Oddballs Read Online Free Page A

much fun with their kids. Vera was three years older than me, Nick a year younger than Vera; both were brainy and good-looking. They were popular at school, though not the least bit pituh.
    Pituh was a term that Vicky and her friends Avis and Eleanor had coined to describe the members of the popular cliques at junior high and high school. That Vera and Nick were popular without being pituh was a unique combination of attributes, and Vicky and I both looked up to them. It would have been natural for us to resent them, since Mom was always telling us what brilliant students they were, so athletic, attractive, articulate, and so on. But we couldn’t help liking them anyway (though Vicky would often scream at Mom to shut up about them). Vera and Nick also clearly enjoyed spending time with us on these family occasions, though we couldn’t really be friends with them at school, since they were older and hung out with a different crowd.
    It was the Greenberg kids who taught us to play the card game I Doubt It. The basic object of the game was to cheat. We loved it. There were many moments during I Doubt It when you’d try to scream furiously at somebody but couldn’t manage it because you were laughing too hard.
    On Thanksgiving, when I was in seventh grade, we couldn’t play I Doubt It because many of the cards had disappeared. Danny, who was four, denied any knowledge of them. We discovered what remained of the missing cards when Mom made Vicky change Tycho. Confronted with this palpable evidence, Danny admitted that he had fed them to him. Both sets of parents thought this was very funny.
    But Vicky and I felt it was unfair that Danny had not even been chastised for ruining our game. The Greenberg kids were disappointed, too. And so, instead of playing I Doubt It, we sat around in my third-floor room, complaining about adults in general and our parents in particular. It was our first conversation of this kind with the Greenberg kids.
    Of course, both sets of parents, merely by existing, had certain defects in common. All parents, by definition, were arbitrary, unfair, demanding, and constitutionally incapable of understanding their children or of seeing any point of view but their own. This was nothing new. But kids from each family were fascinated to discover how many previously unimagined tortures the other set of parents routinely inflicted on their children. Vicky and I were particularly surprised and gratified to find out that the Greenberg parents did not think their kids were as perfect as our mother did—far from it.
    â€œYour parents really force you to eat ?” I gasped in wonder.
    â€œYou mean yours don’t ?” Nick replied.
    Vicky and I shook our heads.
    Vera nodded grimly. “We don’t leave the table until we finish as much as they decide to dish out. And if they catch us with anything like chocolate, then it’s pimple-inspection time.” She rolled her eyes.
    Vicky and I were shocked. “But you guys don’t have pimples,” I said. “Our mother goes on and on about what flawless complexions you have.”
    â€œShe does?”
    â€œShe’s always talking about how wonderful and perfect you are, how much better than us,” Vicky said. “Not that we hold it against you or anything,” she added quickly. “She does it with other people’s kids, too. Her favorite topic is how much worse we are than all her friends’ kids.”
    Vera and Nick clucked sympathetically. “Well, at least she doesn’t do it in public,” Vera said consolingly. “Our mother’s always telling people the most personal, embarrassing things about us while we’re sitting right there. It makes me want to sink through the floor.”
    Now Vicky and I made sympathetic noises. Vera, who was efficient and well organized, began to make a list of our parents’ various sins against us. She was the oldest and the most practiced at