My Miserable Life Read online

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  For S. and J.

  SEPTEMBER

  ABOUT ME QUESTIONNAIRE

  by Ben Hunter

  I am a person who is happy when … I have friends.

  I am a person who is sad when … I lose.

  My favorite color is … red.

  My favorite sport is … baseball, and my favorite team is the Darters.

  My favorite holiday is … Halloween (except when my mom, aka the Halloween Fairy, steals my candy).

  My favorite animal is … Monkeylad. He is part weiner dog but looks part monkey (tail), rabbit (feet: he hops with his back legs), and Rastafarian (ears). He is my favorite, except when he is possessed by a demon or when he steals meat off people’s tables. I am trying to teach him to behave better, but he doesn’t listen very well.

  I live in a place called … Filmland, California, where movies are made, as you can tell by the name. Our neighborhood is very safe, but my mom still won’t let me ride my bike by myself.

  I am a person who likes … sports, running fast, and sugar.

  I am a person who dislikes … too-healthy food, stinky sunscreen that my mom forces me to wear, and bullies.

  My family is special to me because … they love me even though they are annoying.

  My friends are special to me because … they are there for me. Actually, I’m still looking for friends.

  Dear Ben,

  I have a feeling you will make some nice friends in fifth grade. I look forward to getting to know you better. I’m also a Darters fan. Go Darters! And I love sugar. Maybe I’ll make some cupcakes for the class soon. Your dog sounds funny. My cat, Cat’s Pajamas, or PJ for short, is part dog, part rat, and part rabbit, too.

  Sincerely,

  Ms. Washington

  CHAPTER 1

  MISERABLE

  Even though I have a mom who worries too much, a twelve-year-old sister who never stops texting, and a dog named Monkeylad who runs away to steal meat off the neighbors’ tables, I really thought things were going to get better for me in fifth grade. But it’s the second week, and my life is still pretty miserable.

  Things started out okay. This cool kid, Leif Zuniga, who also likes sports and movies and collecting baseball cards, had been having lunch with me every day.

  My mom packed me the usual almond-butter-and-organic-fruit-juice-sweetened-jam-on-whole-wheat-bread sandwich, fresh fruit, carrots, and dried seaweed. Leif took one look at it, said, “Aw, man,” and shared his chips and cookies with me, which was awesome. Then we played handball at recess, and we even planned some times to hang out on weekends.

  I have a teacher named Ms. Washington, who is supposed to be the nicest teacher in the school, and she sure seems that way so far.

  I got A’s on my spelling and math tests.

  Serena Perl, from kindergarten and first, second, third, and fourth grades, is in my class again. Sometimes I stare at the back of her head because she has this perfectly straight part, and I wonder how she or her mother gets it that way every single day. Her hair, which is the same gold color as her skin, must be pretty long when she takes out the braids. Serena Perl even smiled at me a few times. She has dimples.

  At home, my sister, Angelina, was still texting. Monkeylad was still trying to escape. Mom was still being excessively safe. But things were good at school with Ms. Washington, Leif Zuniga, and Serena Perl.

  Then, at the end of the second week, everything changed. A new kid came into the classroom. He was a pipsqueak with hair like that singer my sister loves, Dustin Peeper. I recognized him from summer camp.

  Rocko Hoggen.

  * * *

  The camp was called 4 Kids Only, so when I first went there, when I was around six, I expected to play with just a few kids. The camp logo even had a picture of just FOUR children. But when Mom dropped me off, there were hundreds of screaming kids.

  I told my mom I didn’t want to stay because of the false advertising. She asked what I meant, and I told her there were way more than four kids, and she laughed, which made me even madder.

  “Don’t laugh at me,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Ben, but I was laughing with you, not at you.”

  But I wasn’t laughing.

  * * *

  Last summer I had to go back again. On the morning of the first day, my mom packed me a lunch with an almond butter sandwich, fruit, and seaweed. Then she chased me down, waving her bottle of smelly sunscreen that makes my skin look white and streaky. Monkeylad was leaping along behind her. He loves to lick sunscreen off me about as much as my mom loves to put it on. All I wanted to do was stay home and eat sugar and watch TV, but my sister and I aren’t allowed to eat sugar on weekdays, and we don’t even have TV, only a DVD player, because my mom is a librarian and doesn’t believe in television. She makes us read every night, but I’m usually not that interested in the books she brings home for me.

  I think she’s kind of hypocritical because she sneaks off to the gym almost every day to run on the treadmill and watch bad reality shows. I know this because one of Angelina’s friends’ dads owns the gym and told Angelina that my mom watches How to Be a Hottie and America’s Next OMG. Without a TV, our house is boring. Which is why, even if I had any friends, they wouldn’t come over.

  At least I saw someone I knew at camp—Marvin Davis, who was in T-ball with me in kindergarten. He and I hung out at 4 Kids Only and played volleyball, and it was pretty cool.

  But the next day, this kid named Rocko Hoggen came to camp. I bet when you hear a name like that, you think big, burly pit-bull-type kid, not a little poodle. Rocko started talking to Marvin right away. I could tell he was trouble.

  Later, Marvin and I were playing soccer and I felt a shove. I fell over onto the grass, and it hurt. I couldn’t get up, and then the counselor came and helped me, and Marvin helped, too, and the counselor said he was going to call my mom. I tried not to cry by biting my lip, but my arm hurt like a pit bull had taken a bite out of it. A little while later, Mom came running into the nurse’s office screaming, “Where’s my baaaaaby? What happened?” I was so embarrassed that I forgot about how much pain I was in.

  “I think he broke his collarbone,” the counselor said.

  “He what? He broke his collarbone?” yelled my mom. She speaks in question marks when she’s upset.

  One of the counselors drove us to the hospital, and they X-rayed me and gave me some kind of medicine that made me feel better but also really weird. My mom told me I was saying some goofy things like “The kid that pushed me is a peeper-squeak,” but I don’t remember. I got a sling for my arm to take pressure off my collarbone, which is actually called a clavicle. I thought I might be able to get out of 4 Kids Only, with a shattered body part and all, but nooooo! I still had to go to camp, but I couldn’t run around or play any sports, which made it even worse.

  When I got back to camp,
I went looking for Marvin. He was hanging out with the pipsqueak I’d only glimpsed for a second before he’d pushed me down “by accident.”

  I went up to Marvin to show him my sling, and he said, “Cool,” but Rocko didn’t say anything. He just tossed his hair like Dustin Peeper and looked away and started humming to himself. Then he said to Marvin, “Come on, let’s play handball.”

  Marvin said, “Do you want to play, Ben?”

  But Rocko said, “He can’t. He broke his arm, and his bones are fragile.”

  “Collarbone,” I said. I would have said clavicle, but I didn’t want to sound like a nerd. (And you actually broke it, pipsqueak.)

  They went off to play, and I sat on a bench by myself. At lunchtime I went to eat with Marvin, and there was Rocko again. I sat with them, and Marvin talked to me, but Rocko didn’t say anything. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back, my lunch was gone. I hate my miserable lunches, but I had to eat something. I asked Marvin if he had seen my lunch, and he said no, he had gone to throw his away, and when he got back, mine wasn’t there. I looked at Rocko. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. He tossed his hair like Dustin Peeper and turned away. Marvin gave me an extra fruit roll he had in his pocket. Still, I was hungry for the rest of the day.

  Rocko Hoggen is the worst bully there is. If there was a word called worstest, that would be him. Although my mom would die if I used the word worstest. She also hates the word funnest and when people say a whole nother thing. “Is there such a thing as the word nother?” she will say. “What is that?”

  All summer Rocko was the bane of my existence. My mom would say, “Good use of the word bane, Ben.” I was just so glad that Rocko was out of my life so I could start the school year fresh.

  But there he was again, standing in Ms. Washington’s classroom.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BANE

  I decided to ignore Rocko Hoggen. But at recess, when I went to play handball with Leif, there was the BANE. He blinked at me and tossed his hair.

  “Can you play handball?” Rocko asked. “I thought you broke your arm.”

  “My collarbone,” I said. “And it’s not broken anymore.” Dork. Jerk. Pipsqueak.

  “Well, Leif and I are playing now,” Rocko said, hitting the ball.

  I looked at Leif.

  Leif looked at me.

  I looked harder at him.

  Leif shrugged. “Rocko lives next door to me,” he said. “Our moms are best friends. So are our dads. Since we were born.”

  “We were born in the same hospital on the same day,” Rocko added, slamming the pink rubber ball against the wall with his little grimy pipsqueak hands. “Kind of like twins.”

  I, on the other hand, was born in a bathtub at a birthing center. I didn’t have a best friend being born at the same time. I don’t even have a dad, since my mom used a donor to have Angelina and me.

  When I got home from school, my mom noticed that something was wrong. I know this because she kept asking, “What’s wrong, Ben? What’s wrong, sweetie?” I wouldn’t tell her. How are you supposed to explain to your worried-looking mom that your life is irrevocably miserable? (Even my correct use of the word irrevocably would not comfort her.) But when I started throwing my favorite baseball cards, my mom put her arms around me and made me tell her what was going on.

  “Rocko Hoggen is in my class,” I said.

  “That kid from 4 Kids Only?”

  “That pipsqueak from One Zillion Kids Only, who broke my clavicle,” I said.

  “It was an accident, sweetie.” I could tell by my mom’s squeaky-sounding voice that if I insisted that it wasn’t an accident, she would call Rocko’s house and make him apologize.

  So I just said, “Yeah, but I hate him. And now he’s trying to steal Leif Zuniga.” I hadn’t meant to say that about Leif Zuniga, but it just came out.

  Angelina walked in not wearing her headphones, for once. She had on shiny white leather high-top sneakers, cut-off shorts things that she rolled up when she left the house in the morning and rolled down when she got home, a football jersey with shiny gold numbers, and a gold chain around her neck. She has millions of different outfits with lots of what she calls “bling” on them; I pretty much would wear the same Darters baseball jersey and shorts every day if I could.

  “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.