The Encyclopedia of Me by Karen Rivers Page B

“You have him! I thought you didn’t like him, though, because he’s too nice?”
    â€œI changed my mind,” she said, waving her hand in the air like she was brushing off a fly.
    I felt sick. “OK,” I said. And just like that, I decided to stop my crush clear in its tracks. I refused to compete with my BFF. And I couldn’t win, even if I tried. Against FB? Never! I’d only HAD the crush for a few days! What a waste.
    Ergo, my Crush List was blank. A VERY long time ago, I wrote Shane Dubois on my list, which has now been crossed out so thoroughly, there is a hole in the paper. He was OK looking and had great teeth. But when Shane found out, 50 he stuck a charming note on my locker that said, “I love you, I love you, I love you. NOT.” Oh, that was so funny. I laughed so hard about that! What a jokester! Except the part where it wasn’t the least bit funny and I did not laugh.
    I also did not speak to Freddie Blue for five days afterward, and did not entirely forgive her until she got a baby picture of Shane Dubois from his mother, who happens to teach French at our school, and blew it up to poster size and added a bubble above his head that said, “I wear diapers! I’m Shane Dubois!”
    Before Shane, I also — and I hate admitting this but it’s true, so I have to — had a small potential-crush on Wex ­Stromson-Funk. But! That was ONLY because Freddie Blue was working hard at the time to convince me that he was only mean to me because he was in love with me. It didn’t take long to figure out that she was just being nice and that actually he hated me. Which was fine, because I hated him too. I only would have liked him if all the bullying had been a way of masking the pain he felt of having a terrible unrequited love for me. Then I
might
have made an exception.
    Keep in mind, that happened when I was eight. I didn’t understand much about love back then.
    Under pressure, I just wrote Brendan Carstairs, because he’s nice enough — kind of a smiling guy who is always in the background but never stands out, sort of like wallpaper with a not-too-ugly pattern — and would never laugh at me if he found out about the list, but he’s so boring that I’m really mostly lying by putting him on the list at all.
    See also
Bullies.

Dark
    The opposite of light. Well, obvi.
    I hate the dark. I’m not scared of it, I just don’t like it. (I blame Freddie Blue. Freddie Blue enjoys films that involve people in bikinis being killed brutally while at summer camp.)
    When it is dark, because my house is farther up the hill than Kai’s, I can look down and see into his family’s TV room. Not that I’m spying on him. I am not. Don’t even think that! I can usually see only the TV, not the people. When I watch, it sort of feels like we are watching TV together, even though I can’t hear the sound or really even see what show he is watching. I haven’t seen Kai since we went to the beach, but I know he is still alive because there is the TV — I can see it right now — showing either a sporting event or a movie, I can’t really tell which.
    I wonder if he is watching it, or if it’s his dad or his mom, taking a break from their fighting, which I imagine goes on all the time.
    I wonder if he is going to hang out with me again.
    I wonder a lot of stuff. Most of it has nothing to do with the dark, so I now return you to your regularly scheduled program of alphabetical facts, currently in progress.
Devil-May-Care Attitude
    An attitude that says, “I just don’t care what you think about me and what I’m doing, and the devil doesn’t care either.”
    Grandma used to say that I should always have a devil-may-care attitude. This means that I should never let anyone see when I’m upset. If I ever have a rock band 51 or a line of clothes 52 or even a record label or a small yacht, I