by Jim Benton
And that’s when it happened.
I realized that maybe everybody hates them.
I mean, all my favorite foods don’t require
them
—
ice-cream cones, tacos, pizza
—
you just
pick them up and go. You don’t need plates.
The world didn’t need Angeline’s plates. The
world didn’t need any plates. It needed to be
plateLESS, or plate-FREE.
I knew exactly what I needed to do.
Four hours later, my first attempt was complete.
I used a pair of pliers and some coat hangers to
create it.
I called it the Deliciousness Tree. Here’s
what it looked like:
There were eight prongs, and that seems like
enough for everything I could think of.
This wasn’t merely corn on the cob, it was
everything on the cob. Imagine walking down the
street, eating bites of this and that, without the
nuisance of plates or silverware. It would be like a
Dream Come True.
Okay, not a Dream Come True, exactly. Maybe
like a Dreamish Come Truish. But that’s still
pretty good.
I showed it to Stinker, since he’s pretty severely
into food, but he wasn’t interested. I figured that the
whole plate issue was lost on him, since, as a dog,
everywhere in the world is a plate to him.
I showed it to my dad, and he just reached for it
and began eating, as though this was how he had
always been served food.
“
Dad. Wait. Stop. Did you notice my
invention?”
His tongue was maneuvering a cube of cheese
from a prong with the dexterity you normally only see
in anteaters.
“It’s great, sweetheart. Go get Daddy
another one.”
It had passed the first critical test. Other
inventions of mine had not done so well with Dad, so
this was a big win.
But I knew I had to pass a harder test. I had to
get Isabella and Angeline on board. Angeline was so
obsessed with her plates, it was going to be nearly
impossible for her to go along with this.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Angeline won’t like this
“I love this,” Angeline said sincerely. “It’s
perfect for all the people who won’t like our other
product. You’re covering all the bases, Jamie. You’re
so clever.”
She stood there twirling the Deliciousness
Tree as Isabella watched and puckered her lips
thoughtfully.
“What do you think?” I asked her. I really needed
Isabella’s support on this.
“Jamie,” she began, “I’ve seen a lot of ideas in
my time
—
really great ideas
—
but honestly, I haven’t
cared about any of them.”
“Except this one?” I asked hopefully.
“I don’t have an opinion,” she said. “If an idea
benefits me, I like it. If it doesn’t, I don’t. Until it
does one of those things or the other, I really just don’t
care about it.”
“Don’t listen to her,” Angeline said,
handing it back. “This is great. We need to test it
right away.”
It’s always hard when you get encouragement
and enthusiasm from somebody who isn’t the one you
really wanted it from.
“We’ll make a bunch of them and test them in
the cafeteria, like we did with the plates,” Angeline
went on. “By the way, what’s going on with the people
who are going to make them?”
I took a long drink of my Pepsi as I thought
about how to handle this.
Thinking geniusly, I dropped the
Deliciousness Tree to the ground. When Angeline
bent down to pick it up, I swiftly dabbed a blob of
ketchup under my nose to appear exactly like I had a
bloody nose.
“EWWWW!” Angeline gasped. “You have a
bloody nose.”
Isabella calmly reached across the table, wiped
her finger under my nose, and stuck it in her
mouth.
She smacked her lips.
“That’s just ketchup,” she said.
“How did you know that?” Angeline said.
“I didn’t,” Isabella said.
Not
exactly what I was hoping for, but
Angeline shivered, stood up in utter disgust, and
walked away stiffly.
“Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Isabella asked, reaching for one of my French fries.
“Friends don’t keep things from each other.”
“You keep things from me all the time,” I said.
“You’re right, Jamie. I do. But do you see how I
openly just admitted that to you? See how I didn’t
keep that from you? That’s because I’m a true friend.
You can learn from me.”
I asked Isabella if she’d help me make my
Deliciousness Trees, and she said that she’d be
delighted to help as long as absolutely nothing else in
the whole world came up ever.
Surprisingly, something else in the whole
world came up, and Isabella couldn’t come over. But
Angeline was ready to help twist up some
Deliciousness Trees.
We had all the stuff spread out on the kitchen
table when my dad walked in. He’s always so warm to
my friends.
“Hi, Angela,” he said.
“Hi, Mr. Kelly,” she said, politely ignoring
his error.
“Her name is Ange
line
,” I said.
“I know that. What did I say? I said Angeline.”
“You said Ange
la
,” I said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Angeline,” I said, “what did he call you?”
I should have known better. There was no way
she was going to correct him. I brought it on myself.
“Thanks so much for helping us out with the
plates,” she said sweetly.
“What plates?”
“DAD, DAD, DAD. THE PLATES. YOU
KNOW, THE ONES WITH KIRSTEN HALL.
THOSE PLATES. NOW LEAVE US ALONE
HERE. WE’RE BUSY, OKAY?”
He started to mumble.
“Why is everybody all of a sudden so dang
interested in pla —”
“Dad, we’re going to talk about BRAS now,” I
said, and he scurried out before he had to hear his
daughter utter a single sentence with the words “
CUP
SIZE” in it.
“Dads, huh?” I said as I sat back down. “They’re
such a pain.”
“It’s not easy for dads,” Angeline said softly,
and I knew she was thinking of her dad, out of work and
worried. I wish I could have said something encouraging,
but then I realized the only thing I could have said
would have been:
“Don’t fret, Angeline, I’ve
constructed a gigantic lie to trick
you into feeling some false hope.
Isn’t that considerate of me?”
“Let’
s load up a couple of these things and
see how they look,” I said, masterfully changing
the subject, and we started jamming things on the
Deliciousness Trees. The bits that fell were
quickly snapped up by Stinkette
—
but not Stinker,
who seemed slightly less greedy and disgustingly fat
than usual.
“Can I take one of these home to show my dad?”
Angeline asked, and the look of concern that had been
on her face for the last few days was completely
washed away by her crazy blindingly beautiful smile. I
normally can’t stand how naturally dazzling she
is, but for just a second, I would have let her take
anything in our house to her dad.
It’s like I wanted her to be happy.
Ew.
The next day in class, we showed the
Deliciousness Trees to Mr. Henzy.
“They’re made from coat hangers,” I said.
“I can see that,” Mr. Henzy said. “They’re like
some sort of clever kebabs.”
“OH, JAMIE!” Angeline squealed.
“Klever Kebabs! With a K
! That’s way better than
Deliciousness Trees.”
I looked at Isabella for some support.
“It’s a jillion times better,” she said with a shrug.
I huffed.
“I’m not sure coat hangers are safe for food,”
Mr. Henzy said. “Maybe there’s another way to
make these.”
“I think coat hangers are okay. Don’t you,
Isabella?” I said, looking at her for support.
“They’re probably not,” she said. “They might
have residue of detergent or dry-cleaning chemicals on
them. Plus, the ends of those look pretty stabby. They
could probably poke out an eye or pierce a larynx.”
“What’s a larynx?”
“It’s in your throat,” she explained. “Your voice
box. You punch people in it.”
“Thanks, Isabella.”
“And I’m not sure why these kebabs with multiple
prongs would be better than just a single stick
anyway,” Mr. Henzy said.
Isabella stood up and cleared her larynx.
“Because, Mr. Henzy, we don’t like shish kebabs
telling us what order we should eat things in. We want
to decide. And there are some things we don’t want to
eat at all. We don’t want to have to eat a mushroom as
a penalty for getting down to the piece of chicken. This
is the future, old man. It’s time for you to get with the
times and deal with the New Kebab Reality.”
She sat back down, and the entire class
applauded. Calling him “
OLD MAN” probably wasn’t
necessary, but Mr. Henzy started laughing and clapped
a little himself.
Okay, now THAT was the kind of support I was
looking for. Thanks, Isabella.
Mr. Henzy studied the Deliciousness Tree
Klever
Kebab for a moment.
“This isn’t quite ready to test yet, Jamie. How
about if you let me knock this around a little and see if
I can find somebody to help you with it?”
Was this more of his
AWWWW-ful
faith in
me again? Was he going to try to teach me something
again? We both knew he couldn’t do it.
It’s hard to know if you should trust a teacher.
One day, when they were children, they went to school,
and they never found their way back out again as long
as they lived. You can only assume that they are either
very dumb because they never figured out how to
escape, or very smart because they’ve been going to
school for seventy-five years.
Angeline squealed.
“Now we can do these AND the plates. Jamie’s
dad has somebody who is going to make the plates!”
Mr. Henzy looked appropriately puzzled.
“Why? I thought your test on those failed,” he
said with the blunt, clear, logical thinking of somebody
you wish would just shut up.
Isabella said, “He’s right. They bombed. I hadn’t
thought of that. Why would anybody be interested in
those plates, Jamie?”
I looked at Angeline. She just blinked.
“Maybe plate experts know something about
plates that we don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they have
special plate strategies or something. I mean, look
around
—
there are plates EVERYWHERE. The plate
guys are doing something
right.”
And then I put everything I had into giving them
all a withering dirty look, designed to make them feel
stupid for asking.
And it worked.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Dirty Boxes
Angeline never shut up about our big plate
company. My dad, seeming to know what she was
talking about, helped me stall for time, but it also
amplified her commitment. I figured that the longer I
stalled, the more likely it was that Angeline’s dad
would just get a new job and we could drop the whole
dumb charade. You know, like we did with the Easter
Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. (But not zombies. Dude,
those are real.)
This strategy may have worked, except that Mr.
Henzy was still all interested in math and teaching us
Personal Finance stuff. So every time he started
talking about the cost of living, I watched Angeline add
up numbers, cross them out, chew her lip, and
add them up again.
Normally, this amount of lip chewing is hard on
lips, but it was just making hers look pinker and
plumper. It’s like that time she had one split end, and it
made it look like she had seven times as much hair.
“Who can tell me how much they need to earn a
year in order to cover their basic living expenses?” Mr.
Henzy asked with the kind of big, broad teacher smile
that assures you that they have no idea of how much
you wish they’d just stop.
A few hands went up, including Dicky’s, but
teachers often ignore his hand because it’s usually just
a request to go wash his shoes or belt or something else
that nobody but Dicky does at school.
Angeline didn’t raise her hand, and NOT
raising
your hand is like waving a red cape in front of a bull.
Teachers call on you the most when you don’t want to
be called on. It’s like how cats know who is allergic
to them, so they always choose to jump up on that
person’s lap.
He called on her, and she said she didn’t know
the answer
—
but she really did. She’s not great at
math, but this is really important to her and I know she
has it all figured out now. She just didn’t want to talk
about it because it would make her upset.
So Mr. Henzy started throwing the real numbers
at us, and it just seemed impossible. I don’t know how
my parents do it. I don’t know how anybody does it.
That night at dinner, or whatever you want to
call what Mom served us, I told them I couldn’t believe
how they managed to keep it all going
—
our lives, the
budget, all the expenses. I said that I was totally
impressed that we didn’t live in a dirty box down by
the lake.
They seemed to appreciate my appreciation.
“
Is
there a dirty box available?” Dad asked.
“Because that does sound like it could be a bit more
affordable.”
Dad bragged about my Deliciousness Tree
invention to Mom and told her how it was so great that
he was sure I would be able to sell it for millions of
dollars and we would be able to afford our own
individual dirty boxes and not have to share, and we
could have one for Stinker and one for Stinkette and
maybe an extra dirty old box for Isadora if I wanted to
invite her for a sleepover.
I was having so much fun that I didn’t even
correct him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE SALAD
Dicky counted my chews.
“Eight, nine, ten.”
I swallowed.
“Dicky, don’t do that,” I said. “Let me eat my
salad, and don’t count my chews.”
“You should chew every bite fifty times before
you swallow it,” he said. “Or a hundred.”
“I don’t even chew my gum fifty times before I
swallow it,” Isabella said, and she wasn’t kidding.
Isabella chews a mouthful of meat four times at
the most.
“You need to chew your food well to make
going
to the restroom
easier,” he whispered.
“Birds don’t even have teeth,” Isabella pointed
out. “Doesn’t seem like they’re having any trouble
going to the restroom. You should hear my dad swear
about what they do to his car.”
“Yeah, and whispering doesn’t make it okay to
talk about, Dicky,” I said, taking a long drink of my Coke.
“I’m going to go count somebody else’s chews,”
he said, and waddled away.
“Where’s Angeline?” Isabella asked. “Why
