Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (18 page)

And I must have been doing something right, because Mom said I could be not completely grounded once school started up again. I asked her what “not completely” meant, but she just said, “Let’s see how it goes” and “Don’t push your luck.” I didn’t ask any more questions after that.

Now that I was going to have a little more freedom, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. I’d been racking up plenty of small stuff over
break, but it was time to start thinking big again.

Like really big.

Like Bigfoot Hairy big.

It had been a while now, and maybe if I was lucky, Hairy had taken an anger-management class or something. Anyway, I was determined to at least
try
to get him to tell me something about my dad.

But I wasn’t going in without backup. I needed someone who already knew about the whole Dad situation and who didn’t scare easily. Also, someone who was a real live human being. (Sorry, Leo!)

So as soon as I got to school on the first day back, I went looking for you-know-who.

I found him at his locker, drawing a new pair of eyeballs on the door to replace the ones Mr. McQuade had cleaned off over the break.

“Khatchy!” he said when he saw me. (He’d never called me that before, but that’s Matty the Freak for you.) “What’d you get me for Christmas?”

“The other half of your brain,” I said. “What’d you get me?”

Matty shrugged and unzipped his backpack.
Then he took out this sweet stainless-steel pen, still in the package.

“I’m not so big on wrapping stuff,” he said, and tossed it at me.

Now I felt stupid. I hadn’t even thought about getting a present for him. And the pen looked really nice, like something a real artist would use.

It also looked expensive.

“Um… how’d you get this?” I said, because with Matty, you never knew.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I got some crazy money from my aunt this year.”

I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth, but it’s not like I was going to call him a liar right after he’d given me a present.

And right before I wanted to ask him a favor.

“So, listen,” I said. “You remember Bigfoot Hairy, right?”

“I remember running for my life, if that’s what you mean,” Matty said.

“How would you feel about going back over there for a little surveillance with me?” I said.

I’d learned to speak enough Freak by now that I was pretty sure I knew how to get Matty
interested. And sure enough, the way he smiled when I asked that question, you would have thought I’d just given
him
a present, not the other way around.

I think that’s what you call a win-win situation.

M
om said I could hang out with Matty after school one day that week, as long as I was home by six o’clock. (I guess that’s what not-completely-grounded meant.) In other words, we had to make this count.

One thing I knew for sure: If I was going to talk to Hairy, it wasn’t going to be inside that barbershop, where there was only one exit. And all those scissors. So we set ourselves up in the building across the street, like a couple of real detectives on a stakeout.

Okay, it wasn’t
exactly like that. It was more like Matty calling the barbershop with a fake voice to find out what time Hairy closed, and then the two of us sitting at a bus stop on Calumet Avenue, waiting to see what would happen.

At ten to five, Hairy started sweeping up for the day. That’s when I started getting a little nervous—and by a little, I mean I’m glad it was freezing cold out so I had an excuse for all that shivering.

By the time Hairy came out, wearing a black
biker jacket, I was literally shaking in my boots. But I wasn’t going to quit now. Especially not in front of Matty.

“Let’s go!” he said, and jumped right up.

“Hang on,” I said.

I don’t think Matty was used to following other people’s plans, but I made him sit tight until Hairy got about halfway up the block. It wasn’t hard keeping an eye on him either, since he was about twice as tall as anyone else around.

“Okay, now we can go,” I said, and we started following Hairy.

At first, it was stop and go. We snuck up the street a little, then hid behind a newsstand. Then we went a little more, then stopped in the doorway of a shoe store.

“What are you going to say to him, anyway?” Matty asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll figure it out if I have to.”

“
If
?” Matty said. “What do you mean,
if
?”

“Shh!”

Hairy had just stopped in the middle of the sidewalk for no reason. I turned around fast and
pulled down my hat, trying not to have a nervous breakdown right there.

“What’s he doing?” I said. “Wait—don’t look!”

“Relax,” Matty said. “He’s just tying his shoe.”

We waited for Hairy to start moving again, then fell in behind.

He was going faster now, and it was getting harder to keep up. By the time Hairy turned the next corner, Matty and I were running to get there. We hoped we’d spot him on the next block, before he took another turn.

But there was something I wasn’t counting on. Bigfoot Hairy was smarter than he looked. As soon as we poked our heads around that corner, he was right there waiting for us.

It was an ambush! He clamped one gigantic paw on the back of Matty’s shirt, and another one on my arm.

“RUN!” Matty said, like there was any chance of that now.

Because Hairy wasn’t just onto us. He
had
us. And I was pretty sure I’d just made the last stupid mistake of my life.

Y
ou know how they say your life flashes in front of your eyes when you think you’re about to die? It’s not true.

What I saw was a fifty-foot pile of hair, muscle, and tattoos flashing in front of my eyes.

“What the heck are you two dummies following me for?” Hairy said. (He didn’t actually say “heck” or “dummies,” but this is supposed to be a PG kind of book.)

“We weren’t following you!” Matty shouted at him.

“DON’T LIE TO ME!” Hairy roared back, and held on even tighter. It felt like he was twisting my arm into some kind of balloon animal, and Matty’s feet were practically off the ground.

The next part just kind of popped out of me. There wasn’t any plan, except for trying not to die.

“
You’re my dad’s uncle!
” I yelled. (Okay, maybe kind of screamed, but in a really manly way.) “Hairy Khatchadorian, right?”

It was weird. Hairy didn’t move a muscle. He just kind of froze. But there was about 75 percent less murder in his eyes.

Then he said, “Rafe?”

Let me tell you, I was not expecting that.

“How do you know my name?” I said.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I knew you when you were three years old. Heck, I knew you when you were born. I even changed your diaper a few times.”

Matty laughed when Hairy said that, which made me kind of mad. But I had bigger things on my mind, and I didn’t want to wait around for another one of the guy’s mood swings. So I just kept going.

“Do you know where my dad is?” I asked him.

He let go of us and shoved his hands in his pockets, giving me a kind of funny look. For a second, I even thought he was about to answer my question.

But… no.

“Listen, Rafe,” he said. “That’s something you need to take up with your mom. Where is she, anyway?”

“She’s home,” I said, and he looked confused. “We live here in the city now.”

“You do? But she always hated the city,” he said.

“She did?” That was news to me.

“Come on, mister,” Matty piped up. “He just wants to know about his dad. Why can’t you—”

That’s when the old Hairy came back.

“You mind your own business, kid,” he said, but it also sounded a lot like “I could kill you with one punch, kid.” I’ve never seen anyone stare Matty the Freak down so fast. (Or at all, actually.)

“Go home, Rafe,” Hairy told me. “Talk to your mom first. Then if you want to, you can come back and see me. I’ve got some stories I could tell you about your old man.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t even know what to think. I just stood there like a statue with its mouth hanging open while Hairy patted me on the shoulder and started walking away up the street.

I even kind of forgot Matty was there until he spoke up again.

“Hey, check it out!”

When I looked down, there was a ten-dollar bill sticking out of my coat pocket.

“How’d he do that?” Matty asked.

“Beats me,” I said while my mind just kept spinning around and around, like the inside of a washing machine.

I guess there were still a lot of things I didn’t know.