My mom dropped me off at Isabella’s today. We hung around outside most of the time because her mean older brothers were inside playing video games and, according to Isabella, plotting some sort of horrible scheme against her and trying on pretty dresses.

They weren’t really trying on pretty dresses. Isabella just likes to yell that loud enough for the neighbors to hear. She goes out of her way to make her brothers unhappy. She often asks herself, “What would make my brothers unhappy?” So she won’t forget, she sometimes wears a bracelet that she made with the letters WWMMBU on it.

As we reviewed our List of Summer Excellence, we realized that every single thing on it was going to cost money.

I have a little bit of money in the bank, but my parents won’t let me touch that. It’s supposed to help pay for my college education one day, where I will learn the skills I need to earn the money I’ll need to pay back all the money I borrowed for the college education.

Isabella asked her mom for money, but since Isabella’s mom has THREE children, and she is three times meaner than a mom with only one, she said no. We tried to escape the room as soon as we saw her mouth begin to form ADULT WISDOM, but she’s fast and hit us with, “You know, girls, the best things in life are free.”

“Like money?” Isabella asked. “So, like, free money. Free money would be one of the best things in life, right?”

Isabella really excels at this sort of question, so her mom really excels at answering them.

“Go outside,” she said.

Isabella stayed on the free money theme for a while. She said that her brothers have money, but explained that getting it for free could be a little inconvenient. According to Isabella, it could end up with me having to chew off a leg in order to free myself from whatever trap they had set. (That’s right. “Inconvenient” is how she describes leg removal by chewing.)

Excerpted from DEAR DUMB DIARY #10: THE WORST THINGS IN LIFE ARE ALSO FREE © Copyright 2010 by Jim Benton. Reprinted with permission by Scholastic Paperbacks, an imprint of Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.