by Jim Benton
Ricky bit me so I wouldn’t be able to throw at the
bottle toss. Plus, I used three pleases.
Let me explain: Fat Ricky is this little kid
that Angeline babysits sometimes. Isabella and I
stopped by her house last Thursday.
When we opened the door, Angeline was
holding Fat Ricky, and when he spotted Isabella, he
lunged at her. (Babies instinctively hate her.)
Isabella dodged as nimbly as a bullfighter, because
it was pretty much your standard biting lunge and
her brothers try that on her all the time.
I was standing directly behind Isabella, and
so Fat Ricky bit me right on the arm. And trust me,
even though babies don’t have all their teeth, the
few they do have are like little weasel teeth and
they hurt like crazy. This is why scientists are always
telling us: Avoid baby bites. (Or they should
tell us that anyway.)
Isabella’s eyes popped open wide and she
repeated it: “That’s right. He bit you.”
This isn’t how Isabella typically reacts to a
person being bitten. Usually, she just laughs
because generally, it’s her doing the biting.
“That explains it,” she said.
She pulled me to the side and explained in
a whisper that Fat Ricky is probably radioactive,
which would explain why everyone handles his
diapers that way. (Arm’s length; brisk run to
the trash.)
Isabella said that when Ricky bit me, my DNA
was somehow transformed, the same way that
superheroes are always getting their DNA
transformed. She says that I now have the
superpowers of Being Like a Boy, and that
explains how I managed to kick her, because a big
sissy girl like me could never do it with my regular
old sissy- girl powers.
I told her that this sounded like a fairy tale.
In fact, all of the superhero stories sound like fairy
tales, with big, strong weight lifters in long
underwear filling in for the fairy princesses.
“Maybe,” Isabella said quietly, “but don’t
you believe that sooner or later you’re entitled to a
fairy tale?”
While it was clear that Isabella had
obviously been reading my diary (STOP IT NOW,
ISABELLA), I also thought that maybe she really
and truly believed this stuff. And if so, it might get
me out of the whole bottle toss– Pinsetti kiss thing.
“So,” I said. “The bet’s off, right? Since I
have powers now?”
Isabella thought about this for a full minute,
which is enough time for Isabella to think pretty
hard. Some of Isabella’s most dangerous thoughts
come in at around sixty seconds.
“Nope,” she said. “The bet stands.”
“But what about my superpowers?” I said. To
make the point, I struck a pose like a superhero. I’ve
noticed that they always seem to have time to pose
in spite of all the bad guys running around.
She said she didn’t care, and I had to believe
her. If there is one thing Isabella excels at, it’s
carelessness.
Wednesday 04
Dear Dumb Diary,
There’s a lot of talk going around about the
fair, and it sounds like some of the boys are
actually asking some of the girls to meet up
with them there. These aren’t dates, exactly,
not in the grossest sense of the word. But the idea
is to meet at the Fun Fair and then hang around
together, and I suppose the boys try to win you a
prize because boys are just man- puppies, and men
will work much harder to win a prize for a girl than
they ever would for themselves.
Wait. One. Second.
How did I know that? Is it possible that I
really am developing the superpowers of a boy? Is it
possible that I’m beginning to understand the
workings of their twisted, damaged, cloudy,
disturbed, and occasionally adorable minds?
I have to concentrate. Let me see if I can
understand why they would want to watch sports on
TV all day. . . .
Nope. I have no idea, and I thought in such
a manly way that I almost accidentally grew a
mustache.
Isabella is wrong. There’s no such thing as
superpowers.
(Although I am not fully prepared to give up
on fairy tales.)
Thursday 05
Dear Dumb Diary,
Thursday is always Meat Loaf Day at
our school.
There are two questions I believe the entire
world is asking: How can the world not have run out
of meat loaf by now, and what the heck is it made of?
They serve it to us at school every week,
they’re serving it at other schools, and regular
people are even eating it at home for dinner. (Don’t
ask me why.) Doesn’t it seem that our meat loaf
mines should be depleted by now?
And think about it: If we have so much
meat loaf, isn’t there something more sensible we
can do with it instead of eating it?
I ask Miss Bruntford, the cafeteria monitor,
what it’s made of almost every week, and I’ve kept
track of her most common answers:
Today, the suffocating, rank pew of
the meat loaf was astonishing, but it did not
diminish the spirits of the jillion boys that kept
wandering up to our table to ask Angeline if she
would hang out with them at the Fun Fair. I think
that bad odors really do not bother males that
much, and it is mainly for this reason that they can
stand to be around themselves.
After each boy asked, Angeline just smiled
and politely said no thanks, and we watched the
boys emotionally crackle and fizzle like little
insects that had been drawn into a blond bug light.
The weird thing is that it seemed like all the
boys, even the ones who were clearly way too low
on the popularity totem pole, felt entitled to ask
Angeline, who is close to the very top. (Please
note: There actually is a popularity totem pole.
I made it.)
Like, if you were some kind of spindly little
goat, would you ask a gazelle to go for a gallop? No,
of course not. You wouldn’t be qualified. You would
ask a she- goat or a tortoise, or — what are those
things with the wrinkly skin and sad eyes? — oh
yeah, your grandma.
But for some reason, boys just aren’t
appropriately intimidated by Angeline.
Except maybe for Hudson Rivers (eighth
cutest boy in my school. I may have mentioned him
before. Future husband or future ex- husband,
haven’t decided). Angeline told me that he’s just
about the only one who hasn’t asked her.
See, here’s the thing with Hudson: I’m pretty
sure that Angeline has a crush on him, and I’m sure
he has one on her, too, because — let’s be honest
here — all human males do. He’s had a crus
h on
Isabella, but Isabella isn’t interested in him
because of Isabella’s well-known policy of dealing
with feelings of this nature. (She doesn’t.)
Hudson probably knows that I have had a
crush on him, and he might have had one on me at
one time, but because of all of this twisted history,
he doesn’t want to create any problems between
three friends (even though Angeline is more friends
with us than we are with her).
Wait. One. Second.
How weird is it that I TOTALLY KNOW
WHAT HE’S FEELING?
Perhaps I must just accept that boy DNA is
actually fusing with my own nicer, prettier DNA.
Friday 06
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today, Isabella asked us who the best
athletes at our school were. I had no idea, and
couldn’t figure out why Isabella even cared. But I
was distracted when Angeline began spouting off
statistics like she was Google.
It turns out that boys like to tell Angeline how
good they are at sports. They do it so often that
Angeline has a lot of the information memorized,
even though she says she has no idea what most of
it means. (Which suggests that sports are sort of
like many of my favorite songs.)
Isabella actually began taking notes,
which I believe are the only things I’ve never seen
Isabella take before.
The Toe (Mrs. Maple) gave us an
assignment about ants on Tuesday, and she made
Emmily, Isabella, and me partners. The Toe likes to
give group projects because it means fewer papers
to grade and more time to carefully groom and
preen her precious appendages.
I’m sure you recall, Dumb Diary, that Emmily
is our friend that spells her name with two m’s
because it reminds her of candy. For a long time,
I thought she meant that it reminded her of candy
because of the little m’s they print on some
candies, but she told me it’s really because mm
is the sound she makes when she eats them. (She
thought the letters on the candies were w’s anyway.)
We need to write a paper and have some
sort of visual aid for our project, like an ant
sculpture, or an ant costume, or something.
What this all means is that Isabella won’t help
much with the report because reports aren’t her
thing, and Emmily can’t help much because of
her micro-brain, so I’ll have to single- handedly do
a report about an insect that isn’t as pretty as a
butterfly, or as considerate as a bee — which at
least is decent enough to die from guilt after it
stings you.
Saturday 07
Dear Dumb Diary,
Mom and Dad went out for a fancy dinner
tonight, and since Stinker — my bucket of beagle
guts — and his dogdaughter, Stinkette, would not
be courageous enough to protect me from a
psychotic- maniac- vampire- cannibal, they asked
my Aunt Carol to come over and hang out with me
while they were gone. You know, to look out for
me. Like a babysitter.
I pointed out to them that pretty, 130-pound
babysitters like Aunt Carol seem to be exactly
what those psychotic- maniac- vampire- cannibals
are attracted to in every single scary movie ever
made. If anything, hanging around with one after
dark is probably the absolute worst way to stay safe.
But they insisted, and I really didn’t complain
much because I suddenly realized that Aunt Carol is
slower than I am. This means I don’t have to run
faster than the psychotic- maniac- vampire-
cannibal, I just have to run faster than whoever is
with me when the psychotic- maniac- vampire-
cannibal starts chasing us.
Dad, as always, was ready for dinner forty
minutes before Mom. He sat uncomfortably on
the couch impatiently fumbling with the car keys
and staring at his watch every couple of minutes,
as if looking at it meanly might make Mom
move quicker.
I knew what he was thinking, and felt I had to
explain everything to him.
“Dad,” I said, “when you get ready to go
out, you shower, maybe shave, and put on clean
clothes. At the end of all that, what we have is a
man that smells slightly better than when the
process began.”
Dad looked at me and nodded.
“Mom, on the other hand, is totally
transformed into a different human being by this
process. Not only does she emerge immaculately
cleaned and combed, things are colored, perfumed,
moisturized, and manipulated in ways you just
can’t begin to imagine. That kind of intense
lady- magic just takes longer.”
My dad cocked his head in the way that
beagles do when they are trying hard to understand
something.
He set his keys on the table, leaned back, and
smiled. His impatience dissolved away. When Mom
came out, he gave her a big hug and off they went.
And as Aunt Carol and I waved good- bye to
them, I realized that I had successfully calmed
Dad’s butt down, and there was only one startling
explanation: I must have spoken The Male
Language.
It gets weirder.
Later on, as Aunt Carol and I watched TV, we
started talking. She complained about this friend
of hers and how her friend said this one thing about
some stuff that made Aunt Carol bring up some
junk about this other thing, and before she knew
it, they were all like RAWR RAWR RAWR at
each other.
Of course this all made perfect sense to me,
but she said that when she told Uncle Dan (her
husband and my assistant principal) the exact
same story, he started giving her advice about all
kinds of different ways to handle her friend, and
blah blah blah, and what’s even up with that?
And it happened again. I understood The
Male Language.
I told Aunt Carol that I thought when you tell
a male about a problem, he will often assume that
you want him to solve the problem. When you
tell a female about a problem, she will often
assume that you just want to express how you feel
about the problem. Unless you make it clear to the
listener that you’re looking for something other
than what comes naturally to them, that’s how it’s
probably going to go down.
(I even said that exact thing, “That’s how it’s
going to go down,” because that’s how dudes talk. I
think my male superpower made me say it that way.)
Aunt Carol looked at me with her giant,
amazed eyes and said, “Huh.” Which, because I
still speak The Female Language, I
recognized as meaning: “Oh my gosh. You’re right.
I never saw it that way before. You are totally right,
and pretty, too.”
Maybe Isabella was
onto something. Maybe
superpowers ARE real, and maybe I have some.
Sunday 08
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella and Emmily came over today to work
on our science project. I hadn’t written down when
it was due, and my partners were no help since
Isabella said “never” and Emmily didn’t
remember being assigned anything at all.
Or the teacher who assigned it.
Or where her classroom was.
I probably should have felt dumb calling
Angeline to ask her, but I did it anyway. She had the
date, plus all the details of the assignment, and a
book about ants that she offered to lend us.
Angeline was at my house fifteen minutes
later. She said she would have been there sooner,
but she stopped to catch us a jar full of ants for our
visual aid.
While she was patiently answering Emmily’s
question about why ants don’t wear clothes, I was
filled with this bizarre regret that Angeline wasn’t
in our group.
I thought about suggesting that she ask The
Toe if she could switch into our group, and then it
suddenly occurred to me: KRYPTONITE.
My Superpowers of Boyishness have come
with a super- weakness. Just like Superman is
vulnerable to Kryptonite, my boy powers have made
me weak and vulnerable in the way that Angeline
makes ALL boys weak and vulnerable.
If I had made the mistake of asking her to
switch into our group, she could have said no, and I
would have crackled and fizzled away like the boys
that asked her to meet them at the fair.
These powers of mine. Perhaps they come
with risks.
Monday 09
Dear Dumb Diary,
I didn’t know what to feed the little jar of
ants that Angeline brought us. I took a guess and
gave them a little piece of my toast and left the
radio on so they wouldn’t be so bored all day,