by Jim Benton
From New York Times bestselling author Jim Benton
Nobody’s Perfect.
I’m As Close As It Gets.
Think you can handle
Jamie Kelly’s first year of diaries?
# 1 Let’s Pretend This Never Happened
# 2 My Pants Are Haunted!
# 3 Am I The Princess Or The Frog?
# 4 Never Do Anything, Ever
# 5 Can Adults Become Human?
# 6 The Problem With Here Is That It’s Where I’m From
# 7 Never Underestimate Your Dumbness
# 8 It’s Not My Fault I Know Everything
# 9 That’s What Friends Aren't For
# 10 The Worst Things in Life Are Also Free
# 11 Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers
# 12 Me! ( Just Like You, Only Better)
And don’t miss year two!
Year Two # 1: School. Hasn’t This Gone On Long Enough?
Year Two # 2: The Super-Nice Are Super-Annoying
Year Two # 3: Nobody’s Perfect. I’m As Close As It Gets.
Year Two # 4: what i don't know might hurt me
Jim Benton’s Tales from Mackerel Middle School
Nobody’s Perfect.
I’m As Close As It Gets.
BY JAMIE KELLY
SCHOLASTIC INC.
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e- ISBN 978- 0- 545- 51007 -3
Copyright © 2013 by Jim Benton
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
scholastic and associated logos are trademarks
and/ or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
dear dumb diary is a registered trademark of Jim Benton.
First printing, January 2013
For Griffin, Summer, and Mary K.
Thanks to Shannon Penney, Jackie
Hornberger, Yaffa Jaskoll, Anna Bloom, and
Kristen LeClerc, all of whom would be willing
to tell you just how perfect they are.
Dear Whoever Is Reading My Dumb Diary,
You’re reading somebody else’s
diary?????????????? This is
exactly the
type of behavior that gets recorded in your
Permanent Record, you know.
Your Permanent Record, in case you didn’t
know, follows you throughout your life like a
big tattletale, just waiting for the chance to tell
college professors, police officers, and fiancés
about all the horrible things you’ve done.
You might think
now that you don’t care,
but my cousin has a friend whose little sister
knew this girl and she got this big job where she
put the makeup on important fashion models
and the first day of some big fashion show in
Paris or New Jersey or something, they looked in
her Permanent Record and found something so
bad that she was disqualified from putting
makeup on fashion models and you know what
she has to do now? She has to put makeup on
clowns. And not just
any clowns. She can only
do all the really old clowns where you have to,
like, hold their flappy, floppy skin aside in order
to really cram the makeup down into their face
creases and crevices.
Maybe you don’t care about your future.
Maybe you don’t mind the idea of growing up
all imperfect. Maybe you want to handle clown
creases. For the rest of your life.
In that case, suit yourself.
Signed,
P.S. Okay. Hold on. Stop suiting yourself. The
Permanent Record is a very big deal.
You can’t change it. Once something is in there,
baby, it’s
IN THERE, and “Diary Reader” is a
very bad thing.
Sunday 01
Dear Dumb Diary,
You know the sound a coconut makes when it
bounces off the rubbery side of a prize-winning hog?
Wait.
I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let me describe my Friday.
Let’s say that you had a best friend and
her name was, I don’t know, Shmisabella. Okay, so
Shmisabella is taking banjo lessons. She told you
so and proved it by showing you her banjo case. She
even played you some banjo music she has on her
iPod — “I am way into banjos,” Shmisabella says —
but here’s the thing: Shmisabella does NOT, in any
way, have anything to do with the banjo. You just
don’t know that yet.
1
Perhaps you were at lunch a week before, and
your friend said something about how one time she
brought a kangaroo home from the zoo.
Sure, you know that Shmisabella actually
did it, because it was your garage she hid the
kangaroo in until she climbed into the kangaroo’s
pouch and you had to confess to your parents so
they would call the paramedics to come and remove
her from a kangaroo.
But another girl at the table, Yolanda, who is
a dainty person — you know the type, eats popcorn
one piece at a time, has those tiny little buttons on
her clothing that people with regular human -sized
hands can’t operate — made this quiet, dainty
pfft sound to indicate that she thought your friend
was lying.
Now, Shmisabella didn’t react to the pfft
sound, so you knew that she either didn’t care or
just ignored it.
Yeah, guess what. Wrong. She noticed it.
2
You might think that your science teacher,
Mrs. Curie, was out sick because teachers just
normally get sick. Like maybe they got poisoned by
that red ink they use to grade papers, or maybe the
subject they teach finally just suffocated them in a
big steaming pile of boredom.
You would never think that maybe
Shmisabella had somehow arranged for the
teacher to miss class that morning, maybe by
calling her home and telling her that there was a
large package waiting for her that had accidentally
been delivered to a post office in the next town.
All of these things just don’t add up until . . .
3
. . . until they all suddenly make sense
when the substitute teacher bends over to pick
up some papers that blew off the desk because
somebody had piled them close to the edge an
d
left a window open.
Then Shmisabella reaches forward, places the
tennis racquet that she had been keeping in
her banjo case into Yolanda’s dainty hand, and
throws a tennis ball at 100 miles per hour at the
substitute’s ample backside, making a sound a lot
like a coconut bouncing off the rubbery side of a
prize-winning hog. (You might recall I mentioned
this earlier.)
Yolanda understood exactly how this looked,
and since she’s dainty, she’s capable of swiftly
slipping things like tennis racquets into another
person’s hand, especially if that person is kind
of asleep and that person happens to be me.
4
A substitute science teacher is just like a
regular science teacher in many ways: They bend
over, their butts sound like prize-winning hogs when
impacted, and they are good at figuring things out
scientifically, like determining that the person
holding the tennis racquet probably has something
to do with the cooling ointment the substitute will
be applying to their backside at lunch.
Now here’s the surprise: This “Shmisabella”
I’ve been telling you about is really Isabella, and all
of this really happened. She tried to set up
Yolanda for pffting her kangaroo story, and I, an
attractive and innocent bystander, got caught up in
the scandal.
The sub sent me down to the office to talk to
the assistant principal, but he wasn’t there, so I
have to see him first thing tomorrow morning. I am
SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO SO
telling on Isabella.
Monday 02
Dear Dumb Diary,
I didn’t tell on Isabella.
I met with the assistant principal, who also
happens to be my uncle now because he married my
Aunt Carol. He also happens to be Angeline’s uncle,
through some sort of profoundly tragic bad luck
that involves Angeline being related to him.
He told me that he had read what the
substitute said about the tennis ball incident, and
wondered why I would ever choose a tennis ball as
the projectile. He said that he remembered my Aunt
Carol trying to teach me how to play tennis over the
summer. During the course of an hour, he saw me hit
the ball only three times, and all of those times
were with my neck.
But he said he knew that Yolanda, who sits
next to me in science, is actually quite an excellent
tennis player, and that a tennis ball is exactly what
somebody would expect her to use.
6
But Yolanda, being dainty, just isn’t the
type that gets into this kind of trouble. Uncle Dan
suspected that maybe Isabella had something to do
with this whole thing, because he checked and it
turns out that she was in town when it occurred.
I asked him how he knew Yolanda was good at
tennis, and he waved a folder at me.
“It’s in her Permanent Record,” he said.
“Along with grades and behavior, we keep track of
all your extracurricular activities.”
And then he opened my folder to show me all
of my extracurricular activities which, as it turns
out, didn’t exist.
7
He pointed out that I’ve never joined a
school club or played on a school team or anything
like that.
I explained to him that it was okay because
those things were for weenies and I had never been,
nor planned to ever be, any sort of weenie. I just
don’t see weenieism as an option in my future.
He said that colleges look at these sorts
of things and it was time that I gave that some
thought. One day, he said, I would have to grow up
and work for a living, which I think we can all agree
is a pretty awful way to punish a person just for
the crime of growing up.
8
“Jamie,” Uncle Dan said, “I want you to try
some extracurriculars. You might like them. You
might even make some new friends that aren’t
getting into trouble every couple of days.”
“Like which friend of mine are you referring
to? Angeline?” I asked, awesomely pretending
not to know who he was really talking about.
He smiled. “I’m not going to punish Isabella
or Yolanda. I don’t have proof that they did
anything wrong. I’m not going to punish you,
because I know you can’t play tennis and you have
no sense of aim, even if the target was as wide as
that substitute’s . . .” He stopped himself and
thought for a moment. “Area of
victimization.”
I nodded with enough innocence for both me
and Isabella combined.
9
And then, because there’s probably a rule
that no visit with an assistant principal can end
perfectly well, he added, “Let’s talk in a few weeks.
I want you to try an extracurricular activity, and I
want to hear your thoughts about your future. Your
file is good, but there’s no reason it can’t be
perfect.”
Now I have to think about my future. My
future. I liked my past better. I didn’t have
a future back then.
10
Tuesday 03
Dear Dumb Diary,
Before science class today, Mrs. Curie said
that Assistant Principal Devon told her that I didn’t
have anything to do with the Tennis Balling of the
Rump in Question, although I could tell by the way
she kept her back to the wall during class that she
wasn’t convinced.
In between her quick turns, Mrs. Curie told us
we’re going on a field trip later this month to a
science museum.
Field trips are awesome. I love them. I’ve
thrown up twice on field trips, but nobody can
detect throw-up on our buses. The kids are so loud
and the buses already smell so terrible that you
could barf up a deep -fried basketball shoe and
nobody would notice.
It’s kind of nice knowing you can throw up
anytime you like. You don’t often get that privilege
in the real world.
After class, I asked Isabella about her
extracurriculars, since we are supposed to be doing
stuff like that for college.
Isabella was surprised I was thinking about
college.
“But you’re dumb, Jamie,” she said. “Not
dumb like Accidentally -Ate -the -Wrapper-
on- the- Taco Dumb. You’re more like
Dumb -About -Stuff- That- You- Really-
Shouldn’t - Be- Dumb- About.”
“What does that even mean?” I demanded.
“It’s hard to explain,” Isabella said. “Maybe
if you were smarter, it would be easier. Look at it
this way: Angeline is the pretty one who is also nice
and smart, I’m the smart one who is also pretty and
nice, and you’re the dumb one with pretty friends.”
>
By this time, Angeline had walked up and
overheard Isabella’s conclusions.
Angeline laughed. “I don’t think you have
that totally correct,” she said. “You’re not that
nice, Isabella.”
“WAIT A SECOND,” I said angrily and
totally correctly.
I pointed out that my grades are really pretty
good (better than Isabella’s, anyway), and I know
quite a few very large words, although I was a little
spitty and sputtery when I was saying that so I
couldn’t remember any of them off the top of my
head. But I couldn’t help it. I was angry.
“How long have you thought I was the dumb
one?” I demanded.
Isabella shrugged and said forever. Angeline
said she thought we should talk about something
else, like koala bears, which I know she was just
doing to get me off the subject. It became so
obvious to me after I suddenly realized that for the
last ten minutes I had been talking about koala
bears.
Just wait until they get a load of my future,
which is going to be perfect.
Wednesday 04
Dear Dumb Diary,
So today after school, I took a bold step
toward the future by joining my first extracurricular
activity, the Chess Club.
Chess is a very interesting game, and like so
many interesting games, it is not in any way fun. It
looks like four horses lost amongst a variety of
pepper mills and salt shakers, and the objective is
to remain awake longer than your opponent.
The Chess Club people insist that it is a blast,
but if it was really so great, you have to wonder why
people would have worked so hard for so long to
invent more entertaining things, like watching
television and not playing chess.
14
Then I took another step toward my future (a
chessless future, that is), and decided to never
attend another Chess Club meeting.
I’m not worried. I’ll discover the right
