Octavia Boone's Big Questions About Life, the Universe, and Everything Read online

  MR. JEREMIAH PEACOCK, our neighbor, can always tell when a thunderstorm is coming. This is because of his Ominous Knee. When his knee twinges, that means a thunderstorm is on the way.

  The Ominous Knee once saved his life, says Mr. Peacock, because it was twinging on the day Mrs. Peacock wanted him to put up an aluminum umbrella clothesline in the backyard, and if he’d done what she wanted, Mr. Peacock says, he would have been out there waving a big old aluminum pole around when the storm rolled in and the lightning would have killed him deader than hell.

  “What’s twinging like?” I said.

  I thought it was a cool word, twinging. Kind of copper-colored, like those expensive French frying pans.

  Mr. Peacock fixed me with his good right eye and said I should thank my lucky stars I didn’t know, since it was like red-hot needles straight from Old Nick’s furnace, which, even so, didn’t cause half the pain and suffering he’d had for the past fifty-three years putting up with Mrs. Peacock’s mims and twitters. Though I think he was just joking about the second part because Mrs. Peacock is very even-tempered, and besides, she weighs two hundred pounds and never twitters at all.

  Since then, though, I’ve thought more than once that an Ominous Knee might be a good thing to have. At least it gives you some warning when something awful’s coming so that trouble doesn’t catch you unprepared.

  Because looking back, I was pretty clueless. At the beginning of the year that changed my life, the only thing I was worrying about was my name.

  According to Seventeen magazine, the most popular names for girls are Emily, Emma, Madison, Abigail, Isabella, Hannah, Samantha, Ava, Ashley, and Olivia.

  This is mine: Octavia. Octavia O’Keeffe Boone.

  My name is so far from a popular name that if you set me down next to somebody named Emily, the pair of us would probably just explode, like when matter meets antimatter.

  The O’Keeffe is from Georgia O’Keeffe, who is famous for painting cow skulls and flowers the size of pizza platters. Boone, being a painter, thought I should have a strong female painter’s name in mine. The Octavia was Ray’s idea, probably while she was coming out of anesthesia.

  What I don’t understand is why Boone and Ray couldn’t see that giving me a stupid name like that made my initials O.O.B., OOB, which is just one letter away from BOOB. But then Boone was always so busy painting his masterpiece that he never noticed anything, and Ray has always been a person who makes decisions first and thinks about them afterward. In other words, when it came to naming babies, they were a perfect lethal storm.

  I’ll bet that by the time I was two days old, Ray was realizing her mistake and wishing she’d named me Ashley or Abigail. Not that she’ll ever say so, because another thing about Ray is that she will never admit she’s wrong. Once when I complained, she just said I should be glad she hadn’t named me Cantaloupe or Pomegranate, like all those celebrities who keep naming their kids after fruit, or maybe just @, like this Chinese baby she read about on the Internet.

  Ray’s real name is Rachel.

  Boone’s real name is Simon, but nobody calls him that except Ray.

  “How come everybody calls you Boone?” I asked him once, and first he said it was because all great painters went by their last names, and you didn’t hear anybody going around calling Picasso Pablo, did you?

  But then he said actually it was because of this cross-eyed kid named Woody Schaffer who kept calling him Simple Simon in third grade.

  You’d think that with that in his background, Boone at least would have been more sensitive about names.

  I guess there’s still a part of me that thinks maybe none of this would have happened if Boone and Ray had been the sort of parents to give a kid a normal name, like Jane or Susan or Mary Ann. I think about the kinds of lives Janes and Susans probably have, where their fathers go to an office and their mothers bake stuff and run the PTO. I bet Janes and Susans just have normal problems, like whether they can go to the mall on a school night or get their noses pierced or wear shorts to school.

  To be fair, most kids around here don’t have popular names either, but at least they have strength in numbers since they’re all unpopular in the same way. Most of them have French names like Claude and Cecile and Armand and Solange, because our town is in a part of Vermont that is just eleven miles from the French part of Canada, which is where Boone always says he’s going to move to every time he hears something he doesn’t like on NPR. On the other hand, I am not alone in hating my name. Angelique Soulier says that no matter what her mother says and no matter how many times her French great-grandmother rolls over in the grave, the minute she turns eighteen, she’s changing her name to Jennifer.

  My best friend, Andrew Wochak, does not hate his name, but unfortunately nobody calls Andrew Andrew, except me, his parents, and the teachers at school. Everybody else calls him Woodchuck. This is because Wochak sounds sort of like Woodchuck, and also because Andrew has furry brown hair and his front teeth stick out, though that is being corrected by braces.

  The reason I do not call Andrew Woodchuck is because of an invisible penguin.

  When I was very young, I had a secret friend named Priscilla who was a penguin. Nobody could see Priscilla but me. She went everywhere with me and she slept at the foot of my bed and I saved food for her off my plate, especially stuff like Brussels sprouts and oatmeal. Ray told me once that she worried because I had made Priscilla so real that Ray was always doing things like opening the door for Priscilla or leaving the window rolled down a little if Priscilla had to wait for us in the car.

  Then Priscilla went with me to kindergarten.

  Sixty-five percent of children under the age of seven at some point have an imaginary friend. I read that somewhere. What that means is that out of every ten little kids you see, six and a half of them have an invisible pal hanging around.

  But you wouldn’t have thought so to hear Mrs. Baines, the kindergarten teacher, when I asked for extra purple finger paint for Priscilla.

  “For whom?” she said, and she looked at me down her pug nose, that made her look like one of those sniffy flat-faced little Pekingese dogs.

  Then she called us all together for Attention Time, which meant that we had to be quiet and listen whenever she held up her thumb, and gave us a long lecture about being big kids now, old enough to go to school and much too old for silly things like imaginary invisible penguins. Everybody stared at me and a couple of kids in the back giggled and my face got hot and I wanted the floor to open up under me and swallow me along with my little strawberry-colored plastic chair.

  Then Mrs. Baines said in that smarmy voice some kindergarten teachers use, “Now you all know that things that are invisible aren’t real, don’t you, children? They’re just make-believe.”

  And then Andrew Wochak raised his hand and said, “Well, what about air?”

  I will never as long as I live call Andrew Woodchuck.

  Mrs. Baines doesn’t teach kindergarten anymore. The School Board fired her.

  Here is my word for Andrew: Outstanding.

  I LIKE O WORDS like Outstanding because my brain is cross-wired.

  I am a synesthetic.

  Synesthetics have their senses somehow crossed up and mixed together, so that they can hear colors or taste shapes. To some synesthetics, chocolate tastes like cylinders and pickles taste like triangles, and to others red makes a high whiny sound and harp music is dark gold. I read that people can have synesthetic experiences on psychedelic drugs like LSD, but Boone told me not to even think of going there. Boone had a c
heckered college career and he should know.

  My kind of synesthesia is called grapheme, which means that I see letters as having colors and textures. Sometimes I see words that way too. It’s kind of cool, really, though Mrs. Baines didn’t like it any more than she liked Priscilla. To me, M is fuzzy and pink and T is black and thorny, like barbed wire. A is dark green and Q is like old waxed wood and O is cool and smooth and polished and pale, like a silver bracelet. O is my favorite letter. I love Os.

  For my birthday the year I turned eleven, Ray and Boone gave me The Wonderful O by James Thurber, which is still my favorite book of all time. It’s about a pirate named Black who hates the letter O because his mother once got wedged in a porthole and, since they couldn’t pull her in, they ended up pushing her out, and that was the end of her.

  Then Black and his pirate crew, while out searching for treasure, ended up taking over an island where they abolished everything with the letter O in it: clocks and shoes and spoons and poodles and oboes. Bakers lost their dough and goldsmiths lost their gold and tailors lost their cloth. School became schl and the moon became mn. Soon everyone discovered how awful the world would be without the letter O. Because life’s most important words are words with Os in them.

  Like love and hope and freedom and tomorrow.

  You would think that an O person like me would live in Ohio or Oklahoma, or maybe Colorado, but I don’t, because way back before I was born, when Ray and Boone were picking a place to live, they weren’t thinking about Os but about clean air and natural fibers and making their own granola. Which is why we live in Winton Falls, Vermont, though as Boone points out, it could have been worse, because they also considered Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, which have no Os in them at all.

  So during most of the year that changed my life, I was in the seventh grade at the Winton Falls Elementary and Middle School K–8. We are a combined school because Winton Falls is a really small town and there aren’t enough of us for two schools. Kids from Winton Falls can’t go to high school here, because there isn’t one, but have to take the bus into Wolverton, which is fifteen miles away.

  Even though it’s a small school with a budget that Mr. Peacock says isn’t big enough to spit at, we still do a lot of stuff. We have sports teams, a drama club, and a Maple Sugar Festival, that Ray always said was a dastardly plot between the town dentist and the pharmaceutical companies that sell anti-hyperactivity pills, and we have an annual science fair.

  The science fair is a really big deal and it was a big part of the year that changed my life, though it certainly didn’t work out the way I’d planned. It’s held every spring in the cafeteria, and every year Andrew Wochak fails to win it, not because he is not brilliant but because he is subject to serious miscalculations. Last year, in sixth grade, for example, he built a cabbage catapult, which would have won, except that his demonstration cabbage broke the windshield of Mr. Clover Harrison’s Dodge pickup, and Mr. Clover Harrison is on the School Board.

  After that the judges outlawed any projects that involved the hurling of missiles.

  By the first day of school, Andrew always had a plan ready for his science fair project, but he would never tell me what it was because, he said, he didn’t want to ruin the surprise. That basically meant that he was planning something so potentially horrible that he didn’t want any word of it getting out ahead of time. I should mention here that the Wochaks as a family are known to be prone to disaster.

  This is the sort of thing you know living in a small town, where everybody knows everything about everybody else. For example, like how the Dufresnes, given a choice, always turn the wrong way at an intersection, and the Thibodeaus are what Mrs. Peacock calls poison-neat and never take the protective plastic covers off their living-room chairs, and the Harrisons are tight with money and mean as two-headed snakes. Though in Mr. Clover Harrison’s case this last could be because of growing up with a name like Clover, which must have been very warping for a boy.

  Anyway, what with Andrew being a Wochak, his surprises are not something to look forward to. Actually no surprises are, in my opinion, because in my experience surprises usually turn out to be bad. Like when Mr. and Mrs. Jeremiah Peacock had their fiftieth wedding anniversary, their daughter Sandy, who lives in Ohio, gave them a surprise party. The surprise caught Mr. Peacock asleep in the TV room in his polka-dot boxer shorts and Mrs. Peacock with pink plastic curlers in her hair, and Sandy said afterward that living in Ohio was not nearly far enough away.

  Not liking surprises is also the reason that I always read the ends of books first. Ray says this is a terrible habit, and if authors knew I did this, they would track me to the ends of the earth and take away my library card. But I like to know where things are going. I like to know who’s going to live and who’s going to die, and in mysteries, I like to know who the criminal is right from the beginning. I’ve always wished real life could be like that, that you could peek ahead every once in a while, just to see what’s going to happen.

  The first day of school that fall, Ms. Hodges, the seventh-grade teacher, had us discuss our plans for the future. Ms. Hodges has frizzy black hair and she wears sneakers and cardigan sweaters with pockets that always made me think of Mr. Rogers on old shows on TV. It’s important to think ahead, Ms. Hodges said, because then you have a better chance of getting where you want to go. She was always urging us to establish goals and set benchmarks and keep our eyes on the ball. That first day she made us all take turns telling where we planned to be in ten years.

  Jean-Claude Chevalier, who wears a leather jacket and shaves his head bald, said he was going to be a policeman like his uncle Joe, though without the belly and the high blood pressure. He also planned to have a yacht and a motorcycle and a whole bunch of girlfriends who look like Pamela Anderson.

  Polly Pelletier, whose mother runs the Creative Clip Shoppe on Main Street, said she was going to be a fashion designer. Her line of clothes will be called Polli, with an i. Polly is really into clothes. Her favorite TV show is Project Runway, and her favorite movie is The Devil Wears Prada, except that she doesn’t think the devil does.

  Aaron Pennebaker, who is nearsighted and short for his age, said he was going to make movies about large and powerful superheroes. It is not Aaron’s fault that he is short, though I think his parents should have considered human growth hormone injections instead of relying solely on whole milk and vitamin pills. All the Pennebaker men tend to be on the short side, which, as I said, is the sort of thing you know living in a small town.

  Celeste Olavson, who is the captain of the hockey team, is going to be a physical therapist, which seems only fair what with the number of people she’s practically crippled by whacking them with her hockey stick. Celeste is half Scandinavian and the descendant of murderous Viking marauders.

  Angelique Soulier is going to be a small-animal veterinarian and have four children, two boys and two girls, but she isn’t going to give up her job to stay home with them because she thinks it’s important for women to be strong role models. Of course by this time she will have changed her name to Jennifer.

  When it was my turn, I still hadn’t made up my mind what I was going to say. That kind of discussion always makes me want to say something weird just to be different, like I want to be a blacksmith or a circus performer or a sculptor who makes things out of cheese. Boone says that’s because I have contrary genes.

  But Ms. Hodges was giving us her hard look, which meant that she didn’t want to hear any more smart answers about yachts and Pamela Anderson, so what I said was that I’d like to be a scientist. Because I think that if people applied the scientific method to their lives, there would be fewer problems in the world.

  When I said that later to Ray, she said, “Oh, please, Octavia,” which has always been Ray’s way of saying “You are so full of crap.” For a lawyer, Ray has always been surprisingly illogical.

  Ray was still a lawyer then. She was a partner at a firm in Burlington called Bang
er & Moss, which specializes in environmental law. They prosecute people who dump stuff in the rivers and keep developers from building shopping malls on top of bird sanctuaries and beaver dams. Boone always called Ray’s law firm Bangers & Mash, which is a joke about sausages. Bangers and mash is sausage and potatoes. You get it to eat at British pubs. Boone is a master of feeble jokes.

  Ray was never a vicious lawyer like they show in those cartoons about sharks with briefcases. Ray believes in the importance of feelings. She always says that the heart knows more than the brain. Also, being an environmental lawyer, she was suspicious of science because of the atom bomb and genetically engineered crops and chemical pollution.

  Here is where Ray was wrong: the heart doesn’t know more than the brain. In fact, the heart doesn’t know anything at all because it’s just a big lump of muscle.

  Also, feelings aren’t reliable.

  In sixth grade, Polly Pelletier and Sara Boudreau were such good friends that they always dressed alike and wore the same color nail polish and stayed overnight at each other’s houses all the time and even got little matching rosebud tattoos. By the beginning of seventh grade, due to an irrevocable emotional occurrence over the summer, they weren’t even speaking to each other.

  Also last spring, Andrew, who should have known better, fell madly in love with Julie Laroche. For eight entire weeks, he was a blue-whale-size pain. He hung around Julie all the time looking moon-eyed, and whenever I saw him, all he wanted to talk about was whether or not she’d said anything about him and whether or not she liked him. This was difficult for me since I happened to know that Julie was in love with Jean-Claude Chevalier. She has a thing for bald men potentially about to be in uniform.

  But clueless Andrew couldn’t see it. He even wrote her a poem, which I can predict is going to come back someday to haunt him, like those naked pictures your parents take of you when you’re a baby in the bathtub.

  Feelings make you do stupid stuff. Feelings get you into trouble.