by Jim Benton
Hey, since I was invited to their wedding, am I
automatically invited to their divorce?
Probably.
The day finally arrived, and we proudly watched
as kids lined up in the cafeteria with their HEALTH-
O-PLATES.
Yes. That’s what Angeline calls them. I know,
I know.
Angeline took careful notes. Isabella snapped
pictures with her phone.
We proudly watched as the lunch staff precisely
glopped the foods on the plates in the correct
proportions.
I proudly nodded at Uncle Dan as he proudly
winked at me. This was a great idea, and he
proudly knew it.
We
proudly watched as kids walked to find
their seats, stopping only briefly to slide the glop they
didn’t like directly into the trash cans before they
sat down.
“No, no, no,” Angeline said as she stopped
Mike Pinsetti in mid-glop sliding. “The idea is that you
eat it all. You eat everything on your plate. See, the
plates help you balance your meal.”
“Why?” Mike asked blankly.
“For your health,” Angeline said, with her arms
spread wide as if she was going to hug everybody’s
health all at once.
“I don’t really like my health,” Mike said. He
tried to walk around her, but she moved back in front
of him.
Pinsetti is kind of a bully and weighs two
hundred pounds more than Angeline, but for some
reason, he stopped dead and listened to her.
“You don’t like your health?” she asked.
“Well, I kinda like it.” He shrugged. “But if my
health is going to be a huge jerk all the time about
what I eat, then, like, forget him.”
We scanned the cafeteria. Nobody was eating
everything on their plates. Nobody was even paying
attention to their plates.
Except Dicky.
Dicky ate everything, and he ate it all
alphabetically, just in case alphabetical eating was a
thing. I’m guessing he thought it might be because
vitamins are alphabetical.
Isabella snapped a couple photos of the rejected
food in the trash cans.
“These plates don’t work,” Isabella
said. “Nobody will obey a plate.”
I looked down in the trash. Angeline dragged
herself over and dropped her little notepad in.
“They even threw away the salads,” I said. “I
mean, some of the other stuff is gross, but who doesn’t
like a salad?”
“I don’t,” Isabella said. “Salads aren’t food.
Salads are what food eats.”
“That’s dumb,” Angeline mumbled. “You’re
dumb.”
The
HEALTH-O-PLATE failure had hit
Angeline harder than we knew. Angeline never called
people dumb. Not even dumb people. One time, we
went on a field trip to a farm and saw a horse that
could only gallop backward, and Angeline wouldn’t
even call him dumb. She called him “differently
stabled.”
She was really depressed.
“A salad is just a pile of leaves,” Isabella said.
“When my dad is out working in the yard, he throws
away bags and bags of salad. Stop by and eat one
anytime you like, Angeline.”
“So dumb,” Angeline repeated, staring at the
floor. It was hard to tell who her criticism was aimed at.
“But you can put salad dressing on them,” I said
to Isabella, still trying to make a case for salads.
“That’s just goop, and you love goop.”
“There aren’t even that many good ones to
choose from,” Isabella said. “A few different kinds of
ranch, some vinaigrettes, Thousand Island. We have a
million different ways to make a sandwich but only
a few kinds of tolerable salad dressings, and none of
them are tasty enough to make me eat what’s basically
a floral arrangement.”
Angeline shuffled off, muttering to herself.
There’s really nothing quite as sad as a perky blond
in the dumps. It’s like seeing a bunny dipped in tar, or a
Christmas cookie on the floor of a public bathroom.
I probably should have offered her a sip of my
7Up, but that would have meant that I would have
had one sip less, and that wasn’t going to work
for me.
Later, in Mr. Henzy’s class, he asked how our
HEALTH-O-PLATES experiment had gone. We had
to confess that it was a huge failure. We told him that
nobody was really very interested in our creation.
He was actually pretty sweet about it all.
“Things like that usually fail,” he said.
“Hey, thanks for the warning!” Isabella shouted.
“By the way, when you warn people, that means YOU
TELL THEM IN ADVANCE.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I just mean that
many ideas don’t work at first. Things sometimes need
to be modified or retested. Diamonds don’t look that
great when you dig them up. They have to be
polished
—
then they’re spectacular.”
“Cat turds don’t look great when you dig them
up, either,” Isabella said. “But they don’t change much
when you try to polish them.”
“Do we still get extra credit?” I asked, trying
to find something positive in this whole mess.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “You actually learned
more by failing than succeeding.”
“Thanks,” Isabella said. “Nice job encouraging
us to fail.”
I looked over at Angeline, who had said nothing
during the entire exchange. She didn’t smile. She didn’t
blink. She wasn’t even trying that hard to smell good,
which is one of her main things.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THIS IS WHERE I FOUND OUT
WHAT THE DEAL WAS
That night, Aunt Carol came over for dinner.
Uncle Dan had to leave town for some assistant
principal convention, where they teach them to be
better assistant principals.
I began to tell her about the HEALTH-O-
PLATE tragedy, but she already knew about it. Even
though it was a colossal embarrassment, she thought
it was great that the three of us were already thinking
about earning money for college.
“You’re really going to need it,” she said.
“Especially Angeline. You know that her dad got fi —”
Mom
kicked Aunt Carol so hard one of her
earrings fell off.
I lunged for it, of course, because Stinker
believes that anything that falls on the floor is food.
I’ve seen a few fashion items that have been run
through a beagle. It really doesn’t improve most
of them.
But Stinker didn’t snap at it, so I was able to
return it to Aunt Carol uneaten.
“What were you saying about Angeline?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Mom said, but it wasn’t the
“nothing” where there isn’t anyth
ing there. It was
the
“NOTHING” where there’s so much of something
there that you can’t stand it. It was the kind of
nothing that is the exact opposite of nothing.
“I think I should know, Mom,” I said. “I’m old
enough to handle big things.”
“Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Angeline’s dad got
fired, and things are really tight for them right now.
We’re a little better off, but as of this moment, we
don’t have enough money to pay for you to go to
college. When Grandma died, we thought there might
be a little something for you to inherit, but after her
expenses, there was hardly anything left. She said that
she wanted you to have a bracelet of hers that
might have been worth something, but we can’t
find it. We think it must have gotten lost when we
packed up her things.”
I swallowed hard.
Guess I was wrong.
I really wasn’t old enough to handle big
things. Not all at once, shoved in my face like that. And
up my nose and under my eyelids and down my throat
and in my ears.
“That’s why Angeline cared so much about her
plate idea. She really needs to make money,” I said
quietly.
“Don’t share this information with anybody,
Jamie,” Mom said sternly. “I’m trusting you not to talk
to anybody about it. Not Angeline, and especially not
Isabella.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about Isabella? Can I
tell her?”
“Not
ANYBODY
.”
“Okay. I understand. I promise,” I said.
But here’s the thing about promises:
If you promise somebody something and they
don’t believe that you’ll keep the promise, then when
you break that promise, it’s not that big of a deal: They
weren’t counting on you anyway, so nobody gets
blamed for anything.
If you promise somebody something and they
DO believe you, but they SHOULDN’T have believed
you, then when the promise is broken they really
should have known better. It’s not your fault that
they didn’t.
If you promise somebody something and they
believe you, and they had every reason to believe you,
and you really intended to keep the promise, then the
only reason the promise could have been broken was
because of something that was totally out of your
control. And who could blame you for something out of
your control?
I’m not saying I broke that promise to my mom,
I’m just saying it’s important to understand how
promises actually work, and I’m never to blame.
The next morning at school, I saw Angeline filling
her water bottle at the drinking fountain. She does this
every day, many times a day, because she is
responsible about not wasting plastic bottles, and like
so many people these days, she needs constant
hydration.
You never see people in old photos or movies
carrying water bottles around, but nowadays
everybody does, even though I think people a long time
ago used to work harder and would have been thirstier.
My friends often take a water bottle with them in
the car, going between their house and someplace
where there is water, as if maybe something will
happen in the car that will cause them to have life-
threatening thirst.
Anyway, Angeline was filling her bottle again,
but she wasn’t holding it at the right angle where the
water would enter the bottle flawlessly, like she usually
does. She wasn’t even smiling at the water, and
Angeline smiles at everything.
She was getting some water in the bottle, some
on her hand, some on the floor. And she was looking
nowhere, staring at nothing. Her eyes even seemed less
blue, less twinkly. I think she may have been shedding
some of her eyelashes, which would be very bad news
for the janitors, since they would have to rake them up.
“Good news,” I blurted out involuntarily.
I could taste the lie forming in my mouth. I
could feel it kicking around. I was sweating. It hurt.
I didn’t want to do it. But she was so sad. She
was so worried. With one immense labor pain, I gave
birth to a lie baby.
“My dad spoke to somebody he knows who makes
paper plates, and they’re interested in our HEALTH-
O-PLATES.”
It seemed as though time slowed down for a
moment, and I could see the lie swirling around in the
air between us. Angeline was staring at it. The color
returned to her eyes, her cheeks reddened, and she
activated the enzyme in her body that makes her smell
like strawberries.
And then: the sound.
It was like a squeal that steadily rose in pitch
and volume into something like a scream, but more
musical than that
—
like if a flute screamed. And then
it got louder, and the sound of laughter seemed to be
added to the scream, and every container of spoiled
milk in a two-mile radius suddenly became fresh again.
She hugged me and waggled me around like
a doll until the bell rang and she had to skip merrily
to class.
I knew it was a lie, but for the moment, it
seemed like the right thing to do.
I turned to go to class and walked straight into
Isabella.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“You heard that?” I said, and I realized that I
was about to lie to my best friend, which I should never
do. Isabella almost invented lying to best friends,
and she can tell when anyone is doing it.
“We all heard it, Jamie. And look at you. You’ve
been
freshly waggled.”
It’s pretty easy to tell when somebody has just
received a waggling.
“I told her that my dad knows somebody in the
paper plate business, and they might be interested in
our
HEALTH-O-PLATES.”
“What’s his name?”
“It’s not a him. It’s a her. Her name is Kirsten
Hall.”
Just like that, I had used one of Isabella’s own
techniques against her. Years ago, Isabella taught me
to have a couple FASTFAKENAMES ready, just in
case someone asks. The names have to be believable,
and you have to practice saying them. Stalling for a
name will always give you away.
My female FASTFAKENAME is Kirsten Hall.
I have an entire assortment. My male
FASTFAKENAME is Bob Peterson. My fake
FASTFAKENAME for myself is Jenny Ryan. My
FASTFAKENAME for a pet is Twinkle. I can go
on and on.
“So we might get paid?” Isabella asked, her
fingers clenching imaginary money. (She doesn’t even
realize she does that.)
“We might,” I said, looking her in the eye. Not for
too long, of course, becau
se that makes it obvious
you’re lying. It’s almost as bad as avoiding eye contact
completely. There’s an exact amount of time that’s
right. Like half a second.
“Cool,” Isabella said, and we started walking
to class.
Lying is good,
I said to myself, carefully
making sure not to say it out loud, since I’ve learned
that’s another excellent way to get caught.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
YOU’RE GOING TO NEED BIGGER REINDEER
Every single day after that, Angeline had a new
idea for the plates.
Every day.
Every. Single. Day.
“Let’s make one for kids who can’t read yet.”
“Let’s make one for kids with food sensitivities.”
“Let’s make one for kids with different religious
requirements.”
And Isabella would nod in agreement, and I
would have to go home and make the stupid things.
“Any word from your dad’s friend yet?” Angeline
would ask. “Should we have a meeting with her or
something?”
The whole thing reminded me of the Easter
Bunny.
When I was little, my parents told me about a
happy little bunny that came every Easter and hid
baskets full of chocolate and jelly beans for all the
children.
Pretty good story, except that the neighbor lady
had a pet bunny.
His name was Bouncyboy and he was too stupid
to even react to his own name, much less have his act
together enough to prepare baskets of candy. It’s true,
at first he
seemed
to be pretty generous with the
black jelly beans, but those weren’t really jelly beans.
So, deep down, I knew the whole story was a lie.
But every Easter, there would be a basket of candy for
me, so I didn’t ask a lot of questions.
“The Easter Bunny is coming,” Mom would say in
the weeks before Easter, and she’d be all excited and
playful.
“Oh. Right. Sure thing, Mom,” I would say, and
