Johnny, a fourteen-year-old living in Hull, Vermont, finds out his mom will be spending the summer in upstate New York for a job. Instead of bringing him along, she's leaving him at his Aunt Collette's house, where he'll have to look after his oddly-named fifteen-year-old autistic cousin, Remember. Johnny is dreading his summer, but Mem turns out to be better company than Johnny expected.
Remember Dippy contains examples of:
- Artistic License – Animal Care: Johnny keeps giving people food to Mem's ferrets, Linguini and Jambalaya. Linguini is particularly fond of chocolate, which in real life is highly poisonous to ferrets.
- Awful Wedded Life: Mem's mean neighbor Dirk Dempster is constantly stressed out from his parents yelling at each other. Johnny can relate, because his parents were always yelling at each other during the year or so before they divorced.
- Dedication: "For Annie and Zoe"
- Disappeared Dad: Johnny's dad has lived in Maine ever since his parents' divorce two years ago. Johnny doesn't like visiting him because he doesn't get along with his girlfriend Kim.
- Lost Wedding Ring: Niko, who runs the local pizzeria, has been in despair since accidentally dropping his grandmother's ring, which he was going to use to propose to his girlfriend Carmelita, down a vent. Ripping up the floor to retrieve it would cost more than the ring is worth. The protagonists send Linguini into the vents to look for it, then lure her back out with a squeaky toy. When she appears, she's holding the ring in her teeth. Johnny later hears that Carmelita said yes.
- Signs of Disrepair: Mem and Collette's mailbox used to say "THE DIPPY'S." After a recent rainstorm, it says, "T E DIPP," causing other kids to call Mem "The Dipp." Dirk buys a letter O from the hardware store and changes it to "DOPE." He and Johnny get into a war of leaving insulting messages on each other's mailboxes.
- Timmy in a Well: Millie, the dog of Johnny's elderly neighbor Mr. Boots, appears at the door of the Dippys' house. Johnny follows her on his bicycle back to his street, where he finds Mr. Boots lying on the grass with his leg broken from tripping over the sprinkler.
- Tropey, Come Home: Mem is walking home with Linguini the ferret from Niko's pizzeria when Dirk rides by on his bike, almost knocking over Johnny. Johnny jumps out of the way and bumps into Mem, who drops Linguini, who runs into the bushes. Mem is devastated. The protagonists search for her, to no avail. Until Dirk writes two notes with a chocolate-scented marker and leaves them in the Dippy mailbox. Linguini, drawn by the smell, climbs into the mailbox, where Johnny finds her the next day.
- You Should Have Died Instead: Leesha, who works at her aunt Holly's hair salon, is eager to get out of her hometown of Chicago for the summer because her family has been dysfunctional ever since her brother died in a car crash. Their parents showed no favoritism while he was alive, but now that he's dead, her parents see him as perfect and are constantly getting angry at her for not measuring up.
