Oddest of All Read Free Page A

exactly how I got here, there are times when I wonder if being born dead might not have been the best thing.
    To begin with, I want to say here and now that Mikey Farnsworth should take at least part of the blame for this situation. This, by the way, is true for many of the bad things that have happened in my life, from the paste-eating incident in first grade through the bogus fire-drill situation last year, right up to yesterday afternoon, which was sort of the Olympics of Bad Luck, as far as I’m concerned. What’s amazing is that somehow Mikey ends up coming out of these things looking perfectly fine. He is, as my grandfather likes to say, the kind of guy who can fall in a manure pile and come out smelling like a rose.
    The one I am not going to blame is Tiffany Grimsley, though if I hadn’t had this stupid crush on her it never would have happened.
    Okay, I want to stop and talk about this whole thing of having a crush. Let me say right up front that it is very confusing and not something I am used to. When it started I was totally baffled. I mean, I don’t even like girls, and all of a sudden I keep thinking about one of them? Give me a break!
    In case it hasn’t happened to you yet, let me warn you. Based on personal experience, I can say that while there are many bad things about having a crush, just about the worst of them is the stupid things you will do because of it.
    Okay, let’s back up here.
    I probably wouldn’t even have known I had a crush to begin with if Mikey hadn’t informed me of this fact. “Man, you’ve got it bad for Tiffany,” he says one day when we are poking around in the swamp behind his house.
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” I ask. At the same time my cheeks begin to burn as if they are on fire. Startled, I lift my foot to tie my shoe, which is a trick I learned in an exercise magazine and that has become sort of a habit. At the moment, it is mostly an excuse to look down.
    What the heck is going on here?
I think.
    Mikey laughs. “Look at you blush, Murphy! There’s no point in trying to hide it. I watched you drooling over her in social studies class today. And you’ve only mentioned her like sixteen times since we got home this afternoon.”
    â€œWell, sure, but that’s because she’s a friend,” I say, desperately trying to avoid the horrible truth. “We’ve known each other since kindergarten, for pete’s sake.”
    Mikey laughs again, and I can tell I’m not fooling him. “What am I going to do?” I groan.
    He shrugs. “Either you suffer in silence or you tell her you like her.”
    Is he nuts? If you tell a girl you like her, it puts you totally out in the open. I mean, you’ve got no place to hide. And there are really only two possible responses you’re going to get from her: (a) She likes you, too, which the more you think about it, the more unlikely it seems or (b) anything else, which is, like, totally, utterly humiliating. I’m sure girls have problems of their own. But I don’t think they have any idea of the sheer terror a guy has to go through before any boy-girl stuff can get started.
    I sure hope this gets easier with time, because I personally really don’t understand how the human race has managed to survive this long, given how horrifying it is to think about telling a girl you like her.
    Despite Mikey’s accusation, I do not think I have actually drooled over Tiffany during social studies class. But it is hard not to think about her then, because she sits right in front of me. It’s the last class of the day, and the October sunlight comes in slantwise and catches in her golden hair in a way that makes it hard to breathe.
    It does not help that eighth-grade social studies is taught by Herman Fessenden, who you will probably see on the front of the
National Enquirer
someday as a mass murderer for boring twenty-six kids to death in a