Electric Chalk

I am so serious about electric chalk being the best thing ever invented. No other writing utensil even comes close. I should be the national spokeschick. I want to have electric chalk babies. End of story.

Congrats Juice!

On your speed-ranting prowess!

I'm only cool with your victory because I love the second-place prize.


Electric chalk is the new black.

Witty Day

Today Juice came to school with cheese molded in the shape of hearts stuck all over her dress. I almost didn’t walk home with her, but her mom was baking cookies.

“Cooking the hearts on my dress?” Juice joked as we entered her house.

“Yum yum, fiber,” I said.

These two comments are by far the wittiest things Juice and I have ever said.

“Oh no, it’s Jolly,” Juice’s mom moaned, pulling a sheet of freshly-baked cookies out of the oven. “She always eats all my chocolate chip cookies, the pig.”

“Hey, we cookies are alive! Don’t eat us!” the cookies screamed.

“I love eating alive cookies while watching my sister,” Juice said as her sister wailed, holding a Lick-N-Stick sticker book to her mouth.

“My tongue thtuck!” she cried.

“Too bad she’s still noisy,” I commented, successfully pulling off the second wittiest thing I’ve ever said. After I yanked the kid’s tongue off the book, I asked her if she loved me better than Juice.

“She can’t hear you,” Juice said. “I plugged her ears with cheese hearts from my dress.”

This wit competition was getting tight. Fortunately, Juice’s ex-boyfriend Smarty barged into the house saying, “Juice, I still love you. I brought you this.” He held out a spider in a jar.

“Ugh. I thought I dumped you,” Juice said, sticking out her tongue as we made our way upstairs to practice for our school’s upcoming recital race. Juice and I are going to compete directly against each other in the Academy Award acceptance speech category.

“I wish you hadn’t dumped that nice boy,” Juice’s mom said, stopping us mid-staircase. “That’s a rare species of spider he brought you.”

The answer Juice’s mom got was “Try to guess which one of us is speaking, Jolly or Juice. We’re both taking ventriloquism to improve our speed-ranting techniques.” The truth was that we were speaking in unison, but Juice’s mom didn’t care enough to guess.

“My mouth turned into a triangle during our attempt at ventriloquism,” Juice said as we entered her room and she tried to shut the door on Smarty.

“That’s what you get for dating a geometry wizard,” I scolded her. “You should have dumped him for Joely sooner. Then you would be sick of Joely by now and I could have him.”

“You’re just jealous because I got an A on our first geometry test and you thought it was a snack,” Juice smirked.

“I got to retake the test.”

“At least I dumped him,” Juice said, still smirking and holding Smarty off as he struggled to keep his head and one arm in Juice’s room.

“What a dork!” I laughed.

“It’s a great spider,” he said, responding to my compliment with an optimistic smile. “It even talks!”

“Yo,” said the spider.

most heartwarming day EVER

For those of you who were asking, the library nerds never paid enough attention, so eventually we and our emotions took a hike elsewhere and Juice went on to another fashion phase.

This phase is called the watermelon phase, given her preference of colors. She even joked that her skin represented the seeds. She tolerates my teasing, but today another subject made her blow up at me completely, though she retained her bodily form. As we were walking home from school she told me to read the word on her shirt and I flatly refused, saying, “I can’t. I can’t read anything at all.”

“You can’t even read the word on my shirt?” she shouted.

“Of course not.” I smiled and turned away from her. “I’ve forsworn reading. I can’t read.”

“Yes, you can!” she screamed as she ran away from me. “Just because you’ve forgotten what words look like doesn’t mean you can’t read, Jolly!”

“Get a new outfit!” I called after her.

I stormed home from school thinking things like, “Reading is for idiots. Pulling up my skirt is so much more fun.” This would be a good time to point out that I am in a short-skirt phase.

Once at home, I marveled that my skirt didn’t slide down on the couch even when I propped my knees up. I figured that had something to do with my cat sleeping on my feet. After getting through several rounds of my new handheld video game, “Poet Elimination,” and giving up because Wordsworth just wouldn’t die, I opened a book to reassure myself of my immunity to reading, and realized that, shock of all shocks, there were words all over the pages of the book! They were really small. I decided to kiss the book just to see what would happen, and immediately my lips swelled up. “Maybe the book warned about that!” I thought. “Maybe I should read again. I keep thinking about Watermelon Juice.”

“Don’t knock me over, Jolly,” Mom said as I ran out the door at the same time she was entering the house. “I just won a day as prime minister of Canada. You should treat me with more respect and less running.”

“I have to run in this skirt so everyone can see my undies!” I cried.

Of course my best of friends was running toward me as well, consistent with what television commercials lead us to expect from everyday encounters.

“Juice!” I cried. “You really do look like a watermelon! That is so sad!”

“Jolly!” she cried back. “I kissed a book and my lips swelled up!”

We had a long, heartfelt talk about the entire situation up in my room, and Juice agreed to join me in forswearing reading. She added that she would end her watermelon phase if I would get rid of “that hideously ugly outfit.”

“Not till I look good naked, Juice,” I snorted. Then I turned to finish reading a magazine article about how to see your boyfriend in others you love.

“I can see myself in my parents,” I said after explaining the gimmicky premise to Juice. “I guess that means that I’m my own boyfriend.”

“My boyfriend does look like you,” Juice said, patting me on the hand. “But his idiot father wants him to break up with me. I heard them yelling back and forth yesterday as I was working on Joely’s tasting project in his room--you know, the one where he has to go around tasting everything. His father was saying, ‘Your idiot girlfriend made pee come out of the side of my head when she performed brain surgery on me! Plus she put my tie in a waffle iron!’”
I pretended to care, and then said, “There must be a boyfriend out there for me who looks like me.” I remembered a few days back to when my caninivorous neighbor told me I looked like Joely, the gorgeous young whippersnapper hunk she was after. I hoped Juice was picking up on my hints for her to break up with him for my sake.

“Tee hee,” Juice said, then suddenly halted her giggles. “Jolly, why did you let your mom in the room?”

“Somebody left the door open and I don’t know how to close it,” I shrugged as my mom opened my dresser drawers. “I don’t know why she keeps coming in and putting clothes away. Those aren’t even my clothes.”

“That’s right, Jolly, and I’m not even your mother,” she said, turning toward us. She began to glow all over. “I’m an angel, sent by the most-beloved television networks, to provide answers to all your problems. I’ve come to tell you, Juice, not to feel guilty about what you did to your boyfriend’s father. For a happy ending, I’ve arranged for the three of us to be in a toothpaste commercial together.”

“Nice lipstick,” I said to my fake Mom during the spontaneous and ill-prepared commercial shoot. Then I sniffed and embraced her. “I’ll never forget you, fake Mom,” I told her, “or the money I’m making from this commercial.”