Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (10 page)

F
ive minutes later, I stumble into The Crawley’s lair, far beneath the surface of Planet Cathedral.

It’s dark down here. Too dark to really see where I’m going. I hear dripping water somewhere, and there’s a bad smell in the air, like a sandwich made out of old cheese… and death.

My feet feel their way across the rocks as I go. “Hello?” I say. “Anybody here?”

“Good morning,” a voice answers from the shadows. “Come in, please.”

I take another step—but it’s one too many. The ground slips away beneath me, and the next thing I know, I’m falling through empty air.

The place where I land is soft but sticky. Long
strands like superglue-covered ropes grab on to my arms and legs and don’t let go. I struggle, but that only makes things worse. Before I’ve even started to put up a fight, I’m completely immobilized in The Crawley’s web.

He’s not even trying to appear human down here. Why should he? I’m on his turf now—and at his mercy. One quick stab with those razor-sharp pincers, and he could drain me like a juice box.

“And how are you this morning, Rafe?” he asks, cool as an eight-legged cucumber.

“I’m okay,” I tell him. It’s important that I stay calm too. They say The Crawley can smell fear a mile away.

They also say he likes to play with his food before he eats it.

“I want to ask you about a little incident we had yesterday,” he says. “Something involving a couple of water balloons?”

Not water balloons
, I think.
Rubber gloves.
Of course, I’m not stupid. The less I say here, the better.

“Do you know anything about that?” he asks me.

“I heard about it,” I say.

“That’s all?” he says. “So you don’t know who was responsible?”

“No, sir.”

I may be totally unarmed, but there is one weapon I can use. It’s called
denial
. As long as The
Crawley doesn’t have any proof, I still have a small chance of getting out of here alive.

He starts to circle the lair. I can’t even turn my mummified head, so I lose sight of him for a minute.

When he comes around again, there’s something in his hand.

“Do you know what this is, Rafe?” he says. At first, it looks like a plain folder. Then I see my name, and the words
HILLS VILLAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL
across the front. “It seems you had quite a year last year. Got into a bit of trouble on your home planet, did you?”

My mind scrambles for something to say.

“That was all just a misunderstanding,” I tell him. “I’ve changed since then. I turned over a new leaf. That’s not me anymore….”

Now I’m saying too much. I can tell he’s not buying it. I try to look him in the eye, but it’s hard to know which of those six eyes to look into.

“Rafe, I’m going to ask you one more time,” he says. “Are you sure you don’t know anything about all this?”

“I’m sure!” I tell him. “I swear!”

The lair goes quiet as he stares me down for a
good long time. All I can hear now are those pincers clicking away, ready to start slicing and dicing at any moment.

But then The Crawley reaches up and cuts right through the threads of his own web. A second later, I fall out onto the floor in a heap.

“You can go,” he says.

Already I’m back on my feet, running for daylight as fast as I can.

“But I’ve got my eye on you, Rafe!” he screeches after me. “I’d hate to see what happens if you land in here again!”

Yeah, I think. Him and me both.

B
y the time I left Mr. Crawley’s office, everything had changed. I wasn’t just the new transfer student at Cathedral anymore. Now I was the new troublemaker, as far as he was concerned.

I don’t understand how this keeps happening to me. I’ve never been very good at being good, if you know what I mean, but sometimes it’s like all the trouble in the world is made of metal, and I’m just one big walking magnet. I could change schools every two weeks, and it wouldn’t matter. That permanent record of mine might as well be tattooed across my forehead.

And then, just when I thought my morning couldn’t get any weirder, it did.

I was headed straight up the hall to first period when someone grabbed me from behind. The next thing I knew, I was pulled into some kind of broom closet, the door slammed shut, and everything went pitch-black.

I didn’t wait around for instructions. I just started swinging. I figured if this was Zeke and Kenny, I might as well do as much damage as I could before they got me.

But then I heard “Ow! OW! Cut it out! It’s me—Matty!”

“Huh?” I stopped with my fist in the air. “What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I wanted to know why you got called to the office,” he said, like it was completely normal to have a conversation in a pitch-dark closet. (And for all I know, it
was
normal—for Matty.)

“Why do you think?” I said. “Crawley basically knows I dropped those balloons off the roof.”

“Rubber gloves,” Matty said.

“Whatever.”

“And what’d you tell him?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “He couldn’t prove it, so I just kept my mouth shut.”

I don’t know if this will make sense, but I swear I heard Matty smile right there in the dark.

“Awesome,” he said.

“Yeah, for you. Meanwhile, Zeke and Kenny trashed my locker.”

Now I heard him laughing. “Don’t worry about them. There’s still plenty of time for that little war.”

“I don’t want a little war,” I said. “I don’t want any kind of war. I just want to get to first period. Crawley’s going to be watching me like I’m free HBO from now on.”

“Yeah, all right.” Matty cracked the door open and checked the hall for me. “But I owe you one. If you ever change your mind, I’ve got your back.”

It wasn’t until I was walking away that I even realized something good might have come out of this after all.

Unless I was mistaken, I’d just made a real, live human friend for the first time since I started middle school. (And no, Jeanne Galletta doesn’t count. She was my math tutor, for one thing, and she might have been
friendly
, but we were
never
friends
. At least, not for her.)

Matty said it himself—
I’ve got your back
.

That has to be worth something, doesn’t it?

F
lash forward!

If I tried to write down everything that happened during that first quarter at Cathedral, you’d need a wheelbarrow to carry this book around. So I’m going to skip over some stuff.

The short version is this: I spent a lot of time just getting used to my new school, new home, new city—and I learned a ton, usually the hard way. Here are some handy FYIs, just in case you ever find yourself in the same situation.

When you’re the only boy in a small house with one grandmother, one mother, one sister, and one bathroom, all I can say is—learn how to be patient. Oh, and plan ahead.

Art isn’t easy! It turns out there are just as many rules for making art in art school as there are for anything else. If you don’t believe me, just try holding your paintbrush the wrong way in Mrs. Grundewald’s class sometime, and see what happens.

Art school is smart school. As far as I can tell, most of the kids at Cathedral were born with a math book in one hand and an extra brain in the other. So if you’re a dummy like me, don’t expect to blend in! (And just in case you’re wondering, the answer is
yes
, all those famous dead artists had to learn pre-algebra too. At least, that’s what Mr. Frum told me when I asked.)