by Jim Benton
although it’s hard to hurry when you’re all jiggly-
legged, I realized that we were a little smelly from
running. Not very smelly, of course, but experience
has taught me that by lunchtime it was going to be
worse. Much worse. Think: bologna sandwich
left out on the counter all morning.
I had no perfume, no cologne, and no
deodorant — nothing. And then a fragrance hit us
right between the nostrils as we passed the
Teachers’ Lounge.
It smelled kind of flowery, and definitely
sophisticated. It was a mature scent, and yet
somehow playful and innocent.
“Here,” Isabella said. “In here.” She opened
the door and pulled me through with her.
We were in the Teachers’ Lounge.
We had heard stories of this place, of
course — the wild parties, the strange rituals, the
plump comfy cushions stuffed with confiscated
notes.
But there was no evidence of any of that. If
anything, it was pretty boring and simple. The
colors were on the drab side, the cushions not
plump at all.
The teachers had probably just left for class.
A coffeepot simmered on the burner. This alone
stood out from the shabby surroundings, because
the aroma was heavenly.
“I don’t even like coffee, but I’ve never
smelled anything so good,” I said.
Isabella had already found the bag of
grounds and was examining it carefully.
“This is expensive coffee,” she said.
“Really expensive.”
We looked around. There was a half -eaten
box of bargain donuts on the table. The refrigerator
was full of normal-looking lunches in Tupperware
containers. The flowers in the vase on the table
were plastic. Nothing in the lounge was expensive —
except the coffee.
Isabella dug her hand into the bag, reached
under her shirt, and rubbed a handful of coffee
grounds into her armpit.
64
I ran toward the door. I knew what was
coming next. But Isabella stopped me.
“You said it yourself,” she whispered. “This
smells great. We don’t have a choice. You want
to smell like my Uncle Ned all day? It’s better than
nothing.”
One time, I had dinner at Isabella’s house and
she and I had to sit next to her Uncle Ned. Uncle Ned
smells like every smell every person can smell like,
ALL AT ONCE. They used to sit him next to an
open window, but the neighbors started to
complain. The neighbors in Canada.
I cautiously inhaled the coffee scent from the
bag. It smelled so good that, the next thing you
know, I was also applying the grounds to myself.
We dusted our hands off, peeked carefully
out the door, and then ran to class.
65
Teachers like me. I said, they LIKE me. They
don’t love me. But today, it was different.
They smiled at me more. They joked with me
more. Even Mrs. Curie, who has been on edge with
me about this whole meat loaf business, didn’t get
upset when I asked if she thought that wild dogs
would have bailed on evolution if they had known
they were going to end up as French Poodles.
The reason why the teachers were all so
cheery didn’t occur to me until lunch, when Angeline
sat down between me and Isabella.
66
“Do you smell that?” Angeline asked
us, taking a big inhale of the air around us.
“The coffee?” I asked. “Nope,” I said quickly,
realizing that wasn’t the right way to answer her
question.
“Did you two bring coffee for lunch?” she
said, studying our lunches.
“No,” Isabella said. “Stop smelling us. Stop
smelling everything.”
Bruntford rumbled past. From behind, we saw
her huge frame stop and turn around. She was
smiling.
“How are you ladies today?” she asked
pleasantly.
Two things you never want to see rise: The
Dead, and Isabella’s eyebrow.
Isabella’s eyebrow rose.
“Hey, Bruntford,” Isabella said, making a
point to call her only by her last name. “We were
thinking of having candy for lunch on Monday. You
cool with that?”
Bruntford takes her lunchroom monitoring
very seriously, and eating candy for lunch is the
type of thing that could make a great angry flume
of water spray out of her blowhole.
“Well, okay. Just this once. Have a nice day,
ladies,” she said and waddled away.
Isabella looked at me and grinned.
“It’s the coffee,” she said quietly,
motioning toward her armpit. “They like how we
smell.”
At first I didn’t believe it. But smells do have
a powerful effect on people, and teachers do love
their coffee.
68
Saturday 14
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella pounded on our front door at 8:30
this morning. ON A SATURDAY. You know who’s
up at 8:30 on a Saturday? Nobody. At 8:30, you can
look outside and see birds and squirrels just lying on
the sidewalks, fast asleep.
“Jamie!” she said in a rigid, over-rehearsed
tone, “I have forgotten my school assignment in my
locker at school and must go there to acquire it.”
“Acquire?” I asked. “Acquire?”
“It’s Saturday,” my mom said hoarsely, still
struggling with some morning voice. “What makes
you think you can even get into the school?”
“There are clubs and sports and so forth,”
Isabella recited stiffly. “They use the school on
Saturdays. An example of one is the Drama Club,
who are preparing for the school play, which is
called Oklahoma! But my parents aren’t home right
now, and I don’t think the school is open for long.”
I didn’t know what she was up to, but I knew
it wasn’t homework. And I knew that Isabella was
going to blow it.
69
Even this early in the morning, she was a little
too rehearsed for my mom. I had to save it.
“Forget it, Isabella,” I said. “You’ll just
have to miss the assignment. Who cares if you don’t
do some homework?”
“Oh, no you won’t,” Mom said, snapping at
the bait like a big drowsy trout. “I’ll drive you up
there myself. Jamie, go get ready.”
Works every time.
Isabella came up to my room with me while I
got dressed. I told her that I couldn’t believe she
wasn’t better at lying. Usually her lies are like a
type of ballet.
“Whatever. Let’s get on with your plan,”
she said.
“MY plan? It’s YOUR PLAN,” I objected.
She said that as soon as I stepped in and
helped sell the story to my mom, I had taken partial
ownership of
the plan. That clumsy lying was all an
act, I see now, to get me in on this.
She bounced happily out of my room,
swinging her backpack over her shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she said.
71
When we got to the school, my mom waited in
the car. The front door was unlocked, so we walked
quickly through the empty halls. I stopped by
Isabella’s locker. She kept walking.
“Isn’t your homework in here?” I called
after her.
She kept walking . . . right up to the
Teachers’ Lounge. She knocked on the door and
listened.
No answer.
“Isabella!” I whispered. “What are you
doing?”
“Just keep watch.”
She was in and out in a blink —and she had a
sandwich bag half- filled with the special coffee.
She tucked the coffee into her backpack,
pulled out a small bottle of perfume, and squirted
us both a few times.
“So your mom won’t smell the coffee,” she
said. Then she pulled a homework assignment out of
her backpack to wave at my mom as we trotted
back out to the car.
Isabella had tricked me into being a coffee-
stealing accomplice, and had tricked my mom into
driving the getaway car.
Sunday 15
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella and I spent the morning
whisperyelling at each other on the phone.
“What if we had been caught? What would we
tell my mom?”
“What if we were elephants? What if the moon
explodes? What if spelling matters? These are all
ridiculous questions. We weren’t caught, Jamie.
And now we have the coffee,” she said.
“What are you thinking of doing with that,
anyway?”
“I haven’t figured it out yet. But this is
powerful voodoo, Jamie. You saw how it worked.”
And then she told me we have another
extracurricular to sign up for tomorrow.
I questioned, in very intelligent terms, if we
should even be continuing with the plan to fill our
Permanent Records with extracurriculars, since it
was leading us down a very dark path. “A path as
dark as the darkest espresso,” I said solemnly.
73
But then Isabella complimented me on the
espresso metaphor, and I kind of forgot that I was
concerned.
74
Monday 16
Dear Dumb Diary,
Angeline walked slowly past my locker today
and took a deep breath. I know she was smelling
me, because I may have done the exact same move
to her on several occasions.
“How weird are you, smelling people?” I
asked, all disgusted.
“No coffee today, huh?” Angeline said
knowingly.
“No,” I said.
“Too bad. You know who’s crazy about
coffee? Hudson. I know that you’re kind of over him
and everything, but he loves the stuff.”
“You’re right, Angeline. I am over him,” I said,
with the careless sort of shrug that only the TRULY
OVER can shrug.
75
A few minutes later, I pushed Isabella up
against a stall in the girls’ bathroom and started
digging into her backpack.
“I need some of that coffee,” I said.
Isabella opened the bag, and I scooped some out
and began rubbing it on my neck and wrists like a
fancy perfume. As I checked my hair in the mirror, I
realized that Yolanda had stepped out of a stall and
was watching us.
“What is that? Dirt?” she asked. “Brownie mix?”
Isabella moved toward her. Yolanda
swallowed hard. All the dainty in the world couldn’t
protect her from Isabella.
“Look, Isabella,” she said nervously. “I’m
sorry I made you guys run with us the other day. I
was just trying to get back at you for the tennis
ball thing.”
I stopped Isabella before she could say
anything.
“If she hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have
ever found out about this stuff,” I reminded her
quietly.
Isabella thought for a minute.
“Yeah, okay, Yolanda. But not a word,”
Isabella warned, and I motioned to Yolanda to make
a quick exit before Isabella changed her mind.
I suddenly smelled like a very pretty, very
feminine Starbucks, so the lunch ladies were extra
pleasant and Bruntford tried smiling at me again,
which you would find kind of pleasant but mostly
disturbing even if you were a bison.
Hudson was sitting with Angeline and Isabella
when I got to our lunch table. I sat down right next
to him, leaning in to give him a large inhale of my
fragrance.
He looked at me, repulsed.
“What is that smell? Were you drinking
coffee?” he groaned.
“I, uh, no, I just, I.” Not my best explanation,
I’ll admit, but that’s pretty much how I answered.
He got up and ran from the table.
“He hates coffee,” Angeline said.
“Can’t even stand the smell of it.”
“You said he loved it!”
“Now do you want to tell me what’s going
on?” Angeline asked.
I looked over at Isabella, and she was trying
not to laugh. “Everybody knows Hudson hates
coffee,” she said.
Angeline pursed her lips. “Jamie. You
and I are friends. Why would you keep something
from me?”
I was mad.
“Angeline, the next time you smell somebody
and it occurs to you to tell them that somebody
likes the smell of something, you shouldn’t lie
about it.”
“I’ll stop if you will,” she said.
“Angeline, I’ve lied about smells, like —how
many times, Isabella?”
“Maybe four times,” Isabella said. “Probably
only one time.”
“Yeah, ONE TIME!” I yelled.
Seriously. After all I’ve done for Angeline, this
is how she acts?
78
Tuesday 17
Dear Dumb Diary,
Right after Mrs. Curie took attendance in
science today, I raised my hand.
“Mrs. Curie, I have another idea about
the meat loaf.”
Mrs. Curie said it would have to wait until a
different time. But then, without even raising her
hand, Angeline said that she wanted to hear it.
She’s probably just trying to apologize to me for
stinking out Hudson.
And then Hudson agreed, and then there was
murmuring and head nodding and Mrs. Curie said,
“Fine. Let’s hear it.”
“Well, I was thinking about the cow it came
from. And how the farmer was probably always
telling the cow to finish eating his cow food or
whatever. And the farmer probably made the cow do
special cow exercises and take special cow medicine.”
79
hips. “Right, the farmer wants to keep the cow big
and healthy.”
“No,” I said. “If the farmer could sell the
cow skinny and sick, he would be totally cool with
that. It’s all done for the benefit of the farmer, not
the cow.”
“And how does this relate to the meat loaf?”
she asked.
“Maybe the meat loaf . . . maybe it’s not
for our benefit, either,” I said. “Maybe we’re like
the cow.”
80
I sat across from my Uncle Dan again. This
time he looked a little more uncley than assistant
principally.
“Again with Mrs. Curie?” he asked.
I told him about the conversation we were
having and how Mrs. Curie was all wrong about me
being disruptive. We were just talking.
“Mike Pinsetti was the one that started
mooing,” I said.
“Mike does that all the time,” he said. “He’s
not mooing. I think that he breathes through his
mouth.”
Uncle Dan looked though my folder and
smiled. I think he was on my side on this one.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re really in a lot of clubs
now, I see. Lots of extracurriculars here!”
I nodded and looked away, afraid that I might
confess out my eyes.
“You want me to talk to Mrs. Curie?” he
offered.
I did want him to, but since I had recently
been involved in a coffee robbery here at the
school, I didn’t think I deserved his help.
“No,” I said. “Can I just wait here for a few
minutes and pretend like you yelled at me?”
After sitting there for a few minutes, I asked
him, “By the way, Uncle Dan, do YOU eat the meat
loaf in the cafeteria? You should try it. It’s really
unspeakably awful.”
82
Wednesday 18
Dear Dumb Diary,
I had to work on my news story for Mrs. Avon
in class today, and I didn’t have any good ideas. I
didn’t mean to show any of my headline ideas to