Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (19 page)

I
got home with two minutes to spare before six o’clock.

When I came into the kitchen, Grandma was cooking dinner, Mom was painting on her little easel by the back door, and my head was still on the spin cycle. I couldn’t stop thinking about the last thing Hairy said to me.

He had stories? About my dad? What kind of stories? How many?

“Well, look who it is,” Dotty said. “My favorite grandson.”

“Hey, Rafe-asaurus,” Mom said. “Thanks for making it home on time.”

I came over and she gave me a hug and kiss hello, which Mom always likes to do, even when she’s working.

“What are you painting?” I asked her.

“It’s a cityscape,” she said. “The idea of one, anyway.”

I can never tell what Mom’s abstracts are supposed to be until she clues me in, but then I can almost always see what she’s talking about. This one had a lot of straight lines going in all different directions. Kind of like city streets.

I could tell she was excited about it too. Mom hadn’t sold a painting since we moved to the city, but she sure was trying.

“What do you think, mister art student?” she said. “Am I headed in the right direction?”

“Definitely,” I said.

Mom just kind of smiled at that and went back to painting.

And even though my brain was still overflowing with everything that had happened that day, I decided right then that I wasn’t going to talk about it after all.

Not yet, anyway. I’d just barely gotten ungrounded, and Mom was as happy as I’d seen her in a long time. Also, Dotty was making pancakes, and I
love
breakfast for dinner.

Why would I want to mess with all that?

So instead of having some big, uncomfortable conversation that night, we talked about painting instead. And drawing. And school. And the family of pigeons living on the roof across the street.

I didn’t know when it was going to be a good time to start asking Mom all those Dad questions. I just knew that right now wasn’t it. So for the time being, I was going to keep them to myself and my drawing pad.

(And to Leo, of course.)

A
few weeks into the quarter, Mrs. Ling came around to all the art classes and made an announcement.

“Boys and girls, it’s that time of the year,” she said. “Time to start thinking about your projects for the Spring Art Show.”

But of course, I was already thinking about mine. I’d been thinking about it for months.

I’d never been in a real art show before, and I was going to make this the 195th thing on my list of 195 things. It was like the big finish line for Operation: Get a Life.

My project was going to be awesome!

Just as soon as I figured out what it was going to be.

“Remember,” Mrs. Ling said, “this is your chance to really show us who you are as an artist, as well as the kind of artist you might become if you continue on here at Cathedral.”

And that was a big part of my problem right there.

First of all, how was I supposed to show who I was “as an artist” when I didn’t have the first clue?

And second—hello, pressure! The Spring Art Show was my last chance to prove I belonged in art school. I still didn’t know whether I was going to make it back for eighth grade… or not.

In fact, it seemed like the more Mrs. Ling talked, the more problems I had.

“This is an open assignment,” she told us. “That means you can work with any materials you like, to create anything you can think of.”

That may not sound like a problem, but it was. See, it’s one thing when they tell you to make a self-portrait, or a junk sculpture, or whatever. But when you can do
anything
, it’s like getting a multiple-choice test with one question and thirty-two trillion possible answers. Good luck choosing the right one.

It didn’t help that all the students but me seemed to already know what they wanted to do either.

“In the meantime,” Mrs. Ling said, “to help you along, we have a lovely field trip to the Art Institute coming up. I hope you’ll use that opportunity to take in some of the amazing art in this city and get inspired to reach new heights with your own work.”

New heights? Who said anything about
new
heights? I was still working on reaching some old heights. Or any heights.

All of a sudden, that big finish line I’d been thinking about all year was starting to come up—
fast
.

B
y the time the Art Institute field trip rolled around, I’d had lots of time to think about my project for the Spring Art Show. And after some long, hard, careful consideration, I’d finally managed to come up with… zero good ideas.

But maybe Mrs. Ling was right. Maybe this field trip was going to inspire me to do something I’d never even thought about before. Maybe I’d get the best idea of my life here.

And if not… well, at least it got us out of a whole morning of regular classes.

When we got to the museum, they set us loose with our sketchbooks so we could walk around the galleries and draw whatever grabbed us. Matty seemed like he knew what he was doing, so I let him lead the way.

For a while I kept expecting him to pull something Matty-ish, like taking money from the fountain out front, or trying to get up on the roof, or at least touching some of the stuff you weren’t supposed to touch in the museum.

But he didn’t. As far as I could tell, he was actually interested in the art. We just walked around for a while and sketched some of the paintings, and then we walked around some more. It was a side of Matty I’d never seen before. He seemed so
normal
.

Which, for Matty, was so
weird
.

Finally, when Mrs. Ling came around and told us we had fifteen minutes left, Matty closed his sketchbook and started putting his stuff away.

“Come on,” he said. “We don’t want to miss the best part.”

I followed him out to the front of the museum and then into the gift shop near the entrance.

“This is the best part?” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “Just check it out.”

So I did, and let me tell you what I learned that day. Art museum gift shops are for rich people. Everything in that place cost about ten times more than you’d think. Even the postcards were five bucks each.

After a while, Matty came over to where I was.

“Hold this,” he said, and gave me his backpack. “I have to go to the bathroom. But wait for me here, okay?”

I didn’t really think about it. I just took his pack and kept looking at this hundred-dollar book about some guy named Mondrian, who got famous for painting a bunch of red, yellow, and blue squares, over and over. It made me think maybe I should get my own art book someday.

Just after that, though, I saw Mrs. Ling waving at me to come get on the bus. It was time to go.

I could see Matty too. He was still on his way to the bathroom, so I figured I’d give him his stuff outside.

But then, as soon as I started leaving—

The gift-shop alarm was going off, like someone had just walked out with something that wasn’t paid for. And because I’m not always the swiftest boat on the water, I started looking around to see if I could figure out who the thief was.