look at Bruntford, and it was not agreeing with my
Crunchberries. But it got worse.
“Guess what, Jamie?” Aunt Carol says all
happy in that voice that makes you worry because
when adults are this happy you should worry.
“Dan — I mean — Assistant Principal Devon offered
me a job that just opened up in the office. I’m going
to work at your school. Isn’t that great?”
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
Aunt Carol, Aunt Carol. Aunt Carol.
(I’m slowly shaking my head sadly as I write this
part.) There was a time when you would have
understood that a person would rather bathe in a
tub of hot dog slobber than have a relative of theirs
working at their school. But it looks like you’re ONE
OF THEM now. Aunt Carol, you’re an Adult.
“Yes,” I lied, realizing that I was lying to Aunt
Carol for maybe the first time ever, so I added, “And
I’m not lying to you.”
39
In social studies today, Isabella asked
Mr.VanDoy (who never smiles) if there were any
animals that would eat their own nieces. (I had
told Isabella all about Aunt Carol taking a job at
the school.) He listed a whole bunch — mostly the
mean animals like crocodiles and sharks — but he
said that among the higher primates, like chimps,
the relationship between aunts and nieces is
particularly close, too close, I would imagine, for
an aunt chimp to take an office job at her niece
chimp’s school.
Poor Aunt Carol (again with the sad, sad
head- shaking). She’s not even a monkey anymore.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
40
Wednesday 11
Dear Dumb Diary,
Isabella asked me today how Assistant
Principal Devon had punished me on Monday.
Isabella has already demonstrated that she
is a RE-teller, so I had to make her believe I
was punished. Because Isabella has mean older
brothers, she is an expert on lying. Once, Isabella
had convinced a lunch lady that she had been
diagnosed with a cake deficiency by her doctor,
and was medically entitled to an extra dessert. This
may not sound like much, but lunch ladies are very
sharp, especially in the extra-dessert department,
and talking one out of cake is the type of thing
people write folk songs about.
So I said right back to her, “What do You
think he did?”
See, by doing this, I got Isabella to sort of tell
me the lie she would believe.
“Detention?” she said.
“Yup,” I said. “I got detention.”
Ha-ha! Fooled you, Isabella!
41
Thursday 12
Dear Dumb Diary,
Okay. You cannot fool Isabella
that easily.
I must have sounded a little too happy, or too
sad, or that lie detector she has built into her butt
was going off, but she did not buy it, and she re-told
AGAIN. And AGAIN I was sent down to see
Assistant Principal Devon, and now, even worse, my
Aunt Carol would be there.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
42
But the office was unlike any office I had ever
been in. The office ladies were SMILING.There
was some music playing softly. There were some
flowers, and in the spot where the butterscotch
candies used to be was a great big dish full of little
chocolate candy bars.
43
In the center of this transformed office was
my Aunt Carol. And when she saw me she waved and
grinned and said, “Jamie! Hi, Jamie! Everybody, this
is my niece, Jamie.”
The Mean Office Ladies took those ugly things
they keep on the fronts of their heads (where a face
would normally go) and SMILED at me with them.
I had never thought it possible.
Then, Assistant Principal Devon came out of
his office and showed me Isabella’s latest memo.
“Your aunt has told me about your friend,
Isabella. She’s a re-teller. I figure she’s going to
keep re-telling until you get punished, so how about
this?” He dropped her note on the floor. “How about
if you pick that up and toss it in the wastebasket?
Then you can tell her I made you clean the office.”
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
Amazing, right? His solution was kind of a lie
and kind of the truth at the same time.
I’ve heard that if you made a monkey bang
on a keyboard long enough, it would eventually
write
Romeo and Juliet
. This means that even
a monkey might accidentally, do something that
appears human, and I think that’s what Assistant
Principal Devon was doing.
Only kids know how to tell the truth and tell a
lie at the same time, but Assistant Principal Devon
actually did it right in front of my very eyes.
So I smiled, picked up the note, and tossed
it in the wastebasket before they ran out of candy
bars, or the music stopped, or this monkey stopped
banging on the keyboard.
45
Friday 13
Dear Dumb Diary,
Mom said that Aunt Carol is going to have a
few people over in a couple weeks. Mom called it
a party, but of course, since adults are not fully
formed human beings, it�
�s not a real party.
Aunt Carol was talking to Mom about some
big date tonight, which was so gross to listen to
that it was all I could do to keep eavesdropping.
But they stopped talking when they discovered
me casually crouching outside the kitchen, and
they would not tell me whom this big gross date
was with.
Aunt Carol is attractive enough to be a bank
teller, but she is almost as old as my mom, so her
date could be with anybody who is:
A) More attractive than she is, but dumber.
B) Less attractive than she is, but funnier.
C) The exact same level of attractiveness,
but shorter.
D) The owner of a hot car.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
46
Since I can’t rely on Stinker to help me when
I need him, I secretly fed him a can of beans at
dinner so that he could again stink up my room in
time for me to sleep on the couch.
Now all I have to do is wait until the beagle
lets one fly.
47
Saturday 14
Dear Dumb Diary,
Seriously, how selfish do you have to be
to withhold your odor from somebody? Stinker
stubbornly refused to gas me last night so I couldn’t
be down on the couch when Aunt Carol came home
and eavesdrop about her date.
Mom and Aunt Carol left early to go shopping
for Mom’s appetizer stuff. My mom is an awful cook
and everybody knows it: my family, my friends, the
paramedics who had to come and save Dad from
a lasagna once. But what some people don’t know
is that she can make appetizers. And she loves to
demonstrate her skills to people.
And not just those little cocktail weenies or
frozen pizza rolls. She makes fantastically delicious
little tiny things that people can hardly believe she
made. It’s like Mom would be a great cook if she
only had to prepare meals for Barbies. She’ll be on
full alert to keep us out of them. Especially Stinker,
who has been known to bite guests in the thigh to
make them drop one.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
48
Since Mom was gone, Dad decided to get a
jump on the Projects he doesn’t finish on Sunday,
by not finishing them today.
I called Isabella to come over and watch the
educational channels but she was shopping with
her mom.
49
Sunday 15
Dear Dumb Diary,
Aunt Carol and I hung around a little today.
And it was cool because I felt that we were once
again as close as those aunt and niece chimpanzees
without any butt problems that VanDoy has us
studying. We walked down by the park, and there
were some guys there that were about her age.
“I think those guys are checking me out,”
she said, which was cute, you might think, but
as she is my aunt it was actually fairly sickening.
I don’t think I ever thought of Aunt Carol as
being somebody that the guys would check out.
I didn’t think anybody that old was checking out
anything except maybe books from the library on
subjects like Learning to Live with Those
HUMONGOUS MOLES ON YOUR BACK.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
When I was a kid, I used to think that I would
never be ten years old — A Double Digit, the
Big One Oh — But then it happened.I turned
ten and I realized that ten wasn’t that old. Sure,
getting around was a little harder, going up stairs
and stuff like that, but I still felt like a nine-year-
old inside.
I wonder how old you are when people start
checking you out. I wonder how old you are when
they stop checking you out. I wonder if they really
were checking her out. Or maybe she was checking
them out. More than that, I wonder exactly how you
perform a checking out, and how you receive one.
I’m going to make Stinker check me out and try to
see how I look in the mirror while he does it. Shut
up. It’s not weird to force your beagle to check you
out. Probably lots of people do it.
51
Monday 16
Dear Dumb Diary,
You remember Bruntford, don’t you Dumb
Diary? She is the water buffalo that somebody
trained to be a cafeteria monitor and whose job it is
to make sure that everything in the lunchroom flows
as smoothly as gravy through a grandma.
Ugh ! I think I just grossed myself out a
little. I’m for sure off gravy for a while.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
Anyway, it was your basic lunch scene. Me
and Izzy was in the Hizzy, which means that I was
there with Isabella. Although I’m not sure if it’s
cool for me to talk that way, but I like to so I only
do it privately here in the Old Dumb Diary because
it takes a lot of time to recover from a CRIME
AGAINST COOLNESS .
53
Like Isabella told me about this one girl
that was ACTUALLY WITNESSSED WITH HER
ACTUAL FINGER IN HER ACTUAL NOSE.
Look: I think that everybody puts a finger in his or
her nose sometime, and what a finger and nose
do voluntarily in private is nobody’s business.
But Isabella says that even though this girl was
beautiful, she was not beautiful eno
ugh to
publicly commit the THIRD-WORST KNOWN
FINGER CRIME in public, (don’t even ask me
about one and two) and thirty years later she was in
prison for stealing a car.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
Back to the Cafeteria: Bruntford,
Isabella, the Hizzy, remember?
I was just minding my own business, walking
in that way where technically you’re walking, but
you’re almost running, but not really running. (We
are not allowed to run in school.)
Angeline said, “Hey Jamie,” which surprised
me because Angeline and I are not friends and can
never be friends because she was born with the
deformity of being all perfect.
But I looked, anyway, possibly because I was
curious to see how much I hated her at that exact
moment, and when I looked, I slipped on something.
55
I’m not saying it was a blob of hair
conditioner, but Angeline — a known abuser of
hair conditioner — was in the vicinity, and all of my
hours watching detectives on TV has taught me that
the villain often lingers around the crime scene.
I’m not saying it was meat loaf, but cafeteria
meat loaf is greasy enough to qualify as an
industrial- grade lubricant, and some of it could
easily have fallen from between those ugly flaps
beneath Bruntford’s nose. I think she calls
them “lips.”
I’m not saying it was my new shoes (they
make me look 20 or something) but when I slammed
into Bruntford, I was going about 20 or something.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25S
26R
56
So fast, in fact, that I think I may have
actually PLUNGED into Bruntford a little. It was
kind of like going underwater. You know, like when
the sound changes and you’re weightless.
But then I plopped out of the me-shaped