We sat through another day of school. Like good expendable robots should, learning how to make the teacher not yell at you. I usually try to find some unique things throughout the day so it feels less like school and more like, well, something else.

       Items I collected today: a piece of gum from under my science lab desk (Zebra brand, the rainbow smell), a drawing of a bear biting into a salmon (it’s really great, the details on the salmon’s gills and the bear’s teeth are perfect) and six empty boxes of chocolate milk left on tables after lunch period.

       I like to make small cabins out of the milk cartons by super-gluing twigs to the outsides of them so they look like they’re made out of logs. I put them in my backyard so the beetles and centipedes and even the worms can have a little shelter from the winter. Everyone gets cold around this time of year.



       David’s coming over later. I’m nervous, always. I don’t know if he wants to be impressed or if he likes me the way I am. I don’t know the way I am. One time he kissed me on the lips and I laughed. I thought we were kids still. I was mostly just confused.

       David and I sit in the forest almost every night and talk about things. Steel bridges, wooden bridges, how to blow up our high school, how to build our own school, jobs we would never take (construction worker in Texas is at the top of the list, We’d sweat way too much), jobs we would take in a heartbeat (astronaut is his, and of course, cryptozoologist is mine), and phobias (our favorite is octophobia, a fear of the figure 8, something that would be pretty inconvenient for figure skaters who would never get a perfect score because they can’t trace a simple eight into ice.)

       Last Saturday night we played ‘pretend we have all the phobias’. He told me to ‘look at the moon’ and I said ‘I can’t I have selenophobia.’ He said ‘I have a bad case of venustraphobia’ (fear of beautiful women), and I didn’t know that one yet so I ran inside to grab a dictionary all the while pretending I wasn’t a domotophobe (afraid of houses) and came out smiling and laughing at the dumb old grin that was slapped on his face because it was the cheesiest and most sincere compliment I’ve ever been tossed. It’s hard to be afraid of everything. I think deep down him and me are phobiaphobic, afraid to be afraid. But then again, when it comes down to it, I have to admit I have one fear and it is a hard one to classify into a phobia: I think I am afraid of our potential as human beings.


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