"We shouldn't let parents see people dance because it might give them the idea to dance."
Book 1: Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Jamie is terrified of the possibility that Mike Pinsetti might give her an Embarrassing Nickname, because once someone gets one from him, they never live it down. Ever. One poor kid has been called "Butt Buttlington" for so long that nobody knows what his real name is. Even his mom called him Butt Buttlington once by accident when dropping him off at school.
After Angeline dazzles Hudson with her perfect white teeth and scented Lip Smacker, Jamie writes:
In case my children are reading this years from now, this is the exact moment Angeline stole your father, Hudson, from me, and it is her fault that now your last name is Rumpelstiltskin or Schwarzenegger or Buttlington.
Jamie has to eat her mom's disgusting casserole because if she doesn't she'll get a lecture about the hungry kids in "Wheretheheckistan" who would just love her casserole.
It seems to me the kids in Wheretheheckistan have enough problems without dumping Mom's casserole on them, too. (illustration of said kids screaming and fleeing in terror from a package labeled "From Jamie's Mom - U.S.A.")
On the lower end of Jamie's Popularity-O-Meter, Miss Bruntford the fat cafeteria monitor is a 1, a spoonful of cat litter is a 2, teachers are 3, and one of Angeline's old shoes is a 4.
Jamie tries to dye her hair blond like Angeline's and it somehow comes out the exact color of raw chicken.
I know why they call it "dye." Because after you see what it does, that's what you'll want to do.
Angeline gets her long hair tangled in one of the charms on her backpack and part of it has to be cut off. Later, in English class, Jamie asks the teacher what "mythology" means. He says it means things that don't exist, and she asks if that includes the hair in the left side of Angeline's head.
The next day, Angeline shows up to school wearing a beret on one side of her head to cover up her missing hair. Jamie thinks it looks stupid, so she draws Angeline wearing said beret and holding a sign that says, "I am a goon."
Jamie's younger cousin Eddy comes to stay for a few weeks. He gets sticky so often that she uses her finger to write "wash me" on his face. (Mom yells at her for it.)
Jamie steals Angeline's permanent record and takes it home, but it goes missing. She knows either Stinker or Eddy took it and tries yelling at them and taking away their toys and dog bones to get it back, unsuccessfully. "And Eddy really likes those bones."
When Jamie finds the folder with Angeline's permanent record in Eddy's backpack, she quietly scoops it up and walks out of the classroom. Her illustration for "how I tried to look" is her calmly walking out with the folder, but her illustration for "how I probably looked" shows her maniacally chewing on the folder and clutching it while muttering "my precious, my precious".
Apparently the list of illnesses the school nurse tries to cure with a lie-down on the cot includes: headache, swallowed by python, raccoon mishap (with a drawing of a raccoon's tail sticking out a boy's ear and its head sticking out the other ear), and "nothing left but skeleton".
Jamie almost chokes to death on a piece of bread when Angeline compliments her hair. Mike Pinsetti is about to give her a humiliating nickname until Angeline grabs him by the collar and says, "Just don't, Pin-heady."
"I wondered, if Mike Pinsetti walked by me without making eye contact, if I could find the wisdom that Stinker had found and could exact the precise amount of justice called for here, which was to simply eat Angeline's homework sometime and then call it even."
Book 2: My Pants Are Haunted!
In the intro, Jamie asks Isabella if she ever gets tired of reading her diary, which she's caught her doing 9 or 10 times. The very next page has a note from Isabella that says, "Dear Jamie, I am so sure. I do NOT read your diary, so get over yourself. -Isabella. P.S. I totally agree with the stuff you said about your mom."
According to Jamie, the most dangerous things on Earth are a bear that can burp up hand grenades, a giant shark with smaller sharks for teeth, and her mom when you're trying to make her angry.
Jamie thinks Hudson is too cute for her currently, but if he got stepped on by an elephant or something, they would be on the same level of attractiveness, and then they'd be able to get married.
A beautiful thought: You are just one rampaging elephant away from marrying the handsomest boy in the school.
Jamie's family has Chinese takeout for dinner and she wonders what they call Chinese food in China. Her drawing shows a bunch of storefronts with "Chinese Food", "Chinese Food Only", "Just Chinese Food", "Nothing But Freaking Chinese Food", and "Chinese Food Coming Out Our Ears".
Jamie is afraid of clowns because she was at a birthday party once and walked in on a clown mid-costume change while wearing nothing but his underpants.
When Isabella gets Margaret, an unpopular girl, as her new lab partner, Jamie tells her to be open-minded about it and that Margaret is probably a good person. Which is immediately followed by:
Then I realized what a beautiful and sensitive thing I had said, and I imagined that maybe one day I might open a big sanctuary where all the Social Rejects could live and run free and never have to worry about wedgies again. Plus, I could sell tickets to people to come and look at them.
Jamie comes to the conclusion that Angeline is rich by seeing her in the park with two little kids who don't look like her. Since the kids aren't as beautiful as Angeline, Jamie concludes that they're her little siblings and that Angeline is only beautiful because her father is a rich doctor who did massive plastic surgery on her. And when Jamie sees her a few days later with different kids, she thinks they're not different kids, but the same ones who got plastic surgery from Angeline's dad.
When Jamie is really happy that Margaret has decided to return to being ugly, she smiles at Mike Pinsetti. He tries to smile back (she thinks), but it looks more like he has his hand stuck in a car door.
After watching a horror movie about a cursed necklace, Isabella comes to the conclusion that everything bad that happened so far in the book was because Jamie's designer jeans are haunted, which leads to a list called "strange things my pants made me do". This list includes:
Watching a 20-minute commercial about a chicken roaster.
Tasting kiwi shampoo to see if it's as good as it smells.
Calling Hudson and hang up. Thirty times.
Imagine tragic event in which everybody Jamie knows dies and she has to carry on prettily.
Stroking the roof of her mouth with her toothbrush and cause four-hour tickle.
Book 3: Am I the Princess or the Frog?
Jamie writes a poem for English class about her mother’s cooking.
Mother dear, you’ve helped me grow Into a pretty blossom. So now I’d really like to know Why you would feed me possum.
Angeline invents something called Zone Shampooing, which is where you apply different scents of shampoo to separate parts of your head and then flip your hair in someone’s direction to make them smell it. When Jamie tries it on Hudson, her vigorous head-shaking makes her teacher think she’s having a seizure.
”I heard that one time this kid had one of his legs chopped off by a snow blower on the way to school, but since he had Mr. Evans, the kid dragged himself to school anyway, and Mr. Evans is so strict that he marked the kid partially absent.”
Miss Bruntford finally tries the cafeteria meatloaf she’s always hassling the students about not eating. Her eyeballs pop out of her skull and she yells, “Call 911!”
Isabella’s past schemes include trying to fly with balloons, trying to suntan with a flashlight (wasting over 40 batteries), and pretending to be the weathergirl on the phone to get the principal to declare a snow day in May.
Jamie tries to get rid of her dog by tying his favorite toy to her dad's car.
Everything to do with the photo assignments. During most of the book, Jamie is scared, since the pet-lookalike photos would end up with her compared to a very unflattering image of Stinker. As a joke, Angeline uses a baby picture of Jamie in the spot for young Miss Bruntford, which results in Jamie's anxiety increasing. By the end, it's revealed that Bruntford is using Mrs. Kelly's cooking to make the cafeteria food look better, so Jamie takes the hideous-Stinker photo and places it in the spot for young Bruntford. The resulting illustration caps it off in perfect hilarity.
Jamie's reaction to the love letter she receives, in which her admirer describes the agony of his feelings for her.
Jamie's narration: It just makes me so happy!
Book 4: Never Do Anything, Ever
Jamie sees Angeline wearing a barrette, and buys one of her own, but can't figure out how to wear it. The fourth attempt shows her clamping the barrette to her mouth.
When Isabella was 5, she beat up a mall Santa for not bringing her a panda the previous Christmas. Paramedics had to be called.
"To perform artificial resuscitation on Santa, you are required to keep his head under the mistletoe throughout the procedure."
According to Jamie, teamwork is when a whole bunch of people work together to do something wrong instead of doing it wrong one at a time.
"Margaret is the school pencil eater, which means she's the only one whose number 2 pencils actually wind up as her Number Twos."
The entirety of the baby assignment in gym, where Jamie's group has to get a baby doll across the gym using only a rubber snake, a soup pot and a high heeled shoe (and throwing it isn't allowed).
The running gag of Pinsetti getting head injuries from the various attempts.
Pinsetti suggests chopping the baby into pieces and throwing those across the gym, since the rules forbid throwing the baby, but don’t say anything about throwing chunks of baby.
We decided the multiple head injuries weren’t doing Pinsetti any good.
During the Jump-Rope-A-Thon, Margaret eats several of the pencils from the judges' table, with the sound effect "munch bite crunch bite nibble bite chew chew slobber."
Jamie: I don't want to say she's still eating a lot of pencils, but when she farts I swear you can almost see a little puff of sawdust.
The group comes up with the idea to use the rubber snake as a slingshot to launch the baby, but when they have to demonstrate it, it all goes wrong. Isabella's aim is off because of her contact lenses and Jamie's arms hurt from twirling the rope during the the Jump-Rope-A-Thon, so they send the baby flying in the wrong direction. Pinsetti fails to catch it because he ducks when the baby goes flying at him ("a month of head injuries had him spooked"), and it smashes through the window, lands on the pavement and gets run over by a school bus.
Jamie's drawing of the flattened baby with the comment, "This is about as bad as a baby's day can go."
"My social studies teacher 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 a waterfall or a unicorn. I smile when I think about a unicorn kicking Angeline over a waterfall."
According to Jamie, 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.
In second grade, Isabella beat up a boy named Lewis for laughing at her last name.
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.)
"We became instant friends, and have been that ever since. Although sometimes Isabella seems more like a mousetrap and more like an atomic bomb that you should not stick your fingers in."
One illustration has five identical drawings of Angeline smiling, with individual captions under each one reading "Angeline making me mad", "Angeline making me enraged", "Angeline making me mental", "Angeline making me bananas", and "Angeline making me have rabies".
"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."
Isabella's mom goes on a sugar-free diet and makes the entire house follow it too. Since the principal's office now has a dish of candy bars, Isabella gets herself in trouble eight times in one day to get sent down to the office and get them, including drawing Mr. Evans in a grass skirt and coconut bra on the chalkboard.
