Dear Dumb Diary #11: Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers

by Jim Benton

  Ricky bit me so I wouldn’t be able to throw at the

  bottle toss. Plus, I used three pleases.

  Let me explain: Fat Ricky is this little kid

  that Angeline babysits sometimes. Isabella and I

  stopped by her house last Thursday.

  When we opened the door, Angeline was

  holding Fat Ricky, and when he spotted Isabella, he

  lunged at her. (Babies instinctively hate her.)

  Isabella dodged as nimbly as a bullfighter, because

  it was pretty much your standard biting lunge and

  her brothers try that on her all the time.

  I was standing directly behind Isabella, and

  so Fat Ricky bit me right on the arm. And trust me,

  even though babies don’t have all their teeth, the

  few they do have are like little weasel teeth and

  they hurt like crazy. This is why scientists are always

  telling us: Avoid baby bites. (Or they should

  tell us that anyway.)

  Isabella’s eyes popped open wide and she

  repeated it: “That’s right. He bit you.”

  This isn’t how Isabella typically reacts to a

  person being bitten. Usually, she just laughs

  because generally, it’s her doing the biting.

  “That explains it,” she said.

  She pulled me to the side and explained in

  a whisper that Fat Ricky is probably radioactive,

  which would explain why everyone handles his

  diapers that way. (Arm’s length; brisk run to

  the trash.)

  Isabella said that when Ricky bit me, my DNA

  was somehow transformed, the same way that

  superheroes are always getting their DNA

  transformed. She says that I now have the

  superpowers of Being Like a Boy, and that

  explains how I managed to kick her, because a big

  sissy girl like me could never do it with my regular

  old sissy- girl powers.

  I told her that this sounded like a fairy tale.

  In fact, all of the superhero stories sound like fairy

  tales, with big, strong weight lifters in long

  underwear filling in for the fairy princesses.

  “Maybe,” Isabella said quietly, “but don’t

  you believe that sooner or later you’re entitled to a

  fairy tale?”

  While it was clear that Isabella had

  obviously been reading my diary (STOP IT NOW,

  ISABELLA), I also thought that maybe she really

  and truly believed this stuff. And if so, it might get

  me out of the whole bottle toss– Pinsetti kiss thing.

  “So,” I said. “The bet’s off, right? Since I

  have powers now?”

  Isabella thought about this for a full minute,

  which is enough time for Isabella to think pretty

  hard. Some of Isabella’s most dangerous thoughts

  come in at around sixty seconds.

  “Nope,” she said. “The bet stands.”

  “But what about my superpowers?” I said. To

  make the point, I struck a pose like a superhero. I’ve

  noticed that they always seem to have time to pose

  in spite of all the bad guys running around.

  She said she didn’t care, and I had to believe

  her. If there is one thing Isabella excels at, it’s

  carelessness.

  Wednesday 04

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  There’s a lot of talk going around about the

  fair, and it sounds like some of the boys are

  actually asking some of the girls to meet up

  with them there. These aren’t dates, exactly,

  not in the grossest sense of the word. But the idea

  is to meet at the Fun Fair and then hang around

  together, and I suppose the boys try to win you a

  prize because boys are just man- puppies, and men

  will work much harder to win a prize for a girl than

  they ever would for themselves.

  Wait. One. Second.

  How did I know that? Is it possible that I

  really am developing the superpowers of a boy? Is it

  possible that I’m beginning to understand the

  workings of their twisted, damaged, cloudy,

  disturbed, and occasionally adorable minds?

  I have to concentrate. Let me see if I can

  understand why they would want to watch sports on

  TV all day. . . .

  Nope. I have no idea, and I thought in such

  a manly way that I almost accidentally grew a

  mustache.

  Isabella is wrong. There’s no such thing as

  superpowers.

  (Although I am not fully prepared to give up

  on fairy tales.)

  Thursday 05

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  Thursday is always Meat Loaf Day at

  our school.

  There are two questions I believe the entire

  world is asking: How can the world not have run out

  of meat loaf by now, and what the heck is it made of?

  They serve it to us at school every week,

  they’re serving it at other schools, and regular

  people are even eating it at home for dinner. (Don’t

  ask me why.) Doesn’t it seem that our meat loaf

  mines should be depleted by now?

  And think about it: If we have so much

  meat loaf, isn’t there something more sensible we

  can do with it instead of eating it?

  I ask Miss Bruntford, the cafeteria monitor,

  what it’s made of almost every week, and I’ve kept

  track of her most common answers:

  Today, the suffocating, rank pew of

  the meat loaf was astonishing, but it did not

  diminish the spirits of the jillion boys that kept

  wandering up to our table to ask Angeline if she

  would hang out with them at the Fun Fair. I think

  that bad odors really do not bother males that

  much, and it is mainly for this reason that they can

  stand to be around themselves.

  After each boy asked, Angeline just smiled

  and politely said no thanks, and we watched the

  boys emotionally crackle and fizzle like little

  insects that had been drawn into a blond bug light.

  The weird thing is that it seemed like all the

  boys, even the ones who were clearly way too low

  on the popularity totem pole, felt entitled to ask

  Angeline, who is close to the very top. (Please

  note: There actually is a popularity totem pole.

  I made it.)

  Like, if you were some kind of spindly little

  goat, would you ask a gazelle to go for a gallop? No,

  of course not. You wouldn’t be qualified. You would

  ask a she- goat or a tortoise, or — what are those

  things with the wrinkly skin and sad eyes? — oh

  yeah, your grandma.

  But for some reason, boys just aren’t

  appropriately intimidated by Angeline.

  Except maybe for Hudson Rivers (eighth

  cutest boy in my school. I may have mentioned him

  before. Future husband or future ex- husband,

  haven’t decided). Angeline told me that he’s just

  about the only one who hasn’t asked her.

  See, here’s the thing with Hudson: I’m pretty

  sure that Angeline has a crush on him, and I’m sure

  he has one on her, too, because — let’s be honest

  here — all human males do. He’s had a crus
h on

  Isabella, but Isabella isn’t interested in him

  because of Isabella’s well-known policy of dealing

  with feelings of this nature. (She doesn’t.)

  Hudson probably knows that I have had a

  crush on him, and he might have had one on me at

  one time, but because of all of this twisted history,

  he doesn’t want to create any problems between

  three friends (even though Angeline is more friends

  with us than we are with her).

  Wait. One. Second.

  How weird is it that I TOTALLY KNOW

  WHAT HE’S FEELING?

  Perhaps I must just accept that boy DNA is

  actually fusing with my own nicer, prettier DNA.

  Friday 06

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  Today, Isabella asked us who the best

  athletes at our school were. I had no idea, and

  couldn’t figure out why Isabella even cared. But I

  was distracted when Angeline began spouting off

  statistics like she was Google.

  It turns out that boys like to tell Angeline how

  good they are at sports. They do it so often that

  Angeline has a lot of the information memorized,

  even though she says she has no idea what most of

  it means. (Which suggests that sports are sort of

  like many of my favorite songs.)

  Isabella actually began taking notes,

  which I believe are the only things I’ve never seen

  Isabella take before.

  The Toe (Mrs. Maple) gave us an

  assignment about ants on Tuesday, and she made

  Emmily, Isabella, and me partners. The Toe likes to

  give group projects because it means fewer papers

  to grade and more time to carefully groom and

  preen her precious appendages.

  I’m sure you recall, Dumb Diary, that Emmily

  is our friend that spells her name with two m’s

  because it reminds her of candy. For a long time,

  I thought she meant that it reminded her of candy

  because of the little m’s they print on some

  candies, but she told me it’s really because mm

  is the sound she makes when she eats them. (She

  thought the letters on the candies were w’s anyway.)

  We need to write a paper and have some

  sort of visual aid for our project, like an ant

  sculpture, or an ant costume, or something.

  What this all means is that Isabella won’t help

  much with the report because reports aren’t her

  thing, and Emmily can’t help much because of

  her micro-brain, so I’ll have to single- handedly do

  a report about an insect that isn’t as pretty as a

  butterfly, or as considerate as a bee — which at

  least is decent enough to die from guilt after it

  stings you.

  Saturday 07

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  Mom and Dad went out for a fancy dinner

  tonight, and since Stinker — my bucket of beagle

  guts — and his dogdaughter, Stinkette, would not

  be courageous enough to protect me from a

  psychotic- maniac- vampire- cannibal, they asked

  my Aunt Carol to come over and hang out with me

  while they were gone. You know, to look out for

  me. Like a babysitter.

  I pointed out to them that pretty, 130-pound

  babysitters like Aunt Carol seem to be exactly

  what those psychotic- maniac- vampire- cannibals

  are attracted to in every single scary movie ever

  made. If anything, hanging around with one after

  dark is probably the absolute worst way to stay safe.

  But they insisted, and I really didn’t complain

  much because I suddenly realized that Aunt Carol is

  slower than I am. This means I don’t have to run

  faster than the psychotic- maniac- vampire-

  cannibal, I just have to run faster than whoever is

  with me when the psychotic- maniac- vampire-

  cannibal starts chasing us.

  Dad, as always, was ready for dinner forty

  minutes before Mom. He sat uncomfortably on

  the couch impatiently fumbling with the car keys

  and staring at his watch every couple of minutes,

  as if looking at it meanly might make Mom

  move quicker.

  I knew what he was thinking, and felt I had to

  explain everything to him.

  “Dad,” I said, “when you get ready to go

  out, you shower, maybe shave, and put on clean

  clothes. At the end of all that, what we have is a

  man that smells slightly better than when the

  process began.”

  Dad looked at me and nodded.

  “Mom, on the other hand, is totally

  transformed into a different human being by this

  process. Not only does she emerge immaculately

  cleaned and combed, things are colored, perfumed,

  moisturized, and manipulated in ways you just

  can’t begin to imagine. That kind of intense

  lady- magic just takes longer.”

  My dad cocked his head in the way that

  beagles do when they are trying hard to understand

  something.

  He set his keys on the table, leaned back, and

  smiled. His impatience dissolved away. When Mom

  came out, he gave her a big hug and off they went.

  And as Aunt Carol and I waved good- bye to

  them, I realized that I had successfully calmed

  Dad’s butt down, and there was only one startling

  explanation: I must have spoken The Male

  Language.

  It gets weirder.

  Later on, as Aunt Carol and I watched TV, we

  started talking. She complained about this friend

  of hers and how her friend said this one thing about

  some stuff that made Aunt Carol bring up some

  junk about this other thing, and before she knew

  it, they were all like RAWR RAWR RAWR at

  each other.

  Of course this all made perfect sense to me,

  but she said that when she told Uncle Dan (her

  husband and my assistant principal) the exact

  same story, he started giving her advice about all

  kinds of different ways to handle her friend, and

  blah blah blah, and what’s even up with that?

  And it happened again. I understood The

  Male Language.

  I told Aunt Carol that I thought when you tell

  a male about a problem, he will often assume that

  you want him to solve the problem. When you

  tell a female about a problem, she will often

  assume that you just want to express how you feel

  about the problem. Unless you make it clear to the

  listener that you’re looking for something other

  than what comes naturally to them, that’s how it’s

  probably going to go down.

  (I even said that exact thing, “That’s how it’s

  going to go down,” because that’s how dudes talk. I

  think my male superpower made me say it that way.)

  Aunt Carol looked at me with her giant,

  amazed eyes and said, “Huh.” Which, because I

  still speak The Female Language, I

  recognized as meaning: “Oh my gosh. You’re right.

  I never saw it that way before. You are totally right,

  and pretty, too.”

  Maybe Isabella was
onto something. Maybe

  superpowers ARE real, and maybe I have some.

  Sunday 08

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  Isabella and Emmily came over today to work

  on our science project. I hadn’t written down when

  it was due, and my partners were no help since

  Isabella said “never” and Emmily didn’t

  remember being assigned anything at all.

  Or the teacher who assigned it.

  Or where her classroom was.

  I probably should have felt dumb calling

  Angeline to ask her, but I did it anyway. She had the

  date, plus all the details of the assignment, and a

  book about ants that she offered to lend us.

  Angeline was at my house fifteen minutes

  later. She said she would have been there sooner,

  but she stopped to catch us a jar full of ants for our

  visual aid.

  While she was patiently answering Emmily’s

  question about why ants don’t wear clothes, I was

  filled with this bizarre regret that Angeline wasn’t

  in our group.

  I thought about suggesting that she ask The

  Toe if she could switch into our group, and then it

  suddenly occurred to me: KRYPTONITE.

  My Superpowers of Boyishness have come

  with a super- weakness. Just like Superman is

  vulnerable to Kryptonite, my boy powers have made

  me weak and vulnerable in the way that Angeline

  makes ALL boys weak and vulnerable.

  If I had made the mistake of asking her to

  switch into our group, she could have said no, and I

  would have crackled and fizzled away like the boys

  that asked her to meet them at the fair.

  These powers of mine. Perhaps they come

  with risks.

  Monday 09

  Dear Dumb Diary,

  I didn’t know what to feed the little jar of

  ants that Angeline brought us. I took a guess and

  gave them a little piece of my toast and left the

  radio on so they wouldn’t be so bored all day,