I don’t mind brushing my teeth in the morning but it seems silly to do it before I’ve eaten anything. I know this kid named Todd Kemp who used to live next door and he brushed his teeth as soon as he woke up, even before eating breakfast. It doesn’t make sense to me but everyone has their own way of doing things.

Mom’s taught me a lot about that. Most people can’t understand her so well because she’s part alien. She told me when I was four. She painted her nails with glow in the dark polish and told me that the reason why people can’t understand the way she talks is because she’s not from here. Really though, mom has cerebral palsy which means that the part of her brain that’s supposed to know how to move her body and talk and stuff is a little out of wack. Sometimes people think she’s deaf with the way she talks, but she’s always listening.

She pays the bills doing astrology readings. She’s a double Leo with a Libra moon which means that she’s got a lot of passion but knows how to keep her emotions balanced. It’s more complicated than that she says, but those are the basics.

I don’t know what my moon or double anything is. She said she won’t tell me until I turn sixteen because I don’t need to worry about any of that stuff yet. I should just live my life for now. She always knows a lot more than she ever tells me. I feel like she knows how my entire life will play out, but she does her best to hide it. I can see it in her eyes, a certain something for these things. She’s basically a psychic. An alien psychic.

We have this jade Buddha face that hangs on our wall in the living room with eyes that look like blank pregnant bellies. There’s something about the eyes on statues that look like stomachs. I can't help but think about it. We saw some pictures of totem poles in my class last week and there were these eyes on a wood-carved hawk. It made me think the same thing. What if eyes gave birth the way people do? I wonder what would come out of them. Maybe little baby eyes – or rainbow slugs or something.

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