Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! (6 page)

T
hat weekend, Mom got me a bus pass so I could get myself back and forth to Cathedral while she drove Georgia to her own school in a different part of the city.

But on Monday morning, she said she wanted to drive us both, just for the first day. I think she was more excited about Cathedral than I was.

“You’ve got your sketchbook?” she said.

“Right here,” I said.

“And your good pen?”

“Got it.”

“Should I come in with you?” she asked when we pulled up in front of the school.

“Nah, I’m good,” I said. About a million kids were
hanging out on the sidewalk, and there was no way I was going to let them see my mommy walking me inside for the start of seventh grade.

“Okay, then. Well…” Mom kept looking at me the way she does when she’s about to get all mushy. And then sure enough—

“You know, art school was always a dream of mine,” she said. “And even though I never got to go, it feels like that dream is coming true right now.”

I was afraid she was going to start crying next. If there’s one thing I can’t deal with, it’s when Mom cries, even the happy kind of tears.

But then—for once!—my sister’s big mouth actually came in handy.

“Come on, come on, LET’S GO! We’re going to be LATE!” Georgia screamed from the backseat, like there was some kind of lifesaving information handed out in the first ten minutes of fifth grade.

“All right,” Mom said. “Well… good luck, honey!”

“Let’s GOOOO!” Georgia said. “Rafe, get out!”

That was fine with me. Before Mom could kiss me good-bye in front of the whole school, I opened the car door and made my getaway. Then I headed straight inside for my first day as a real, live, actual art student.

Whatever that meant.

W
hen I walked inside the school, the first thing I saw was this huge painted banner that said
WELCOME TO PLANET CATHEDRAL!

They weren’t kidding either. The whole lobby was fixed up with little twinkly lights like stars, and a bunch of papier-mâché planets and asteroids hanging from the ceiling. There were kids playing weird, science-fictiony music on synthesizers, and all the teachers who were telling everyone where to go were wearing outfits made out of aluminum foil, like robot aliens. I guess it was some kind of first-day welcome-back-to-school thing.

That’s when I knew for sure that I’d left Hills Village Middle School about eighty million light-years behind.

First up, I had something called New-Student Orientation. Basically, it was me and about a hundred sixth graders, learning everything there was to know about being a student at Cathedral School of the Arts.

After Mr. Crawley told us how happy we should be to be there (and I was!), they divided us up by program—theater, music, and visual arts. My group went with Mrs. Ling, the head of the art program, and she gave us a tour of that part of the school.

I guess if I had to pick one word to describe everything Mrs. Ling showed us on that tour, it would have to be…
totally, amazingly cooler than I ever expected
. (Lucky for me, I don’t have to pick just one.) I couldn’t wait to try everything I saw, and the more I saw, the more I wanted to try.

I mean, I was still going to have to get up and go to school five days a week. There was no way around that. Still—seventh grade was looking up, up, UP!

E
xcept, of course, it wasn’t exactly that simple. (It never is, right?)

After the tour, Mrs. Ling sat us all down in one of the art rooms and gave us a big talk.

It started off with the usual stuff about rules, and classes, and I’m not sure what else, because I wasn’t exactly listening. I was still too excited about everything else.

But then, right near the end, she threw in the big catch.

“Boys and girls, I believe every one of you can do extremely well here,” she said.
“However—

“—not every student is invited back to Cathedral at the end of the year.”

Now she had my attention. And there was more too.

“As some of you already know, all visual arts students at Cathedral are required to reapply for the program after our Spring Art Show in March,” Mrs. Ling said. “In the meantime, if you can’t keep up with your academic classes
and
your art assignments,
and
show us that you really want to be here, you might find yourself somewhere else next fall.”

In other words, if I couldn’t figure out a way to do this…

… then at the end of the year, I was going to be doing this:

To be honest, up until then I kind of thought it was a big deal that I had gotten into Cathedral at all. But it turned out that was the easy part.