Summary
One morning during hot chocolate with the Safety Patrol, Rowley gets called down to Mr. Winsky's office. Apparently, a parent saw Rowley terrorizing the kindergartners that he'd been walking home. Mr. Winsky yells at Rowley about disrespecting the badge, and tells him he'll have to apologize to the kids and will be suspended from the patrol for a week. But Greg knows what happened. On a day when Rowley had a quiz, Greg had to walk the kids home alone. Since it had just rained, he found a worm to put on a stick, and chased the kids around with it. Mrs. Irvine, who is friends with Rowley's mom, though it was Rowley doing it since Greg was wearing Rowley's coat at the time. Therefore, she mistook Greg for Rowley when she called the school to report the incident.
Greg is pretty conflicted about what to do, and his mom notices that something is on his mind. He tells her that he's in a tough situation, but she doesn't pry. His mom simply tells him that he should do the right thing because it's the choices people make that make them who they are. After a tough decision, Greg decides to just let Rowley "take one for the team" and leave him to apologize to the kids.
But on their way home, Greg comes clean to Rowley about what happened, and says that he hopes Rowley has learned his lesson to be careful about who to lend his coat to. But Rowley doesn't see Greg's side of it and decides to just go home and take a nap instead of playing with Greg after school. At home, Greg's mom asks if he did the right thing, and he says he did. To show her support of Greg's good decision, she takes him out to ice cream.
At school the next day, Greg gets called into Mr. Winsky's office. Mr. Winsky tells him that an anonymous source has informed him that Greg is really the culprit, and Greg is stripped of his Safety Patrol duties, effective immediately. Rowley is reinstated on the Safety Patrol and given a promotion for exhibiting dignity under false suspicion. Greg is pretty upset that Rowley ratted him out, but decides not to be mean to Rowley since if he stays on his friend's good side, Rowley will probably extend his invitation to Greg to be his partner on the Safety Patrol's annual trip to Six Flags. But Rowley starts giving Greg the cold shoulder, ignoring him in the morning when he comes to the Safety Patrol door to try to get some hot chocolate, and generally avoiding him. Greg is especially mad because Rowley is the one who sold him out, and if anything Greg should be mad.
Rowley starts hanging out all the time with Collin Lee instead of with Greg. Rowley and Collin even wear matching shirts to school one day that have a picture of the two of them together with the words "Best Friends" above it. After dinner one night, Greg sees Collin and Rowley walking to Rowley's house, and Collin has his overnight bag. Feeling spiteful, Greg goes to Fregley's house with his overnight back and invites himself in. Fregley's mom is glad that Fregley has a playmate and is glad to let Greg spend the night.
Greg is totally pre-occupied with Rowley, though, and keeps looking out the window to see Rowley and Collin playing together in Rowley's front yard. He doesn't want to leave since he knows Rowley will see that he's not spending the night at Fregley's house, so he stays. There's a complication when Fregley breaks into Greg's bag and eats the entire pack of jelly beans Greg had in there. Fregley isn't supposed to have sugar and goes totally nuts, chasing Greg around the house until Greg locks himself in Fregley's room. Eventually, Fregley slips a note under the door saying he's sorry he chased Greg around with a booger on his finger, but that he's attached it to the paper so Greg can still touch it. Greg blacks out, and next thing he knows, he's outside his house throwing rocks against his parents' window. They're mad that he's woken them up at 2 AM, but he doesn't really care.
Since Greg and Rowley haven't been friends for a month, Greg has started going through Rodrick's stuff after school every day. He finds his brother's old middle-school year book, where Rodrick has written all over everyone's pictures with what he thinks about them. It turns out that he thought most of his classmates were jerks or nerds. But looking through the year book gets Greg starting to think about the Class Favorites votes. He thinks that if he can get voted as a class favorite, he'll end up being popular and well-remembered for a long time to come.
Greg decides to try to get voted Class Clown. He figures that if he can pull off a big, memorable prank before the end of the school year, he'll make a big impression. He knows there's going to be a substitute for Mr. Worth in History, so he devises a plan to give the substitute a hard time. But the plan backfires when it ends up that his mom is the substitute. Instead, she embarrasses him by making him feel like a mama's boy.
After "Creighton the Curious Student" comes out, Greg decides to quite his job as the school cartoonist. His replacement? Rowley—with a comic where every punchline is "Zoo-Wee Mama!" It's even called "Zoo-Wee Mama!" It makes Rowley incredibly popular, as the teachers love it and all his fellow students ask to be put into it. It really gets to Greg that Rowley is getting so much attention for his idea, so he confronts Rowley about it in the hallway one day. Rowley gets defensive and says that the comic strip was his idea, and things start to get heated. Eventually, a group gathers around Greg and Rowley telling them to fight, and they all go outside to do it. The only issue is that neither Greg nor Rowley know how to fight, but Greg is a little afraid that Rowley might win since he takes karate. But before they can start, a big car pulls up, and everyone runs away.
The car is full of the teenagers from Halloween night—the ones who Greg said he was going to call the cops on. They have come to get their revenge. Greg notices that the cheese is still on the basketball court, and his fixation with it makes the teens realize it's there too. Since Rowley got singled out first, the teens force him down and made him eat the cheese. They are about to force Greg to do it too, but he makes up a lie and says he is allergic to dairy. The teens buy it and don't make him do anything. On their way home, Rowley is totally shaken.
At school the next day, everyone realizes that the cheese had disappeared, and there are a number of theories about what happened. Someone says the cheese grew legs and walked away. Greg realizes that some of the guys wondering about the cheese were ones egging him and Rowley on to fight. Rowley must realize this too because he begins to panic: he sure doesn't want anyone knowing he ate the cheese. Greg decides to step up and say that he was just tired of looking at the cheese so he picked it up and threw it away. But everyone bolts away from him. Why? Because if he touched the cheese, then he got the Cheese Touch.
Rowley starts hanging out with Greg again after that, although they don't talk about their old issues. Greg ends up finding it ok to have the Cheese Touch. In gym class, he didn't have to square dance since no one wanted to partner with him and get the Cheese Touch from him. When the yearbooks come out on the last day of school, Greg turns right to the page with Class Clown and sees that Rowley has gotten it. Greg is miffed, and says that Rowley better stay on his good side, unless Rowley wants people finding out that he at the cheese.
Analysis
One of the big criticisms you'll hear about Diary of a Wimpy Kid is that some parents don't think it's an especially good influence on their kids. In a New York Times article about the series, Tara Parker-Pope quotes Amazon reviews that complain about the language used in the book, such as "moron," "stupid," and "hot girls." And Jeff Kinney, in interviews, has said that he doesn't necesarilly consider these books that are supposed to be particularly serious or even educational for kids.
Kinney considers his books candy and not vitamins, and mainly wants them to be entertaining reads that get kids interested in reading. He's even gone as far as to say that he doesn't think it's his job to moralize to kids. But the fact of the matter is that, perhaps despite Kinney's best efforts, Diary of a Wimpy Kid does teach a lesson. The big conflict in the book revolves around Greg's refusal to take responsibility for terrorizing kindergarteners while on Safety Patrol, letting his best friend Rowley take the blame instead.
The entire time, we know that Greg is doing the wrong thing, and when Rowley stops hanging out with him and starts hanging out with Collin Lee, we totally get it. Since Kinney doesn't want to make Greg a totally likable protagonist, we definitely understand why Rowley would hang out with someone else who is willing to wear a t-shirt to school proclaiming that Rowley is his best friend. Rowley deserves a friend that will treat him well, not one who will break his arm and then let him take the fall for something that he himself did.
But Greg ultimately comes around and is rewarded for it. Rowley never quite forgives Greg for not owning up to terrorizing the kindergarteners, but warms back up to him after he prevents the other kids at school from finding out that Rowley was forced to eat the cheese off the basketball court. It's the first grown-up thing we really see Greg do in the book, and it feels good to see him do it. He even gets his friend back.
That New York Times article also quotes a child psychologist who says that the power of the book is that it portrays a kid who's growing up just trying to deal with the things that life gives him, and that this is an important thing for parents and their children to be honest about with each other. While Diary of a Wimpy Kid isn't half as moralizing as an entry in the Berenstain Bears series, it's not total junk food. It shows readers what it's like living through those confusing pre-teen and early teenage years, and gives little examples of what to do and not to do. Sure, it's often all in the name of humor, but does that mean that a book with jokes can't give a reader something valuable?
