most heartwarming day EVER

For those of you who were asking, the library nerds never paid enough attention, so eventually we and our emotions took a hike elsewhere and Juice went on to another fashion phase.

This phase is called the watermelon phase, given her preference of colors. She even joked that her skin represented the seeds. She tolerates my teasing, but today another subject made her blow up at me completely, though she retained her bodily form. As we were walking home from school she told me to read the word on her shirt and I flatly refused, saying, “I can’t. I can’t read anything at all.”

“You can’t even read the word on my shirt?” she shouted.

“Of course not.” I smiled and turned away from her. “I’ve forsworn reading. I can’t read.”

“Yes, you can!” she screamed as she ran away from me. “Just because you’ve forgotten what words look like doesn’t mean you can’t read, Jolly!”

“Get a new outfit!” I called after her.

I stormed home from school thinking things like, “Reading is for idiots. Pulling up my skirt is so much more fun.” This would be a good time to point out that I am in a short-skirt phase.

Once at home, I marveled that my skirt didn’t slide down on the couch even when I propped my knees up. I figured that had something to do with my cat sleeping on my feet. After getting through several rounds of my new handheld video game, “Poet Elimination,” and giving up because Wordsworth just wouldn’t die, I opened a book to reassure myself of my immunity to reading, and realized that, shock of all shocks, there were words all over the pages of the book! They were really small. I decided to kiss the book just to see what would happen, and immediately my lips swelled up. “Maybe the book warned about that!” I thought. “Maybe I should read again. I keep thinking about Watermelon Juice.”

“Don’t knock me over, Jolly,” Mom said as I ran out the door at the same time she was entering the house. “I just won a day as prime minister of Canada. You should treat me with more respect and less running.”

“I have to run in this skirt so everyone can see my undies!” I cried.

Of course my best of friends was running toward me as well, consistent with what television commercials lead us to expect from everyday encounters.

“Juice!” I cried. “You really do look like a watermelon! That is so sad!”

“Jolly!” she cried back. “I kissed a book and my lips swelled up!”

We had a long, heartfelt talk about the entire situation up in my room, and Juice agreed to join me in forswearing reading. She added that she would end her watermelon phase if I would get rid of “that hideously ugly outfit.”

“Not till I look good naked, Juice,” I snorted. Then I turned to finish reading a magazine article about how to see your boyfriend in others you love.

“I can see myself in my parents,” I said after explaining the gimmicky premise to Juice. “I guess that means that I’m my own boyfriend.”

“My boyfriend does look like you,” Juice said, patting me on the hand. “But his idiot father wants him to break up with me. I heard them yelling back and forth yesterday as I was working on Joely’s tasting project in his room--you know, the one where he has to go around tasting everything. His father was saying, ‘Your idiot girlfriend made pee come out of the side of my head when she performed brain surgery on me! Plus she put my tie in a waffle iron!’”
I pretended to care, and then said, “There must be a boyfriend out there for me who looks like me.” I remembered a few days back to when my caninivorous neighbor told me I looked like Joely, the gorgeous young whippersnapper hunk she was after. I hoped Juice was picking up on my hints for her to break up with him for my sake.

“Tee hee,” Juice said, then suddenly halted her giggles. “Jolly, why did you let your mom in the room?”

“Somebody left the door open and I don’t know how to close it,” I shrugged as my mom opened my dresser drawers. “I don’t know why she keeps coming in and putting clothes away. Those aren’t even my clothes.”

“That’s right, Jolly, and I’m not even your mother,” she said, turning toward us. She began to glow all over. “I’m an angel, sent by the most-beloved television networks, to provide answers to all your problems. I’ve come to tell you, Juice, not to feel guilty about what you did to your boyfriend’s father. For a happy ending, I’ve arranged for the three of us to be in a toothpaste commercial together.”

“Nice lipstick,” I said to my fake Mom during the spontaneous and ill-prepared commercial shoot. Then I sniffed and embraced her. “I’ll never forget you, fake Mom,” I told her, “or the money I’m making from this commercial.”