5

But one of the things that makes my friendship with Rowley work is that he doesn't MIND watching me play video games. Plus, the reason our ancestors invented technology in the first place was so they didn't HAVE to interact with one another. Mom sent me and Rowley down to the basement, and the two of us tried to figure out what to do. I'd asked Rowley to bring some DVDs with him so we could stay up late watching movies. But he only brought HOME movies, and you couldn't PAY me to watch THOSE.

I RIP Rowley's 5th Grade Play rowley's Birth Mom brought us down some "Wacky Sentences" books, where you fill in the blanks to create funny phrases. For the first round, Rowley came up with the words and I wrote them down in the blanks. The phrases we made were actually pretty funny, but what wasn't funny was Rowley's new habit of saying "lol" instead of laughing.

OUR CAFETERIA HAS REALLY SMELLY FOOD. LOL THE PIZZA IS PURPLE AND THE FRENCH PRIES ARE SLIMY. LOL. LOL It was really driving me crazy. So we switched roles, and I came up with the words instead. Rowley started by asking me for the name of a sport, so I said "volleyball." But he told me it's "bolleyball," with a "b." So then we got into this huge argument about what letter "volleyball" starts with. I found a dictionary and handed it to Rowley and told him to look it up himself. But instead of flipping to the letter "v," Rowley read every single word in the "b" section. And when he couldn't find "bolleyball," he started over from the beginning.

BACON... BACTERIA... BADGER... Rowley accused me of having an outdated dictionary and said that's why "bolleyball" wasn't in it, so then we got into an argument about what year volleyball was invented. By this point Rowley was really getting on my nerves, and I realized we'd better change gears or we were gonna end up in a fight, as usual. I told Rowley maybe we should do something different, and he said he wanted to play Hide-and- Seek. But the problem with playing Hide-and-Seek with Rowley is he thinks that when he can't see you, you can't see him. So that makes him really easy to find.

I decided we just needed a break from each other, so I came up with an idea. I told Rowley we were gonna see who was braver, me or him, and we stepped out the sliding glass door. Each of us had to walk into the woods and write our name on the tree fort we built last summer. And whoever chickened out was wrong about volleyball and had to call the other guy "sir" for the rest of his life. Rowley seemed to think that was a fair deal.

I told Rowley I'd go first, and I walked into the woods. But as soon as I knew he couldn't see me, I ran around to the front of my house. There's no way I was gonna go into those woods by myself at night. I had written my name on the tree fort when me and Rowley built it over the summer, and that's the reason I came up with the dare.