Rodrick Rules

So, Mom went and bought me another journal. You'd think she would've learned after the disaster with my last one, which Rodrick got a hold of and nearly ruined my life. He's the only person who knows about this really embarrassing thing that happened to me over the summer, and he's been holding it over my head ever since. My summer was pretty lousy anyway, mostly thanks to Dad making me join the swim team again. Practice was at 7:30 in the morning in freezing cold water, and I had to wear Rodrick's hand-me-down swim trunks. I spent most of the summer hiding out in the forty-degree locker room, wrapped in toilet paper, just to get out of practice. Honestly, I was actually looking forward to school starting.

Things at home are the usual disaster. Mom has this crazy idea that if me and Rodrick do chores together, like the dishes, we'll magically start getting along. All that really means is that Rodrick disappears into the bathroom for an hour while I do all the work. To make things worse, Mom started a new reward system called “Mom Bucks,” which is basically play money we can earn for doing good deeds. Rodrick cashed his in immediately for heavy metal magazines, but I thought I'd be smart. I found a huge stash of the exact same play money in one of Rowley's board games and figured I was set for life. That plan blew up in my face, of course, when I tried to pay Rodrick twenty thousand Mom Bucks for an old history paper he wrote, and he tried to cash it all in at once.

My best friend Rowley is back from his vacation to South America, and as usual, he's totally obsessed with it. He came to school in some ridiculous costume and all the girls were fawning over him. It's getting a little annoying how much he copies me, too. He even got a diary just to be like me. I tried to see what he was writing about me in it, but the whole thing was just page after page of him writing down his “feelings” and drawing pictures of us as best friends. After seeing what's going on in his head, I'm kind of starting to wonder why I'm friends with him in the first place.

Then Mom and Dad made their biggest mistake ever: they went away for the weekend and left me and Rodrick home alone. The second their car was out of the driveway, Rodrick was on the phone, and before I knew it, our house was ground zero for a massive high school party. I thought I'd at least get to see what a real party was like, but Rodrick just locked me in the basement for the whole night. The next day, he blackmailed me into helping him clean up the entire trashed house, threatening to spill my secret if I didn't. We almost got away with it, but we had to swap the bathroom door with a closet door to hide some permanent marker graffiti. I had a feeling that was going to come back to haunt us.

Eventually, Dad found a photo from the party that someone accidentally took on Mom's camera. Rodrick got grounded for a month, and I got a two-week video game ban for being his “accomplice.” While he was grounded, his band, Löded Diper, practiced in our basement every single day for the Winter Talent Show. Dad was going so crazy listening to them that he ended Rodrick's punishment early. The talent show was their big chance to get discovered, and Rodrick asked me to videotape their performance. I told him no way.

Mom volunteered to film it instead, and it was a total train wreck. She did a decent job, but she talked through the whole thing, and when Rodrick started his big drum solo, she got up and started dancing right in front of the stage. The camera followed her for the rest of the song. The video went viral online, and now everyone knows Rodrick as the drummer from the “Dancing Mom” video. He was furious and blamed the whole thing on me. To get revenge, he finally did it: he told all his friends my secret.

By the next morning, I knew everyone at school would know. The real story is that I got accidentally trapped in the women's bathroom at Grandpa's retirement community over the summer. It was humiliating. But somehow, as the story got passed around, the details got completely twisted. When I walked into school, bracing for the worst, everyone started congratulating me. The story had become that I'd snuck into the girls' locker room at Crossland *High School*. Suddenly, I was a legend. They even gave me a nickname: the “Stealthinator.”

Now, Rodrick is the one hiding out in the basement, waiting for his own embarrassing story to blow over. I guess I feel a little bad for him. He's about to flunk Science if he doesn't turn in a project for the Science Fair, so I offered to help him out. He can be a huge jerk, but he is my brother. When he gets first prize tomorrow, I just hope he realizes how lucky he is to have a brother like me.