I have a lot of friends, but just one person that I could call a best friend. Her name is Charlotte, and all our lives we’ve been right next door to each other. I can walk over to my window any time in the evening and see her hunched over her desk, right down to the loose tendrils of hair tumbling easily from the bun she wears it in. Sometimes she’ll look up at me and smile, and I’ll smile back. Hi, Charlotte.


I’ve got a decent family too, I guess. My parents are together, and my sister Kelsey Ann is cool enough. She’s ten years old and leaps from one obsession to the next like it’s going out of style—probably because it is. Lately, she’s been squealing in her room about David Bowie an awful lot. How a kid can be infatuated with a guy that old is beyond me, but she’s not the only one, she’s usually on the phone with one girlfriend or another. At least the man can dress well, I’ll give him that.


So… about Charlotte. She’s different than the other girls here. She doesn’t like things, she loves them. She loves colors, she loves to dance (and to make me dance, too), she loves to paint and scribble and run and climb and sometimes fall asleep on my arm. She’s probably the most energetic person I’ve ever known, but energetic doesn’t quite express her… maybe I should say she’s the most vibrant person I’ve known.

She’s a little younger than me, fourteen years old, but sometimes it seems like a lot more—she’s really childlike in a lot of ways, and I mean that in the best way possible. She sees the beauty in everything and she makes sure I see it too. That means she’s pulled me into a lot of things I didn’t want to do, like for her last birthday when we went to a skating rink. I hate skating and I was determined to sit in the corner booth eating cheap snowcones the entire night, but she took my hands and pulled me away, and I had to be a good sport about it. There’s no saying no to her when she’s got her mind set and she’s looking at you the way she does.


She’s stubborn, too. The summer I turned nine, we were in my backyard trying to build a control center (for what, I’m still not entirely sure) out of old wood scraps and tarps that her dad gave her, and she just wanted to wing it. I’m a very anal person (ha-ha), and I always had to map out our building projects with a nifty little blueprint. Sometimes they were even blue, too. Long story short, she threatened to go home and let me build the control center myself if we had to waste an hour drawing out another one of my anal blueprints, so I let her do it her way.


The control center lasted all of one afternoon. Lots of loose screws, don’t you know it.

That's my Charlotte.