Who's Ingrid? Alex says, "Awwwk! Word on the street is that Ingrid is the Alpha R,O! Girl." By which he means that after Ready, Okay! got published, I got email about it from about four hundred teenage girls, and Ingrid was the best. "Best" here meaning that while most of these correspondences wound up amounting to very little — I would say things like "glad you liked the book" and "tell me about yourself" and the girl would send me some perfunctory reply and it would quickly become clear that we had nothing more to say to one another — my correspondence with Ingrid wound up amounting to very little but she had an amazing blog. It was called "I'll Get My Coat" and she deleted it in 2005. But archive.org preserved a few scraps, and when I went back to see what she'd said about Iowa, I was reminded anew of why I fell in love with this kid's writing:

• My mother accidentally set her menu on fire. Now, at the time it was a hoot and a half, but fire safety is no laughing matter. Unless fire safety is taught by a clown.

• On Susan B. Anthony: I'm sorry, but Sacajawea would kick that suffragette's butt in a battle of the coin dollars. But George Washington would calm them down and they'd have a three-way, because I wrap coin dollars in paper dollars sometimes.

• Me: You suck. I have to write an essay about you.

  Socrates: [long, convoluted philosophical babble and obnoxious questions even Socrates cannot answer]

  Me: You suck so much. (beats Socrates with a club)

  Christopher Walken: Yes! Yes! Hit him again!

  Me: Where are your pants?

• There was a big spider in my bed last night. I first noticed it molesting the photographs on my wall, but it then crowded my bedspace. Now, I called it a big spider, yes? I mean a big spider. I'm talking about a spider that eats infants for breakfast and could destroy Tokyo. And it was red. Yeah, I bet you're scared now. But not me. I just thought that it might prefer to have the bed for itself. Because I'm a giver.

  So when I ran away from my bed I was just saying "You're welcome!" in the super secret spider language. Which is composed of girlish yelps.

• The worst thing about failing my driver's test was realizing I failed very early on, and still having to continue the test. It was one of the automatic fails (I was just backing up and that curb came out of nowhere), and I was all teary and tense as I executed lovely turns and complete stops and parked nicely. My tester had a big old porn star mustache and actually said, "Did you know that hitting the curb is an automatic fail?" No, I just get really emotional over my awesome three-point turns, bitch!

Again — she wrote this stuff when she was fifteen and sixteen years old. Prodigious! And she was a she. Society doesn't normally train girls to write comedy. Where on earth did she pick up this way with a phrase? Seriously, whatever it was that made Ingrid into Ingrid, we need to distill it and introduce it to the water supply.

So basically what I'm saying is this: See, Tabetha? Suzanne isn't the only one of my old hopeless crushes I can get nostalgic about!

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