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When we were in grade one we had to do a project called All About Me. We had to write about what we looked like, what we wanted to become, our secrets, our families, our favorite foods, our favorite animals — each topic on a separate page, with a blank space on top for a crayon drawing. Each kid’s project went in a duotang with our grade-one school photo glued onto the cover.

My printing went outside the lines and bunched up and slanted like the losing team in a tug of war. When the teacher complained to Miranda that my writing didn’t fit between the lines, Miranda said, Make the lines bigger.

My crayon drawings, however, were masterpieces. They were violently emotional. I loved that all the crayons had names printed on the sides. The names were either very dramatic (Banana Mania, Laser Lemon, Cerulean Blue, Atomic Tangerine) or mysteriously plain (Medium Red).

It was during the process of creating All About Me that I first noticed I didn’t have a father.

I mean, I knew I didn’t have one, of course. But it was the first time I noticed that almost everybody else did.

On the page that was supposed to be about my father I ended up writing about some guy named Phil, who lived in the house attached to ours for two months and who owned a Doberman.

The Doberman barked and gnashed his teeth against the living-room window and slathered ropes of saliva from his pink-and-black spotted jowls every time someone walked down the sidewalk.

Once Phil gave me a bubble wand. It made giant wobbling bubbles as big as my head that would burst with a cloud of mist. The bubble wand seemed to qualify Phil for page 6 in my duotang, the page about Dad.

The Doberman is also featured on the My Favorite Animal page, a portrait in Turquoise Blue and Crimson crayon, with the studs on his dog collar scrawled with my most prized and never-cracked crayon: Silver.

Phil moved out two days after he gave me the bubble wand and we never saw him again.

If I had to write All About Me now, complete with crayon illustrations, what would it contain?

Name: Flannery Malone

What I Look Like:

1) Freckles (Burnt Sienna)

2) Pale skin (Silver)

3) Green eyes (Sea Green) . . .

4) . . . with little hazel flecks shooting through the green (Raw Sienna)

5) Limp, whip-straight orange hair to my shoulders (Sunglow)

6) 5'6" on tiptoes

7) Skinny, except for my boobs, which are, I think we can say, big.

Secrets: I’ve had the school glockenspiel hidden under my bed since I quit band in grade five. I quit because I couldn’t do the glockenspiel justice and the teacher was threatening me with the triangle.

It took me so long to return the glockenspiel that after a while I was afraid to return it at all. It lives under my bed, silent in a glockenspiel coffin, a heavy, velvet-lined box of guilt (a toss-up between Crimson or Medium Red for the lining).

Other: I am sixteen, currently without a boyfriend, though I am horribly in love with Tyrone O’Rourke. The very worst kind of love. Unrequited love.

I am in high school at Holy Heart in St. John’s, Newfoundland. I have a driver’s permit, level one. I once had a math tutor who told me that whales have veins big enough for a person to swim through and many other interesting facts that did not appear on my math exam but have made me feel awe.

I am a person who likes to feel awe.

I also enjoy making pancakes, often spelling my brother’s name with the batter. Which leads me to . . .

Family: Miranda (mother), Felix (half-brother) and two goldfish, Spiky and Smooth.

Miranda (see above) has nearly killed these goldfish many times, but they are true soldiers. She forgets to feed them when it’s her turn, and feeds them again when it’s supposed to be my turn, and lets their water evaporate until they’re almost beached.

Once Miranda let Smooth bellyflop out of the soup ladle when she was in the middle of transporting them so she could clean the bowl. She stood there screaming and waving her hands around her head yelling, Flannery, do something! Do something! And I had to pick up poor old Smooth and practically give him mouth-to-gill resuscitation before plopping him back in the bowl.

Once after a party I found a cigar butt floating on the water. Smooth and Spiky climbed up onto the stogie, one on either end, and stood on their fins attempting the age-old sport of log rolling. They made that cigar roll back and forth with deft slaps of their tails, just like the stubble-faced lumberjacks of yore.

Okay, Spiky and Smooth, they didn’t really do that with the stogie. But they did waste a day or two head-butting the soggy cigar from one end of the bowl to the other.

They are a lesson in fortitude and commitment.

Father: I have a single artifact, from the once-upon-a-time love affair between my mother and father. A sole memento in the form of a single chocolate shaped like a heart and wrapped in bright red tinfoil and hidden in a jewelry box under my bed.

Soon after my father left, sailing away from St. John’s forever, Miranda discovered she had no contact info on him — that, in fact, she hadn’t really caught his last name. And, before I was even born, she had already fallen in love with someone else. And then someone else. And so on.

My father’s first name is Xavier. That much she knows. It’s a French name. That’s why I took French last year — I figured that if I ever meet the guy, it would be nice to say a few words in his mother tongue. Father tongue. Xavier. X is the unknown variable in a math equation. If Y equals my mother in her tiara, with her love for fairness and feminism and joie de vivre, her inability to pay bills, her blogs and her non-existent domestic skills, and if I am the answer, then Dad must be X, right?

So I like to call him — my father — X. In my head, I mean, because of course I don’t actually get to talk to him or call him anything because, like I said, Miranda forgot that little thing of asking for his address, or his last name, or blood type, or genetic propensities for disease or special talents or whether he has a strong sense of smell, which I do have, or if he was good at the glockenspiel, or if he loves chocolate, or if there are aunts and uncles or even other children. Brothers and sisters.

What she does remember I can fit in a thimble. 1) He had hazel-green eyes; 2) red curly hair; 3) he was six foot two; 4) he cared about the environment; 5) he laughed a lot and they stayed up until dawn on the fateful night of my conception and they drank and went for a skinny dip in the ocean under the cloak of darkness and shortly after that frigid, primordial-soup dip, I was created.

Otherwise, yeah, no father. Though I have more Mom than most people ever have to contend with.

Favorite Things: I love strobe lights, the smell of cloves and bonfire-roasted marshmallows, the feel of my teeth after they’ve been cleaned at the dentist (though not the actual trip to the dentist, of course).

I love long baths without anybody banging on the door, or would love those kinds of baths, I’m pretty sure, if I ever experienced one.

As it is, I’m lucky if I’m not sharing my bath with, at the very least, a rubber ducky or a wind-up alligator that wags its tail and snaps its jaws, and maybe a fire truck or two.

I love skating on a pond in the evening, even though I can’t skate very well, but I love being dragged around the ice by Amber, me holding one end of a very long scarf and Amber holding the other, that moment when you know it’s time to turn around and head for home, when it’ll soon be getting dark and all the ice on the trees starts to tinkle in the wind and the moon and the sun are there together and Amber swishes to a stop and sprays snow dust with her shiny blade. She digs her toe pick into the ice and uses it as a pivot and I’m gliding in wide arcs around her and then she lets go of her end of the scarf and the centrifugal force spins me out toward the darkening horizon, and I am flying.

These are a few of my favorite things.

And Tyrone.

Obviously.