We switch to coming up with costume ideas for the statue. I’m for lab coat and Einstein wig, but Eggy is very adamant about going cowboy. Flatso says she can make it a little hat.
And just like that, we turned something weird and scary into something weird and funny.
Mostly.
Chapter 10
I DIDN’T SEE THIS COMING
Lucky!” Flatso whispers when she sees my note. (She’s no longer British in bio, by the way.)
“It’s because I nearly flunked my lab,” I tell her.
“Great idea!”
“What? No! I didn’t do it on purpose!”
Flatso thinks this over, like she suspects I might be trying to get some one-on-one time with our cute teacher. Which I am not. “Hmm,” she says.
Actually, I’m pretty embarrassed by my lab. I’m usually a great science student, but missing ten days a while back really put me behind. I don’t want Winnie—Mr. Quinn… What am I supposed to call him? Anyway, I don’t want him to think I’m an idiot.
“I’m not an idiot,” I tell him after class.
“What? I didn’t think you were.” Winnie looks confused as students file out of the room. “The mistake you made is pretty common.” He starts writing on my lab to show me what I did wrong, and all I can think is:
“You just missed a step,” he tells me.
I snap out of my little reverie and realize I missed his entire explanation. He turns my paper—now full of his red marks—back around and smiles at me, and when I look into his eyes, I see that they’re this really beautiful greeny-blue around the iris and sort of amber at the center. I’m so busy looking at his eyes, that when I reach for my paper, I accidentally touch his fingers. A jolt of electricity shoots through me, and I feel myself start to blush.
“Um, thanks,” I mumble, and hurry out of the room so fast that I knock my shoulder against the doorframe and stumble into the hallway. Attractive!
“Hey!” Brainzilla grabs my arm and helps me stay upright. “You okay?”
I nod and mutter something, and then she thrusts a copy of PlainSpeaking—which is our student newspaper, of which she is the editor, of course—into my face. “Check it out! Hot off the press! Now look at the front page!”
“Winston Quinn is sixteen?” I ask.
“He’s seventeen now,” Brainzilla says. “Cool, right?”
Cool? Maybe. Maybe just weird. So I have this Downy-fresh crush on a cute teacher who’s… my age? Does that make it better? Or worse? And how could I forget that Flatso is totally in love with him already?
I’m not sure. All I know is that now I’m having all kinds of Wrong Thoughts, and I don’t know how to stop them.
Or even if I want to.
Chapter 11
THIS IS EMBARRASSING
TGIF!
Totally Gonna Instantly Freak!
Just kidding. I mean, I know I’ve been in a mental hospital and my name is Cuckoo and all, but I actually think I’m pretty normal. You know, relatively.
And yet I am heading off to visit the school psychologist right now. Mr. Tool insists that I see Ms. Kellerman every Thursday at 2:30 PM.
“It’s for your own good,” Mr. Tool says. “Of course, we have to keep the best interests of all our students in mind.”
Translation: If Cuckoo goes nuts, I want someone to warn me that it’s coming so I can keep the rest of the student body away from her and keep their parents from suing me.
It really gives me the warm fuzzies to know how much he cares.
Do not get me wrong: Ms. Kellerman isn’t a bad person.
Mr. Tool, maybe, but Ms. Kellerman? No. It’s just that she’s a little too excited about handling my “case.”
Ms. Kellerman is fine dealing with manic overachievers, recreational druggies, and girls who are considering having (but do not actually have) an eating disorder. But she’s way out of her league when it comes to figuring me out. She’s got a BA in psych while I spent ten days in a hospital with a bunch of MDs and PhDs, and only one of them ever really understood me.
Ms. Kellerman is also obsessed with my diary.
She’s desperate to read it, but that is not happening. I won’t let her set eyes on a single word. Not even a comma.
I usually spend my hour with her scribbling away, which really irks her. I’m not trying to be mean. It’s just that the few times we’ve had a conversation, it hasn’t really gone anywhere.
So I decided to stop talking. I prefer to just stay quiet and work on my new ending for each of the Twilight books. The series had a good ending, but like I said, I hate endings. Rewriting it gives me a way to make it seem less… permanent.
Hmm… let’s see what else could happen: Zombie attack? Beach party? Ninja scene? Dance contest? Asteroid hitting Earth? “It was all a dream”?
None of those really grab me. So instead, I come up with a new ending for The Hunger Games, which feels easier—probably because I’ve only seen the movie and haven’t read the book yet.
Oh, man. This is exactly why I can’t show Ms. Kellerman my diary. I’m guessing she would have a full-blown field day with this.
I crack myself up.
Chapter 12
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER. GUESS AGAIN.
It’s Thursday night, and Mrs. Morris is a little distracted. She’s watching Wheel of Fortune, but she just doesn’t seem into it. She usually guesses the phrases way before the contestants do—sometimes before a single letter has appeared on the board—but tonight she can’t even figure out K__P O_ TRU_KI_G. Her mind is clearly elsewhere.
I’m pulling the ground beef out of the fridge and wondering what’s up with her when I suddenly remember that tonight was the night Marjorie was supposed to come over, and I have a little Oprah-esque aha! moment.
Marjorie.
Is it fair that a complete cornflake like Marjorie got a sweet person like Mrs. Morris as a mother? I mean, is it? Even when Marjorie isn’t here, she makes her mother miserable. And when she is here, it’s worse.
I wish I could take Mrs. Morris’s mind off her daughter. Just roll her out of here and meet up with some of my friends, maybe bomb around town. Let’s see, who would be fun to hang out with? Laurence Darcy, of course. Probably not Holden Caulfield, though. He’s cool but not exactly fun. We’d want someone more like… Nicki Minaj, maybe?
I imagine us finding some nice restaurant. Parking right up front in the double-wide handicapped space, thanks to Mrs. Morris, then strolling up to the ma?tre-d’. He’d take one look and give us a table right away.
There are only three flaws in this plan:
I have no car and no money.
I don’t actually know Nicki Minaj.
Mrs. M would never recite Puff Daddy lyrics.
So, since we clearly aren’t going to have dinner at an expensive restaurant with literary celebrities and rock stars, I decide to do the next best thing. I mix up some meat loaf and put it in the oven, then pull a tablecloth over the table and drag out the candlesticks. I get the wineglasses with the blue stems down from the top shelf and fill them with cranberry juice, which looks really pretty in the candlelight. By the time I call Mrs. Morris to the table, things are looking pretty festive.
Mrs. Morris gets into the spirit of our special meal by nearly chatting my ear off.
Okay, so she’s not really a super-chatty person. But I can tell she appreciates the trouble I took by the way her eyes shine as she eats the meat loaf. Neither one of us mentions Marjorie.