Jenna wasn’t sure if love existed.

She also wasn’t sure if she’d ever been sure about this.

(Jenna wasn’t sure about much.)

She knew that life was life – of course, how stupid was she? – and she knew that love was love. But, she thought, what exactly was love? And, more importantly, would she ever fall into it? (On that line, she puzzled, how could one fall into something if they didn’t know what it was?)

There were plenty of people she’d like to fall in love with, Jenna figured, but they didn’t seem to return the feeling. It wouldn’t be much fun to be alone in love, even though she didn’t know exactly what that meant.

She could love William Pippey III from math class if she wanted to. Everybody called him Willy, but no one was ever exactly sure if it was spelt with a “y” or an “ie”; it would’ve been a problem if they cared. He was a tall enough fellow, she knew; not too much taller than her so as to seem like a giant, but not shorter than she was, either. It wouldn’t be much fun to be in love with a short guy, she thought, although she didn’t personally know. Willy was a nerdy sort of fellow. He was the kind of guy who hung around with you whether you wanted him to or not, and the type who’d get arrested for stalking if anybody ever paid attention to him. It was lucky for him that nobody did. Jenna guessed he wasn’t that attractive really, but she was rather tall and hard put to find anyone taller than herself, so he could definitely be considered. She didn’t want to rule him out.

Some of her girl friends had cute guys already; but it was against the code to steal your best friend’s boyfriend. This was something Jenna had heard someone mention in the hallway awhile ago, and it sounded quite the intelligent thing to say, so she’d written it down. Jenna made a habit of writing down all the intelligent things she heard every day in a tiny, spiral-bound notebook she kept in her left-hand back pocket. It was rather difficult to come up with any on her own, and much easier this way. At night, she’d lie in bed and try to invent some smart-sounding phrases, but this wasn’t an easy thing to do. It was always hard to think fantastic, creative thoughts in a fluffy pink bed with a canopy. This was something Jenna knew for certain. She slept under the same canopy she’d slept under when she was six, and the canopy she’d slept under when she was six was the same she’d slept under when she was three. Oh, she hated that canopy.

In all honesty, Jenna didn’t know why she was thinking about love. She’d never been in love before, and she didn’t think she knew what it was really, so what was the point of thinking about it for so long?

(There was an answer to this question, but Jenna had to make absolutely sure no one was round before she gave it. It was secret.)

Having made certain the coast was clear and even the walls were wearing ear-plugs (Jenna wasn’t stupid. Her mother told her the walls had ears), it was time to answer her own question.

“I think I’m in love,” Jenna leaned forward and whispered to the alarm clock next to her bed.

Normally, people don’t talk to their alarm clocks.

Don’t worry. This is not a story about a parallel universe, perhaps one in which electronic appliances have enchanting discussions with their owners. This is, however, a story about one young teenager who’s finally fallen in love (with the wrong guy) and has no idea what to do about it. She also tends to be a bit ditzy. This is not because she is blond. It is merely because she was born ditzy. When a man named Mr. McAllistiwagopstickel (whom we shall, for the sake of spell-check, call Mr. McAllister; he was Russian, and all Russians must have long, hard-to-pronounce names. It is a law there, I believe) was bored one Sunday afternoon, he ran around his neighborhood on a motorized red scooter and took note of all the people that qualified for ditziness. This was how he discovered that, on average, 22.3 out of every 47.8 people born each day are born ditzy. Some are ditzier than others on birth; some develop that way. When his statistics were first published, the President didn’t agree with him; he protested that no one had ever seen .3 of a person; but Mr. McAllister drew his plastic lightsaber and brandished it threateningly (miraculously managing to ward off the Secret Service with his son’s water pistol as he did so) and from then on, everyone believed the McAllisters. (There is another embarrassing story later on about another McAllister who proved the world was flat by hijacking God, but I will not go into that now.) I will just let things rest by saying that, like it or not, Jenna Anderson was terribly, terribly ditzy. The things she remembered from one day to the next were incredibly odd; for example, one day she knew she’d eaten three cans of preheated creamed spinach for supper the night before, but a few minutes later she remembered the same meal to be five and a half tins of pickled artichokes, while her mother was sure she’d eaten four tuna sandwiches (complete with anchovies). Ditziness, if you were not aware of this, is genetic (another fact proven by our friendly family, the McAllisters.)

Ah well. Let’s go back to the story.

The alarm clock proved to be rather a sullen conversationalist.

“Isn’t that a song?” Jenna asked it, but received no answer. “Anyway, I do think I’m in love. Isn’t it just positively TERRIBLE?”

“Terrible?” the alarm clock thought to itself, “you’ve been whining about wanting to fall in love for ages, and now that you have, it’s terrible?” but didn’t say anything, of course, because alarm clocks really can’t talk (luckily for us. They can be quite cynical. Blenders are much nicer.)

In the side drawer of the table next to Jenna’s bed, which was pink and fluffy to match her canopy exactly (she hated it too), was a piece of paper, folded over and over upon itself dozens of times. This was what she now pulled out, unfolded, and kissed gently. It was a photo of the boy she’d decided to fall in love with. It was not, however, a photo of the boy she actually was in love with. This boy’s picture was kept under her pillow rather than in her nightstand, and the kissing of the false love was merely a matter of ritual. The alarm clock was unaware of this, or so Jenna thought.

There were several fascinatingly important reasons why Jenna should not be in love with the fellow she was in love with, and, she thought, it would be quite intelligent of her to list them; would, of course, that she could remember them. The most important, she knew, (with a sudden burst of inspiration) was also the most embarrassing, and it was something that she did not go round telling her girl friends at school. The fellow she loved also happened to be a fellow she’d never met – and with this, Jenna flung herself bodily forward on her bed and buried her face in a pink fluffy throw pillow. (She hated the pillow, but it was rather good for embarrassment recovery.) She knew this wasn’t the way it was supposed to work. You were supposed to check out hunky guys in the hallways and flirt with them, then try to snag a date with the head of the football team or, if you were particularly lucky, the wrestling captain. This was how all Jenna’s friends had gotten their boyfriends and it was obviously the way she was supposed to go about getting hers. The problem, however, was that none of the boys at her school were remotely interesting. It would be logical, of course, for someone ditzy to fall in love with someone equally ditzy, but that is not the way it normally works out. They say that authors fall for beautiful models because the models have the beauty but no brains and the authors have the brains but no beauty – well, Jenna wanted someone intelligent. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much to choose from.