by Jim Benton
Dumbness Is a Dish
Best Served Cold
Think you can handle
Jamie Kelly’s first year of diaries?
#1 Let’s Pretend This Never Happened
#2 My Pants Are Haunted!
#3 Am I The Princess Or The Frog?
#4 Never Do Anything, Ever
#5 Can Adults Become Human?
#6 The Problem With Here Is That It’s Where I’m From
#7 Never Underestimate Your Dumbness
#8 It’s Not My Fault I Know Everything
#9 That’s What Friends Aren't For
#10 The Worst Things in Life Are Also Free
#11 Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers
#12 Me! (Just Like You, Only Better)
And don’t miss
.
.
.
Year Two #1: School. Hasn’t This Gone On Long Enough?
Year Two #2: The Super-Nice Are Super-Annoying
Year Two #3: Nobody’s Perfect. I’m As Close As It Gets.
Year Two #4: What I Don’t Know Might Hurt Me
Year Two #5: You Can Bet on That
Year Two #6: Live Each Day To The Dumbest
Jim Benton’s Tales from Mackerel Middle School
DELUXE
DEAR DUMB DIARY,
BY JAMIE KELLY
SCHOLASTIC INC.
Dumbness Is a Dish
Best Served Cold
Copyright © 2016 by Jim Benton
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920.
scholastic
and
associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
dear
dumb
diary
is a registered trademark of Jim Benton.
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility
for author or third- party websites or their content.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this
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Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living
or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data available
e-ISBN 978-0-545-93293-6
First printing, July 2016
Page design by Yaffa Jaskoll
For Shea, Ella, and Elaina.
Thanks to Kristen LeClerc, Shannon Penney,
Abby McAden, Sarah Evans, Yaffa Jaskoll,
and Emily Rader.
Dumbness Is a Dish
Best Served Cold
Dear Whoever Is Reading My Dumb Diary,
We all know that we’re
not
supposed to read
other people’s diaries. We’re all mature enough
to understand that certain things are just
private, and we should just keep our
nosy
noses
out of other people’s business.
But honestly, I sort of can’t blame you for
being a horrible, nosy person. I mean, if I knew
somebody who had been involved with a
Big
Weird Thing
like
The Big Weird Thing
that I’ve been involved with, I would probably
behave like the type of horrible turd who reads
other people’s diaries.
Yeah, right.
Who are we kidding?
Of course I wouldn’t.
I know that reading another person’s diary
can reduce the amount of money you earn one
day, add unwanted calories to your diet, and can
result in tooth decay, intense blondness, and a
whole bunch of other things nobody likes.
Trust me, I’m doing you a favor here.
Put down the diary and walk
away slowly.
Signed,
P.S.
Oh yeah, everything in here is true. I swear.
At least, as true as it
needs
to be.
SUNDAY 01
Dear Dumb Diary,
So the carton says this stuff we buy is 2% milk.
Am I the only one who wonders what the other 98% is?
It could be anything, right? Mouthwash, udder
sweat
.
.
.
It just seems to me that what we really would
like to know is what MOST of the stuff in there is
—
not
just the 2% that’s milk.
At our house, for my cereal I can use 2% milk, or
coffee creamer, or skim milk, which my mom buys
because she says it’s helping her lose weight.
But she really hates drinking it, so my dad uses
it in his coffee so she won’t have to. He hates it, too,
but he drinks it for her out of love.
Sometimes I feed it to the dogs out of my love
for them both.
At breakfast, I usually have one of these cereals
to choose from:
We might have WheatyOs, which are like little
dehydrated clown lips. Or we could have the
Fibergrunt Flakes, which, based upon what I’ve
heard about fiber, are eaten mostly because you also
want to poo them. Or we might even have the
Frosted
Crispy Wonderfuls, which are purchased just for
me
—
but my parents secretly eat them, so those are
gone about four hours after they’re purchased.
There’s also always oatmeal, but I never eat that
unless it’s really cold out and I want to eat livestock
feed. Or if the criminals that are holding me hostage
are forcing me to eat it. (It’s probably the main way
you’ll know that I’m being held hostage, and you should
call the police.)
And that’s it. Those are my choices.
Well, on a GOOD day those are my choices. On a
good day, Life lets me choose between the Fibergrunt
Flakes and oatmeal. With skim milk.
I’ve always wished there was a way to demand
that Life takes you out for pancakes.
Dear Dumb Diary again,
I’ve decided not to do things like usual, Dumb
Diary, because I want to tell you the entire story of
THE BIG WEIRD THING without going day by day.
So this is more like one gigantic diary entry that I’ll just
split up into chapters whenever I feel like it.
CHAPTER THREE
See? Just like that. At any given moment, I could
just sur
CHAPTER FOUR
prise you with a new chapter.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I could even skip them. I might not even give
them numbers. I might just give them names.
CHAPTER SYLVIA
Okay, names don’t really work. Numbers. I’m
going to use numbers.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EATING. ALL THE TIME, EATING.
WHAT IS IT WITH YOU?
The Big Weird Thing has a lot to do with
food, so when you read this, it might seem like I spent
a month or two doing nothing but eating. I did other
interesting things, too, like sitting around and sleeping
and stuff, but I just want to tell you about this one
BIG WEIRD THING, so you’ll have to imagine the
other stuff.
CHAPTER NINE
NATURE’S BEAUTIFUL CRUELTY
Isabella says there’s a beautiful and
elegant harmony in Nature that makes it so your
parents get old and feeble and unable to fight back at
about the same time you want to throw them out of the
house so you can keep it for yourself.
Unfortunately, she says, Modern Science has
interfered with this gentle balance by giving us
medicine and nutrition that keep our parents
artificially
strong. They’re wrongly able to defend
themselves for decades past what is really right.
We’re all angry about this, sure, but it’s hard for
us to blame Modern Science for anything. It’s
given us the method by which we can miraculously turn
a bowlful of various types of sands and powders into
something as magical as cake. All we have to do is
add heat and a raw egg, which is really pretty much
just a liquefied chicken, and not something that you
would usually add to dessert without Science telling
you to.
Modern Science has also given us phones,
computers, decorative pillows, and those X-ray
machines at the airports that let us know if anybody is
trying to get on an aircraft without underwear on.
We love Modern Science.
Seriously, would you want to live in a world
without decorative pillows? Or blenders? Or have
underwearless people sitting right next to you on
a plane?
You know what we’d call smoothies if we didn’t
have blenders?
Fruit.
And who needs that?
When you think about it, many of our best
modern foods are smoothies. Look at that bowl of
soup: carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, beef,
tomatoes. Soup is essentially a smoothie somebody
made out of a whole farm. Yum.
I’m getting off track here. The whole discussion
with Isabella about the elegance of throwing your
parents
out in the cold came up because of math
class. I can explain.
Years ago, Isabella had a goldfish. She named it
Golda. Back then, her mom wouldn’t let her have a dog
because they already had to take care of Isabella and
Isabella’s mean older brothers, and I’ve always had the
impression that if there had been a way for Isabella’s
mom to leave one of those three people at the pet
store, she would, but since she couldn’t, she decided
that she would leave all the dogs at the pet store
instead.
Still, Isabella always felt that she could change
her mom’s mind. She thought that if she kept the
fishbowl clean and the fish stayed healthy, then she
would be able to talk her mom into getting a dog.
Oh
—
and she also felt that if she could just
teach Golda a trick, then her mom would have to
say yes.
One trick.
Goldfish are pretty. They’re like tiny mermaids
but with deformed faces. And they’re relaxing to
watch, but there’s a reason you never see them
guarding buildings, or herding sheep, or leading blind
swimmers around in a lake.
They’re
not smart
—
not as smart as dogs
anyway.
But that didn’t stop Isabella.
She wanted to train Golda to leap out of the
water like a dolphin. She would sit patiently and watch
Golda, and every time Golda made a tiny move toward
the surface, Isabella would hold a little flake of food
just above the water and say, “Jump!”
And every time Golda didn’t jump, Isabella would
pull her out of the bowl and yell at her for it.
She had to secretly replace Golda five times
before she rethought her methods. She had learned
that yelling is pretty hard on a goldfish, even though
she thought the first three fish were just pretending to
be
asleep to get out of jumping practice.
She also learned that rewards didn’t really work
any better than punishments because:
A) Goldfish can’t hear underwater
—
screaming
doesn’t seem to help because they may not have ears.
B) Goldfish may not have dolphin jumping
skills, even though they are both fish. (Yes, I know
—
dolphins are really mammals. Not the time to
argue with her.)
C) The more recent goldfish may have had deep
feelings for the earlier goldfish and now they would
just never cooperate with Isabella out of revenge.
Isabella still had a very difficult time accepting
these things, though, and continued to try to teach a
goldfish a trick.
Just like my math teacher, Mr. Henzy.
I give Mr. Henzy a lot of credit for trying to
teach me math.
I mean, he knows it’s not going to happen, I
know it’s not going to happen, EVERYBODY knows
it’s not going to happen
—
but he still politely looks
directly at me during the class, as if something might
actually be sinking in for once. His faith in me is kind of
adorable and tragic at the same time. One can’t
help but think of tiny Isabella dangling a sad little
flake of fish food for her half- witted goldfish.
Is there a word for that? Maybe it’s
“AWWWW-ful.”
Yes. Exactly. So Mr. Henzy did this AWWWW-
ful thing where he tried to teach us Personal
Finance, which is like the math you really and truly
will
HAVE to use to buy things and save money
—
not
the kind of math where you might be walking down the
street one day and suddenly have to know things about
the area of a trapezoid.
To start things off, he had us write down our
guesses of how much a house, a car, and a month’s
worth of groceries cost. Then he had us take those
papers home and get our parents to sign them.
I know this seems crazy. These are things really
only an adult needs to know about, and I won’t be one
of those for centuries.
Okay, maybe one century. ABOUT one century.
I love my parents, and
I want them to have a
good time, so why wouldn’t I enjoy hearing the
trickling music of their gentle laughter?
Well, maybe because, when they read my cost
guesses, they laughed so hard that my mom had
to go change and my dad couldn’t breathe, which
disturbed the dogs and made them bite each other.
I called Isabella to ask what her parents did
when she showed them her paper, and she said they
grounded her. Not for what she’d written down,
but because she doesn’t like being laughed at, and
she decided that the best way to make them stop
doing it involved her dad’s bare foot and the
stomping of it.
I would have called Angeline, but she probably
guessed the answers perfectly exactly to the penny,
and I really didn’t want to hear how well she did.
It’s one of the things I’ve learned about
Angeline. Sure, on the outside, she’s all beautiful and
smart and kind to people, but when you go way down
deep inside
—
way down deep
—
you discover that she’s
actually
more beautiful and smart and kind.
This makes you hate her even more, but you then
realize that even though that is the most natural
reaction, it’s terrible to hate somebody for being
wonderful. And your hatred of Angeline for this will only
make her look even better compared to you. So just by
standing next to you, as you are becoming more
terrible, she is actually improving
—
and you’re
causing it.
And that’s not all. While you’re standing there,
simmering in your own hate gravy, you are
actually becoming worse because that’s what
hate simmering does to a person.
So anyway, the safest assumption is that
Angeline got the numbers right, and it’s best to just
live with that and not whip up a whole batch of
gravy by asking about it.