make super beds. My friends who don’t go to Ikea only have French beds that are hardly imposing, and frankly not super. So, then, since I have a super imposing bed I can build an even smaller house underneath. A chaoui house, it’s called. Chaoui is a word my dad uses. Once we were in Epirus and there was a chapel where an old guy lived with his goats. Home of the chaoui, he called it. Chaoui sounds pretty, it’s a good word for small people. I stretched a sheet from the top bunk, stuffed it under the bottom mattress to make a wall, and set up my house. Mom gave me an oven for my kitchen. It’s not a real oven that cooks real things, but you can imagine, and anyway, we can eat raw things, like apples, for example. It’s enormously crowded in my cabin, don’t think I live all alone. I have two hundred and two stuffed animals. They each have a name and I hold lessons every day at the house—that’s why I’m tired, because after coming back from school I still have to play teacher for my homeschooled pupils. They’re all very good. I always give them 20 out of 20 points because I know how much it matters to not feel worse than anyone else. We’re a little cramped but it’s not too bad. I’d rather be squished than other things. Even so, everyone has their own bed. And since the oven isn’t a real oven that cooks, the bears can sleep in there, too. My house is in the middle of a jungle of apple trees, because I love apple trees, and I made my mom promise to bury me near an apple tree. I think a lot about my death, ever since Grams’s, when everyone argued over her burial. No one asked Grams what she would have wanted, so for me, I prefer to stay on top of things. It’s a big jungle of apple trees with special apples, there’s golden apples and toxic apples (the toxic apples are easy to recognize: they’re red with blue spots). My house is inside a
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