MR. JEREMIAH PEACOCK, our neighbor, can always tell when a thunderstorm is coming. This is because of his Ominous Knee. When his knee twinges, that means a thunderstorm is on the way.

The Ominous Knee once saved his life, says Mr. Peacock, because it was twinging on the day Mrs. Peacock wanted him to put up an aluminum umbrella clothesline in the backyard, and if he’d done what she wanted, Mr. Peacock says, he would have been out there waving a big old aluminum pole around when the storm rolled in and the lightning would have killed him deader than hell.

“What’s twinging like?” I said.

I thought it was a cool word, twinging. Kind of copper-colored, like those expensive French frying pans.

Mr. Peacock fixed me with his good right eye and said I should thank my lucky stars I didn’t know, since it was like red-hot needles straight from Old Nick’s furnace, which, even so, didn’t cause half the pain and suffering he’d had for the past fifty-three years putting up with Mrs. Peacock’s mims and twitters. Though I think he was just joking about the second part because Mrs. Peacock is very even-tempered, and besides, she weighs two hundred pounds and never twitters at all.

Since then, though, I’ve thought more than once that an Ominous Knee might be a good thing to have. At least it gives you some warning when something awful’s coming so that trouble doesn’t catch you unprepared.

Because looking back, I was pretty clueless. At the beginning of the year that changed my life, the only thing I was worrying about was my name.

According to Seventeen magazine, the most popular names for girls are Emily, Emma, Madison, Abigail, Isabella, Hannah, Samantha, Ava, Ashley, and Olivia.

This is mine: Octavia. Octavia O’Keeffe Boone.

My name is so far from a popular name that if you set me down next to somebody named Emily, the pair of us would probably just explode, like when matter meets antimatter.

The O’Keeffe is from Georgia O’Keeffe, who is famous for painting cow skulls and flowers the size of pizza platters. Boone, being a painter, thought I should have a strong female painter’s name in mine. The Octavia was Ray’s idea, probably while she was coming out of anesthesia.

What I don’t understand is why Boone and Ray couldn’t see that giving me a stupid name like that made my initials O.O.B., OOB, which is just one letter away from BOOB. But then Boone was always so busy painting his masterpiece that he never noticed anything, and Ray has always been a person who makes decisions first and thinks about them afterward. In other words, when it came to naming babies, they were a perfect lethal storm.

I’ll bet that by the time I was two days old, Ray was realizing her mistake and wishing she’d named me Ashley or Abigail. Not that she’ll ever say so, because another thing about Ray is that she will never admit she’s wrong. Once when I complained, she just said I should be glad she hadn’t named me Cantaloupe or Pomegranate, like all those celebrities who keep naming their kids after fruit, or maybe just @, like this Chinese baby she read about on the Internet.

Ray’s real name is Rachel.

Boone’s real name is Simon, but nobody calls him that except Ray.

“How come everybody calls you Boone?” I asked him once, and first he said it was because all great painters went by their last names, and you didn’t hear anybody going around calling Picasso Pablo, did you?

But then he said actually it was because of this cross-eyed kid named Woody Schaffer who kept calling him Simple Simon in third grade.

You’d think that with that in his background, Boone at least would have been more sensitive about names.

I guess there’s still a part of me that thinks maybe none of this would have happened if Boone and Ray had been the sort of parents to give a kid a normal name, like Jane or Susan or Mary Ann. I think about the kinds of lives Janes and Susans probably have, where their fathers go to an office and their mothers bake stuff and run the PTO. I bet Janes and Susans just have normal problems, like whether they can go to the mall on a school night or get their noses pierced or wear shorts to school.

To be fair, most kids around here don’t have popular names either, but at least they have strength in numbers since they’re all unpopular in the same way. Most of them have French names like Claude and Cecile and Armand and Solange, because our town is in a part of Vermont that is just eleven miles from the French part of Canada, which is where Boone always says he’s going to move to every time he hears something he doesn’t like on NPR. On the other hand, I am not alone in hating my name. Angelique Soulier says that no matter what her mother says and no matter how many times her French great-grandmother rolls over in the grave, the minute she turns eighteen, she’s changing her name to Jennifer.

My best friend, Andrew Wochak, does not hate his name, but unfortunately nobody calls Andrew Andrew, except me, his parents, and the teachers at school. Everybody else calls him Woodchuck. This is because Wochak sounds sort of like Woodchuck, and also because Andrew has furry brown hair and his front teeth stick out, though that is being corrected by braces.

The reason I do not call Andrew Woodchuck is because of an invisible penguin.

When I was very young, I had a secret friend named Priscilla who was a penguin. Nobody could see Priscilla but me. She went everywhere with me and she slept at the foot of my bed and I saved food for her off my plate, especially stuff like Brussels sprouts and oatmeal. Ray told me once that she worried because I had made Priscilla so real that Ray was always doing things like opening the door for Priscilla or leaving the window rolled down a little if Priscilla had to wait for us in the car.

Then Priscilla went with me to kindergarten.

Sixty-five percent of children under the age of seven at some point have an imaginary friend. I read that somewhere. What that means is that out of every ten little kids you see, six and a half of them have an invisible pal hanging around.

But you wouldn’t have thought so to hear Mrs. Baines, the kindergarten teacher, when I asked for extra purple finger paint for Priscilla.

“For whom?” she said, and she looked at me down her pug nose, that made her look like one of those sniffy flat-faced little Pekingese dogs.

Then she called us all together for Attention Time, which meant that we had to be quiet and listen whenever she held up her thumb, and gave us a long lecture about being big kids now, old enough to go to school and much too old for silly things like imaginary invisible penguins. Everybody stared at me and a couple of kids in the back giggled and my face got hot and I wanted the floor to open up under me and swallow me along with my little strawberry-colored plastic chair.

Then Mrs. Baines said in that smarmy voice some kindergarten teachers use, “Now you all know that things that are invisible aren’t real, don’t you, children? They’re just make-believe.”

And then Andrew Wochak raised his hand and said, “Well, what about air?”

I will never as long as I live call Andrew Woodchuck.

Mrs. Baines doesn’t teach kindergarten anymore. The School Board fired her.

Here is my word for Andrew: Outstanding.