Only one way to deal with this: like a man.

“Hey!” I say loudly, trying to make my voice as strong as it can be. It doesn’t help that puberty is still a pipe dream (oh joy, let me tell you how I can’t wait for that; I’ll start growing hair in weird places and probably want to smoke, flip up my collar, and put my ball cap on backward and say things like “Right on, dude. It’s time to par-tay.” Ugh. Adolescence will be the bane of my existence). “Hey!” I shout again, knowing repetition is needed when dealing with big galoots.

He looks down at his feet. God, he is so frustrating.

I take a deep breath and square my shoulders. My head is held high as I step off the curb and cross the street, trying to keep myself from running. I’m intimidating. I’m smooth. I’m a badass. I trip over my own feet. I stumble. I catch myself before I fall. I blush. I walk a little bit slower. My head is still held high. I’m still a badass. Kind of.

Bovine Boy hears my approach and glances up at me before looking down at the ground again, his arms behind himself like he’s in the military or something. The lace on his left shoe is untied, the aglet missing from one side, the end frazzled. It looks like he’s drawn little stars on the whites of his shell tops with a Sharpie. That’s kind of neat, I guess. If you like that sort of thing. I wonder if Bear would let me do that. Is that what big kids do? Draw on their shoes? I can’t make very good stars, but I can write the Greek alphabet. From memory. That’s not something I brag about because people tend to look at me funny when I tell them. Bear says it’s just because they’re jealous. I hope he’s right; otherwise my life is going to be one awkward moment after another. I know too much about nothing.

I stand in front of the other guy, and I think this may have been a mistake, because he looked a little smaller from all the way across the two-lane road. I wonder if this has to do with faulty depth perception, but before I can even begin to diagnose myself with some ocular disease, the big kid grunts. Like a gorilla.

I can’t help it: I laugh.

I don’t mean to, it just comes out on its own. I smoosh my hands against my mouth to block the sound, but this causes me to snort, and snot comes out of my nose. I try to cover it up and jerk my left hand up, but it bounces off my nose and I poke myself in the eye. My eyes water as I hiss and knuckle my eyeball, but I’ve still got snot on my hand and it gets all up in there, making it burn even more. Ow. I want to turn and run, but I’m temporarily blinded by my own devices, and I know, I just know, that this big kid is probably some popular jock and I’m forever going to be stuck with the nickname Booger Eye Snot Face. I ask God quietly if he wouldn’t mind opening the ground beneath my feet and allowing me to fall down a chasm to save me from myself. The ground doesn’t open. I’m still laughing, but it’s that high-pitched thing I do when I find something really funny. I hate that laugh. It always sounds like a clan of female hyenas all going into labor at the same time. Yip! Yip! Ayyyyyyyy! Yip! Yip! Ayyyyyyyy!