Dear Dumb Diary, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is a book written by Jim Benton that is the first in the Dear Dumb Diary book series. The book starts off with us being introduced to a girl named Jamie Kelly. Jamie Kelly is a girl in middle school. Her best friend’s name is Isabella, and her biggest rival is a girl named Angeline. But the story doesn’t just start there. At Jamie’s school, there’s a mean boy named Pinsetti. He’s the official nicknamer of the school. He even nicknamed a boy Butt Buttlington, and now nobody knows his real name. But in the meantime, Jamie has been experimenting with her hair. She ends up choosing a dye that looks like Angeline’s hair, and it ends up coming out the same color as raw chicken. So she grabs a chunk of hair from her hairbrush, brought it to the store to have the clerk help her find a match for her original color, and then redyed it to brown.
Hey, remember that girl Angeline from earlier? She stole Isabella’s signature Lip Smacker flavor, so Isabella has Jamie go to the mall with her to pick one out. The next day, something incredible happens. Angeline’s hair gets caught in the things that hang off of her backpack, so one side of it has to be cut off! The day after that, Jamie feels sick at school, so the nurse has her lay down on the cot. Lo and behold, in the wastebasket in the room, there sat Angeline’s clump of hair. And Jamie took it. She didn’t know why, she just wanted it. So the next day, Jamie had to figure out what she was going to do with Angeline’s hair clump. After she couldn’t come up with a good idea, she decided to keep it as a trophy. Speaking of Angeline, guess what she decided to do to cover up the area where her hair got chopped off? Start wearing a beret. Jamie thought that was stupid, but when she came back to school the next day, half the people in school were wearing them. In fact, it was almost as if the people in berets had formed their own union against the cafeteria meatloaf. Despite being chastised by the head lunch lady, they all refused to eat it. In the next two chapters over, Jamie chooses to go online and read about Medusa and Icarus.
