The Great American Whatever by Tim Federle Read Free Book Online

easy.
    â€œOkay, time ,” Carly says, for the first time not sounding excited but rather cautious. Can’t blame her there. I literally have no idea who the first celebrity is.
    â€œOh, jeez.”
    See, this is why I like everything written out beforehand. I am trying to star in my life story, not appear as the unbilled comic sidekick.
    â€œSay something,” a girl from my team says. “Say anything.”
    Amir and I catch eyes and dammit I look away.
    â€œIs it a man or a woman?” says Faye Dunaway.
    â€œI think a man.”
    â€œOh, Christ .”
    â€œI mean—sorry—definitely a guy.”
    â€œThirty seconds!” Carly says.
    â€œOkay,” I say, “his last name is, like, French.”
    â€œGérard Depardieu!” a teammate says, and I appreciate, at least, the relatively obscure movie star reference.
    â€œNo, but really good guess.”
    â€œThanks. I don’t need positive reinforcement, I need clues .”
    Yikes.
    â€œ Guys , back off,” Carly goes, but oh God: I don’t want to be that kid who everyone has to be nice to because their parents got a handout at the beginning of the year saying their child would be sharing the classroom with “someone exceptional.”
    â€œOh!” I say. I swing my arms so wide that it knocks an entire liter of Fanta into a bowl of corn chips. Worth it. “His last name is like Pepé Le Pew. You know, the, like, possum cartoon thing.”
    â€œHe was a skunk ,” a girl says, wiping Fanta from her leg. You could say it kind of splashed “everywhere.”
    â€œAnd his first name is Italian!” I go.
    â€œTime!” Carly hollers. Big hoots from the Pittsburgh team, who are up three-nothing. Josh is literally still getting high-fives for the John Travolta/Oprah sequence.
    â€œPepé Le Pew was a skunk ,” that girl says again, in case I didn’t hear her, which I did.
    â€œWell, who was it?” asks my “hot as balls” teammate, who never even tried to guess during my round, not even once.
    â€œI thought we weren’t showing clues,” I say, but now nobody puts up a fight, and so I hold up the celebrity for him to see.
    â€œMario Lemieux ?” he goes. “You don’t know who Mario Lemieux is?”
    â€œOne of the most legendary Penguins of all time,” somebody else adds.
    Ugh. A hockey reference. The clue might as well have been written upside down, in Arabic.
    â€œJesus, you call yourself a Pittsburgher?”
    â€œNo.” I sit down. “I’m from Cleveland.”
    The “hot as balls” guy leans forward. Now I see what he’s doing. He’s impressing this girl next to him. “You could have literally just said, ‘This guy’s first name was one of the most iconic Nintendo characters of all time.’ ”
    I try not to scrunch my eyebrows at him, but whoops .
    â€œSuper Mario Brothers,” he goes. “Hello? Are you secretly ninety ?”
    The girl next to him giggles and whaps his shoulder in a “You big lug” kind of way. They are definitely doing it later tonight.
    I hug my knees. I am the last American virgin.
    â€œSo, whose birthday is next?” Carly tries to say, but it’s as if the soundman forgot to turn on her microphone; that’s the effect her prompt has. Nothing.
    I get up to take the ruined corn chips to the kitchen—also to launch an investigation into whether my face is incredibly hot or incredibly cold (it’s one or the other)—and as I set the bowl in the sink, a spider crawls out from beneath the windowsill and startles me enough that I back up, hard, into somebody.
    â€œSorry,” I say. With my luck, it’s probably the girl whose bright white jeans were splashed with Fanta.
    Nope. It’s worse.
    â€œNo problem.”
    It’s Amir. We made actual physical contact and I didn’t even have the benefit of