy cents; but you can’t seem alarmed, you have to act like, whoops, you just keep forgetting to tell your parents), then scan the lunchroom for a place to sit. But you can’t stand there looking for too long or else everyone will think you’re a freakish loser with zero social options. So you zoom in to spot your “friends,” the guaranteed few who’ll save you a seat. Even if you hate them. Even if they hate you back.

  So I did, and of course, they didn’t. Save me a seat, that is. Brianna and Hayley were sitting at the table closest to the water fountain, with Zachary Hogan, the smirky little hairball, and Lindsay Frost, this snotfaced girl from swim team. Lindsay was leaning across the table to tell them something obviously private, and they were all laughing like whatever she said was so incredibly amusing. And it was really obvious, even from a distance, that there was absolutely no room at that table for me.

  Crappachino. Turd, turd, turd. Yeah, okay, but what was I expecting? Hayley and Brianna were in their own private little world of whispers and giggles. Apparently they opened it up to let in Lindsay, but that wasn’t exactly surprising. Lindsay swam with them at the fitness club every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, so of course they shared blow-dryers and towels. And secrets, too, probably. More than probably: definitely. I could see it by the way their dark-blond heads came together. They were a group, a trio. I really didn’t like Lindsay at all. She flipped her hair all the time and wore this pink lip-gloss that made her mouth look all sticky, like she ate too much cotton candy for breakfast or something. She always flirted with these total jerks on the boys’ swim team, like Mike Greenwall and Ryan Francona, who wouldn’t know what to do with a book if they sat on one. And to me she always acted all condescending. (When I quit the swim team—that is, had to quit—she touched my arm and said, “I heard the news— I just feel awful for you, Cassie,” like I had a brain tumor or something). So, actually I wouldn’t want to sit there even if they had saved me a seat. Which, of course, they hadn’t.

  Okay, fine, I get it, I thought. So on to Plan B. But what was Plan B? The thing about seventh grade is that all the groups are totally set. Starting in fifth grade, you figure out your group to eat with, hang out with at recess, even hang out with on weekends (although the truth is, I hadn’t done that in a long, long time). Even if you hated every single kid in your group, even if they bored you/ignored you/insulted you/disgusted you, it was still your group. All things considered, you were lucky to have it.

  But what if somehow, in some weird way you couldn’t quite figure out, your group gradually stopped being your group? It’s not like you could just bring your lunch tray over to some other table—say, the Jock table, or the Dork table, or the Video Game table. It’s not that they would actually prevent you from sitting with them. It’s just that they would totally ignore you and make you feel like a big wet puddle of cat barf. So you were better off, much better off, sitting by yourself, or else sitting with some other groupless loser, and praying that lunch would end quickly. Like in a zillionth of a nanosecond.

  So there I was with my tray, scanning the lunchroom for some place, any place, to sit down fast before the whole seventh grade could tell that I’d lost my group. I could’ve sat down next to Katie Chang, who was kind of boring but otherwise okay, but she was sitting with this girl actually named India. The two of them were definitely another best-friends unit, though, and I decided I just couldn’t deal with any more of that. I also vetoed sitting with Mariah Silverman (because all she talked about was MTV), Arianna DeVito (because all she talked about was grades), and Tara Nolan (because all she talked about was Tara Nolan).

  Right next to the Video Game table were Danny Abbott and his best friend, Noah Davis. There was definitely enough space for me to squeeze in there, I thought. But did I want to? Well, of course I wanted to, but would I actually do it? It was one thing if I was sitting with Brianna and Hayley and then somehow we ended up talking to Danny. It was completely different to actually walk up to his table on my own and just sit down. And he was with Noah. Maybe if he’d been sitting there all by himself, maybe then possibly I’d have gone over and sat down with him. But under these circumstances how could I walk over there and interrupt whatever conversation they were having and just start talking to him like, ho hum, isn’t that Mr. Mullaney such a bore?

  I stood there in front of the lunchroom balancing my tray full of chicken nuggets, and then suddenly it hit me: I WAS SOUNDING EXACTLY LIKE MIRANDA.

  I was. I really was. I was turning into everything I despised: a girly-girly, squealing, yakking, Adam-waiting, pathetic loser. Just like Miranda. Just like her trusty side-kick, Madison Avenue.

  I felt like barfing. And of course Danny picked that moment to look across the lunchroom right at me.

  So I looked down at my tray like, what do you know? Chicken nuggets! How’d they get here?

  And then I sat down with Bess Waterbury.

  Today she was eating a blob of cottage cheese and some fruit salad that looked like it was preserved in formaldehyde. Probably tasted that way too.

  “Okay if I sit down?” I asked, sitting down.

  She stared. “Sure.”

  I started eating my chicken nuggets,
which by now were so cold they tasted like chicken rocks. She watched me.

  “Want a bite?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I can’t. I’m on this diet. I’m trying to lose, like, fifty pounds.”

  “Wow,” I said, chewing. “That’s a lot.”

  “Yup. I’ve already lost six. But you know my whole family is fat. We have a genetic predisposition. It’s weird how things run in families.”

  Now it was my turn to stare. After realizing I’d just been having a Miranda Moment, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I quickly changed the subject.

  “So, Bess, have you written any more haikus lately?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m tired of those. Now I’m writing a story. Well, actually, it’s kind of long, so maybe it’s more of a novel. How’s yours going?”

  I winced. “I gave it up.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because. You said it was the best thing you ever wrote.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped. “Yeah, well, it was,” I said, “and that jerk Mr. Mullaney doesn’t deserve it! I mean, I worked so hard on it, I cared about it so much, and he made me feel like it was garbage. It’s like I was, I don’t know, sharing something precious, like a gift, and he was treating it like it was nothing.”

  She poked at her cottage cheese blob for a while. Then she said, so quietly I could barely hear, “Yeah. But if you stop writing it, then he won.”

  I swallowed. My throat felt tight, and it wasn’t from the rocky chicken, either.

  “So,” she said, finally. “What was it about?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. It was this sort of fantasy adventure story.”