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for a while and help her get back on her feet—“love and direction,” as my dad says. She had a boyfriend in New York who wasn’t good for her. I think there might have been drugs involved, and I hate to say it because it makes me so mad, but I’m pretty sure her boyfriend hit her sometimes and that’s the main reason she had to getaway. When she came to live with us, she looked a lot older than twenty-six, but the longer she stayed the younger she got.
    Bobby has this major crush on Aunt Pam—or did until Kelsey came along and he got a girlfriend of his own. (And one his own age. Hello.) When he found out that Aunt Pam was going to move back to New York (which she’s going to do after Christmas), he could hardly talk about it. I’m kind of glad he feels that way, because to be honest, I can hardly talk about it myself. I’m going to miss her soooo much. She says we’ll IM and talk on the phone, but it won’t be the same. She’s my aunt, but in some ways she’s my very best friend. She’s the keeper of my secrets. She makes me feel so fine I shine.
    She says I’ll shine just as bright without her. We’ll see.
    I just reread everything I wrote about my family. I pretended I didn’t know me or Jeff or my mom or dad or Aunt Pam, and I thought,
Wow, this is a pretty nice family
. Then I got thinking about Colin’s family and how I’ll bet he could write really nice things about them, too—but there’s something, I don’t know, different about them. I’ve been over to his house a few times now, and his mom and dad are very polite and try hard to make me feel welcome,and his little sister, whose name is Claire, is really cute (although weirdly well-behaved for a six-year-old), but I never feel entirely comfortable there. Everything
matches
. It’s all so perfect—from the American flag flying out front to the cabinet in the family room full of trophies and awards (a lot of them Colin’s). The magazines on the coffee table in the living room are fanned out like they belong in a doctor’s office, and there isn’t one picture on the walls that’s even, like, a millimeter crooked.
    Then there’s Colin’s room. It’s nice and all, but it’s not exactly what you’d expect a seventh-grade boy’s room to look like. Neither is mine, of course, but it definitely looks like me. Colin’s room looks like it belongs in one of the magazines on the coffee table downstairs. I asked him once if he’d picked out the furniture and pictures on the walls, and he just laughed and said, “As if.” He told me his mom uses this decorator named Paul, who comes up from Albany and
he
makes all the decisions in their house. He said his mom thinks Paul is “brilliant,” but his dad doesn’t want to be there when Paul is around because “people like that” make him “uptight.” When I asked Colin what his father meant by “people like that,” Colin said, “You know,” and changed the subject.
    My other friends’ families are nothing like Colin’s.They’re more like mine, but funkier. Addie’s family is the funkiest of the funky, even after her mom started shaving her armpits a few years ago (thank you, Lord). They all wear these really ugly sandals that should be totally banned—Birkensomethings—and the way they eat tofu 24/7 you’d think it actually tasted
good
, when in fact it has no taste at all! And they’re always carrying on about the latest political outrage and the starving children of Armenia and animal rights and women’s rights and Native American rights … and, well, their car has so many bumper stickers I swear it’s a miracle they haven’t caused, like, a zillion accidents. I mean, how are you supposed to read those things when you’re zooming down the highway at a hundred miles an hour?
    As for