by Jim Benton
I mean: I rock at language arts.
Sunday 22
Dear Dumb Diary,
Only two moms in history have ever shouted
this at the top of their lungs in the living room:
“Pablo Picasso! Pablo Picasso!”
One of them was, of course, his mother, Mrs.
Picasso. She probably had a very good reason for
this, such as his little square-looking dog leaving
his little cube-shaped bones all over for her to trip
on. (She was probably prone to tripping, anyway,
what with her backward legs and her eyes on
sideways. At least, that’s what she looks like in
his paintings.)
But in MY mom’s case, she was yelling out
the answer to some quiz show that she and my dad
were watching on TV. (She was right: The answer was
Picasso.)
They were laughing and shouting and trying
to prove to each other how smart they were about
stuff like oceans (the Pacific is the largest), and
how Julius Caesar was stabbed (they got him right in
the middle of his important duties).
I was watching them in amazement for a
moment, enjoying themselves. Then the next
question was “What is a mattoid?” They just
looked at each other, and I answered the question
without really thinking.
“It’s an almost-insane person, like Cousin
Felicia. Remember when she tried to train worms
because she believed if they would just work a
little harder, and apply themselves, they could
be snakes?”
The host on the TV confirmed my answer.
Mom and Dad just sat there, staring at me for
a moment.
As their eye lasers beamed into my face, I
felt the need to clarify. “I didn’t say I thought that
worms could be snakes. Felicia did.”
“No, no,” my mom said with a huge smile.
“We’re just impressed. I didn’t know what the word
meant.”
“She’s so smart,” my dad said, grinning and
turning his attention back to the TV.
Huh.
Surprisingly, it turns out that merely
knowing something can be pleasant.
Reaching into your head and finding an answer is
like reaching into an old coat pocket and finding
money you forgot about.
I’m beginning to wonder if knowing other
things is as pleasant. Except not math. I mean, let’s
not push our luck here.
Monday 23
Dear Dumb Diary,
Dad drove me to school today, but he wanted
to stop for a large coffee at this place that tells you
the size in Italian if you pay them a dollar more than
it’s worth. Grande? That will be one extra dollar,
please.
The coffee place had a new guy who could
actually get Dad’s order right on the first try
instead of after three or four tries like the old
guy, so that meant I got to school early.
I hate when the school is empty like that,
because it feels very much like a scary movie
just before something terrible starts attacking
the pretty star of the film — and let’s face it,
I’m pretty attackable.
On a bench, all by herself, I spotted Angeline
reading something so intensely I figured it must
have been a stolen love note that was probably
intended for somebody with browner hair.
As I got closer, I could tell that it was just our
math book. She seemed so interested, it made me
think that maybe the publishers had accidentally
included something disturbingly inappropriate.
And then I realized that Angeline was
cheating on our upcoming math test. Well, she was
kind of cheating. It’s that kind of cheating where
you write down all of the answers inside your head. I
think some people call this “studying.”
Can you believe it, Dumb Diary?
Angeline wants so badly for people to
believe that she’s smart that she is actually willing
to really become smart just to continue the
masquerade. Ugh.
Tuesday 24
Dear Dumb Diary,
Emmily emailed me directly this time.
Dear Jmaie,
Sorry it has taken me so long to write you.
My new school is great but I really miss you and
Angeline and that mean boy with the round glasses
that you always hang around with.
Myabe you guys can come and visit me some time
or I can come and visit you or we can visit each
other at some place exactly halfway between us.
Love, Emmily
P.S. I miss you and Angeliine and that mean boy with
the round glasses.
I was pretty surprised. Not that Emmily was
remembering Isabella as a boy. (People do that
more often than you might think.) I was surprised
she wasn’t going on and on about her grades
like she has in all her other letters.
Maybe she’s just so used to being smart now
that she’s forgotten that she is smart.
Wednesday 25
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today was the Vocabulary Bee. Here’s
how Mrs. Avon set it up: We all turned in our three
words, and then she went around the class calling
on us, choosing words at random from the ones we
turned in. If you couldn’t define the word, you were
out. If you could, you stayed in.
A few kids were taken out early, and with
words that weren’t really that hard, like
“stethoscope” and “catapult” and
“chrysanthemum.”
Mike Pinsetti’s snorts clued us in to which
words he had turned in, although I was hardly
surprised that he had submitted “toilet,” “toiletry,”
and “toilet fixer guy.” (That was three words, of
course, but Mrs. Avon just wanted to get it over
with. By the way, the word you were struggling for,
Pinsetti, was “plumber.”)
I guess there were no surprises until it was
Angeline and her glasses’ turn. Mrs. Avon asked her
the meaning of “smatchet.” Imagine my delight
when I realized Angeline was going to have to face
MY words!
Again, I had prepared my long pppfffttt.
And Angeline answered prettily.
“An unpleasant person.”
I discharged only the first two pp’s in my
pppfffttt when I realized she had it right.
Then she got “prat” and even “mattoid”
right. MY mattoid.
My mind was reeling. Could she really be that
smart? I looked at Isabella, who just threw her arms
up in a big I Don’t Know pose.
Then it was my turn. Easy stuff: “swindle”
(to cheat somebody) and “incarcerated” (to
be put in jail). Clearly, these were Isabella’s words.
Then came “marplot.”
“It’s a small, bad-tempered Australian
animal,” I said.
Mrs. Avon giggled a little.
“Wrong,” she said.
No, I wasn’t wrong. And I let her know.
“It’s a small, stupid, bad-
tempered animal.
It hunts koalas. It’s from Australia. I’ll bet you
anything,” I protested.
Mrs. Avon laughed.
“That’s wrong, Jamie.”
I asked her to double-check, and she tapped
the word into the dictionary software on her laptop.
She read the screen and shook her head.
“You’re wrong, Jamie. I’m afraid you’re out.
Anybody else want to tell us what it means?”
“It’s a person that ruins somebody’s plans,”
Angeline said.
“Exactly,” Mrs. Avon said, and displayed
about four extra inches of gums as she did.
I felt my face go red and then the class had a
good laugh and it went redder. Isabella gave me the
big I Don’t Know arms again, and I had to sit
there while Angeline went through two more rounds
before she finally got knocked out. I don’t even
remember who won. Either that one kid I hate
or that other kid I hate.
So Isabella was wrong about marplot.
That’s to be expected, especially when it involves
an animal. She divides the animal kingdom into
three categories: ones you eat, ones you ride, and
ones you throw sticks at.
But I should have known.
I didn’t feel embarrassed, exactly. You know
how before I said that knowing something was like
reaching into a pocket and finding money? This
was like reaching into your pocket expecting money
and finding half an old taco — and it’s not even
your taco.
Simply not knowing something doesn’t
feel bad. Things you don’t know are just pockets you
haven’t put anything in yet.
It’s dumbness that feels bad. Dumbness is
finding that old taco.
I can’t write any more now, Dumb Diary. I
have a math test to study for.
Thursday 26
Dear Dumb Diary,
The big hairy math test was today. The
numbers came at me from all sides. I remember, in
particular, a seven that quite clearly had murder
in its eyes.
I felt like I got a lot of the questions right.
Maybe even most of them.
When I was all done, I detected a fragrance
in the air — the smell of burning rubber. And then
I became aware of a soft scrubbing sound.
I looked over and saw that Angeline was
erasing something and smiling. But I could tell
she wasn’t even erasing a problem. She was just
erasing on her desk.
The eraser smell made me wonder if I should
go back and check anything.
So I did, and I found two things I would
have gotten wrong. Was Angeline erasing just to
remind me? Was she trying to remind the whole
class? Or is she just some kind of a mattoid
that likes to rub down erasers?
Friday 27
Dear Dumb Diary,
Mr. Henzy worked hard to get our math tests
graded fast. Evidently, he has two kids at home
that really enjoy math and like to help grade
papers. I can hardly imagine how boring their
dinner conversations must be.
As Mr. Henzy was handing the graded tests
back, I felt exactly like a prisoner in some sort of
medieval dungeon where the main torture guy is
walking around handing out the torture method he
had planned for each individual.
(I’m not sure if this is how they actually
did it. They don’t teach us a lot about medieval
torture at school.)
“Here you go, son, we’ve decided to torture
you by rubbing you with raw bacon and letting
beagles eat you to death,” Mr. Henzy said as he
handed one of the prisoners the paperwork
associated with being beagled to death.
“And for you, young man, we think that
perhaps stapling you to the wall with our medieval
staplers seems like a good idea. Here’s your
paperwork.” (Medieval staplers were much larger
back then than they are today.)
And then Mr. Henzy, the Head Torture
Guy, turned to me.
“Jamie Kelly. Yes, here it is. . . .”
“Nice work, Jamie. You pulled yourself up one
whole letter grade with this test,” he said.
And everybody turned to look at where the
big celebratory WOOOO-HOOOO came from.
For a second, I assumed it came from inside
my mouth. But it didn’t.
It came from inside Isabella’s. It was the first
time Isabella ever got excited about a test — and it
wasn’t even hers!
I think maybe Isabella is growing up, too.
Dinner was great. My math test wasn’t
perfect, and my math grades aren’t perfect. But my
parents were really impressed that I had worked
hard enough to improve.
I feel like a nerd admitting it, but I was
actually kind of proud that I improved the
grade a little. Don’t tell anyone, Dumb Diary.
Maybe they teach us things like math to show
us that, if we can learn something as unpleasant as
math, we can probably learn anything.
The grades are just there to give us an idea of
how much of the stupid stuff we’ve learned.
Saturday 28
Dear Dumb Diary,
Angeline came over today. She opened her
purse and handed me her glasses. She insisted that
I try them on.
“These don’t do anything for me,” I said.
“They don’t do anything for anybody. They’re
fake,” she confessed.
AH-HA! She was only wearing them to try
to look adorable! She’s not actually adorable at all!
What a fake. Wait. She actually is adorable. What
is . . . I don’t even understand. . . .
Angeline could see that I was speechless.
“Isabella asked me to wear them,” she said.
“WAT? ”
“It was all to keep you out of summer school.
Isabella had this dumb idea that it would make you
nuts if people thought I was smart. As if you’d ever
be jealous of me,” Angeline said.
“Yeah. Right. Like. I could. Ever. Be. Jealous
of. You. Angeline,” I said in a totally convincing way.
“She said that if we made you work hard
enough, your parents wouldn’t send you to summer
school. I was just trying to help.”
“Isabella,” was all I could say.
“Summer school isn’t even that bad anyway,”
Angeline said. “I went.”
“WAT? ”
“School is hard for me, Jamie. I know it
usually comes easy for you, but not for me. I have
to study and work like crazy. You probably don’t
notice, but I’m erasing and correcting myself all the
time. I got way behind one year, so I took summer
school classes to catch up. It wasn’t fun, but it’s
not anything like Isabella says. And it helped.”
When I finally figured out how to make my
tongue work again, I asked why the grades were
important to her. For a second, it looked like I had
asked somethin
g I shouldn’t have.
“You know what my Uncle Roy’s job is?”
she asked.
“It’s —” she started to tell me, and then
she stopped herself. “Well, never mind what it is.
He’s really smart and funny and there’s nothing
wrong with what he does, but he always says that
he wishes that he had worked a little harder in
school and had been able to go to college, so he
could have had more things to choose from. I want
more to choose from, too.”
So this was maturity, huh? Talking about
career choices? Ah, yes. It was suddenly so clear
to me why I didn’t like it.
Angeline told me I could have the glasses if
I wanted them, but I passed. There was no telling
when she would need to look extra- super-
adorable again.
We talked more, and I discovered that
Isabella had been quizzing her on the words for
the Vocabulary Bee. That’s how she knew some
of the crazy-hard words like “smatchet” and
“prat.” And she knew what “marplot” meant.
For some reason, Isabella had told her the real
meaning of “marplot,” and not me.
I thanked Angeline for helping me get a
better math grade. Not by faking me out with
glasses, but by sending up her little eraser smoke
signals. She laughed and admitted that she had
hoped it would send a message.
As she was walking out, she stopped and
turned in the doorway.
“My uncle,” she said. “I don’t want you to
think I’m ashamed of him. I love him and he does a
great job, and I’m proud of his work — so is he. It’s
just that he wishes he’d had more choices.”
I told her that I understood.
“And it doesn’t help that, a few years ago,
some kid almost took his eye out with
a golf ball, but that’s a long story.”
WAT?