My Miserable Life (3 page)

“Is that the kid you've been hanging out with?” she asked.

I nodded. I told them the whole story about the handball game and how Rocko and Leif had been best friends since they were newborns in the hospital, spitting up on each other while their moms, who were also best friends, envisioned their sons' futures together.

“Maybe you could find another friend in your class to play with?” Mom said.

“It's ‘hang out with,' Mom, not play. He's in fifth grade now,” said Angelina. She went over to the refrigerator and pointed to the paper whale I had made in second grade that said
FRIENDSHIP MEANS TRUSTING EACH OTHER
. It bugs me that my mom still keeps that up.

I appreciated that Angelina had corrected my mom about not using the word
play
, but there was no one else I wanted to hang out with. Simon Heller picks his nose and sticks it under his desk. Joe Knapp is only eight and a half and just reads all day. Nicholas Gonzalez never sits still or stops talking. Darby Levine has a Mohawk and hangs out with eighth graders. And for some inexplicable reason, EVERY SINGLE OTHER KID IN MY CLASS OF TWENTY-FIVE IS A GIRL!

“People usually don't realize they're being rude. They're just thinking about themselves. You need to go where the love is, Ben Hunter. Like with Serena Perl, maybe?” Since Angelina got her braces off, she always flashes her perfect teeth at me. I still have some baby teeth and two front chompers that you can see a mile away. “Come here, Monkeylad,” she called, putting on some fresh lip gloss.

Monkeylad trotted in, and she picked him up. His tail was sticking through the hole in the back of the cheerleader outfit he was wearing. The costume belonged to a bear Angelina had made herself at Stuff-It, and she liked to put it on Monkeylad since she was a cheerleader, too.

Our dog is obsessed with lip gloss and tried to lick it off Angelina, but she moved her head away.

“See?” Angelina said. “That's what I mean, right, Monkeyladdy? Go where the love is.” She winked at me. “He's a real chick magnet. You should bring him to school one day for show-and-tell.”

Show-and-tell? That was worse than using the word
play
. And the only chicks Monkeylad could get would be cooked chickens stolen from someone else's table!

Some evenings at dinnertime, Monkeylad manages to escape. At first we thought he was running away, but then we heard our neighbor Mrs. Finkelstein knocking on the door and yelling, “Your baby's home!” She was standing there with Monkeylad, who had something in his mouth. It looked like a mummy head or something really gross, but it was actually a fully cooked Easter ham. We had no idea how he got it. But then he kept running away and coming back with different things in his mouth—pot roasts and turkeys and chickens and steaks.

For obvious reasons, the neighbors don't like us very much. Especially Mrs. Finkelstein and a man we call the Grump. The Grump lives alone. He puts on a suit and tie and goes to work every day and comes home and never seems to leave his house any other time or speak to anyone. When my mom tries to ask him his name, he just turns his back on her and walks away. When the Grump and Mrs. Finkelstein see Monkeylad come running, they slam their doors, but sometimes he gets in through the windows. Then they come over and yell at us, and my mom has to buy them a new pot roast or whatever.

Angelina put her headset back on and walked out of the room with Monkeylad. I wished she'd leave the dog with me for once. I never get to sleep with him.

Monkeylad came from the shelter. My sister and I had been begging my mom for another dog after our perfect, beautiful, well-behaved golden-doodle, Pleasant, got very sick and had to be put to sleep. My mom would say, “How can I have another dog? I'm so busy I could hardly take care of Pleasant,” and my sister would say, “You took good care of her, Mom. Until the part where you KILLED her!” I guess the guilt trip finally worked, because we got Monkeylad.

At first Monkeylad seemed like a little angel. He sat quietly on his bed, staring up at us with puppy eyes, or pranced down the street on his walks like a show dog. But then one day it was like he had become possessed by a demon.

For no reason, he started running in mad circles around the house growling. My mom tried to catch him, but he bared his teeth, and his eyes rolled back in his head and turned blue. When she finally caught him and put him in the bad room, aka the bathroom, to calm down, he nipped at her shoelaces until he untied them with his teeth.

We have to put him in the bad room every so often. When he comes out, Angelina takes a photo of him and posts it on Fastpic with her other photographs. She captions the picture “Bad Dog Photo.” Sometimes she takes really blurry, badly lit shots of him and uses the same caption as a joke.

Monkeylad becomes possessed by a demon about once a month. We still have no idea why. Maybe he was traumatized as a puppy in the shelter.

When the demon calms down, Monkeylad looks guilty for a few minutes, but after that he seems to think pretty highly of himself. He won't obey me. Maybe I could learn something from him. I do everything everyone tells me, but I always feel like I'm doing something wrong.

 

THE THIRD WEEK OF FIFTH GRADE

by Ben Hunter

My week has been miserable.

I know we're supposed to support our opening statement (why I am having a miserable week) with at least three examples. Here they are:

Rocko Hoggen is in my class.

Rocko Hoggen steals my friends. So far he has stolen Marvin Davis and Leif Zuniga.

Rocko Hoggen broke my clavicle.

Those are the reasons I am having a miserable week.

Dear Ben,

I'm sorry you are having a miserable week. You can always hand me a little note if you are feeling left out or uncomfortable. I don't think Rocko means any harm. I asked him about what happened, and he said that when you broke your arm at camp, he was really worried about you and that the boys were sad you couldn't play handball. He just likes to be friends with Leif, since they've known each other for so long. Why don't you try being friends with Simon, Joe, Darby, or Nicholas? Joe is especially nice. Maybe you could help him come out of his shell and play a little ball. Also, maybe in your next essay, you could try to write about at least one thing that is going okay. It might be a challenge, but I know you can do it.

Ms. Washington

 

CHAPTER 3

THE CAT'S MEOW

Even though Rocko lied about feeling bad about my clavicle and told Ms. Washington it was my arm because he doesn't even know what a clavicle is, I was feeling a little better after reading Ms. Washington's note. Also, today she gave us chocolate cupcakes that she baked herself. My mom never makes cupcakes anymore.

When I was in second grade, she surprised me by bringing cupcakes to school. Usually she made fruit-juice-sweetened banana nut muffins, but this time she'd promised to behave like a normal mother and bring cupcakes with swirly frosting from the market. She came in, smiling like crazy and wearing bright-colored yoga pants. Her hair was kind of messy, and she was carrying two huge pink boxes. She put the cup-cakes on the table. My teacher at the time, Mrs. Kunkel, told me to hand them out. But when I opened the box, I saw that there were these little toy things on top of the cupcakes. You know, those little plastic things that you get at the dentist's or doctor's after they've tortured you for a few minutes with sharp instruments? (As if this makes anything better.)

The toys would have been fine, except some had little pink Hey! Bunny Rabbits! like the ones on my sister's pajamas, and some had blue Timmy the Trains with smiley faces. And all of them were rings that you were supposed to wear on your finger. How would the kids in my class know that I didn't request pink rabbit heads and baby trains on my cupcakes?

I mean, I hadn't been into the smiley trains since kindergarten, when I used to squat on the floor and hop about like a frog trying to move the trains around the track. Then someone discovered lead paint on a few of the trains and my mom got rid of all of them.

Angelina said that my mom had wasted all that money on those poison trains because she never could say no to me because I used to be so cute. I'd put my arms up when I wanted to be held and say, “Hum peas,” which meant “Hold me, please.”

“Not so cute anymore, dude,” Angelina said. “But then you had these fat cheeks and tiny teeth instead of those big honkers, and you smelled like strawberries and not like dirt.”

Sometimes I hate my sister more than usual.

In second grade I was still kind of cute, if you ask me, but maybe not cute enough for my mom not to ask me first before she bought cupcakes with stupid girly and babyish plastic rings on them.

I took one look at the cupcakes and started to cry. Mrs. Kunkel was the kind of teacher who believed no one should cry, especially boys. Once she had taken me aside to explain that if boys cried, everyone would make fun of them and label them a crybaby. But I was only seven. I really don't think it's so bad for boys to cry, even when they get older. I especially don't think there's anything wrong with crying when your mom brings babyish cupcakes to school.