Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (14 page)

“Mom?” he started saying.
“Mom?
Excuse me, have you seen a tall lady with a red hat?”

I thought Leo the Silent was a genius, but this was the best move I’d ever seen. Two minutes later, we were up to our eyeballs in superluxury seating at the first R-rated movie I’d ever watched in a theater. It was called
Zombomania
and, believe me, I saw some stuff I definitely wasn’t supposed to—for instance, a lady who not only was a zombie but also happened to have no clothes on—the whole time.

And all I can say to that is—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So all of that was pretty good already. But then, when the movie let out, we were starving, and Matty said he knew a place where we could get something to eat—for free, of course.

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Where to?”

S
o how’s that junk sculpture coming along?” Mom asked me while I was pretending to be hungry for dinner that night. “You’ve been working so hard on it lately.”

I told her the sculpture was going okay, which was true, but meanwhile I was also trying to erase the last five hours from my brain. I don’t know about you, but my mother’s like a mind reader that way. It’s safer if you just don’t think about the stuff you don’t want her to know.

And that wasn’t easy, because I still had about a hundred questions I wanted to ask.

Finally, after dinner, I decided to take a chance—not with Mom but with Grandma. I waited until Mom and Georgia were upstairs watching a movie, and then I found Grandma in the living room,
fixing up the couch for me the way she did every night.

“Grandma?” I said. I kept my voice down, just in case.

“Yeah, kiddo?”

“You know that picture of Mom with my dad? The one of them in front of Hairy’s Place?”

“Sure. I love that picture,” she said.

“Well, I was just curious. Do you know who Hairy is? I mean, not that it really matters or anything,” I said.

“Oh, he’s your father’s uncle,” she said, just like that. “Not a very nice man, though.” Then she went back to tucking my blankets in under the cushions.

It hit me like a punch in the stomach. That big, hairy—scary—guy was
my great-uncle
? It seemed kind of impossible, even though it wasn’t impossible at all.

“Grandma?” I said again.

“Yeah, kiddo?”

“Do you know what his real name is?”

“Whose name, sweetie?” she said. Sometimes talking to Grandma is a little like a bad phone connection.

“Hairy,” I said. “The guy with the barbershop. The one in the old picture?”

Grandma got this big smile on her face. “You know, that reminds me,” she said. “Have I ever shown you my old photos before? We should dig them out sometime and take a little walk down memory lane.”

Well, what was I going to say to that? Besides, it wasn’t like going back to square one. I already knew more than I did before I talked to her.

“Sure,” I told her. “That sounds good.”

She dropped a couple of pillows onto the couch and then crunched me up in one of those surprisingly strong hugs of hers.

“I love you, Ralphie,” she said. “You’re a good boy.”

“I love you too, Grandma,” I said.

And that was the truth too.

I
decided to leave the whole Hairy thing alone for a while and give him some time to cool off. Like maybe until the next ice age.

But I wasn’t quitting either. That night after Grandma went upstairs, I got right back on the computer.

This time, I typed in
Luca Khatchadorian
to see what I could find.

There wasn’t much, though. Almost all of it was about some kid who lived on a goat farm in some place called Latvia.

So I tried just plain
Khatchadorian
after that, but then it was the opposite problem: I got about two million hits.

Finally, I searched for
Ralph Khatchadorian
, just
for the heck of it. That got me a big zero, but the message on the screen also said
Did you mean “Rafe Khatchadorian?”

And I thought—I don’t know… did I?

I figured it couldn’t hurt to click anyway.

The first thing on the list that came up had my name right there, and something about Cathedral. Then, when I clicked on that, it brought up my student page on the school’s site, with a bunch of pictures, artwork, and other stuff.

The only problem was, I didn’t
have
a student page on the school’s site. I knew we were allowed to set them up, but the only people who did that were the ones who had eighteen thousand friends they could collect and show off.

And whoever had set up this page was no friend of mine.

The more I looked at it, the more I forgot why I had sat down at the computer in the first place. I wasn’t thinking about Luca Ralph Khatchadorian anymore. Now I was thinking about Zeke McDonald and Kenny Patel.

And revenge.

Again.

“Hey, Leo?” I said.

“What’s up?” he said.

“I need to call a time-out in Operation: Get a Life.”

“WHAT?”

“Just for a few days,” I told him.

“Why?”

“Because of the No-Hurt Rule,” I said. “I think I’m about to break it, and I don’t want to be in the game when I do.”