Ocampo de: On the other hand, read them about a year earlier when I was 12, before technically the book was even written.

It was a Saturday afternoon in the middle of that blank, gray stretch of winter that seems to go on forever. I was up in my room, minding my own business. My mother and her sister, my Aunt Caroline, were in the kitchen. I could hear them talking, but I certainly wasn't paying any attention to what they were talking about.

Until I heard a familiar phrase waft up from below like a bad smell, and that phrase was "reluctant reader." No one ever said it when they thought I would hear, but I knew it referred to me. I heard it in second grade as I waited outside my classroom while my parents talked to my teacher. I heard it again in fourth grade when my teacher was speaking to the school librarian during our class's library time. I heard it from my father talking to the children's book expert at our local bookstore.

And here it was again, this time from my mother. Now that I knew they were talking about me, I tuned in. "Then he'd be perfect," said Caroline. "He's exactly what I need. Just let me ask him, okay? If he says no, I promise I won't bring it up again."

If this sounds like my mother and my aunt were plotting to use me as a guinea pig in an unpleasant experiment, it's because that's exactly what they were doing.

"Alex," my mom called, "can you come down here? Aunt Caroline wants to ask you for a favor."

If this were fictional and not my actual life, I would have taken the opportunity to climb out my bedroom window and run away for a wild adventure. But it was a long drop from my window. And besides Aunt Caroline wasn't a mad scientist. She worked in an office. She wasn't going to hook me up to a machine and switch my personality with an actual guinea pig's.

As I walked slowly down the stairs, I decided that Aunt Caroline wanted to use me as a test for her childproofing, Caroline and her wife, my Aunt Lulu, were having a baby in a few months. But they were carrying on like they were expecting a visit from really judgmental royalty.

The paint in the baby's room had to be the perfect shade of early twilight blue. The carpet had been changed out twice for not being plush enough. And they were childproofing as if they expected their infant to leap out of their arms and start guzzling the poisons under the sink within seconds of its arrival in their home.

Some of these excessive precautions might've had to do with my little brother, Alvin. There was some history there.

I arrived in the kitchen, resigned to crawling around Caroline and Lulu's house, trying to poison, strangle and electrocute myself.

But that wasn't the favor at all. It wasn't nearly as fun. Caroline wanted me to read a book.

Three. Aunt Caroline had written a book for kids my age and needed a test reader, she said. The stack of paper on the kitchen table was on the small side. At least she'd had the courtesy to write a short book, but still, not only was it a book, it was a book that someone I knew had written. How could that be any good?

"Why don't you have Alvin read it?" I asked. "He'll read anything."

Alvin was eight and the opposite of a reluctant reader. He was what parents and teachers and librarians called a voracious reader, which sounded much cooler than it is. It sounded as if Alvin swam around like a shark pulling struggling books down into the depths and devouring them whole. In reality, he sat on his bed for hours at a time, almost motionless reading and popping the occasional Cheeto into his mouth.

"That's the point," said Caroline. "We thought you'd be better since you're harder to please." "You mean a reluctant reader?" "Not at all," said Caroline. Because I'm not, I just have a bunch of other stuff I'd rather be doing. "Which is the definition of reluctant," my mother said.

It isn't, but I didn't know that at the time. The fact was I preferred doing things that didn't involve so much sitting still and paying attention, like running any time, anywhere. On the soccer field, down the sidewalk, in the halls of school when I could get away with it. And if I was going to sit still and to pay attention...