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!
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
CAN ADULTS
BECOME HUMAN?
SCHOLASTIC INC.
Jim Benton’s Tales from Mackerel Middle School
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored
in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in
any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known
or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the
publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc.,
Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
e-ISBN 978-0-545-29556-7
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Benton
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks
and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
DEAR DUMB DIARY is a registered trademark of Jim Benton.
First printing, May 2006
For The Office Ladies,
most of whom
are really and truly nice.
Thanks to Mary K., Summer, and Griffin, who
help more than anybody could ever imagine.
Thanks to Maria Barbo, who worked from
afar, and Shannon Penney, who did her work
from aclose.
Thanks also to Steve Scott, Susan Jeffers
Casel, and Craig Walker.
And most of all, thanks to the DDD readers.
Dear Whoever is reading My Dumb Diary,
Are you sure you’re supposed to be
reading somebody else’s diary? Maybe I told
you that you could, so that’s okay. But if
you are Angeline, I did NOT give you
permission, so stop it.
If you are my parents, then YES, I know
I am not allowed to call people idiots
and dopes or to talk about gross bodily
functions and all that, but this is a
diary, and I didn’t actually “say” any
of it. I wrote it. And, if you punish me
for it, then I will know that you read my
diary, which I am not giving you permis-
sion to do.
Now, by the power vested in me, I do
promise that everything in this diary is
true, or at least as true as I think it needs
to be.
Signed,
PS : What kind of animal reads a person’s
diary, anyway?
PPS : Oh! I bet I know. I bet it’s one of
those big, dirty animals that eventually
ends up on a bun with mustard and onions.
Hint, hint.
Monday 02
Dear Dumb Diary,
teachers don't fart
I spend something like eight months a
year, seven hours a day with teachers. If they
did, I’d know it. Moms do it. Dads do it. Beagles do
it (sometimes so bad that your eyes burn and your
lungs might try to escape by jumping out your
mouth).
Even I do it. One time I had a fart that lasted
so long, that around the middle of the fart I was
thinking back to when the fart began.
Anyway, I was thinking about teachers and
their intestinal gas today in school and that may
have prevented me from learning anything. Maybe
the teachers just need to try harder. (To teach me
things, that is. Not to cut one.)
1
Seriously though, it’s hard for me to blame
teachers. It’s probably pretty tough to stand up
in front of us normal human beings and try to
convince us that the equator is interesting, or that
the clothes that the people in Wheretheheckistan
wear are beautiful. (Fashions in other countries
sometimes appear to be based on one person daring
another person to wear something in public.)
Fortunately, I do have one teacher who I
always like: Miss Anderson, my art teacher. She’s
my BTF, which is like a BFF but it’s for teachers.
She is pretty enough to be a waitress, and she
notices important things like when I create my own
private glitter blends. (Currently, I’m using a secret
mixture of gold, red, and magenta. It’s pretty much
magnificent.)
Art class would be perfect if Angeline (Miss
Blondy BlondWad) wasn’t in it. Angeline is not
an artist and when she stands next to something,
she has a way of making it look less pretty by
comparison. Which, when you think about it, is a
form of vandalism that sadly, our legal system has
no penalty for yet.
Oh, and Mom FINALLY got me the shoes I
wanted. Dad, being a dude, only has, like, two pairs
of shoes and can’t fully appreciate how much you
can need a pair of shoes that you don’t need at all.
Mom is totally immune to my begging for
most things, but since she is a girl — or used to be
one — she has way too many shoes and sympathizes
with other females who also want too many shoes.
Anyway, they make me look 20 or something.
Tuesday 03
Dear Dumb Diary,
My social studies teacher, Mr. VanDoy, never
smiles. I know that’s hard to believe, because
everybody smiles about something, right?
Isabella smiles when her brothers get in
trouble. Angeline smiles when she thinks about
how much prettier she is than, like, a waterfall or a
unicorn. I smile when I think about a unicorn kicking
Angeline over a waterfall. But Mr. VanDoy doesn’t
smile at all. I wonder if when you become an adult,
you can lose your sense of humor the way you lose
your teeth or hair or fashion sense.
Our social studies class is studying animal
social groups now, which means we are learning
how ants and chimps and birds live together and
tolerate one another. (Personally, I hate ants so
much that even if I was an ant, I don’t think I could
resist stomping on myself
.)
5
Isabella says we can do our homework just
by watching the educational channels, although
it seems like every time I turn those on they are
showing the footage of the cheetah running down
the cute little antelope and not the stuff we need
for class.
Isabella says that if she had been born a cute
little antelope and saw the cheetah coming, she
would just kick another cute little antelope in the
shins so it couldn’t run very fast, and the cheetah
would get
it
instead of her.
Pretty smart, huh? Except I’m pretty
sure that if Isabella had been born a cute little
antelope, all the cute little antelopes in Africa
would be hunting and eating cheetahs by now. As
well as elephants and human beings. I really and
truly don’t think we’re thankful often enough that
Isabella was not born a cute little antelope.
On the subject of Isabella, I noticed her
notice my new shoes today, and I’m sure I noticed
her noticing how they make me look 20, but I also
noticed her trying not to be noticed, so I did the
polite thing and unnoticed her doing it, because
that’s what friends do.
Dumb Diary, did I ever tell you how Isabella
and I became friends? It was instantaneous. It’s
what people call Like at First Sight. It was way
back in second grade. On the first day of school, our
teacher, Miss Baker, was asking us all to stand up
and say our names. Isabella stood and said, “I’m
Isabella Vinchella,” and Lewis Clarke giggled.
It took three teachers and half the class to
pull Isabella off Lewis, who she seemed to be playing
like a fat little xylophone. (He actually made higher
notes when she punched him in certain places.)
Violence is never the answer, of course, unless your
question is “Hey Isabella, what’s the answer?” But I
admired the fact that she was like some sort of
dangerous little mousetrap that you just should not
stick your fingers in. I told her so, and she liked the
description.
We became instant friends, and have been that
way ever since — although sometimes Isabella seems
less like a mousetrap and more like an atomic bomb
that you should not stick your fingers in.
Wednesday 04
Dear Dumb Diary,
Today in art class, Miss Anderson asked us to
give her ideas for our next assignment. I suggested
that we make self-portraits with a lot of glitter and
jewels. Angeline suggested collages (
Ugh!
). Isabella
suggested that we decorate padlocks to put on our
bedroom doors so our brothers can’t get in our stuff.
Although her judgment is usually excellent,
this time Miss Anderson went with Angeline’s
suggestion of collages. I suspect this was because
of some kind of law that says she has to offer a
certain number of projects for The Artistically
Imparied each year. Since not everybody in
the world has what it takes to grow up to be an
important artist like I might become if I decide not
to be a scientist who also makes a lot of money
dancing on TV, art teachers occasionally must offer
projects that the kids who were born with toes for
fingers can do — like collages. A collage is when you
cut things out of a magazine and glue them onto a
piece of paper. These are not terribly challenging
projects to complete.
Once on a field trip to a petting zoo, I saw
this goat that had eaten a newspaper and some
cotton candy and he had made his own little
collages all over the barnyard. Really quite amazing
work for a goat.
I would’ve gotten one, too, except that the
teacher caught me putting some goat art in my
lunch box.
11
These collage projects wouldn’t be so bad
if Miss Anderson subscribed to a variety of
magazines, but most of the old magazines she
brings in have headlines like COOKING SMALL
MEALS FOR ONE IS NOT NECESSARILY
SAD or HEY! MAYBE DOGS ARE BETTER
THAN HUSBANDS .
She also has a lot of bride magazines, but
somebody has blacked out the teeth or drawn
arrows through the heads of most of the pictures,
which makes them useless unless your collage is
about a kid that lives near a church and really likes
archery but has super bad aim.
Isabella says the magazines mean that Miss
Anderson is totally desperate to get a husband,
which is odd because she is even more beautiful
than Mrs. LaBeau down the street, who has already
had five or six husbands by now. Isabella says that
it means that Miss Anderson must do something
so BAD that it outweighs her PRETTY.Helpfully,
Isabella has the ratios all worked out.
enough to eat salad for breakfast, let’s say, but
not pretty enough to brush her teeth with ketchup.
Isabella also said that Angeline is pretty enough to
brush her teeth with mustard, but not pretty enough
to burn down SeaWorld.
Isabella said that she, herself, is pretty
enough to put mayonnaise on her popcorn, but
not pretty enough to burn down SeaWorld unless
Angeline and Miss Anderson help her. Isabella
says that I' m pretty enough to be an exhibit at
SeaWorld. (I suspect she is jealous of my shoes. I’m
telling you, they make me look 20 or something!)
13
There was a time when I would not have
known how to react to something like that from
Isabella, but after being her friend all these years,
it was perfectly clear to me what I had to do. . .
After that, Isabella spent most of the
afternoon trying to remove the picture of
the toothless, arrow-headed bride that I glued to
her hair. Guess that makes us even.
Thursday 05
Dear Dumb Diary,
Okay. It turns out that you can’t exactly get
even with Isabella. I had forgotten about the time
one of her mean older brothers ate a chocolate
bar that she had been saving and she snuck into
his room that night and quietly put an earthworm
in his sleeping mouth and then taped it shut. One
can hardly imagine his panic. Now her brother gets
a little sick every time he sees candy, and THAT is
what Isabella calls "even."
While it’s true that THE EARTHWORMING
was over chocolate and Isabella has a huge
chocolate- dependency problem, Isabella can
"Bring It" — as she likes to say — even when it’s
not about chocolate.
So, first thing this morning, she "brought
It " to me, and I was called to go down to the office.
But let’s be reasonable about placing blame
here. Yes , Isabella told on me for gluing something
&
nbsp; to her, but the collage thing was Angeline’s idea
in the first place, so she really is mostly to blame
for this.
15
I believe that there are schools with nice
office ladies that are pretty and don’t smell like
discount coffee and butterscotch candies. In fact,
it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that ALL other
schools are like that. Just not my school.
Now, to be fair, it’s not just the office ladies.
Many adults have a need to drink coffee all day so
that they can remain alert and have bad breath.
But the candy is a different story. Our office
ladies ENJOY being mean, especially to me, and
a huge fishbowl of chocolate won’t do that to you
the way a huge fishbowl of butterscotch will. Here
is why: Every time they look at the bowl, the office
ladies think: “We could have bought good candy. We
hate these hard butterscotch candies. Butterscotch
candies aren’t good for anything. I think we should
take it out on the next kid who walks in here.”
And that kid is usually me.
Isabella had told on me to Assistant Principal
Devon, who wears ties but is nice, anyway. He said
I shouldn’t glue things in people’s hair and blah -
blah be kind to each other and blah - blah what
kind of a world would this be if blah - blah - blah.
He was just getting ready to come up with
some sort of punishment when I asked him what
happened to his glasses — he used to have these
HUGE glasses he could probably see molecules
with —and he said that his niece talked him into
getting eye surgery so he wouldn’t need them
anymore, which I have to admit was a pretty good
idea, because without his glasses he looked almost
handsome for an old guy (He's probably
forty!). Not that I’m an expert on Isabella’s newest
good - looking - enough -formula, but I
suppose that he is still not handsome enough to burn