Middle School: How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli, and Snake Hill

  I mean, it’s not like I thought something was going to happen. No way, no how. She was at least in college, and I was… me. But still, I’ve never felt that way about a teacher, ever, ever, ever—unless Jeanne Galletta counted. She was my tutor back in Hills Village, but that wasn’t the same.

  Nobody was the same as Katie Kim.

  Katie Kim. That was her name. Did I already mention that? Is this getting a little stupid? I don’t care. It was still great!

  FISHY

  Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying it’s Katie Kim’s fault that I needed extra help with the first math assignment. Not exactly.

  But I am saying that if she hadn’t been so interesting to look at, I might have known what to do when she started passing out these Fun with Fractions workbooks near the end of the period.

  When I looked inside, it was kind of familiar, since I’d learned this stuff before, at Hills Village Middle School. But when it comes to school stuff, my brain’s like a pocket with a big hole in the bottom.

  Besides, what was I going to ask her? Could you please repeat everything you just said for the last half hour? I don’t think so.

  Also, I know from personal experience that I’ll do at least one stupid thing every time I try to talk to a pretty girl. (Or woman? Was Katie a woman? I didn’t even know.)

  So I asked the guys for help instead. But Dweebs just said, “Uh, I was kind of hoping you could explain it to me,” and Smurf was more like, “Well, you know, you just… like… multiply that stuff, like… fractions, you know?”

  And then I remembered why we were all in summer school to begin with.

  That’s when Norman spoke up. He’d been sitting off to the side, minding his own business like always. “It’s not that hard,” he said. “Just multiply the top numbers together and then the bottom numbers together. Then you reduce the fraction, like this.”

  He showed me his page. Most of it made sense, except the reducing part, which I never get. But now Norman had me thinking about something else.

  “Are you sure you’re in the right group?” I said. Between the math skills and the reading twenty-eight hours a day, I just wasn’t buying it.

  “Definitely,” he said right away. “I guess math is kind of the exception for me. I’m really bad at everything else.”

  “Like reading?” I said, but Norman didn’t answer. Then before I could ask any more, Katie said the period was over, and Norman got out of there like a hairless cat at a German shepherd convention.

  “You know what?” I said to Dweebs and Smurf. “I think that kid’s hiding something.”

  “Nah,” Smurf said. “That’s just Booger Eater.” But I wasn’t so sure. Brains-wise, it seemed obvious to me that Norman the Booger Eater was more of a Georgia Khatchadorian than a Rafe Khatchadorian, if you know what I mean.

  Maybe I didn’t know how to reduce fractions yet, but I did know one thing for sure: Norman was pretty bad at playing dumb.

  The question was—why would he want to?

  DROP EVERYTHING AND READ

  So imagine this: You’ve got these four pieces of a dog-poo sandwich that you’re supposed to eat. Don’t ask me why. (And don’t worry, it’s not real!) They’re just sitting there on a plate in front of you, and you’re not going to be allowed to get up until you’ve eaten every bite.

  Okay, now imagine that someone comes along and puts one more piece on your plate.

  That’s basically what happened after math. Just when I thought it was the end of the school day, I found out we had one more period to go. (Like I said, poo sandwich!)

  It turned out that Major Sherwood was all gung ho about reading, just like Norman. So every morning from eleven o’clock to eleven forty-five, everyone at camp, including the teachers, had to sit and do nothing but stare at a book. They called it D.E.A.R., which stands for Drop Everything and Read. Maybe you even have it at your school, but I’d never heard of it.

  The only kind of book I’d brought to camp was my sketchbook. I like drawing more than anything, and all that heavy reading was the kind of stuff “good” kids did, like Norman and my sister, Georgia, and Jeanne Galletta back home. Not me.

  I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m not against books. Heck, you’re reading my story right now, and I’m all for that. It’s just that, up until now, the only reading I did every day was on the back of cereal boxes.

  Still, Major Sherwood was ready for kids like me. After fourth period, he got on the camp loudspeaker and said that anyone who didn’t already have a book to read should come down to the library in the main building and pick something out. “NOW!”

  Yeah, that’s right. Camp Wannamorra had its own library, which is kind of like putting a dentist’s office in an amusement park.

  Still, the word on the street was—don’t cross the Dictator! So I got myself down to the main building right away. I even had a new idea about what to do by the time I got there.

  The camp library didn’t look much like the libraries I’d seen before. There was no computer, no librarian, not even a scared-looking kid hiding from the bullies in the back.

  It was just a big room with a bunch of bookshelves.

  I kind of hung back while everyone else started grabbing stuff. Cav took something called Hatchet, which I thought might be about serial killers, but it wasn’t. And Smurf picked out The Chocolate War (which doesn’t have a single thing to do with food fights, in case you’re wondering).

  Then I felt this hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s your pleasure, Mr. Whatchamacallit?” Major Sherwood asked. It was like the Dictator had come out of nowhere.

  “It’s Khatchadorian, sir,” I said. Nobody ever gets my name right.

  “That’s what I said,” he told me. “Whatchamacallit.”

  Mom says I need to learn how to choose my battles, so I didn’t push it.

  “Do you have any of those big books about art?” I asked him.

  “Ah! An art lover, are we?” he said.

  “Uh… I guess we are.”

  I knew that a lot of those art books were huge, and that’s what I wanted—something really big. Sherwood took me around the corner and showed me a shelf with extra-large books sitting on their sides.

  There were books about Russia and world records and dogs, alligators, ladies’ jewelry, and a whole bunch of other things. I found two art books. One was on Michelangelo, and the other was about some jumpy guy named Hopper. I took the Michelangelo.

  “Good choice,” the major said. “Now go find a quiet spot and get to it!”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  I went outside and scoped out a tree to lean against so no one could sneak up behind me. Then I opened the Michelangelo book, put my sketchbook inside, and “got to it,” like the Dictator had said.

  So while everyone else was Dropping Everything and Reading, I was doing what I do best—Dropping Everything and Drawing.

  Which I guess made them D.E.A.R. And me D.E.A.D.

  GOING FOR BROWNIE POINTS

  P.S. Don’t get me wrong about the whole reading thing. I just want to state for the record…

  PESTILENCE(S)

  Question: What’s red, bumpy, even uglier than usual, and itches all over?

  Answer: Me, after a week at Camp Wannamorra.

  Here’s something they don’t tell you in the camp brochure, just so you know: It’s not really Major Sherwood who runs that place. It’s not the counselors or even the campers. It’s the BUGS.

  I’m not even joking. Up in the mountains, they call the mosquitoes “Franken-skeeters.” I swear they look like they escaped from some kind of mad scientist’s lab. The wasps are as big as birds and have definite anger-management issues. And the no-see-ums are the worst. They’re called that because they’re so tiny, you can’t even see um—but you definitely feel um once they start chowing down on you. I think I spent half of that first week at camp scratching.

  And that’s just the bugs. I also had Doolin and his fiends to deal wit
h, not to mention enough math, science, social studies, and English to choke a very smart kid going to some great college I don’t even know the name of.

  Then there were the counselors. In the brochure, they all look like movie stars who want to be your best friend. And to be fair, some of them (Katie, Katie, Katie) were okay.

  Rusty is okay, even if he’s kind of clueless. I call him Wannabe Thor, but not to his face. (You saw those muscles, right?) He also has two best counselor friends, Pete (Wannabe Tony Hawk) and Gordon (Wannabe Donald Trump—including the hair!).

  The thing you need to know about the counselors is that they have this favorite “game” they like to play called Kamikaze. And when I say “game,” I really mean “form of torture.”

  It goes like this: Anytime a counselor shouts out “KAMIKAZE!” every camper in sight has to hit the dirt. No matter what. It doesn’t matter if you’re brushing your teeth, about to catch a fly ball, or spreading manure in a field full of stinkbugs. If you hear that word, you go down. There’s no choice.

  I mean, you do have a choice, but believe me… you don’t have a choice. I saw a kid move too slow on the second day, and he ended up getting wedgied within an inch of his life.

  And that’s just one of the possibilities. Believe me, the counselors have it down to a science.

  Here’s the other thing about Kamikaze: It’s kind of skeezily funny the first two or three times. But the next nine hundred? Not so much. Especially if you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which reminds me, here’s another question for you:

  What’s worse, getting poison ivy or getting poison oak?

  If you answered “getting both at the same time,” then you’re starting to get the idea of what my first week at Camp Wannamorra was really like.

  THERE IS A HEAVEN

  Truth time. If I’m being honest, I have to say that camp wasn’t all bad.

  I had some new friends, for one thing. I didn’t have to see my sister most of the time. And best of all, from 2:05 to 3:05 every day that it didn’t rain, the boys’ camp got to use the water-front.

  The lake was probably the one thing at Camp Wannamorra that actually looked better in person than in the brochure. Honestly, it was kind of awesomely beautiful. If you passed the water safety test, you could swim off the dock and out to the raft. You could use the canoes and rowboats. Or you could just lie around and look at Katie Kim.

  Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t even mention the best-best part yet. Guess who was one of the lifeguards?

  She took this little motorboat from the girls’ side of the lake back and forth every day. If I ever figured out how to make actual words come out of my mouth when she was around, I was going to ask her for a ride. In the meantime, I really liked being in the water and hanging out on the raft, which was my favorite spot in the whole camp.

  So of course, Doolin and the Bobcats had to wreck that too.

  There I was, all by myself on the raft one day, soaking up the sun and feeling like life could be worse, when I heard Katie laughing over on the dock. When I looked, Doolin was there too. He said something and she laughed again. Oohh—that gave me a migraine and a stomachache!

  I knew we were just kids to Katie, but still, more than anything I wanted to make her laugh like that. Stupid Doolin was blabbing away like it was the easiest thing in the world. How do guys do that? Talk to girls, I mean. Seriously, is there some instruction manual I never got in the mail?

  And because I was so busy sending virtual sharkgrams Doolin’s way, I didn’t even notice the other Bobcats coming up behind me. The next thing I knew, I felt a cold, wet foot under my back, and I got rolled off the raft like this was some kind of burial at sea.

  “Our turn,” somebody said.

  When I got the water out of my eyes, I saw three of them standing there, looking down at me. I didn’t even know their names, but I knew they were Doolin’s friends.

  “Swim on back to shore, Muskrat Meat,” one of them said. “You rodents like the water, don’t you?”

  “You Bobcats like being world-class dinguses, don’t you?” I said.

  “Come up here and say that.”

  I actually wanted to. I wanted to climb right back onto that raft and start swinging with my lethal fists. But there were a few problems with that plan.

  One, I don’t have lethal fists.

  Two, I didn’t want to risk getting in trouble with Katie or getting permanently kicked off the water-front for fighting.

  And three, it also might have had something to do with the four hundred pounds of Bobcat on the raft, and the one hundred pounds of wet Muskrat in the water. “You and your Muskrats are going to pay for that crack!” one of them yelled at me as I swam away.

  And something told me those world-class dinguses weren’t kidding.

  RETURN TO LOSERVILLE

  Sure enough, that night after dinner, we came back to the Muskrat Hut and found it was a disaster area—like maybe a hurricane or a tornado had hit our home away from home.

  On the outside, the cabin looked normal. But when we went inside and turned on the light, it was like there’d been an explosion at a shaving cream factory.

  It was everywhere—on the floor, on the windows, on the beds. Especially on my bed.

  And that wasn’t all. They’d gone after Norman, big-time. Besides the shaving cream, there was tape all around his bunk, like it was some kind of toxic waste dump. They’d also put up these stupid signs that said DANGER and KEEP OUT and BOOGER ZONE.

  I looked over at Norman, but he didn’t say anything at all. He just started taking down all the tape and signs and throwing them away. I figured the least I could do was help him clean up. Technically, it was my bunk too. Not to mention, this was at least partly my fault.

  Still, once I started touching his sleeping bag and stuff, I couldn’t help but think about that stupid name, Booger Eater, and what it might really mean.

  It must have shown too, because Norman took one look at me and said, “You don’t have to worry, Rafe. I stopped eating my boogers when I was six.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about that…. I mean, I wasn’t—”

  “Yeah, you were,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  I just kept wiping up shaving cream with my towel, but I still wondered what he was thinking. After another minute, I said, “So then… why do you let people call you that?”

  “Let them?” he said. “It’s not exactly my choice. I got caught doing it once, six years ago, and it just kind of stuck.”

  “Like a booger,” I said. That actually got a smile out of him. “But doesn’t it bother you?”

  Norman shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t even care that much.”

  This kid was a terrible liar. I could see right through him. He was acting like he didn’t care because he didn’t think he could do anything about it. But I would have bet anything that he cared a whole lot—on the inside.

  Been there. Done that.

  “What if I came up with a different nickname?” I said. “I could call you Boo, for short. You know, instead of Booger—”

  “I got it,” he said. “And no thanks.”

  “What about Norm?”

  “My name’s Norman, Rafe,” he said. He crumpled up the last of those stupid signs and tossed them in the wastebasket. “It’s not that complicated.”

  I tried to look him in the eye. “That’s the same thing you said about the math,” I told him.

  But I guess he was done talking. He just climbed onto his bunk and picked up another book. This one was called The Lord of the Rings by some guy named J. R. R. Tolkien. I think the R. R. stood for “Reading and Reading” because this book looked about ten thousand pages long. I couldn’t finish that book in my lifetime, but Norman would probably be done by breakfast. It was crazy.

  Almost as crazy as he was. I seriously didn’t get him, but I did feel bad for him. And let’s face it, if he hadn’t been at Camp Wannamorra,
it would have been me down there at the bottom of the heap. Usually, that’s what the new kid is for.

  Maybe I should have just minded my own business. Maybe it would have been better for everyone if I’d left it alone. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how Norman was going to be stuck with that nickname for the rest of his life if someone didn’t do something about it.

  Someone like… oh, I don’t know. Me, maybe.

  TIME-OUT

  Time-out for a second.

  In case anybody’s wondering, the answer is NO, I did not have a new mission. I’m totally out of the mission business.

  I’d already done two gigantic missions with Leo. The first was Operation R.A.F.E. (Rules Aren’t For Everyone), and it got me into a whole lot of trouble. The second one was Operation: Get a Life, and guess what? It got me into a whole lot of trouble too. Even I could see a pattern there.

  So was I interested in a new mission? No. Absolutely not. Wasn’t going to happen.

  No way.

  No how.

  No, sir.

  No sale.

  Just… no! No! NO!

  BUT…

  But if I did have a new mission, it would have been called Operation: Norman. That’s all.

  Now turn the page and forget I ever said anything.

  (And definitely forget my sister Georgia’s ridiculous plug for her ridiculous book.)

  TAKE A HIKE!

  The next day at lunch, the counselors told us that the Muskrats, the Bald Eagles, and the Badgers were all going on a nature hike. It meant missing out on the waterfront, but at least the Bob-cats weren’t going to be there.

  We went back to our cabin, got our stuff, and headed out into the woods.