Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (21 page)

I guess that answered one question, anyway—about whether Matty was mad at me. And now that I knew, it made me think of something else. Something much scarier.

Let me put it this way: If I was going to count down the top five reasons why it was good to
have Matty the Freak for a friend, it might look something like this:

R
emember how I said earlier that Matty never did anything halfway?

That’s what I was afraid of. I’m not going to say I was paranoid when I got to school the next day, but I did feel a little bit like I was being hunted.

It didn’t take long to find out what was going to happen next either. The closer I got to my locker, the more I saw people in the hall looking at me and whispering to each other.

And here’s what they were whispering about:

I guess the good news was that all the paint was on the outside this time. Any other day and I might have thought Zeke and Kenny had struck again.

But that “GET A LIFE” was like code. Matty was the only person at Cathedral who knew about Operation: Get a Life. And as far as I could tell, he was also the only person
not
standing around laughing at me right now.

So I went looking for him.

He wasn’t hard to find. He always hung out on the back stairs
before first period. When I got there, he didn’t even look up, which only made me madder.

“What’s your problem?” I said.

“You don’t rat on a friend,” he said. “That’s what.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t let a friend get caught with something
you
stole,” I said.

“I was coming back.”

“How was I supposed to know that?”

“Because I
said
I was,” Matty told me. Now he looked me right in the eye—and maybe he was telling the truth, and maybe he wasn’t. I’d seen what a good liar he could be.

“Yeah, well, you’ve had your little fun,” I said. “Now back off.”

Matty closed his sketchbook and stood up. Then he got right in my face and gave me this familiar smile. I’d seen it before, and it always looked kind of evil and funny to me at the same time.

But right now it just looked evil.

“I’m not afraid to fight you, Matty,” I told him.

“No,” he said. “But you’re so afraid of getting in trouble, you’re not going to do anything about it, are you?”

I didn’t answer—mostly because he was right.

This was the worst part. Matty knew me better than anyone else at school, and I’d told him way more than I ever should have. Now it was too late to take any of it back.

“And by the way,” he said, “I’ll let you know when I’m done having fun.”

Then he just walked away while I stood there and watched.

I couldn’t believe this was happening. A day earlier, we were supposedly friends. Now, as soon as he gets into a little trouble instead of me, we weren’t friends anymore? As far as I was concerned, he was just being a big baby about the whole thing.

A big…

unpredictable…

highly dangerous…

baby.

I
spent the rest of the morning wondering what Matty’s next move was going to be.

By fifth period, I was so tired of watching out, I was ready for a nap.

Of course, that wasn’t going to happen. For one thing, I didn’t want to give Matty a chance to tattoo my face or roll me out the window.

And for another thing… just because my day wasn’t already complicated enough… we also had a crit that period.

This one was for a digital-art unit that Mr. Crawley had been teaching. The assignment was to take our own pictures and then cut them up on the computer and make a new image with them.

In fact, I actually liked my finished thing. I’d
gotten Matty to take a picture of me (back before we hated each other). Then I put parts of myself into another picture, of a brick wall, so it looked like someone had built the wall right up around me, with my arms, face, and legs sticking out in different places. I also made up my own graffiti on the computer and put that all over the wall too.

Not that I expected anyone else to like it. Zeke and Kenny basically had a rule about hating everything I did. And now I had to worry about what Matty was going to say too.

Or maybe he wouldn’t say anything, because he’d be too busy figuring out how I was going to wind up under a bus after school. Either way, I wasn’t looking forward to this.

The crits for digital art worked a little differently than the others. When you finished your assignment, you used your password to load it onto the school’s computer. Then Mr. Crawley could pull it up and put it on the big screen at the front of the room for everyone to see.

And the reason I’m telling you this is because it was the one thing I didn’t think about ahead of time.

Back when Matty and I were trying to get rid of
that fake RAFE K page of Zeke and Kenny’s, I told him my password. It didn’t seem like a big deal when I did it. I figured if there was one person at school I could trust, it was Matty.

And that might have been the biggest mistake I made all year.

“Okay, Rafe, let’s see what you have for us,” Mr. Crawley said when my turn came up. “What’s the name of your piece?”

“
Kid in Wall
,” I said. (What can I say? Titles just aren’t my thing.)

Mr. Crawley punched a couple of keys on his laptop and pulled up my file. But instead of
Kid in Wall
, this is what came on the screen instead:

The whole computer lab went totally quiet. Nobody laughed. Nobody whispered. I don’t even think anyone breathed.

At least, not for the first ten seconds or so.

After that, I couldn’t tell you, because I’d already walked out of the room.

T
he next thing that happened was something I’d thought about a million times in sixth grade but never actually did. I walked right out the front door of the school in the middle of the day and just kept walking.

I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I didn’t care if I got kicked out of Cathedral. I didn’t care about any of it anymore. I just wanted one thing.

O-U-T.

“Where are we headed?” Leo asked.