The (Almost) Perfect Guide To Imperfect Boys Read Free Page A

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    â€œWell, it’s possible, isn’t it? He could be this normal,cute Frog boy only pretending to be Zachary Mattison.”
    Maya covered her mouth. “Interesting theory, Nancy Drew. Except for one thing: why would anyone pretend to be Freakazoid?”
    She turned the doorknob. As the door screeched open, it was obvious that the class was in quiz mode. Olivia Moss looked up at us in desperation, Chloe DeGenidis grumbled, and Jarret Lynch, well, grunted. I hated to even say that word to myself, “grunted,” because it was such typical Croaker behavior. But he really did grunt, and so loudly that Kyle Parker punched him in the arm.
    â€œHola,” Señor Hansen boomed from the back of the room. “You girls are now seven minutes late for my class, which I find extremely disrespectful. But instead of reporting you both to the principal, I’ll allow you to wrestle with a little pop exercise.”
    â€œFabutastic,” Maya murmured.
    Señor Hansen flashed a fiendish smile. This gave him a unibrow, one dark werewolfish fringe above his eyes. “Excuse me, Señorita Lopez, what did you say?”
    â€œI said sorry we’re late, Mr. Hansen,” Maya answered calmly. She always called him that, “Mister” instead of “Señor”; if he noticed, he never said anything.
    He hulked over and with his scary-hairy fingers gave us each a double-sided paper titled Quiz #15—Irregular Verbs in the Preterit .
    Help, I thought.
    I hadn’t studied for this quiz, and even if I had, this was exactly the sort of thing I was horrible at. For me to memorize something it needed to make sense—I couldn’t just mindlessly recite a list of meaningless verb variations. Whenever I was stuck studying history or science, Mom suggested memory tricks (“mnemonic devices,” she called them)—silly rhymes and acronyms, mostly, but they made the facts stay in my head like friendly ad jingles. Except you couldn’t use Mom’s tricks for cramming irregular verbs in the preterit—you just had to drill them, over and over.
    Plus the whole “preterit” business was ridiculously complicated. Why did the Spanish language need two past tenses—one for completed actions (the preterit) and another for past actions done over time (the imperfect)? It all seemed random and unfair, if you asked me.
    I peeked at Maya, whose table was in the back of the classroom over by the windows. Totally apart from the fact that she spoke Spanish at home, my best friendwas a superstudent, so of course she was already busy conjugating.
    All right, Finley, get to work, I scolded myself. I took my chewed-up pencil out of the other pocket, the one without the camera. Somehow I made it through the first three conjugations, but by numero quatro , all I could think about was Zachary Mattison.
    Not the one I’d just seen. I mean the Tadpole-egg version, the skinny, doofy little kid with the chirpy voice and the sticking-out ears, who wore rugby shirts in primary colors, and who was always telling the world’s stupidest jokes. Jokes about boogers. Also about smelly armpits, fat butts, farts, burps, and other assorted body functions. Not to mention his specialty: jokes about people’s names.
    I remembered how crazed he made Chloe DeGenidis, insisting her name sounded like a disease. One time in the middle of the cafeteria, she yelled, “Zachary, I’ve had it, you are such a total loser !” Then she threw her cell at his head, and when it hit his forehead, he actually laughed .
    Oh, and when he laughed, he usually fell on the floor, so a lot of the time he was dusty. Or smeary or full of crumbs. Which didn’t do much for his Total Loser status, especially with the girls.
    And of course neither did his obsession with gummies. Zachary had this thing for the grossest ones: worms, squid, octopi, slugs. (Did they even make gummy slugs? Whatever, you get the