“But what do you do here? Like, for fun?”
Jules actually looked interested, so I decided to tell her the truth. “Mostly I go out on our boat.”
“You mean with your parents?”
“Nope. By myself.”
“Cool,” Jules said.
I didn’t add that I’d been boating alone for only the last bunch of months. Before that, I always used to go with Pop Pop. Everything I know about the water, I learned from him.
“What do you do for fun in Hollywood?” I asked.
“The Palisades,” she corrected. “Not Hollywood. And not a lot. Before my parents split up, I mostly just went to my friends’ houses and watched movies in somebody’s screening room or whatever. Now I’m just not that into it.” Jules put on a big pair of black sunglasses that hid half her face. Then out of nowhere, she said, “Want to see a picture of my mom?”
“Um… sure,” I said, even though I was not at all sure why she offered.
Jules scrolled through her phone and passed it to me. I cupped my hand around the screen so I could see a picture of a smiling mom-ish-looking woman with brown hair who had her arm wrapped around Jules. Jules was smiling too, with her head leaning on her mom’s shoulder. She almost looked like a different person, like a regular, happy person instead of an angry supermodel from Hollywood.
Excuse me, the Palisades.
“She looks nice,” I said.
“She is,” Jules said.
Over Jules’s shoulder, I spotted three boys from my grade heading our way. Douglas, Wilder Douglas, and Fritjof play together on the soccer team in the fall, the basketball team in the winter, and the lacrosse team in the spring. They all wore hair gel, even though it was ten in the morning and they were at the beach. Also, Wilder isn’t an adjective; it’s a first name. I’m not sure why everybody uses his last name too. They just do. And Fritjof is called Fritjof because his dad is Norwegian.
“Heyyyy! Otis, buddy! How’s it going, dude?” Douglas said.
Fritjof and Wilder Douglas pounced on Otis, who was totally thrilled to pounce right back.
It’s possible that some people like my dog more than they like me.
“Hey, Blue. Who’s your friend?” Douglas asked, noticing Jules.
“This is Jules,” I said.
There isn’t a single girl at my school who looks like Jules. Which might be why Douglas was squeezing his eyes shut really hard and then rubbing his nose.
“You wanna go swimming?” Jules said.
“Oh. Yeah. Totally.” Douglas yanked off his T-shirt and flung it down without looking, so it landed on my leg.
You’d never have known that Douglas, Nora, and I used to hang out when we were little. It was like all those playdates when we dressed up in superhero capes and jumped on the bed had never happened.
Jules stood up. “You coming, Blue?”
I love swimming in the ocean. I wakeboard, boogie board, bodysurf, and scuba dive. But no matter how much I like the water, I wasn’t about to get into the whole insulin pump thing with Jules.
I could only imagine what she’d say when I took out the raisin-box-sized machine from my pocket and unplugged the skinny plastic tube that’s part of a catheter that’s buried in the skin next to my belly button, which was currently hidden by my baggy shirt and elastic-waist shorts. Words like “android” and “freak” and “ewwww” were not outside the realm of possibility. And then, of course, there’s my bathing suit—a plain brown tankini—which I wear so I can cover the infusion set but still have access to the tube, and which isn’t exactly what anyone on the planet would call fashionable.
Nope. Not gonna go there with Jules.
“I have to stay with Otis.”
Douglas, who knew that Otis would be fine watching me from the shore if I wanted to swim, did me the small favor of saying nothing.
“Whatever. Watch my stuff, okay?”
While Jules and my former friend and his two new friends went swimming, Otis drank water from his portable dish, and I tested and took insulin so I could eat an apple and peanut butter.
I didn’t used to care about people seeing me deal with diabetes. My parents made a point of treating it like it was normal—scrunching down my shorts to give me a shot in my hip at the pizzeria when I was little or telling me to go ahead and test in the middle of the bookstore—and kids at school had always known about my diabetes and were used to it. But all that changed when I got to middle school.
On the first day of sixth grade, our homeroom teacher, Ms. Gorman, made us push the desks to the sides of the room and told everyone to sit in a circle on the floor like it was kindergarten again.
“We’re going to play a get-to-know-you game,” Ms. Gorman said. “Everybody think of a fun fact about yourself that you can share with the class. Something unique and interesting that’s special about you.”
I was racking my brain for my fun fact—my thumbs are double-jointed? I once kept a pet spider for three days until it dried up and died?—when Eliza Jackson, who had gone to the same elementary school as me, said from all the way across the circle in a really loud voice:
“You’re so lucky, Blue. You have diabetes.”
Turns out I did have a fun fact. Something unique and interesting that was special about me. And it was a disease.
Kids I didn’t know started asking questions, and other kids I did know started answering them.
“Diabetes? Is that the thing with the needles?”
“Yeah, Blue gives herself shots all the time. Like every hour.” Which wasn’t true.
“One time she passed out in gym.” Which was true.
I got lighter and lighter and lighter until I floated from the floor to the ceiling. My body became paper-thin and see-through, and the only thing that kept me from evaporating altogether was Otis. He crawled half into my lap, anchoring me down so I wouldn’t turn to dust particles and drift away.
The next summer—last summer—at the CJDF gala, my picture was everywhere—on the invitations, on the programs at every seat, on bigger-than-life-sized posters. Not my name, just my face:
CURE TYPE 1 DIABETES!
GIANT PICTURE OF BLUE’S HEAD
There were hundreds of people at that party. Hundreds more at school and even more around town. And every single one of those people knew me as Diabetes Girl. If I wanted a unique and interesting thing about me that wasn’t a disease, it had to be more than having extra-bendy thumbs. My fun fact had to be something big. Something huge.
Something like finding a 350-year-old ship of gold.
CHAPTER FIVE
True Fact: If you don’t know what to think of a person, ask your dog.
After Jules and the boys came back, we all went to the Shark Pit, a food truck in the parking lot with a picture on its side of sharks dancing in a swimming pool. If the boys weren’t totally in love with Jules before, they definitely were after she bought them fish tacos. The whole time, Jules was Super Jules. Googolplex Jules. Ultimate Jules. She took selfies with the boys and then made a big point of erasing them because her phone was full. She knuckle-punched Douglas after he made a stupid joke and then stopped him with a stare when he tried to do it back. Half of what Jules talked about was so cool we’d never heard of it (do people really put charcoal in their lemonade?). She twisted her hair up in a knot, then shook it down, tossed it all over one shoulder, then the other, then back up again, then down but pushed off her face with her sunglasses. I think she got to hairstyle 157 just counting from our time at the Shark Pit.