Why Girls Are Weird Read Free

India?” he asked.
    â€œYou never listen when I speak. It’s about an Indian woman falling in love with a newscaster.”
    â€œIt sounds wonderfully retarded.”
    â€œThat’s why I’m naming it after you.”
    â€œI like it when we’re seven,” Dale beamed.
    â€œMe too. Being a grown-up is way dull.”
    â€œIt’s dorky.”
    â€œCrappy.”
    Dale hid his face in his hands and whispered, “Shitty!”
    â€œI’m so telling!”
    Dale giggled and then pretended to be quite serious. “Write me a story,” he demanded with a stamp of his foot. “And I need some body gel. And an R.E.M. CD. Wait. Let me get some paper. I’ll make you a list.”
    I went home and wrote the Barbie entry.

000003.
    Subject: Yay!!!!
    Dear Anna K,
    I feel silly writing to you, but I wanted you to know that I just found your webpage. I really like it and I hope you keep writing because it’s really good. I used to do that stuff with my Barbies, too!
    Well, I’m going to go before I feel stupid for writing this fan letter, but I wanted to tell you that I think you’re very cool. How old are you?
    Thanks,
Tess
    -----
Subject: Questions About You.
    Anna K,
    Your Barbie entry is hysterical! One of my girlfriends sent it to me. I love it! We printed it out here at my work and we pasted it by the copier. You should see the looks of the men in the office when they read it. We got our intern Ted to blush!
    We keep coming back to read more, but you haven’t posted anything else. Would you mind telling us more about you? Do you have other places where you’ve written? More, please!
    -Kristen
    -----
    I stared at the screen for ten minutes, reading the words over and over again. Actual fan mail. People had sent fan mail. I couldn’t believe how quickly it had happened. I had just written the Barbie entry. How had so many people read it already? Not only that, but they loved it. They loved the words I had written. I had fans. Fan s —plural!
    When I was eleven I wrote my one and only piece of fan mail, to one of the actors on Head of the Class . I had just moved to a new school and was lonely. I wanted a classroom like the one on Head of the Class, where the only thing that mattered was fifth-period History and the people in it. I wanted a gifted class where the ten or twelve of us were a family, with a wisecracking teacher as our father. So I wrote to the girl who played Simone, the redheaded poet. My thinking was that of all the actors on the show, she was the one most likely to write me back because she seemed so nice and sensitive.
    I told her all about me, and asked if she’d write back to say she got my letter. She didn’t. I promised myself back then that if I ever got fan mail I’d write back to everyone. And now here I was. Take that, Simone.
    -----
Subject: re: Yay!!!
    Dear Tess,
    Thanks so much for writing. It’s good to know who’s reading. Hope you stick around. I’m twenty-four years old, but sometimes I’m really just sixteen.
    Anna K
    -----
Subject: re: Questions About You.
    Kristen,
    Don’t get poor Ted fired. I’d never be able to live with myself. I’m not published anywhere else yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as it happens. Thanks for writing!
    -AK
    -----
    It felt like Christmas morning, just after all of the presents had been opened. I wanted more. I wanted a column, a book, a book tour. A body of work that took up a shelf. A house. A dog. A dog to write about in my books. I wanted to see my paperbacks with the covers ripped off piled in a used-books store, all beat up and worn with the memory of a thousand different fingers.
    I wrote another entry immediately where I introduced myself. I said I was twenty-four and still trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I liked roller-blading, but the truth was I’d never even tried it. I guess I wanted to appear