by Jim Benton
we kept up that Gigantic Yearly Lie until we all
just ran out of the energy to maintain it.
So I figured that’s how it would go with the
HEALTH-O-PLATES. I’d lie for a little longer,
Angeline would eventually run out of energy, and the
entire issue would just fade away, like the Easter
Bunny.
But it didn’t fade away.
It got worse.
And it served as a great example of why people
should never talk to people.
One day, I walked into the school and found
myself strolling down the hallway that passes in front
of the school office. I realized, once it was too late
to turn around, that Angeline, Aunt Carol, and Uncle
Dan were standing there talking, which, you’ll
remember I pointed out earlier, is a bad thing for
people to do.
I knew they were going to ask me about the
plates. There was no way they weren’t.
There was only one logical thing to do.
I turned around and quickly smashed my math
book up into my face. Nobody would question me if I
had a bloody nose. I’d have to go take care of it
—
right?
Turns out that noses don’t always bleed that
easily. So now my whole face hurt, my nose wasn’t
bleeding, and I still had to walk past them.
Angeline waved like crazy and pranced like a
pretty little goat.
“Hi, everybody,” I said, and kept walking. I tried
to look like one of those celebrities who had committed
a recent crime and was trying to get past the
reporters to her limousine.
“Running late,” I added, rubbing my nose, which
hurt for the rest of the day.
I only got away briefly. Later on, at lunch,
Angeline was waiting to pounce.
“Did your dad talk to his friend yet?” she asked.
“Angeline,” I began, surprised at how nasal my
voice sounded from the book slamming, “we might not
be able to totally depend on this, you know.”
“I don’t want to get into it,” she said. “But I kind
of
have to depend on this. And when it becomes a
huge success, it’s going to be that much better
because we did it together. Best friends, together.”
Isabella’s expression was unchanged, but I’m
sure I heard a tiny, cruel laugh escape her lips. It was
so small and so quiet that maybe I was the only one
who could hear it. It was the kind of laugh that only a
friend can hear:
silent but friendly
.
“Together,” I repeated, and I tried my
hardest to use my mind to make my nose bleed so I
could leave the table. Then I tried making Angeline’s
nose bleed.
I noticed that Dicky’s nose bled a little, and I
wondered if my mind had accidentally gone up his
nose, but I then I remembered that his nose always
bleeds when he drinks milk, which he’s not supposed to
do and which he does daily.
My nose is just way too tough.
By the time I got home, I realized that something
had to change. While we were eating dinner, I turned to
my dad for help.
“Dad, somebody called for you. Her name was
Kirsten Hall. She said it was something about plates,”
I said.
“Plates? Where was she from?”
Mom got excited.
“I can’t believe you remembered that I
wanted new plates for our anniversary!” she said,
throwing her arms around him. “You’re the best.”
This was not what I had planned. I just wanted to
put the fake name in Dad’s head and tell him that
it had something to do with him and plates. That
way, later I could get him to nod or something when
I was explaining to Angeline that the deal wasn’t
going through.
“Oh, right, plates,” he would say, distracted by
the TV. “Yeah. Something something plates.”
This would be enough to convince Angeline that I
had been telling the truth
—
she’s too polite to
question him for details.
But I wasn’t prepared for Mom’s reaction.
She assumed Dad was buying new table settings.
And if I was underprepared for Mom’s reaction,
Dad’s was even harder to anticipate.
Without hesitation, he turned to me and said,
“Well, Jamie. You’ve kind of ruined the surprise, but
yes, I was talking to that woman about getting Mom
new plates for our anniversary.”
I was shocked, disgusted, and a little
impressed. Dad had pulled off a huge lie with
practically
no effort.
“Did you get her number?” he asked.
“She said you had it,” I said.
“Oh, right. Of course,” Dad said, even smoother.
“What’s her accent?” I asked, just to check the
level of smoothness here.
“German,” he responded easily.
He was so smooth I could have ice-skated
down his back.
I nodded at him slowly and took a bite of my
salad. I wondered how deep we were going into this lie.
Just then, Stinker lay in the corner and farted, which
was perhaps the only sincere and genuine thing
expelled into the room that evening.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The worst thing she’s ever done
They say the secret of martial arts is
anticipating what your opponent will do before
they do it.
And having nunchucks to hit them with (or are
they
numchucks?). You know, those little poles
connected with a chain. You might wonder why those
are better than just hitting your opponent with a full-
sized baseball bat. It’s because your opponent is
probably thinking that you’re doing some kind of little
performance for him with your special sticks, so you
guys are kind of friends now, and then you
SUDDENLY hit him in the face and he’s badly hurt
—
especially his feelings.
Actually, probably especially his face.
Either way, he was unprepared.
Anyway, Aunt Carol came over after dinner to
borrow something of my mom’s. Out of NOWHERE,
she nunchucks me in the face with her words by saying
the following to my dad, who is on the couch
concentrating on a TV commercial.
“Hey, I heard about your friend and the plates.
Pretty exciting,” she says, obviously because Angeline
had shared my lie with her.
My dad turns to her and makes this face like
Aunt Carol had just said how much she likes the smell
of
wet cats.
“Yeah,” he said slowly, and then looked at me,
confused.
I shrugged.
“People love plates,” I said to him. “What are
you gonna do?”
It was good to know how marvelous I was at lying
and how good my dad was at it, too. What a great
idea it was to lie, I thought.
&n
bsp; Just lie all the time.
Lie, lie, lie.
I had to eat Fibergrunt Flakes the next
morning, and as I sat there gnawing them into a gray
paste smooth enough to swallow, I thought about how
much better the world would be if we all lied.
Like, if I worked at the factory where they made
Fibergrunt Flakes, when nobody was looking, I would
just dump a huge bag of sugar into the big cauldron
where they were stirring it all up.
“Jamie, did you add sugar to this?” some sad
cereal maker would ask me as he tasted it and found it
suddenly
not as sickening.
“ Nope,” I would say. “It’s just good now. It just
tastes good now for some unknown reason that nobody
knows. It just does. Just roll with it.”
And he’d be satisfied with that, and the people
who bought it and ate it would finally be happy, and
what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with
being happy?
I know that people say it’s wrong to add things
to people’s food and not tell them. But guess what
—
I actually talked to the people that say
that, and we had a long conversation about it, and
now they say it’s fine. They said that they were wrong,
and it’s fine now.
See? Another lie. I just lied, and it sounded great.
Works every time.
And I was going to need the lies to work like
that again.
Like, the next day.
I didn’t know much about Angeline’s young
childhood. But it’s a known fact that the school has a
PERMANENT RECORD of everybody, and all your
bad grades and terrible deeds and events of your
childhood are recorded in it forever. Once, I had brief
access to Angeline’s permanent record, but I never
read it. Later, she told me that there were terrible
things in there that could have destroyed her, and I felt
a deep sense of pride for not invading her privacy, and
even
deeper regret for not having a copy of those
things to stick up her nose later.
Not knowing what was in there nearly drove
Isabella insane, and in a carefully planned scheme in
which she got herself sent to the assistant principal’s
office (Uncle Dan) at the exact time a bee flew into
his office (he’s allergic to bees, she learned), she
managed to quickly pull open a file drawer and shoot a
single photo of one thing in Angeline’s PERMANENT
RECORD before he managed to return to his office
with Aunt Carol to kill the bee for him.
It wasn’t actually a bee anyway. It was a fly that
she had secretly released from a jar. I talked Isabella
into using a fly because a bee could make him really
sick, but mostly because it would be more
hilariously embarrassing when Aunt Carol
discovered that he had almost cried about a fly.
Later, when we looked at the photo of Angeline’s
record, we could see just the top of one report that
said something about hitting and, in front of that, the
full page of one about SOMETHING AWFUL. We
were
thrilled
shocked to discover that it was for
stealing, but our spirits fell as we read deeper.
Angeline had stolen some mints off a teacher’s
desk. Just a little pack of mints. It’s still stealing, of
course, but
.
.
.
It was second grade. She had learned about the
people who work at the sewage treatment plant that
have to purify all our wastewater. She was so concerned
about the smell that they had to put up with that she
started flushing the mints down the toilet, one at a
time, in an effort to improve things at the sewage
treatment facility miles away.
This was just so, so,
SO
sickeningly adorable,
that when Angeline’s mom told the people at the
facility about it, they presented Angeline with the title
of
Water Princess, and she was on the news.
The only reason it was in her permanent record
at all was because, technically, there was a theft, and
the school has to record everything like that, even the
cutest crime of the century.
See? Angeline really does genuinely care about
people. Gross, right?
I’ve always felt that Angeline has it all. I mean,
she has skin like a Barbie, hair like a Barbie, and
eyelashes like, I don’t know, a Barbie, I guess.
People absolutely love her on sight, and to make
things worse, she’s not just a pretty face. She’s
actually a very kind human being. Very kind. Terribly,
terribly kind.
KIND. KIND. KIND.
Which is why I kind of hate her sometimes.
But beauty fades. It just doesn’t last forever,
and incredibly, there are actually people in the world
who are JEALOUS of people with hair like golden silk
and a voice like a silver flute and lips that evidently
naturally salivate their own gloss. Extreme
attractiveness can work against these people.
This is why I have always strived for just the right
amount of attractiveness.
Anyway, Angeline, like so many of us, will have to
learn to do something for a living one day.
I always thought she could be a supermodel, but
Angeline doesn’t like being thought of as just pretty.
She always wants to do something
—
to accomplish
something. Just being beautiful isn’t enough for her.
It’s probably the one thing about her that’s just like me.
Why do they call them SUPER models anyway?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The cow was down with it
“We won’t have to look at these much longer,”
Mom chirped as she brought our dinner in from the
kitchen and set the plates down in front of us.
“That’s a relief,” Dad said. “
Ugliest
meatballs I’ve ever seen.” He chuckled and looked
over at me. “I’m glad she said it, and not me.”
I laughed a little, too, mostly because these
weren’t even close to the ugliest meatballs Mom had
ever made. Once, she made some with holes poked
through the middle. She thought they looked like
adorable little donuts, but the hole just looked like
the
screaming mouth of a meatball shrieking in
horror at what it had become.
“I was talking about the plates,” Mom said flatly.
Dad was chewing absently until he caught Mom’s
scowling stare.
“I meant the
PLATES,” she repeated. “We won’t
have to look at these plates much longer.”
If you’ve ever sat with a large, quiet cow and
described the different planets in our solar system,
and how they all revolve around the sun, and how the
sun is really just a star, you have a very good idea
of what my dad looked like in that moment.
“Because you’re getting her new plates,” I
said, nudging his large cow shoulder.
“New. Plates,” the large, quiet cow repeated
dim-wittedly.
“For your anniversary,” I prompted.
“OH!” he said, really big like that. “Right.
From Kathleen.”
“Kirsten,” I reminded him.
“Kirsten. Yup. The plates. Yup. I am. Yup.”
I suddenly had the impression that this whole
plate thing may have actually been Dad’s very first
attempt at lying. I simultaneously realized that I had
said the word “
PLATES” more in the last few days
than ever before in my life.
The thought of saying “plates” and talking
about plates and thinking about plates suddenly
enraged me. I felt the anger rising up from my guts. I
heard my teeth grind, and I felt my face turn hot
—
hot
enough to warm a small lunch item.
There are only so many times in a week that you
can think about plates. There are only so many times
you can say the word “
PLATES.”
Thunder cracked.
Somewhere, I mean. Probably. But if it had
happened at my house right then, that would have
been really perfect.
My fists came down on the table with a crash,
and a meatball tumbled off the table and landed
directly in between Stinker and Stinkette.
Amazingly, Stinker didn’t try to eat it, so
Stinkette
gobbled it up in one piggish bite.
Mom and Dad stared at me. They didn’t look
angry. They looked more amazed that this THING was
living in their house, pounding their table and
launching their meatballs.
“I’m sorry,” I said, which was strange because
I’m usually not sorry about things, but this time I really
might have been.
“Angeline is making us nuts with these paper
plates of hers, and I know it’s because she’s really
concerned about money and her future, but honestly,
I don’t think I ever want to hear about plates again. I
think maybe I hate plates now.”