"A.M. or P.M.?" Janine asked innocently.

Duh.

There I stood, Claudia Kishi, the Dunce of the Kishi family. I had taped the Late Late Late Show.

Which is why I ended up watching the Andy Warhol documentary right then and there, complete with commercials.

It was worth it, though. At least I thought so. Warhol would paint an ordinary object, like a Campbell's soup can, in a way that made you want to look at it — as if it were the most interesting thing in the world. He also made wild-colored silkscreen portraits of legendary movie stars, like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean and Elvis Presley.

Well, Janine sat through about thirty seconds of this before she announced, "I don't understand how you can call that stuff art." Then she walked off, probably to study advanced calculus or physics or something else just as fun-filled.

Janine is only a junior in high school, but they ran out of classes hard enough for her, so she's taking courses at a local college. Me? I'm thirteen, and in eighth grade atStoney-brookMiddle School , inStoneybrook,Connecticut . I have a hard enough time with normal classes. The first time I heard Janine mention "calculus" I thought she was talking about a Roman emperor. Then she showed

me her book. You know what the strangest thing was? Calculus is supposed to be a kind of math — but there were hardly any numbers! It was mostly a bunch of squiggles and letters. Janine tried to explain it to me, but I suddenly felt like I'd taken a sleeping pill. Boring!

As you can gather, my sister and I could hardly be more different. We do both have dark hair and almond-shaped eyes (our family is Japanese-American), but that's about it. I'm into wild clothes and different hairstyles. That afternoon, for instance, I was wearing a man's paisley vest I'd found at a yard sale, over a striped button-down shirt with tuxedo-stripe black Spandex stirrup pants, held up with pink-flecked black suspenders.