• 23. Attention
  
  Jason liked attention, so when my mourning technique after my dad died was keeping myself really busy with things that wouldn't remind me of Dad, I knew that Jason wasn't happy. I guess I could have seen it coming, it just made me sad. Jason reminded me so much of Dad, and my mom would make jokes that our famliy only went after the same kind of guy. Dad loved attention, but the more time I spent with Jason reminded me more and more of him.

• 24. Ride
  
  For my Dad's 45th birthday he bought himself a red sports car. He had it decked out with black leather seats, black leather steering wheel, and a stereo with top of the line speakers. That car was everything to him. When he and Mom got into fights, he would sit in his car in the garage playing The Beatles and old music from his childhood. He taught me how to drive a stick-shift in that car, slowly giving me directions in an empty parking lot until I finally got the hang of it.
  
  When he died, that car represented Dad's adventurous sign. And when Mom gave me his car keys and told me that Lola (yes, he named the car Lola) was mine, I didn't know whether to be happy that I had my own car, or whether to cry because it had once been Dad's prized possession. I took the keys and took Lola out for a ride, and I knew that this would be me and my Dad's only living link.

• 25. Back
  
  That next week, I went back to school driving myself in Lola. As I stepped out of the car, made sure that all four doors were locked, and slipped my keys into my tote bag Jason walked up to me. "Isn't that your--" I cut him off. "My car, it's my car now." Then I walked away.
  
  "Naomi, we need to talk." He said running after me.
  
  "No, we don't. We're over, remember?" I said annoyed.
  
  "But Naomi, I love you babe." He said sweetly.
  
  "Then why did you kiss her Jason? Why did you do such a stupid thing when I didn't give you what you wanted? My life sucks enough already, you just had to make it worse!" I was screaming now and I could see heads turned, "We're over Jason, face it." I walked away tears streaming down my face. Naomi's back, I thought.

• 26. Smile
  
  Janine was happy, she and Colin were together. It was official, in their little school the two were known as "The new kid and Janine." Every time she heard Colin's name she smiled, sometimes a little grin, sometimes a huge smile with teeth and everything. Colin would meet her at her locker, or they would hold hands on their way to English. Emily was still in a slump, even though she was happy for Janine. Janine could tell that this things with Joey and his new girlfriend bugged Emily.
  
  It was a Wednesday afternoon and Emily and Janine were going to walk home to Janine's house to study for a huge test the following day. They walked across the parking lot, then took a shortcut through some woods. They heard some giggling in the distance and when they walked a little they saw what it was. Joey and his girlfriend were behind a tree in the woods making out. "Let's go," Emily said. The two walked away and by the time they reached Janine's house Emily was crying.
  
  "Don't cry," Janine said, "If he doesn't see how great you are, then he isn't worth liking. Just smile, Joey isn't worth it."

• 27. Fluffy
  
  Every once in a while I did something that I knew Mom would kill me for if she found out. What I did, was spend the night somewhere, anywhere besides my bed. I had spent the night at the local library once, and I almost got caught a couple times. I slept in that bathtub when I was 13, with a bunch of pillows and a sleeping bag. Whenever I left the house for these adventures I told Mom that I was staying at a friends house and to call my cell phone if she needed anything (luckily she never called when I spent the night at the library).
  
  It was a Friday night and I had nothing to do. It sounds kind of dorky, but it was the truth. It was one of the first Friday's in a while that none of my friends had planned anything to do. So I decided to spend the night somewhere else, anywhere but my boring room. So I told Mom I as spending the night at Sadie's house, and told her that my cell phone would be on. Then I got a blanket and a big fluffy pillow and put them in the backseat of my car.
  
  I drove for a while until I was at some town called Hollow Springs. I decided that this seemed like a good place to crash and drove around until I found a park and parked the car. I took out my little sister's portable DVD player (I had rented the Pirates of the Carribean 1,2, and 3; these were only good when I was by myself because all of my friends loved them for some reason and I could only really critisize them when I was by myself). It was about 10:00 when I started watching, and I wasn't finished with them until around 4 in the morning. Finally, I curled up in the back seat and drifted off to sleep, my head resting on my big fluffy pillow.

• 28. Pity
  
  Emily is the kind of person that hates to be pitied, she had a little rule that the only person that could pity her was herself. It was a big deal though, Janine had to know the difference between comforting her best friend and pitying her. While Emily was in the bathroom Janine looked up pity in the dictionary, just so that she wouldn't anger Emily. The definition of pity was: sympathetic sorrow for one suffering. Janine guessed that that meant that she couldn't be sad because Emily found the boy she liked making out with his slutty girlfriend, she could be completely happy but still hug Emily and try to make her feel better. This was going to be tricky.
  
  To get Emily's mind off of the picture of Joey liplocked with a girl in a mini-skirt and a shirt with such a low neckline that her bra was showing the two studied like madmen. If the American Revolution was a battle about trivia on the American Revolution Janine and Emily would have kicked mega-ass after a study session like they had that night. They studied until 11:00, and somewhere during their session Emily's mom had dropped off her stuff so that she could stay the night.
  
  "Janine?" Emily said around midnight when they had just turned out the light.
  
  "Yeah Em?"
  
  "What's it like to be really in love? Well, in puppy love like you're in."
  
  "Pretty awesome, I mean, I thought that it would be a lot better than it actually is. But I think about Colin a lot more than I have ever thought about my other boyfriends," Janine said, "Like, just the feeling I got the first time I saw him."

• 29. Hope
  
  The longer I had Dad's car the more I felt linked to him, and the more I got over his death. I stilled cried ocasionally, but I didn't really feel like he was really gone because such a big part of him was mine. I started spending a lot of nights in that car, and most of the time it was just in the garage. I loved sleeping on the leather seats, and I loved waking up with the stream of light from the window in the garage through to the inside of the car.
  
  It gave me hope, it gave me hope to do things I had never done before. I felt comfortable going to dances without a date, I made more friends than I had before, and I felt comfortable being me not that made up person that I pretended to be around everyone except for my really close friends. When prom rolled around, three guys asked me.
  
  There was Robbie, Jake, and Jason. I automatically told Jason no, even if he only meant to go as friends. I told Jake and Robbie that I'd get back to them. Jake was a boy that had been in my Computer Graphics class the whole year, and we had become pretty good friends through our common interest of creating webpages and animated things. But it was obvious that he liked me more than just a friend, and I knew that probably hurt him because he knew I didn't like him back. Robbie and I had been friends since we were little, but he felt more like a brother to me. And if I said yes, I knew he'd take it as a "Yes, I will be your boyfriend," instead of the "You do know that we're just friends" that I wanted it to be.
  
  In the end, I called Robbie and told him that I wanted to go to the prom as just friends with him. I could tell their was dispoitment in his voice, but I knew that there was also hope because he knew that I was giving him a chance. And maybe (just maybe) I could learn to like him the way he liked me.

• 30. Rain
  
  It was a dark and dreary day, it was humid and I could feel that a big rainstorm was coming. Being a lover of rain, I took Lola out for a ride and parked on the street next to a park. I listened to National Public Radio (I know, I'm such a dork) and waited for the rain to come. They were talking about global warming and about what people have done to spread the word on the important matter. Right now, they were talking about The Inconvienient Truth, I'd seen it a couple of times for my Political Discussions class that I was taking.
  
  Finally a drop landed on the windsheild and I waited patiently for more. Within 10 minutes there was a steady fal of big raindrops, I opened the window and stuff my hand out so that I could feel the rain on my hand.
  
  I sat their thinking about everything that was going to happen in my life: In a year I'll be heading off to college, in a month all of my friends will be all dressed up and we'll be in a limo heading to the Junior Prom, all of my AP exams, the SATs, and my summer job at the local library (no longer my night hideout).

• 31. Crayons
  
  I was in my room working on my homework (not really I was really talking to my friends on the computer while pretending to do my homework, but who am I kidding?) when my Mom yelled, "Cat! Phone!" I slid my chair (it has wheels) across my room and picked up the phone.
  
  "Hel-lo?" I said cheerfully.
  
  "Hey Cat! It is Marlene, Jackie and Pattie's mom. I know that they weren't exactly a peice of cake the last time you sat for them, but I was wondering if you could again. I'll pay you ten bucks and hour!" Wow, this woman must be desperate.
  
  "Um, when?" I asked.
  
  "The thirteenth from five to eleven," Sixty bucks, sweet.
  
  "Yeah sure, what do I need to bring? Crayons? Books? Board games?" I'm a very imformed sitter.
  
  "Jackie's new favorite color is green, and Pattie only likes yellow now. So they have these boxes of one color in all different shades of Crayons, if you could buy yellow and green ones that would be amazing. They'd be in a good mood for the rest of the night!"
  
  "Great! I'll see you then!" I hung up and marked it on my calendar, hopefully this would be better than the last time I babysat them.

• 32. Beast
  
  Those children were beasts, I found them their crayons and they were thrilled. But Jackie and Pattie's idea of thrilled meant running around in circles and screaming "I'M HAPPY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" three thousand times until my ear-drums we ready to explode. I finally got them to calm down by giving them blank sheets of paper and told them to make pretty pictures with their new crayons. That slowed them down for about ten minutes, then they were up running around again screaming, "I HAVE A PRETTY PICTUREEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" This was war, war between me and hyper three year olds.
  
  "Who likes Beauty and the Beast?" I asked. Both girls raised their hands and started jumping up and down. "If you two can pick up your crayons then I'll let you watch it while I make you dinner." The two obeyed me, Wow, I thought, they must really love that movie... Then I turned it on, but Pattie started crying because the first part was scary. So I fast-forwarded through that part straight to where Belle is singing in the town.
  
  I made a meal of macaroni and cheese, and the two loved it until Jackie spilled hers on the floor (more like threw it onto the floor) and Pattie wanted ketchup. No matter how much they got what they wanted, those two were beasts.

• 33. Counting
  
  Pattie liked counting, she counted everything. She counted crayons, she counted button on the remote, she counted how many eyes everyone had (she still hadn't understood that everyone has the same number of eyes), she counted how many dollies she had. Damn, that girl loved to count. Jackie hated counting, she hated how Pattie was praised for counting. She hated it when Pattie counted, and started to cry every time Pattie counted her.
  
  "There are three of us. I have one sister," She held up one finger as if I didn't understand her, "I have four dollies." After saying that Jackie started to cry, and soon enough she was screaming.
  
  "I DUN LIKE IT WHEN YOU COUNT!!! NO MORE COUNTING!!!!" I picked up Jackie and attempted to comfort her. This was going to be a long night, I thought.

• 34. Squeeze
  
  In the morning, I loved fresh squeezed orange juice. Mom made it every single Saturday, she would go to the market, buy oranges and then come home and squeeze orange juice. My whole family loved that orange juice, especially me and Dad. We could drink a whole pitcher of it during breakfast. Mom would joke that if we drank anymore our pee would turn orange. My little sister, Cassidy hated pulp. She would make sure that she would get the very first glass of it because all of the pulp had gone to the bottom and she hadn't reached it.
  
  Dad and I loved the pulp. I don't know why, I guess I just didn't really think about it. Pulp was really what made fresh-squeezed orange juice special.
  
  Our favorite breakfast was homemade waffles with strawberries, whipped cream, and syrup with fresh-squeezed orange juice. Mom and Dad would add a mug of coffee to the meal. It was our favorite meal on a Saturday morning, whenever we had that meal it brightened the day for everyone. Mom made it for the last time the Saturday before Dad died, which made it hard. For some reason, something didn't feel right. The meal was delicious, but for some reason it wasn't as good as it had been before.

• 35. House
  
  After the rainstorm I drove back to my house, and as I drove into the driveway I saw why Mom and Dad had loved that house so much. It had their warmth, it had their taste, it had their style. It was like a description of my parents if a house could describe someone. Every last detail of that house, down to a single detail in the molding was perfect for our family. When I was a kid Mom and Dad talked about selling it and moving to the city after Cassidy graduated high school, but then they just stopped mentioning it.
  
  They loved that house too much to give it up, but I knew that Mom would probably sell it when Cassidy graduated from high school. The house was too big for one person, even if that one person loved it with all her heart. That house had followed them through their marriage, through the birth of Cassidy and me, through the long drawn out illness of my grandmother, and the death of my grandmother. It had followed us through our days in school from the first time I stepped onto the school bus to my elementary school and middle school graduations. It followed Cassidy just as it had follwed me. And it had been there that we got the phone call that Dad had gotten into a car crash.
  
  That house was the foundation that kept our family together, and the very thought of it not being there hurt. In a year I would graduate, and in four Cassidy would. When that time cam, and Mom actually did sell the house, I have no idea how she would live with herself.

• 36. Sit
  
  Like Dad, I found sitting in his car a good way to calm my nerves. So when I got off the phone with Jason for the last time, that is exactly what I did. Jason called again, even after I screamed at him at the parking lot at school, and rejected him for prom, he called again. He wants me back, he loves me. Yeah right, I'm the most gullable person you will ever meet, and even I don't believe that bullshit. So he wants me back, and I told him for the last time that I was never going to go out with him again, and that he had to face it. I guess that I did love him, but it wasn't true and eternal love. And ever since I had started to read teen romance novels and I had always swore that if I couldn't trust a guy, then I shouldn't be with him.
  
  I had been Jason for just over a year when I caught him kissing Bianca Smitters in back of the school. I had told him that I didn't need a ride home from him, that I was going to Jenny's after school. As Jenny and I left the building we used the back exit because we were walking to her house and the back exit was closer. I'm guessing Jason didn't know that there was back exit, so he thought that making out back there was a safe hiding place. When really, he had set himself up to be caught.
  
  When I saw him I yelled, "You bastard, we're over!" and ran away crying. Jenny spent the night at my house, and within two days I had been showered with flowers, and when that didn't work gift baskets. He knew I hated gift baskets. He knew that gift baskets made me think of Dad, because that is all we got for weeks after Dad died. Or maybe he didn't know, maybe he didn't really love me. Maybe he just thought of me as just another girl, another girl that he had been going out with for over a year. That made me think, had there been other girls? Was Bianca Smitters the first?
  
  Sitting in the car kind of made me feel a little better, but it made me think more. And thinking often makes things hurt even more.

• 37. Dare
  
  I was at a party one Saturday night a few weeks before prom, it was most of my huge group of friends. We were all having fun just talking and hanging out when Jas suggested that we play Truth or Dare. I guess that was on the better side of these kind of games, I'd been stuck playing Seven Minutes In Heaven and Spin the Bottle. I would have assumed that a bunch of seventeen year old's would have been a little too mature to be playing Truth or Dare, but I was wrong.
  
  Jeremy was the first one up, he chose truth. After a lot of consideration we landed on a good question, "How big is your package?" I asked giggling histerically.
  
  I breathed in dramatically and then said quickly, "Four inches." Somebody chimed in, "Ahh, below average ehh?" Everyone laughed. Jeremy's face turned bright pink. There were more dares, somebody had to moon the next car that came down the street, two girls had to french kiss, one boy had to prank call our principal, they were hilarious. I guess I was really wrong, kids are age are just as immature as they were when they were 12.

38. Learn

When Dad died, I had to learn to deal with my anxiety and my fear. I had to learn that Dad was never coming back, and that no matter what I did or what I believed, he was gone forever. People die, I knew that my whole life, everyone dies. But why is it so hard to cope with death?

I learned that it was the way people died, and your relationship to them that makes it harder. I learned that it was the thought that they just weren't there anymore was what made it almost impossible to cope with.

39. Forgotten

I have a theory. It's a proven (almost proven) theory about death. Yes, death. See when people die everyone is like, "WAHHHHH HE IS GONE." WEll, that's bullshit. See, in my extremely valuable opinion (do you sense the underlying sarcasm there?), someone isn't gone until they are forgotten, completely and totally forgotten.

So, according to my theory, Napoleon isn't dead. Because there are millions of people that know who he is and have studied him in school and taken tests on him and written about it. So he won't be dead until the last person that ever studied Napoleon has forgotten him. Because in reality, we aren't gone until we're forgotten.

40. Laughter

I was watching Grey's Anatomy a few days ago and I was watching the extremely awkward sex scene between George and Meredith. Meredith started crying, except I thought that she was laughing. So I was sitting there in my bedroom thinking, "Is George's penis freaky-looking or something?" So then, in my completely perverted mind, I begin to picture a naked George with various penises (peni...?). "Oh look! George with a purple penis! Wow, it just transformed into a polka-dot penis!" It was an entertaining train of thoughts. Makes me chuckle.

41. Marked

The House of Night series begins with a book called Marked. Horrible book, bad writing, stupid characters, and a really retarded storyline. But the first book is called Marked. It's about, drumroll please, VAMPIRES. Shit, everything is about vampires lately. But to me, it really isn't.

Twilight vampires are not vampires at all. There is no such thing as a nice vampire. There are vampires that have been cursed with souls, but there is no such thing as a vampire that chooses to not eat humans just because. If it was that easy to not eat humans, then vampires wouldn't have gone down in history as being evil. Buffy/Dracula/True Blood vampires are the way to go.

I am marked with a taste. A taste for true evil, not fake retarded not-evil.

42. Good

I am good. Well, most of the time. I do my homework (mostly), I always call if I am going to be out late, I always wear my seatbelt, I get good grades. So does that make me "good?" Sure, I talk a little too much in class. I watch too much TV, I'm loud and obnoxious and rarely censor what I'm saying. But shouldn't the things I'm not doing cancel out the things I am doing?

Those pregnant, alocoholic potheads of the tenth grade should not be considered good. Partly because they are doing many illegal things, and are going to be failures at life in twenty years. So if they are considered not good, then I should be considered good.

43. Strawberry

A few weeks ago I got a fondue set, and I was super excited to use it. So I got together with my friends, and we attempted to melt some chocolate. We had strawberries and grapes to dip in our melted chocolate. Except, as we melted the chocolate it stopped melting and sort of died. Then we added some milk and put it in the microwave and it was a lot better. Then we put it in the fondue thingy and it started burning. So a few burned tongues later, along with a bunch of half eaten strawberries, we gave up.

I am fondue failure.

44. Intellect

I spew intellect. I spew intellectual contemplation and intellect. Damn, in comparison to half the people my age I'm a genius. But what makes my intellect? Is it my urge to learn new things? Is it my love of history and books? Is it the fact that deep down I secretly love Geometry (even if I played Tetris first period the whole year, but that's because my teacher was retarded and I live with a physicist that could teach me everything)?

I am surrounded by people that spew intellect. At dinner every night my family has discussions about politics, society, history, literature, etc. So it's my nature to spew intellect, right? What other girl is surrounded by Nobel prize winning physicists and mathematicians? ...That's what I thought.

45. Quick

The argument of ninjas vs. pirates has been going on for decades. My lunch table would frequently break out into arguments about it. See, pirates had more money and were a little more skilled with sea-travel, but ninjas and quick, speedy, and stealthy. Ninjas are kung-fu MASTERS. They are QUICKER than any pirate will ever be.

I do love pirates, but ninjas are badass. So yes, I am on the Ninja side of the Pirates vs. Ninjas debate.

46. Level

I like putting up pictures in my room, and because I have put up all of these pictures in frames I have permanently stolen my dad's level. And it's a pain in the ass, making sure that every frame is even and centered and not crooked. It makes me wish I could go back to those plain white walls. It was easier that way, less cluttered. But the pictures, they are me. They define me. They tell people that look at my room who I am in one glance. It's great.

47. Percent

On Grey's Anatomy, people are always because choices. Whether they want to undergo a surgery they only have a 50 percent chance of surviving, for the chance to live a long and fulfilled life. I think what I would choose. I could die now in the surgery without as much pain, I could not do the surgery and die a slow painful death, or I could survive and live the rest of my life. I like to think that I would just the surgery, but I will never know when I get placed in that position.