Dumbness is a Dish Best Served Cold (Dear Dumb Diary: Deluxe) Read online

  Hey, since I was invited to their wedding, am I

  automatically invited to their divorce?

  Probably.

  The day finally arrived, and we proudly watched

  as kids lined up in the cafeteria with their HEALTH-

  O-PLATES.

  Yes. That’s what Angeline calls them. I know,

  I know.

  Angeline took careful notes. Isabella snapped

  pictures with her phone.

  We proudly watched as the lunch staff precisely

  glopped the foods on the plates in the correct

  proportions.

  I proudly nodded at Uncle Dan as he proudly

  winked at me. This was a great idea, and he

  proudly knew it.

  We

  proudly watched as kids walked to find

  their seats, stopping only briefly to slide the glop they

  didn’t like directly into the trash cans before they

  sat down.

  “No, no, no,” Angeline said as she stopped

  Mike Pinsetti in mid-glop sliding. “The idea is that you

  eat it all. You eat everything on your plate. See, the

  plates help you balance your meal.”

  “Why?” Mike asked blankly.

  “For your health,” Angeline said, with her arms

  spread wide as if she was going to hug everybody’s

  health all at once.

  “I don’t really like my health,” Mike said. He

  tried to walk around her, but she moved back in front

  of him.

  Pinsetti is kind of a bully and weighs two

  hundred pounds more than Angeline, but for some

  reason, he stopped dead and listened to her.

  “You don’t like your health?” she asked.

  “Well, I kinda like it.” He shrugged. “But if my

  health is going to be a huge jerk all the time about

  what I eat, then, like, forget him.”

  We scanned the cafeteria. Nobody was eating

  everything on their plates. Nobody was even paying

  attention to their plates.

  Except Dicky.

  Dicky ate everything, and he ate it all

  alphabetically, just in case alphabetical eating was a

  thing. I’m guessing he thought it might be because

  vitamins are alphabetical.

  Isabella snapped a couple photos of the rejected

  food in the trash cans.

  “These plates don’t work,” Isabella

  said. “Nobody will obey a plate.”

  I looked down in the trash. Angeline dragged

  herself over and dropped her little notepad in.

  “They even threw away the salads,” I said. “I

  mean, some of the other stuff is gross, but who doesn’t

  like a salad?”

  “I don’t,” Isabella said. “Salads aren’t food.

  Salads are what food eats.”

  “That’s dumb,” Angeline mumbled. “You’re

  dumb.”

  The

  HEALTH-O-PLATE failure had hit

  Angeline harder than we knew. Angeline never called

  people dumb. Not even dumb people. One time, we

  went on a field trip to a farm and saw a horse that

  could only gallop backward, and Angeline wouldn’t

  even call him dumb. She called him “differently

  stabled.”

  She was really depressed.

  “A salad is just a pile of leaves,” Isabella said.

  “When my dad is out working in the yard, he throws

  away bags and bags of salad. Stop by and eat one

  anytime you like, Angeline.”

  “So dumb,” Angeline repeated, staring at the

  floor. It was hard to tell who her criticism was aimed at.

  “But you can put salad dressing on them,” I said

  to Isabella, still trying to make a case for salads.

  “That’s just goop, and you love goop.”

  “There aren’t even that many good ones to

  choose from,” Isabella said. “A few different kinds of

  ranch, some vinaigrettes, Thousand Island. We have a

  million different ways to make a sandwich but only

  a few kinds of tolerable salad dressings, and none of

  them are tasty enough to make me eat what’s basically

  a floral arrangement.”

  Angeline shuffled off, muttering to herself.

  There’s really nothing quite as sad as a perky blond

  in the dumps. It’s like seeing a bunny dipped in tar, or a

  Christmas cookie on the floor of a public bathroom.

  I probably should have offered her a sip of my

  7Up, but that would have meant that I would have

  had one sip less, and that wasn’t going to work

  for me.

  Later, in Mr. Henzy’s class, he asked how our

  HEALTH-O-PLATES experiment had gone. We had

  to confess that it was a huge failure. We told him that

  nobody was really very interested in our creation.

  He was actually pretty sweet about it all.

  “Things like that usually fail,” he said.

  “Hey, thanks for the warning!” Isabella shouted.

  “By the way, when you warn people, that means YOU

  TELL THEM IN ADVANCE.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I just mean that

  many ideas don’t work at first. Things sometimes need

  to be modified or retested. Diamonds don’t look that

  great when you dig them up. They have to be

  polished

  —

  then they’re spectacular.”

  “Cat turds don’t look great when you dig them

  up, either,” Isabella said. “But they don’t change much

  when you try to polish them.”

  “Do we still get extra credit?” I asked, trying

  to find something positive in this whole mess.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “You actually learned

  more by failing than succeeding.”

  “Thanks,” Isabella said. “Nice job encouraging

  us to fail.”

  I looked over at Angeline, who had said nothing

  during the entire exchange. She didn’t smile. She didn’t

  blink. She wasn’t even trying that hard to smell good,

  which is one of her main things.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THIS IS WHERE I FOUND OUT

  WHAT THE DEAL WAS

  That night, Aunt Carol came over for dinner.

  Uncle Dan had to leave town for some assistant

  principal convention, where they teach them to be

  better assistant principals.

  I began to tell her about the HEALTH-O-

  PLATE tragedy, but she already knew about it. Even

  though it was a colossal embarrassment, she thought

  it was great that the three of us were already thinking

  about earning money for college.

  “You’re really going to need it,” she said.

  “Especially Angeline. You know that her dad got fi —”

  Mom

  kicked Aunt Carol so hard one of her

  earrings fell off.

  I lunged for it, of course, because Stinker

  believes that anything that falls on the floor is food.

  I’ve seen a few fashion items that have been run

  through a beagle. It really doesn’t improve most

  of them.

  But Stinker didn’t snap at it, so I was able to

  return it to Aunt Carol uneaten.

  “What were you saying about Angeline?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Mom said, but it wasn’t the

  “nothing” where there isn’t anyth
ing there. It was

  the

  “NOTHING” where there’s so much of something

  there that you can’t stand it. It was the kind of

  nothing that is the exact opposite of nothing.

  “I think I should know, Mom,” I said. “I’m old

  enough to handle big things.”

  “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “Angeline’s dad got

  fired, and things are really tight for them right now.

  We’re a little better off, but as of this moment, we

  don’t have enough money to pay for you to go to

  college. When Grandma died, we thought there might

  be a little something for you to inherit, but after her

  expenses, there was hardly anything left. She said that

  she wanted you to have a bracelet of hers that

  might have been worth something, but we can’t

  find it. We think it must have gotten lost when we

  packed up her things.”

  I swallowed hard.

  Guess I was wrong.

  I really wasn’t old enough to handle big

  things. Not all at once, shoved in my face like that. And

  up my nose and under my eyelids and down my throat

  and in my ears.

  “That’s why Angeline cared so much about her

  plate idea. She really needs to make money,” I said

  quietly.

  “Don’t share this information with anybody,

  Jamie,” Mom said sternly. “I’m trusting you not to talk

  to anybody about it. Not Angeline, and especially not

  Isabella.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What about Isabella? Can I

  tell her?”

  “Not

  ANYBODY

  .”

  “Okay. I understand. I promise,” I said.

  But here’s the thing about promises:

  If you promise somebody something and they

  don’t believe that you’ll keep the promise, then when

  you break that promise, it’s not that big of a deal: They

  weren’t counting on you anyway, so nobody gets

  blamed for anything.

  If you promise somebody something and they

  DO believe you, but they SHOULDN’T have believed

  you, then when the promise is broken they really

  should have known better. It’s not your fault that

  they didn’t.

  If you promise somebody something and they

  believe you, and they had every reason to believe you,

  and you really intended to keep the promise, then the

  only reason the promise could have been broken was

  because of something that was totally out of your

  control. And who could blame you for something out of

  your control?

  I’m not saying I broke that promise to my mom,

  I’m just saying it’s important to understand how

  promises actually work, and I’m never to blame.

  The next morning at school, I saw Angeline filling

  her water bottle at the drinking fountain. She does this

  every day, many times a day, because she is

  responsible about not wasting plastic bottles, and like

  so many people these days, she needs constant

  hydration.

  You never see people in old photos or movies

  carrying water bottles around, but nowadays

  everybody does, even though I think people a long time

  ago used to work harder and would have been thirstier.

  My friends often take a water bottle with them in

  the car, going between their house and someplace

  where there is water, as if maybe something will

  happen in the car that will cause them to have life-

  threatening thirst.

  Anyway, Angeline was filling her bottle again,

  but she wasn’t holding it at the right angle where the

  water would enter the bottle flawlessly, like she usually

  does. She wasn’t even smiling at the water, and

  Angeline smiles at everything.

  She was getting some water in the bottle, some

  on her hand, some on the floor. And she was looking

  nowhere, staring at nothing. Her eyes even seemed less

  blue, less twinkly. I think she may have been shedding

  some of her eyelashes, which would be very bad news

  for the janitors, since they would have to rake them up.

  “Good news,” I blurted out involuntarily.

  I could taste the lie forming in my mouth. I

  could feel it kicking around. I was sweating. It hurt.

  I didn’t want to do it. But she was so sad. She

  was so worried. With one immense labor pain, I gave

  birth to a lie baby.

  “My dad spoke to somebody he knows who makes

  paper plates, and they’re interested in our HEALTH-

  O-PLATES.”

  It seemed as though time slowed down for a

  moment, and I could see the lie swirling around in the

  air between us. Angeline was staring at it. The color

  returned to her eyes, her cheeks reddened, and she

  activated the enzyme in her body that makes her smell

  like strawberries.

  And then: the sound.

  It was like a squeal that steadily rose in pitch

  and volume into something like a scream, but more

  musical than that

  —

  like if a flute screamed. And then

  it got louder, and the sound of laughter seemed to be

  added to the scream, and every container of spoiled

  milk in a two-mile radius suddenly became fresh again.

  She hugged me and waggled me around like

  a doll until the bell rang and she had to skip merrily

  to class.

  I knew it was a lie, but for the moment, it

  seemed like the right thing to do.

  I turned to go to class and walked straight into

  Isabella.

  “What was that about?” she asked.

  “You heard that?” I said, and I realized that I

  was about to lie to my best friend, which I should never

  do. Isabella almost invented lying to best friends,

  and she can tell when anyone is doing it.

  “We all heard it, Jamie. And look at you. You’ve

  been

  freshly waggled.”

  It’s pretty easy to tell when somebody has just

  received a waggling.

  “I told her that my dad knows somebody in the

  paper plate business, and they might be interested in

  our

  HEALTH-O-PLATES.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “It’s not a him. It’s a her. Her name is Kirsten

  Hall.”

  Just like that, I had used one of Isabella’s own

  techniques against her. Years ago, Isabella taught me

  to have a couple FASTFAKENAMES ready, just in

  case someone asks. The names have to be believable,

  and you have to practice saying them. Stalling for a

  name will always give you away.

  My female FASTFAKENAME is Kirsten Hall.

  I have an entire assortment. My male

  FASTFAKENAME is Bob Peterson. My fake

  FASTFAKENAME for myself is Jenny Ryan. My

  FASTFAKENAME for a pet is Twinkle. I can go

  on and on.

  “So we might get paid?” Isabella asked, her

  fingers clenching imaginary money. (She doesn’t even

  realize she does that.)

  “We might,” I said, looking her in the eye. Not for

  too long, of course, becau
se that makes it obvious

  you’re lying. It’s almost as bad as avoiding eye contact

  completely. There’s an exact amount of time that’s

  right. Like half a second.

  “Cool,” Isabella said, and we started walking

  to class.

  Lying is good,

  I said to myself, carefully

  making sure not to say it out loud, since I’ve learned

  that’s another excellent way to get caught.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  YOU’RE GOING TO NEED BIGGER REINDEER

  Every single day after that, Angeline had a new

  idea for the plates.

  Every day.

  Every. Single. Day.

  “Let’s make one for kids who can’t read yet.”

  “Let’s make one for kids with food sensitivities.”

  “Let’s make one for kids with different religious

  requirements.”

  And Isabella would nod in agreement, and I

  would have to go home and make the stupid things.

  “Any word from your dad’s friend yet?” Angeline

  would ask. “Should we have a meeting with her or

  something?”

  The whole thing reminded me of the Easter

  Bunny.

  When I was little, my parents told me about a

  happy little bunny that came every Easter and hid

  baskets full of chocolate and jelly beans for all the

  children.

  Pretty good story, except that the neighbor lady

  had a pet bunny.

  His name was Bouncyboy and he was too stupid

  to even react to his own name, much less have his act

  together enough to prepare baskets of candy. It’s true,

  at first he

  seemed

  to be pretty generous with the

  black jelly beans, but those weren’t really jelly beans.

  So, deep down, I knew the whole story was a lie.

  But every Easter, there would be a basket of candy for

  me, so I didn’t ask a lot of questions.

  “The Easter Bunny is coming,” Mom would say in

  the weeks before Easter, and she’d be all excited and

  playful.

  “Oh. Right. Sure thing, Mom,” I would say, and