I'm the One That I Want Read Online Free

about it, parodying the plotlines and the scandalous characters, and we’d call up KFRC and request it over and over again.
    We’d commiserate about our piano teachers, the strange, old white people who would come into our homes and sit next to us as we hammered out “Close to You” on the keys. Those lessons were the one luxury my family could afford, and my brother and I suffered through them for years. Lotte and Connie would make me howl with laughter at the tales of their teacher, who would use the bathroom for up to half an hour, and help herself to Sanka in the kitchen. “Best cup I ever made . . .”
    I don’t know why it was so funny. Maybe because this was the first time anybody seemed to understand me. Those girls made me feel so much less alone in the world, which made their betrayal particularly painful.
    Lotte and Connie had a cousin, a shy, awkward girl named Ronny, who started going to our church. She had two older brothers who were really good-looking, with glossy, black feathered hair and tan, hard bodies, which made her popular by proxy. I was friendly to her at first, not knowing that she was to be my replacement.
    One day Lotte came up to Ronny and me as we chit-chatted in the church parking lot. She looked at Ronny with a knowing glance and said, “Oh, I see you’ve met MORON!!!” They both started laughing hysterically and I tried to be a good sport, accepting it as some healthy ribbing among friends, even though my face got red and a knot grew in my throat. The two girls walked off and joined Connie, who was nursing a sty the size of a golf ball. They didn’t speak to me again for the rest of the day, which was suspicious, but I tried to ignore it.
    I went home and looked in the mirror to see if there was something wrong with me. My hair was too short: my mother had cut it into “Sheena Easton,” and the feathered sides wilted in the midday heat. Maybe I was paranoid. I hoped the situation would right itself before I went off to the church summer retreat, three days in the red-woods with all the kids from MYF, a chance to be away from parents, smoke cigarettes, and bond with one another. It was Little Darlings — and although the thought of losing my virginity was a rather lofty notion for me then, at twelve, it was still in the heady mix of possibilities of being away at camp .
    I could barely sleep the night before because I was so excited and worried at the same time. I tossed and turned and woke suddenly with the sun shining in my face, not having been aware that I had fallen asleep.
    My mother drove me to the church and then inexplicably burst into tears, begging me not to go. I couldn’t understand this at all. We had not been getting along lately. None of my family had. My mother and I would fight because I wouldn’t practice the piano, my brother and I would fight over the TV, and my father and mother would fight all night long. I pulled away from her as she gained control of her emotions. She was cold again as I left the big yellow station wagon. I was relieved to be getting away from the fighting.
    I’d hoped to get a ride with Lotte and Connie, but they’d already gone with Ronny. I was too afraid to ask Carl, the cute monkey-faced popular boy who lived to make me miserable, or Jaclyn and Eugene, the equally simian brother and sister who fancied themselves trend-setters because they’d started hating me long before anyone else.
    All the kids had organized themselves into groups riding up together, and since I was late, and hated, I just stood there with my cowboy sleeping bag and tried not to look scared. I reasoned with myself that the more I worried about something bad taking place, the less likely it was to happen. Since I’d been so tortured about this trip, by this law it was bound to turn out fine.
    I rode to the camp with the young minister who led the youth group. He never wore a clerical collar and was of indeterminate age—youngish, unmarried, but ageless in the