by Jim Benton
“I bet you’re wearing a different shirt
underneath that one,” he said.
We looked at each other for a moment and
then sat in silence for several blocks.
“It’s best that we don’t know the results of
these bets,” I said, unbuttoning monkeyvomit.
“I have no idea what we were just talking
about,” he said, loosening his tie.
In the afternoon, Angeline ran up to my
locker and rudely interrupted a conversation that
Isabella and I could have been having. (Of course
she didn’t see the monkeyvomit shirt. I had that
stashed in my backpack.)
“We doubled the hits on the site!” she
squealed squealfully.
Isabella pulled out the new iPad that her
mean older brothers recently gave her without their
knowledge.
“Show us,” she said.
Angeline opened up the Student Awareness
Committee site. “See? Look at the numbers! We
had FOUR people read the blog last night.”
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Isabella and I started laughing. I could actually
hear our laughter echoing off the flawless
porcelain perfection of Angeline’s sad face.
“That’s just embarrassing,” I said.
“You’re making the Internet cry,” Isabella
added. “You’re making my iPad feel bad about itself.”
Angeline looked hurt, which I am sensitive
and caring enough to know should bother me. But
then an expression suddenly flashed across her face
that reminded me of Isabella, and I shuddered.
“Well, it’s not my name there at the top of
the page.”
She was right. Isabella and I are the
presidents of the Student Awareness Committee.
Right there at the top of the page, just below the ad
for Lou’s Car Wash and just above Angeline’s latest
article (“Lambs Are Really Cute When They Do Cute
Lamby Things”), we saw our names, big and
bold, like the entire stupid site had been our
stupid idea or something.
Instinctively, I tried to rub our names
off with my fingers, but it’s an iPad, so the names
just got bigger, and I panicked for a second.
“We quit,” Isabella said.
“Yeah. Take it down,” I said.
“Let’s see what Uncle Dan thinks about you
two ignoring your responsibilities,” Angeline said
snottily, and started marching snottily toward
the office.
You might remember, Dumb Diary, that Dan
Devon is the assistant principal of our school. He’s
Angeline’s uncle, and since he married my Aunt
Carol last year he’s my uncle now, too.
As she snottily stormed away, Angeline
turned around just long enough to let us have a
snotty glimpse of the puppy-dog eyes she was
planning to snottily use on Assistant Principal
Devon. They were so big and watery and sad
that, for a moment, I was sure that there was a
blinded puppy stumbling around someplace looking
for the eyeballs that some snot had stolen.
22
“Hang on,” Isabella said. She told me
that Assistant Principal Devon just got over
being angry about her selling some first graders
earthworms by telling them that they were baby
boa constrictors. She had to give the money
back, wash some desks, and write a report about
why it is wrong to paint stripes and eyes and fangs
on a worm. Needless to say, Isabella doesn’t feel
like having any additional friction right now.
“People don’t appreciate how hard it is to
customize a worm,” she said quietly.
23
So we agreed to help Angeline with the stupid
site we’re presidents of. I told her maybe I’d try to
come up with something to write about, just to
protect our reputations. Isabella, who is so cute
with how she’s always grubbing for money,
wanted to know about the car wash ad.
“That sponsor,” Isabella said. “How did you
get them to place an ad on your derfy little
website?”
“He’s a friend of my dad. We have a way to
tell how many people click on his ad,” Angeline
explained. “The more people that click, the more
Lou donates to the Student Awareness Committee.
He only pays when people click.”
Isabella began clicking furiously on the
ad. She looked like a squirrel trying to crack open a
nut with one finger. Squirrels might do that.
“Here comes my money,” she said gleefully.
“It won’t work,” Angeline said. “The clicks
have to come from different users. The Internet
is onto you, Isabella.”
24
As much as I would have loved to hang around
and be bored the rest of the way to
death, I had to go get my monkeyvomit shirt and
cleverly put it back on in the girls’ bathroom.
After I changed, I kept the shirt concealed
under my jacket and ran out to the car, where Mom
was waiting to pick me up. Perfect timing.
I must get my trickiness from Dad. When he
came home from work tonight, he was confidently
wearing his monkeyvomit tie. The three of us sat
down to eat, and for the first time in a long time,
Mom’s dinner was not the ugliest-looking thing
at the table.
Maybe Mom should use this fabric to make a
tablecloth. Then everything she served would look
great in comparison.
Thursday 05
Dear Dumb Diary,
Thursday used to be Meat Loaf Day. We would
spend the first half of the day fearing lunch and
the second half regretting it.
We helped convince the school to stop having
Meat Loaf Thursday, and they replaced it with
SURPRISE Thursday. Now Bruntford (our
lunchroom monitor) walks around taking little
surveys where she asks you how much you either
A.) Hate
or
B.) Especially hate
the new Thursday Special.
26
Isabella and I were forming our opinion of
today’s Thursday Special, the HOTDOG FIESTA
(which was nothing more than a sad little hotdog
wobbling around in a taco shell), when Angeline
flitted over and landed at our table like an
enormous butterfly, only much flittier.
“Got something to write about?” she asked.
“For our site?”
“I can’t think of anything to write about,” I
said. “What are you writing about next?”
“This new menu item,” she said, pointing
one of her lustrously painted fingernails at my
lunch. “I’m writing about the Hotdog Fiesta and
how good it is.”
“Good? Are you joking?” I asked.
“‘Fiesta’ means ‘party’ in Spanish. This is more like
a . . .” I turned to Isabella. “How do you say
‘funeral’ in Spanish?”
“El funeral,” she said. “Or entierro.”
“Isabella speaks Spanish?” Angeli
ne asked,
surprised.
I shook my head. “No. She just knows how to
say ‘funeral’ in a lot of different languages.”
27
Friday 06
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today, Isabella showed me our Student
Awareness Committee site again. 53 people liked
Angeline’s story about the Hotdog Fiesta. That’s a
record number of likes. There’s a little section
under the article where people can leave their
comments, and that’s where things get really weird.
“Awesome story,” one person wrote.
“I guess those hotdog things are pretty
good,” a different dope said.
“I hated them until I read your article.
Now I love them,” said another misguided
halfwit.
Isabella tapped the screen on her
brothers’
iPad.
“And look — she says that tomorrow she’s
writing something about how much she likes to run
laps in gym.”
Isabella pointed out that Angeline might be
influencing public opinion. Soon, everybody will
see everything the way Angeline does. Isabella
said that even though Angeline isn’t as bad as many
of the diseases we’ve read about, one Angeline
seems to be about as many as the world should
have to deal with, in spite of the fact that it seems
to be able to deal with many diseases.
I told her that I didn’t think Angeline’s dumb
little blog posts meant anything to anybody.
“You remember how long it took you to finally
get rid of the meat loaf? How many of those Hotdog
Fiestas are you prepared to eat?” Isabella asked
dramatically. “And don’t forget the other things
they’ve tried to substitute for meat loaf.”
29
Isabella is sleeping over tonight. Right after
dinner, my mom gave her a great big surprise. A
REALLY BIG SURPRISE.
My mom made Isabella a skirt and hat.
Isabella kicks people far more than the
average person kicks people, and when you do
that in a skirt, there’s a huge issue of not
broadcasting your underwear for the whole world
to see because:
A.) It’s embarrassing.
and
B.) All the people who saw the underwear have to
be kicked as well, and the whole process
begins all over again.
and
C.) Who has time for that?
30
So Isabella hates skirts. But even though
she hates them, and even though this particular
skirt was ugly even compared to my monkeyvomit
shirt, Isabella accepted it, said thank you, and ran
off to the bathroom and put it on. She even wore
the matching hat.
We were all watching that reality show on TV
with those awful people that say awful things to
one another, and when my mom got up to leave the
room, I asked Isabella if she really liked the skirt.
“Oh, heck no,” she said right away, and
my dad laughed quietly.
“Then why were you in such a hurry to put it
on?” I whispered.
“Jamie, my grandma is always making me
horrible clothes. I know all about these things.
The sooner you wear them, the sooner you spill
something on them or tear out a seam. With stuff
this ugly, you must never delay, Jamie. You have
to wear it fast and wear it hard.”
Dad and I looked at her in awe. How can she
scheme so well?
31
Dad jumped up and ran out of the room. Two
minutes later he was in the kitchen, wearing his
monkeyvomit tie.
“Who wants hot fudge sundaes?” he shouted
merrily, waving the chocolate syrup bottle
recklessly.
Unfortunately, not a drop got on the tie.
32
Saturday 07
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella and I had one of those days where
you spend four hours trying to come up with
something to do, and then, by the time you come up
with something, there’s no time to do it, so you just
watch TV in positions that make it look like maybe
you were born without bones.
We do this about twelve times a month.
“Since we’re not really doing anything, we
should practice debate,” I said.
“No, we shouldn’t,” Isabella said.
“We just did,” I said.
Then Isabella hit me for tricking her into
practicing debate.
33
“Maybe what we should do is have you write
something for that dumb website,” she suggested.
“That’s not US doing something. That’s ME
doing something.”
“Look,” Isabella said. “We could spend hours
going back and forth about why I see something
one way and you see it the other, wrong way. The
bottom line is that Angeline is currently writing
circles around you, and I guess that means she’s the
better writer.”
“HA,” I said, really big like that. “I’m a
better writer than she is and you know it.” (Look
how big I wrote that HA.)
34
“Oh, I know, Jamie. It’s just that, right now,
nobody else does. The whole school is reading
Angeline’s entries and not yours.”
She was right, but it made me so mad
that I intentionally spilled soda on her pants so
she would have to walk home wearing the
monkeyvomit skirt.
(And hat, you know, because it really set off
the ensemble.)
35
Sunday 08
Dear Dumb Diary,
I started to read Angeline’s entries on the
Student Awareness Committee blog today. Here’s
one of them:
I like warm days. I don't like when it's very hot,
and I don't like when it's very cold. Sometimes when
it's only a little bit hot I don't mind it much. And
sometimes when it's only a little bit cold I don't mind
it much. In conclusion, I like warm days.
— Angeline
P.S. And kind-of-warm days.
It was a great entry because I’ve always
wondered what sort of thing we’d get to read if a
blog post was written by a fart. Like, a real fart.
Like if a mindless odor-cloud, with no
personality or purpose, stopped drifting around
a room for a moment, somehow learned how to
press the keys on a keyboard, and wrote a few lines
36
about the weather before it just dissolved into
thin air and was blamed on the dog. I had always
wondered that.
And then I read the responses to her post,
which got 67 likes, now the current record.
37
“Oh, Angeline, you really nailed it. LOL! Warm
days! LOL!”
“I liked the part about the warm days. Wow!”
“I agree about the cold days and also about
the days that aren’t very cold.”
Angeline is slowly turning everybody
into farts.
Dear Dumb Diary,
It’s clear that Mr. Smith’s wig was designed
for men with thinning hair who want to create the
illusion that they are balancing a Yorkshire terrier
on their heads. This is not really appealing to
anybody, except maybe a real Yorkshire terrier
during a flood.
In social studies today, he had us pair up with
our partners for quiet practice debates. He gave us
each a short list of subjects and said to just spend
a couple of minutes on each one. He explained that
one of us had to be against the things, and one of
us had to be for them.
“I’ll be for the things,” Angeline said.
“But you haven’t even read the list,” I said.
“That’s okay.” She smiled. “I know that I’m
for them.”
39
How can somebody know that they’re for
something without even knowing what it is? I
started just making up debate topics to test this
theory.
“All right, Angeline,” I said, pretending to
read from the list. “Why are you for rainy days?”
“It’s good for the plants, and you can stay
inside and read a book.”
Okay. Okay, maybe I could see that.
“How about the flu?” I said. “Why are you in
favor of the flu?”
“Well, it helps you to appreciate the people
that take care of you, and you feel so great when
it’s over.”
I almost bit through my pencil.
“Okay, Blondy. How about getting struck by
lightning?”
Angeline rolled her big fat eyes and batted
her big fat eyelashes. I’d done it. Even Angeline
couldn’t come up with something good about
getting struck by lightni —
40
“Well, it’s a very rare occurrence. So, I guess
it would make you famous,” she said, SMILING.
