by Jim Benton
She looked at me and asked, “Why? Do you
want to go and tell them it isn’t?”
And she was right, which is always a
surprising thing to discover about an adult. You
know, because of how they are.
FRIDAY 13
Dear Dumb Diary,
I asked Isabella why she had even wanted to
have an arm-wrestling competition in the first
place. She said she did the whole thing so that Jake
and Emmily could meet and see how much they had
in common, like a love for arm wrestling, and
thinking that puppets are alive.
It might be hard for other people to believe
that Isabella would go to all this trouble for another
person (or any trouble, for that matter), but I
happen to know that Isabella has a soft spot for
Emmily. This is evidenced by the several times she
has elected not to put the KICK ME sign on
Emmily’s back again after numerous impacts
knocked it off.
Saturday 14
Dear Dumb Diary,
Aunt Carol came over today. She was going
shopping and asked Angeline to join her and they
decided to stop by and see if I felt like going along.
Remember, Dumb Diary, that Aunt Carol is
also Angeline’s aunt now because she married
Angeline’s uncle. I know I have explained this to you
before, but I want this to serve as a warning to
future Jamie to be very careful who she marries,
and to consider the impact your marriages will have
on the environment. Especially the environment
of your various relatives, who will have to deal with
your husbandand his relatives, even though they
did not share in the joy of picking out a wedding
dress and bossing around your bridesmaids.
When Aunt Carol and Angeline invited me
to go shopping, I suggested we pick up Isabella.
They reminded me that Isabella was currently not
welcome at the mall due to a misunderstanding
about a bottle of bubble bath liquid and their
fountain and somebody who looked like Isabella
being videotaped pouring one into the other.
Long story short: That could have been
anybody that looked like Isabella, and the fountain
needed to be cleaned anyway. And probably the
floor. And possibly the pants of the forty people
that slipped in it.
So we went without Isabella, because the
mall is a mystical, magical, majestic place
where you may find all of the world’s trea sures (but
make sure you get a receipt, because when you get
home you may find that some of the world’s treasures
make some of your other trea sures look fat). And I
couldn’t pass that up.
We went to a bunch of stores and watched
Aunt Carol almost buy a tremendously ugly purse,
but we sneered at it so hard she dropped it like it
was full of scorpions. (Oldsters, we will always be
there for you, telling you when things are gross, if
you just call out to us.)
We had lunch at the mall, too. For some
reason, food always tastes better when it’s
surrounded by stuff you can’t afford.
And then two amazing things happened at
the same time: First, I saw Hudson Rivers with
his dad across the mall and he guy-waved at us.
The second thing was that Chip, who is the
number one cutest guy in our school, walked
over and asked Angeline if she would meet him at
the Fun Fair.
Chip is cute enough to be in a commercial for
men’s cologne, but he is not that kind of weird cute
where you can tell he would be just as cute if he had
been born a girl. Chip also has a supercoolness
that never quits.
Angeline did not choke on the lemonade
she was drinking and then start laughing out of
some kind of weird embarrassment —which I may
have done, but that is a perfectly normal reaction
when you are unexpectedly avalanched by that
much coolness.
Instead, Angeline barely smiled and quietly
said, “I guess.”
And that’s when my superpowers
kicked in. Hudson was watching us from across the
food court, and his face just fell. And then a split
second of anger flashed across it, and then a
microsecond of sadness. And then he turned,
and was gone.
Don’t think I’m nuts here, Dumb Diary, but I
believe it’s possible that boys, like ants, may
actually, really, and truly feel things.
Sunday 15
Dear Dumb Diary,
Once, there was a huge wart. Either it ate
something terrible, or it contracted some kind of
horrible illness, and a beagle broke out on its skin
and began to grow.
When it achieved maximum grossness, the
beagle ate the wart and lived on by itself.
Eventually, this wartdog came to be known as
Stinker, my beagle.
Stinker grew in size and odor, living mostly on
dog food, morsels dropped on the floor, an
occasional sock or underpant, and for dessert, his
own foul moods.
In order to anger me as deeply as possible,
Stinker married Angeline’s dog, Stickybuns, and
they had puppies together. One of those, Stinkette,
is also my dog.
Stinkette inherited many qualities from her
dogdaddy. She looks like him, smells putrid like him,
and has similar tastes in food, which is why I’m even
mentioning this.
This morning I was talking to my ant jar,
encouraging the ants to live at least until our
report was due, and I noticed Stinkette snurfling
under my bed.
When I dragged her out, she had dust bunnies
on her nose, and had evidently eaten quite a few
because she started making the loud KACK noise
beagles make to indicate that they have eaten
something they didn’t care for, and are about to
kack it out on the floor.
The sound of the kacking, and the
appearance of the partially swallowed dust
bunnies, suddenly reminded me that I might
have to kiss Mike Pinsetti.
In a panic, I ran downstairs and gathered a
bunch of things so I could set up a practice bottle-
toss game in my backyard and try to improve.
I set up bottles to tip over with a tennis ball,
and a drawing of a clown to avoid hitting with the
ball, just to be safe. (I don’t think I could
hospitalize a clown with a tennis ball, but I don’t
want to take that chance.)
When the dogs saw me go outside with a ball,
they assumed that it was for them, because chasing
after balls is one of the most important things in the
world to dogs, right after scratching, slobbering,
and things I’d rather not talk about.
Stinker is a huge ball hog, so if Stinkette
was going to get any chance at all to play, I had to
throw it directly to her. This is harder than you might
think, because Stinker likes to
use his gargantuan
fatness to get between me and Stinkette. If Stinker
was just four pounds heavier, the city would make
us get a permit to operate a dairy.
Still, I managed to get the ball past the
cow-beagle thing, so Stinkette got a chance to play.
After a while, Isabella and Emmily came over
for more ant study, and Angeline tagged along
because she said she finished her report already
and would help with ours if we wanted.
They watched me play with the dogs before I
put them inside so that I could demonstrate the
fake Fun Fair game I was going to use to practice.
Isabella objected, saying that she made the
bet with an unpracticed Jamie, and that practicing
this way was cheating.
But both Angeline and Emmily stood up for
me, saying practicing was perfectly fair — Angeline
pointed out that it was how she learned the guitar,
and Emmily pointed out that it was how she learned
pointing.
And then, just to show Isabella how things
worked, I set up the bottles and threw a high-speed,
perfectly aimed tennis ball onto the roof.
The next ball was much closer, bouncing off
a window behind which Stinkette was frantically
trying to catch it.
The following ten throws went a variety of
places. I never hit the target, but I was getting
closer. Isabella was laughing so hard she wrote,
“Please stop can’t breathe” in the dirt
with her finger.
I finally had to stop when my arm started to
hurt and my mom came out and said that Stinkette
was slobbering all over the glass and I should quit
before she peed.
Isabella didn’t change her mind about me
practicing, but she did ask me to record it next time
so she could watch it anytime she was depressed.
We went inside and got to work writing down
all sorts of ant junk, like that they only live for
six to nine weeks, except the queen, who can live for
years and have millions of babies. Also that a
colony is almost all females, who do all of the hard
work, with only a few tiny flying males winging
around the queen.
I included in our report that I think it’s pretty
unfair that girl ants don’t have a choice in the
things they do. Maybe some of them want to fly,
maybe some of them want to strike out on their
own and be queens of their own colonies. Maybe
there’s an ant that just wants to do things her
own way.
When I said that, I noticed that Angeline
wrote it down. She wrote only three words on her
paper: Her Own Way. She had a faraway look
in her eyes, like she was thinking hard about
something, or had been very recently kicked in
the face.
Monday 16
Dear Dumb Diary,
In the cafeteria today, Emmily said that Jake
asked her to meet him at the fair and she told him
she couldn’t.
This really surprised all of us, because Emmily
will accept an invitation to watch you do laundry.
When we asked her why, she said it was
mostly because she had already met him. Then
she called us stupid for not remembering that she’d
met him at the arm-wrestling competition.
After a few minutes of explaining her little
mistake to her, and how “meet” can mean a couple
different things, Angeline told Emmily to just go
explain to Jake and tell him that she wanted to
meet up with him at the fair.
Isabella chimed in that girls can’t ask boys to
things because asking is the boy’s job.
Angeline was a little angry at this and asked
Isabella if she thought we should behave like a
bunch of ants, and follow some set of bug rules
about what the females could and could not do.
It turns out that Isabella may have been
listening in class after all, because she pointed out
that there are a heck of a lot more ants in the world
than there are people, so maybe we SHOULD take
a little advice from the ants, who were at least
smart enough to get rid of all the blond-haired
ants long ago.
I’m almost friends with Angeline now, but
that doesn’t mean I’m friends with her hair, and I
had to laugh at Isabella’s scientific observation.
(I’m afraid our arguing may have confused
Emmily, whose eyes cross when this happens. It was
probably the comment about blond ants.)
Angeline stood up with a look on her face like
my mom after Dad makes a dadmistake
(examples include: “Yes, it makes you look fat” or
“Don’t worry, we can still eat this”). Maintaining eye
contact with Isabella the whole time, she walked
over to a table where Pinsetti was sitting and asked
him, loud enough for me and Emmily and Isabella
and Hudson (who was sitting just a couple tables
away) to hear, if he would like to meet up
with her at the Fun Fair.
Time seemed to stop for a minute, especially
for Pinsetti, whose breathing also did. After a little
shake, he snapped out of it and said yes.
Angeline walked back, sat down, and said
to Emmily: “You see? You can ask Jake if you want to.
Anybody can ask anybody.”
Emmily nodded, smiled, and said, “Yeah, I
know. I just don’t want to.”
While Isabella laughed, I watched Angeline
swallow hard, realizing that she had just asked
Pinsetti to the fair after she had already told Chip
she’d meet him there, and all because she was
trying to prove a point to somebody who already
understood it.
And I felt sorry for her.
I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for Angeline’s
eyelashes. Not one bit. I’m not friends with those,
either.
But I did feel sorry for the girl they were
dragging around.
Tuesday 17
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today I looked at my jar of ants, which I now
realize are all girl ants, and explained to them it
wouldn’t be much longer before they could go free.
I just wanted to turn them in with the report, and
then that would be that. I tried to cheer them up
with some candy, which I gave to them in very small
pieces gently lowered into the jar.
Then I put them on the highest shelf in my
room, because I could feel Stinkette’s beady little
beagle eyes glaring at the candy in the jar.
Because I’m a little bit psychic (it comes with
the superpowers), I detected some tension between
Isabella and Angeline in science class. I think that
Angeline may blame Isabella a little for putting her
in that position with Pinsetti. Also, the big heart
with “Angeline Loves Pinsetti” written on it
that Isabella made and held up for Angeline to see
in class could have contributed to the hard feelings.
Isabella very nearly got caugh
t by Mrs. Maple,
who I suspect may use those long, waggling toes to
detect things the ways ants use their antennae.
Angeline didn’t really react at all, which is
the number one way to infuriate Isabella. I’m
not sure if I told that to Angeline, or if she figured it
out by watching TV shows about handling the
criminally insane or babies.
The Toe reminded us that our ant reports are
due in ten days, and Emmily raised her hand to ask
a question.
When Emmily raises her hand, teachers always
grit their teeth, take a huge inhale, and then let it
out in one big burst through their nostrils. They’ve
learned from experience that there are generally
four categories of questions Emmily asks:
But Mrs. Maple called on her anyway.
1. “Can I please go to the bathroom?”
2. “Where is the bathroom?”
3. “Is it okay if I raise my hand and ask a
question?”
4. “I don’t understand anything you’ve said
in the last thirty minutes. Could you explain
it again, please? Also the last six weeks.”
And Emmily asked, “Why are ants so strong?
You don’t see other little things, like hamsters,
lifting couches over their heads. And if the females
are that strong, wouldn’t the boy ants be even
better at doing the work, since boys are stronger
than girls?”
Mrs. Maple’s mean face was replaced by one
of astonishment that Emmily had asked a real
question. The rest of us were astonished, too, and
we probably would have listened to the answer
except for the fact that it was astonishingly
boring.
Except Isabella listened. And she listened
very carefully.
Angeline noticed and made a “What’s up
with Isabella” face at me, and I made a
“Yeah, I know” face back at her.
Wednesday 18
Dear Dumb Diary,
