by Jim Benton
I know, right? Angeline called me dumb.
Angeline has to be pretty angry to be as mean as I am
on a regular basis.
I leaned in close and spoke quietly.
“I know this thing with your dad has you worried.
Personally, I blame Mr. Henzy for making us learn how
much things cost. I mean, when you think about it, it’s
all his fault. You with me?” I put up my hand for a
high five that never came.
“I know that you feel like you need to start
saving for college, and you thought your plate thing
might be one of those million-dollar ideas that would
take care of it for you. I saw how worried you were, and
I wanted to cheer you up. But I know I shouldn’t have
lied to you. I should have just —”
That’s when I realized that Angeline wasn’t
looking at me. She was looking at something over my
shoulder.
Isabella had drawn a little crowd. Pinsetti had
sat down next to her and poured Sprite all over his
salad, too.
Other kids were asking questions and reaching in
for a sample. They were nodding in approval.
“Jamie,” Angeline said, her voice trembling.
“Jamie. This. This. This.”
Her soft hands clutched my arm, and her
fingernails dug in as the aloe in her hand lotion
soothed the cuts as she was inflicting them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MORE EXCITEMENT
Angeline had come back to life.
She believed that this was the idea that was
going to work. As excited as she was about the
HEALTH -O-PLATES, she was a jillion times more
excited about this salad thing.
I realized that Angeline is an expert on being
excited.
The next day, we gathered in my kitchen with
cans of Coke and Pepsi and root beer and cream soda
and lettuce.
Isabella sat there watching over us, using her
special gift: being an expert at hating things. She
can hate things the rest of us never even thought of
hating. This made her especially well qualified for the
job of sampling our salad dressing concoctions and
deciding whether she hated them or not.
Flavors are a lot like colors and textures. I’m an
expert at combining things like this in order to make
gross things fabulous or delicious. I’ve spent my whole
life trying to turn my mom’s cooking into something I
could eat.
As a team, we were bizarrely qualified, like a
mythological hero who was made of three people.
We came up with a lot of salad dressings.
We discovered that adding salt is important, as
well as some kind of herb. Garlic worked pretty well.
And parsley, even though I’m not sure I could taste the
individual ingredients after they were mixed together.
It was like people in a crowd yelling
—
you can’t really
tell what any one person is saying.
We tried adding lemon or lime here and there,
and Mom showed us how to boil something for a while
to make it thicker. Mom learned this trick once when
she boiled something too long, which was pretty much
every single time she ever boiled something.
Also, adding cornstarch will thicken stuff up, but
you have to mix it into cold water first because if you
just dump it right into the boiling stuff you get horrible
wads and clumps. Looking back, I think that Mom also
learned this trick on those occasions when she served
us Wads ’n’ Clumps for dinner.
Isabella had figured out a way to quickly taste
the dressings and let us know her expert hateful
opinions. She would dip a small piece of lettuce into
each sample and either:
A)
Swallow it
or
B)
Discharge it from her mouth like a
cannon.
The salad dressings that she didn’t spray all over
the table were the ones we set aside, planning
adjustments to make them even better.
But then Isabella tried dressing number
forty-two. It was dark brown, a little thick, and a
little sticky.
She dipped her lettuce leaf and took a bite, and
Angeline and I instinctively raised our aprons to
protect our faces in case she spewed it at us the way
she had twenty- three times before.
But she didn’t.
She swallowed it.
And she smiled.
“Ladies,” she said as she took another bite, “I’m
very happy to say that if you tell anybody else what is
in this recipe, they will find you floating facedown in
the river.”
It was the sweetest thing she could have said.
I mean that. This really is the sweetest thing
Isabella can say.
There are advantages when your uncle is the
assistant principal. Occasionally, you can talk him into
things, like testing your salad dressing formula on a
large population of human children.
We mixed up a big batch, and he let us offer it at
lunch in spite of the very real possibility that it was
not in any way healthy and may have had some dog
hair in it.
We didn’t put any dog hair in there, of course,
but when you have a couple of dogs, everything you
own has dog hair on it. There are very few things
you can do about it.
Of course the stuff was a huge hit, even with
Dicky, who never gets caffeine at home. It made all
the saliva vibrate out of his mouth, but he
loved it.
Bruntford said that she thought it was a terrible
idea to use soda pop as the base for a salad dressing,
but Angeline carefully explained all of the calorie and
fat numbers to her, and pointed out how the kids were
actually finishing their salads for once, so Bruntford
backed off. (Also, Isabella kicked her.)
We were NOT
expecting the arrival of the news
team that Aunt Carol called. They asked us questions
and filmed all the kids eating. It aired on TV that
night, and people started posting it online, and before
you knew it, we were getting emails. LOTS
of emails.
Everybody wanted to know the recipe. And we
remembered Isabella’s suggestion/ threat about not
revealing it.
“We’re going to bottle this garbage
and sell it,” she said.
We looked into what that would take, and it
seemed like more than we could do by ourselves.
But then we got an email from a food
manufacturer that had seen the news story. They
wanted to BUY the recipe from us.
My dad said we needed a lawyer, but Angeline
and I felt that since we had Isabella, we wouldn’t need
a lawyer. Or a team of bodyguards.
“Are you sure you can do this, Isadora?” Dad
asked her.
She lifted her foot to stomp his, but I stopped her.
“Dad.
This is who she is.”
Isabella lo
oked into my dad’s eyes, and I’m
pretty sure I heard the cream in his coffee curdle. He
never questioned her again.
We talked about the terms of the deal, and
here’s how it works: We get 10% of whatever they sell it
for. (They started by offering us 4%, Isabella scared
them up to 8%, and then Angeline started crying, which
got them up to 10% and one of their guys ran out to get
her ice cream.)
Isabella also demanded that we got to name the
dressing, and that our photo would be on every bottle.
We had to sign an agreement saying that we
would
never reveal the recipe to anybody else.
And then we got the check.
Isabella made them pay us an advance based on
what they planned to sell in the first year. I asked how
she knew how to do all this stuff, and she said that she
had learned it by watching movies.
It was the biggest check I had ever
seen. It was the biggest check I had ever
heard of.
It’s not like it will cover our college educations or
anything, or buy us all hot cars or houses, but it was a
great start. Plus, it was enough to convince Angeline
that she was going to be able to eventually save
enough, and it made her cry so hard that Isabella gave
her back her ice cream.
A few days later, they arranged for us to have
our picture taken for the label. They had people do our
hair and makeup, and we all looked even more fabulous
than usual.
They moved us into position in our matching
aprons and got the lighting just right, and we all smiled
these huge, beautiful grins.
A couple people screamed.
I looked down and saw blood on the front of
my apron. I had sprung a massive nosebleed. It
seriously looked like I had inhaled a couple of tiny
chainsaws.
NOW a nosebleed? Really, nose?
While Isabella tried to help me stop it, they kept
photographing Angeline.
“We can Photoshop you all together on the label
later,” the photographer said.
Isabella and I sat there, watching Angeline beam
and glow and flutter and flirt, and it was clear what we
needed to do.
“The more bottles we sell, the more money we
make,” Isabella said quietly.
“I know. It should be Angeline on the label. Just
Angeline,” I said, crumpling a Kleenex in my fist.
“She’s so pretty it actually hurts my feelings.”
Angeline fought us, of course. To humor her, we
took a few pictures just to show her why we felt the way
we did. Next to Angeline, Isabella and I resembled
unappealing tiny older men.
It’s not something we wanted to admit, but in a
way, we had accomplished our dream of bottling
and selling Angeline.
When it came to naming the dressing, I took
the lead. Angeline’s face was on the label, so I wanted
to make sure that Isabella and I were represented
somehow. I combined our names into something
catchy.
“How do you guys like
Isabelly Kelly’s
Salad Glamorizer
?”
Isabella gave me a thumbs-up, but Angeline
knocked me over with a single high-volume squeal of
delight.
“It rhymes!” she shrieked. “That’s the best!”
We had a big party at my house to unveil the
name and the dressing label. The company generously
sent us a big poster of the label after Isabella yelled at
them to do it.
We served salads, of course, and I dared Isabella
to eat broccoli, which she did
—
with Salad Glamorizer
on it. She said the dressing was so delicious she would
eat a Band-Aid dipped in it.
I let her try it on some Fibergrunt Flakes, but we
learned that while it might work on a Band-Aid, there
are things that even our Salad Glamorizer couldn’t fix.
Our dads talked for a long time, which was
weird to see. Are they somehow like us? What did they
talk about?
Stinkette was begging for treats all night, but
Stinker was off hiding someplace. I figured it was
because he didn’t want to deal with a big loud crowd
of people.
But I was wrong.
He was upstairs in my room.
Dead.
I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t
have Stinker. He was horrible, of course, and loud and
stinky, but I loved him. He was exactly like one of my
own burps.
It was Stinkette who found him, and she started
whining and barking. When I came to see what was
wrong, I found him, and he was dead.
I started screaming for Mom and Dad, and I
scooped up his enormously fat body and ran out of my
room and around the corner and then I accidentally
dropped him down the stairs.
Dad was running for the kitchen and didn’t see
Stinker at the bottom of the stairs, and he stepped
on him, which made this long, noisy fart sound come
out of Stinker’s mouth like he was a whoopee cushion.
“What is it?” Mom screamed as she followed
behind Dad and also stepped on Stinker.
“Stop stepping on him!” I cried. “ He’s
dead!”
Dad picked him up, and we all jumped in the car.
“ Go to the dog hospital!” I cried, and Dad took
off so fast that Stinker rolled off my lap onto the
floor.
“Right!” Dad said, and looked at Mom. “Where
is that?”
Mom called the vet, and she met us at her office.
It was after hours, but she loves dogs in spite of having
met Stinker.
Dad dropped Stinker two more times on the way
from the car, and then lifted him up onto the
examination table, where Stinker growled.
“He’s alive!” I yelled, which startled Stinker
and made him bite Dad.
We explained what had happened, and the
doctor guessed that the drops and stepping-upons
may have restarted Stinker’s breathing, like a series of
really careless and abusive Heimlich maneuvers. Dad
and I congratulated ourselves on how brilliantly we had
practiced medicine, and Dad proposed that stepping
on a dog be called the Kelly maneuver.
After a couple of X-rays, the vet told us that
Stinker had some sort of obstruction in his intestines.
It was probably something he ate, but it was now
causing an infection. He was in really bad shape. I
suddenly realized why he hadn’t been his normal greedy
self for so long.
Mom and Dad said that the most humane thing
to do would probably be to let the doctor put him to
sleep, which is the way they say “kill your dog”
when they know you’re already upset.
“Can’t they operate on him or something?” I
said, wiping the tears off my face.
“Stinker’s old,” Dad said. “There’s a chance he
wouldn’t mak
e it. And operations like this are really
expensive.”
I remembered how Isabella told me that when
your parents get old, you should be able to throw them
out of the house, and how that seemed mean to me.
And if I wouldn’t do that to my parents, I wouldn’t do it
to an old beagle, either.
“I can afford it ,” I said. “
I can pay for it —
with my salad dressing money.”
We discussed it for a while, and then talked it
over with the vet. Mom and Dad didn’t want me to
spend the money, but they agreed to let me do what I
wanted, so Stinker went in for an emergency
operation. I texted Angeline and Isabella to tell
them the news. They both offered to help pay for the
operation with their portion of the Salad Glamorizer
money, except for Isabella, but I wouldn’t let them.
Stinker wasn’t their problem. He was my
responsibility.
Afterward, the vet told us that she hadn’t been
sure that Stinker was going to make it, but she believed
that his desire to bite more people probably saved
his life.
Dog operations aren’t covered by insurance, and
I had to spend just about everything I had earned. I
was sad about that, but I was glad that Stinker was
going to be okay.
Then the doctor handed me a little bag and
asked if I recognized it. It was my grandma’s
bracelet
—
the fancy one, the one my parents lost
when they were packing up her things. Evidently, at
some point, they dropped it on the floor, and Stinker
ate it. That’s what had messed up his guts. It was still
in perfect condition, and Mom said we could sell it and
maybe it would pay for the whole operation. That
meant I had salad money in my bank account again.
It was touching that even though my grandma
had passed away, she was still taking care of me from
up in heaven. Of course, she also tried to kill my dog
from heaven, so I suppose she has that to answer for