by Jim Benton
Math. It was reasonable. Math and I talked about
how many fingers I had, and then later in our
relationship, we discussed my toe count.
Way back then, 2 looked like a swan, and 5
looked like a duck. 4 was the sail of a tiny boat
happily drifting past.
But as we progressed, I saw that 6 and 9
were coiled snakes. Now I realize that I should
have recognized that 8, a beheaded snowman,
was supposed to be a warning to me.
This may sound like I have a negative
attitude, but it’s hard to be positive about
numbers after you learn that more than half of
them are negative themselves.
Sure, I know, zero isn’t negative, but by now
he must have realized that he’ll never amount to
anything on his own, and that has to hurt.
But words aren’t like that.
Sure, some of them have made questionable
choices about how they should be spelled, but if you
aren’t certain about how a word is spelled, you can
always choose an alturnative alturnitive alturnutive
a different way of saying the same thing.
Those sorts of options are there for you when
you need to tell somebody who is wearing something
gross that it looks gross without using the word
“gross.” (Those wearing something gross,
in particular, should be grateful for this.)
So today in language arts class, Mrs. Avon
asked us to write a paragraph explaining a short
poem that she had read to us.
I finished mine quickly, and then happened to
glance over at Angeline, who was writing and erasing
and writing and writing and erasing and looking up
at the ceiling and then writing some more.
I’ve probably never mentioned Angeline to
you before, Dumb Diary, because her intense good
looks, eternal niceness, and towering popularity
just aren’t something I’ve ever really noticed. I only
mention her now because her Uncle Dan is married
to my Aunt Carol, which means we’re related but
not really.
I guess Angeline is a friend-like person.
I think I would like her more if she was less likable to
others.
Anyhow, Angeline was biting her lip and
pulling at her luminous golden hair — which is really
quite average as luminous golden hair goes —
and struggling with this little paragraph.
Seriously, Angeline, it isn’t that hard. Just
write it down and be done with it.
At the end of the class, Mrs. Avon asked if
anybody would read their little paragraph out loud.
I casually raised my hand, but instead Mrs. Avon
called on Angeline, who didn’t even have her hand
up. She must have using some sort of telepathic
prettiness to attract the teacher’s attention.
Since it was pretty darn clear that whatever
Angeline wrote was going to be dumb, I inhaled
deeply and pursed my lips tightly, preparing myself
to make a big, appropriate ppppfffffffftttt
sound after she read it.
But after she did, Mrs. Avon said it was great
and gummed all over the place, and even Hudson
Rivers (eighth cutest boy in my grade and known
poetry hater) smiled and nodded.
I strongly felt the need to point out that so
much erasing went into Angeline’s little paragraph
that there was a little pink pile of eraser shrapnel
under her desk — but then the class ended. Plus,
I didn’t really know how to make the point that
Angeline was only good at language arts through
immense effort , and for me it all came quite
easily, which should dramatically reduce how
impressed they all were with her.
Seriously, people. Isn’t working that
hard a lot like false eyelashes or false cheeks or
false eyes? You don’t really deserve all the praise.
Am I right?
All I could do was flaunt my unused eraser as
I exited the class.
Thursday 05
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today, Isabella was complaining to me and
Angeline about being broke again. Every time
Isabella decides she wants something, we have to
listen to her ideas about raising money until she
finally gets what she’s after.
Isabella doesn’t get any kind of allowance,
and we’re too young to have real jobs, so cash is
hard to come by. It’s not like it was when our parents
were kids and they could have a paper route or rob a
stagecoach.
She told me that she gets as much as ten
dollars from her dad every time she brings home a
good report card, but she thinks the next one
probably won’t get her any more than two bucks,
and two bucks won’t cut it.
Angeline said her parents would never pay
her for good grades, and I really don’t think mine
would, either. I wouldn’t even want to ask them. I
can imagine the huge lecture it would start.
Yeah, no thanks.
At dinner tonight, my parents brought up my
grades and maturity again, and I got the impression
that maybe they had carefully considered brand-new
arguments so that I couldn’t stick them up
their noses like I did the earlier ones.
Dad opened up by saying that I needed math
so in case I ever built a rocket or something, I could
calculate the right amount of fuel to put on board.
Yup. That was really what he said.
Really.
Mom just stared at him for a moment before
she gently eased Dad into his chair and softly put
one finger over his lips. It made me think of how you
might handle a very vocal and very old ox that you
weren’t quite ready to make into stew today, but
maybe tomorrow.
And then Mom turned to me, and I suddenly
had the impression that perhaps I was being
considered as another ingredient in tomorrow’s stew.
“Your grades are going to improve,” she
said. “You may not believe it now, but I’m telling
you, Jamie Alexandra Kelly, either you bring the
grades up or the grades are going to bring
you down.”
The sound of my middle name burnt the inside
of my ear. I hate it when she uses it that way and
she knows it.
“I love when you use my middle name,” I said.
“Let’s use it all the time.”
“I know she gets this from Isabella,” the ox
said from his quiet-chair.
Friday 06
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella reminded me that I asked her to
sleep over tonight, which was good because I often
forget these things without her helpful reminders.
She also just remembered that eight years ago I
borrowed a dollar from her. Incredibly, she even
remembered that I had borrowed it on a Wednesday.
She is so good with numbers. I would have
forgotten to pay her back.
Isabella is over so much that my parents
don’t even try to clean
up the house or talk nice in
front of her. Deep down, they must love her.
Everybody knows that the more you love
somebody, the less you try to look nice for them.
My parents feel SO COMFORTABLE with
her, in fact, that at dinner they decided to pursue
the grades conversation again, right in front of her.
“So, Isabella,” my dad said, trying to sound
all sly, “what do you think about grades? Are they
important?”
Then he gazed over at me like he was some
sort of lawyer who had just asked the question that
was going to convict the accused criminal and
sentence them to a lifetime of math.
Isabella eyed him carefully. I’ve seen her do
this before. It’s scary. She can pry open your head
through your eyes and see what’s going on in there.
“Sure they are,” she said, and, anticipating
my reaction, she moved her leg out of the way
before I could kick it under the table. Isabella is
kicked under tables pretty regularly, so she can tell
when somebody is going to attempt it just by tiny
shifts in their shoulders.
“But improving grades can be hard,” she
continued. “Sometimes parents don’t understand
just how hard. There are a lot of things on a young
girl’s mind.”
My mom stopped chewing for a minute and
stared intently at Isabella. My dad kept eating and
nodding.
I was a little grossed out to hear what
sounded like the voice of either a counselor or a
principal or some similar weirdo coming out of
Isabella’s mouth — and believe me, I’ve heard
some gross things come out of there.
Speaking of gross things and mouths, it was
at this exact moment that Stinker and Stinkette
(my fat beagle and his fat dogdaughter) decided to
bark and fight and growl over some little lump of
food that Isabella had accidentally dropped on
the floor.
“Better take them outside,” Isabella said. I
grabbed the Disgusting Duo and collar-walked
them out of the house and into the backyard.
Fortunately, by the time I got back, Isabella
had regained her senses, and we were no longer
talking about anybody’s futures or dumb things
like that.
For the rest of the evening, we spoke only of
things that really mattered in the world.
Saturday 07
Dear Dumb Diary,
Dad got us hamburgers and French fries for
lunch today, and Isabella and I ate them while
Stinker and Stinkette watched us eat.
It’s not hard to guess what they were
thinking, because it’s a known fact that dogs only
have five thoughts to choose from.
1. I want to sleep.
2. I want to go to the bathroom and I won’t need
an actual bathroom.
3. I want to eat what you’re eating now.
4. I want to scratch or sniff or lick something and
I don’t care who is watching.
5. I want to bark until somebody yells at me.
Isabella likes to torment the dogs by
pretending to throw a French fry and watching
them scramble for it, which is mean and wrong.
I even told her to stop after she did it about
sixty times.
This antagonizes Stinker in particular, since
he is fatter than Stinkette, and for some reason fat
dogs are very determined to stay fat. My Uncle
Lou shares this quality with Stinker, as well as a
willingness to fart in a closed car with others. (The
Uncle Lou story is long and terrifying. Let’s just
say that I barely managed to save my own life by
breathing the fragrance through the holes in a
couple of peppermint Life Savers held protectively
around my nostrils.)
I’ve heard a lot of people say there really isn’t
a Loch Ness monster, and there are no such things
as aliens from other planets, and ghosts aren’t real,
but I have never once heard anybody say that
Bigfoot doesn’t exist after they saw my Uncle Lou
at the beach.
He stayed overnight at our house one time,
and after he used the shower, the floor of our tub
looked like it had been carpeted.
Even so, Mom loved having him as a guest
because he is the only human on Earth who actually
enjoys her cooking. Gristle, bone, beaks — he
doesn’t care what you feed him.
“I like anything that will make a fart bad
enough to murder my niece, Jamie,” he always says,
probably.
Isabella didn’t want to watch a movie or ride
bikes or even do Zombie/Vampire/Goth makeovers,
which is usually her favorite thing to do that won’t
get us grounded.
So since she didn’t want to do anything
important, we actually wound up doing
homework on a Saturday. This is when
Angeline always does it, thereby turning her Sunday
into a weird substitute Saturday. Switching days
around that way must have an effect on the
Natural Order of Things. I’m not saying
Angeline is somehow accelerating global warming,
but it’s pretty clear that nobody can confidently
deny it.
Against Isabella’s wishes, we started with our
language arts homework. It seemed like the logical
place to start, mostly because it’s my house and I
said she had to go home if we didn’t.
Our assignment was to write a short poem
about life. This kind of assignment is pretty easy for
me, since I use words every day and don’t feel like
clobbering people when I see them (which is the way
numbers often make me feel).
Here’s the poem I beautifully composed:
Your life is like a pizza.
It could be round, it could be square.
But you’ll enjoy it most of all
When it’s something that you share.
I let Isabella read it to help her get the hang
of poetry writing. Isabella doesn’t really seem to
care much about words. I’m pretty sure she would
be perfectly happy knowing only a dozen or so,
as long as at least two of them were swears.
Isabella wrote and erased for a long time
until she finally came up with this one:
Life is like a pizza.
It is good to eat.
You better share your pizza with me.
You greedy piggy slob.
I stood there for a moment after I read it, not
knowing exactly what to say.
Finally I just hugged her, because a hug
said it best of all. This was the most amazing poem
Isabella had ever composed, and the longest thing
she’d ever written that wasn’t a list of the same
sentence over and over, repeating something she
would never do or break or puncture again.
I was so happy I was even willing to
perform math.
Isabella is pretty good at math, because the
things that affect her the most have a lot to do
with math: hours of detention, mone
y, how many
stitches somebody has to get because of her. . . .
We warmed up on a couple of story problems.
The first one was about a guy on a train, but
Isabella switched things up so that I would
hate it less. She turned the guy on the train into
Lady Gaga on her tour bus, and I had to figure
out when she would have to leave New York if
she wanted to be fifteen minutes late for her
performance, which is a stylish amount of time
to be late, but not so late that your fans will
start tearing off each other’s false eyelashes, or
fourteen-inch-tall high heels, or hats made out of
banana bread and coat hangers or whatever.
Eventually we moved on to our real math
homework. It had far less Gaga in it, but seemed to
be just a little easier with Isabella there to provide
nurturing support and nurturing
assurance and nurturing arm punches
when I got something wrong.
Sunday 08
Dear Dumb Diary,
My standard Sunday schedule looks something
like this:
8:00: Alarm goes off.
8:15: Alarm goes off again.
8:30: Alarm goes off again.
9:00: Mom goes off.
9:30 until bedtime: Wander around
trying to not do homework that I know I
have to do before bedtime, while avoiding
questions about homework and room
cleaning and dog-poop-picking-up-from-
the-backyard-before-Dad-runs-it-over-
with-the-lawnmower-and-creates-
a-hideous-Poo-Rainbow-of-Horror.
But since Isabella and I finished our
homework yesterday, today I was free to frolic
about on my Sunday afternoon. I was surprised
to learn that there were others out there who were
doing the same.
This must be how zombies feel when they
come across other zombies.
Mom and I went to the store to get me some
