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gently behind her.
    I spent the rest of the day alternating between lying on my bed and lying on the Itchy Couch with ice packs on my head while my mom shone beams of Angry and Disappointed out of her eyes and in my direction. I hoped Freddie Blue and the blue-haired boy had a nice afternoon! If by “nice afternoon,” I mean “I hope a wild orca leaped out of the ocean and dragged them both to a watery grave.”
Books
    You know what a book is, right? Pages? With writing on them? Between covers? So why is this entry here?
    Because
B
is for “Book.” That is why. You know, like
A
is for “Apple.”
    I like books. If I was going to make a top-ten list of everything good in my life, I’m almost sure that “Books” would feature, but if not, I’ll give them an honorable mention 32 because books are mostly awesome, except the ones that are stupid and don’t bear mentioning or even reading for that matter, and why yes, I am talking about
The Hobbit
.
    One day, I will write a book that will be as brilliant and amazing as my favorite book of all time, which is called
I Capture the Castle
, by Dodie Smith. If you have not read it, drop this book right now and go find a copy. Your mom probably has one. It’s an old book.
Boy, Blue-Haired, Who Just Moved in Next Door
    I do not know anything about the Blue-Haired Boy Who Just Moved in Next Door, except that he is a boy. And he lives next door. And he owns MY tree. And his hair is blue. And he has skateboards that he leaves on his front porch, completely unsecured.
    His hair is bigger than mine, the biggest hair I have ever seen. It has big fat curls, like you’d see on a kid competing in a beauty pageant whose mother has labored over that hair for six hours with a curling iron. It is long and thick, like a shiny, loose, soft, white-kid Afro. It is mostly dark brown but then has blobs of blue in it, such that it looks like a flock of angry birds who have been dining exclusively on blueberries have recently flown over his head.
    If you guessed that this boy is the boy from the entry
Boarding, Skate
, you would be 100 percent correct, and you have won a beach towel and a year’s supply of charcoal briquettes! Congratulations!
    Freddie Blue told me that his name is Kai. When I say “Kai” out loud, it sounds like the barking sound that harbor seals make while they beg for fish down at the wharf. “Kai, Kai, Kai,” she said. “Kai this and Kai that and Kai this and blah blah blah.”
    She said Kai is as “cute as a cracker” and will also be going to Cortez next year, even though he does not look very “gifted” 33 from a distance or even up close. Not that I have seen him up close, except that one time when I was only half-conscious on the road.
    I do not know if Kai is cute or not cute. He may be as cute as toast or even a Pop-Tart, for all I know.
    I thought skate boarding kids were supposed to be cool and aloof and inaccessible to the likes of me, but whenever this “Kai” sees me, he waves in a way that reminds me of a small dog who wants to climb up your leg while slobbering on your shoes. I do the only thing that I can do when this happens, which is to hide, usually in
his
tree. This is probably ironic.
    Freddie Blue says that Kai is probably going to be my first real boyfriend because in after-school TV shows, boys who live next door are always sweet and kind and give people their first kisses. They are never bad boys at all, and while she herself prefers “bad boys,” she thinks that I should have a “sweet and kind” boyfriend because I am not “streetwise.” Freddie Blue apparently equates “streetwisery” with “talking to her BFF like she is idio.” 34
    Kai will not be my boyfriend. My first boyfriend is required by law to have lovely, smooth, straight, blond hair; blackish eyes; to be from a small European nation; and also to be a