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

  “His name is Tommy Worley,” Georgia said. “Is he in your cabin?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Actually, nobody calls him Tommy,” Christine said. “Everyone here calls him Doolin….”

  And—SLAM! Let me tell you, I didn’t see that one coming. It was like getting hit in the head with an invisible fist. This girl was Doolin’s sister?

  I was still taking that one in while she kept talking.

  “The Doolin part comes from my mom, ’cause when Tommy was little, he used to play with swords all the time, so she started calling him Dueling Tommy and then Dueling and then it was just Doolin after that. Actually, my brother has a whole bunch of nicknames, like TW and Cheese Steak, and sometimes we even still call him Pamp—”

  “Yeah, okay, well, have a good summer,” I said. Then I dove into the water and started making my getaway.

  It wasn’t like I was afraid of Christine, exactly. I just figured that between her mouth, Georgia’s mouth, and my luck, I was better off keeping my distance. One false move, and I’d have the whole Bobcat cabin coming after me even more than they already were.

  “Wait!” Georgia yelled after me. “Don’t you want to come canoeing with us?”

  I turned over in the water and just kept kicking. “No way,” I said. “Too dangerous!”

  They probably thought I was talking about the canoe. Which was fine with me. The less I said, the better.

  Because unlike my sister, I know when to keep my mouth shut.

  RAFE TO THE RESCUE (KIND OF)

  When Katie blew her whistle at 3:05, I was the last one out of the water, as usual. I always liked swimming for as long as possible.

  That meant I was also usually the last one walking up the path from the lake to the main part of the boys’ camp.

  And that’s where I stepped into my next big, steaming pile of trouble.

  The path goes right through the forest, and for about five minutes there’s nothing around you but trees. I thought I was all alone that day, but then I heard some voices back in the woods.

  When I looked over, I saw Doolin and a couple of his friends giving Norman a hard time. They were tossing this blue towel back and forth, playing keep-away while he tried to grab it.

  “Give it back!” Norman said.

  “Not until you say it,” Doolin told him.

  “I’m not going to say it.”

  “Then you’re not getting your towelski back.”

  I stepped behind the thick branches of a big pine tree to keep out of sight. I wasn’t really sure what to do, and I wanted to see what would happen before I made any stupid decisions that maybe could get me and Norman murdered.

  “Go on,” one of the other guys said. “It’s not that complicated. ‘Booger Eater would like his towel back. Pretty please.’ Just say it.”

  “Forget it,” Norman said. “Keep the stupid towel.”

  He started to walk away, but Doolin’s two friends grabbed him by the arms. I still didn’t know those guys’ names. I just thought of them as Number One and Number Two (if you know what I mean).

  I also saw an empty can and some old cigarette butts on the ground. This was probably where the idiots snuck out to smoke at night like the idiots they were.

  “No way, Booger Eater,” Doolin told him. “You started this, and I’m going to finish it.”

  “I didn’t start anything!” Norman said.

  The one thing he had going for him was that he didn’t sound like he was going to cry. That was good. In a weird way, Norman was actually kind of tough. He’d probably been through something like this a million or so times.

  And in a really weird way, I could relate. I’d been up against my own share of jerks, like my mom’s old boyfriend, Bear, and Miller the Killer, and Zeke McDonald. I guess I never would have survived this far in middle school if I weren’t at least a little bit tough myself.

  But meanwhile, I couldn’t just walk away and leave Norman on his own.

  The question was, what to do now? As usual, I had plenty of ideas. Just not good ones.

  Then, before I could figure out a real plan, I leaned out to see better, and that’s when I totally blew it.

  I guess my foot landed on a stick or something, because there was this loud SNAP! It went off like a gunshot in the woods. The next thing I knew, I had four pairs of eyes looking my way.

  Doolin smiled. Then he laughed out loud. He actually seemed happy to see me.

  “Look who it is,” he said. “The second-biggest loser at Camp Wannamorra. What’s your name again? Whatchamacallit? Katch-a-cold?”

  My heart was bouncing around like a pinball by now. This was three against two—at best. I wasn’t even sure that Norman and I added up to two.

  “Just give him his towel back, Doolin,” I said. “What do you care? He didn’t do anything to you.”

  “Here’s the deal,” Doolin said. He pointed at the towel around my neck. “You can trade if you want. Yours for Booger Eater’s.”

  “His name is Norman,” I said, but all that got me was another big horse laugh. I didn’t care about my own stupid towel anyway. So I walked over and held it out for Doolin.

  “Here,” I said. “Take the towel. Satisfied?”

  “Rafe, don’t!” Norman said, but Doolin already had it. He didn’t make any move to give back Norman’s.

  “Wow. You’re even stupider than you look, aren’t you?” Doolin said.

  Now I was starting to get this familiar feeling inside. It’s like when you’re halfway up that first hill on the roller coaster and you know what’s coming, like it or not. Also known as the “point of no return.”

  My fingers curled into fists. My face felt like someone had just turned on the heat in the woods. If I had to fight, I’d fight.

  “I’m not fooling around, Doolin,” I said. “Give me the towels. Right… now.”

  Did I expect him to listen to me? Nah. It was more like one last try before I took a really dumb swing at him and started getting my butt kicked.

  But then the unexpected happened. The very unexpected. The miraculously unexpected.

  Doolin looked over at his friends—and kind of shrugged both his shoulders. “You know what? We’ve got better things to do than kick butt here.”

  Then Doolin dropped the towels, and they all went tromping off through the woods, probably to go make someone else’s life miserable.

  Just like that.

  I couldn’t believe it. On the one hand, I never thought that Doolin would actually back down. And on the other hand, I was thinking—

  I AM THE MAN!

  THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

  I AM THE MAN!

  I was about to give Norman the first high five of his life when I realized that we still weren’t alone.

  I turned around, and there was Legend. He was just standing on the path, watching us.

  And I thought—Oh. That made a lot more sense. I wasn’t the man. Legend was the man. The minute he’d shown up, it went from three against one and a half… to three against one and a half plus one potential serial killer.

  “Um… thanks, Legend,” I said.

  “For what?” he said. “I didn’t do anything. Never lifted a finger. Not my style.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. But as soon as Legend started walking away, I could hear that laugh of his. It’s not like a ha-ha-funny kind of laugh. It’s more like a haha-I’ll-kill-you-just-as-soon-as-look-at-you kind of laugh.

  But whatever. I wasn’t complaining.

  Norman didn’t say anything either. He just picked up his towel and headed back toward the cabins. And he didn’t thank Legend, and he didn’t thank me. Maybe he wanted to fight his own battles.

  But later that day, when I came back from dinner, I found something waiting for me on my bunk. It was one of Norman’s precious books, sitting there like some kind of present. So I guess maybe he was grateful after all.

  Weird.

  But grateful
.

  There were all kinds of strange things at Camp Wannamorra that I didn’t even begin to understand—like math, girls, Snake Hill, mystery meat, and Norman. But the thing I was the most curious about by now was Legend. This kid was way stranger than anyone I’d ever known. Or at least, he might have been if I actually knew him. Which I didn’t. Because he was so strange.

  You see what I’m talking about? No? Maybe a little? Stay with me here, okay?

  That night, when Legend left the cabin to go to the latrine (or to go hunt wild wolves with his teeth, for all I knew), I started asking around.

  “Hey, Smurf,” I said. “What’s Legend’s deal, anyway?”

  “His deal?” Smurf said. “His deal?”

  “Yeah. Why is everyone so afraid of him? And where did he get that name, anyway?”

  Dweebs leaned down off his bunk. “You’ve been here more than two weeks. How do you not know this stuff by now?”

  I just shrugged. I’m pretty used to not knowing stuff. Besides, I wasn’t going to admit I’d been kind of scared to ask. You never knew when Legend might be listening in.

  “Hey, Cav, check the door,” Smurf whispered. “And hit the lights too.”

  Everyone gathered around on the bottom bunks, except for Norman. His flashlight came on the second the cabin lights went out, and he just kept reading.

  Smurf turned on his flashlight too. He held it up under his chin, which was funny and creepy at the same time. I like Smurf a lot. Actually, I like all the guys. Even—up to a point—Legend.

  “This,” he said, “is the legend… of Legend. Listen at your own risk. I’m not kidding.”

  I laughed when he said that, but I was the only one who did. So I shut up and listened while Smurf started the story.

  “They say he was born on Friday the thirteenth. This particular Friday the thirteenth was right in the middle of the biggest electrical storm in a hundred years and a solar eclipse,” Smurf said in a creepy whisper. “Right away at the hospital, they knew Legend was different—and not in a good way. The first thing he ever did in his life was give the stink-eye to the doctor who delivered him.

  “Nobody knows his real name for sure,” Smurf said.

  “I heard it was Klaus von Munster,” Tunz said. “Hey, I’m just sayin’ what I heard.”

  “It’s Walter,” Bombardier said, “but anyone who’s ever called him that is dead, so there’s no way to prove it.”

  “It’s very possible he never got a name at all,” Smurf told us. “Supposedly, his parents were too scared to choose the wrong one. So he just named himself as soon as he could talk.”

  “The early years are a little hazy,” Smurf went on. “Some people say he went to live with grizzly bears in the Rockies. Some say he went out for chocolate milk when he was five and didn’t come back until he was eight.

  “What we know for certain is that he spent most of third and fourth grades in the state penitentiary. State records show that Legend was the youngest kid to ever be locked up in that place. But nobody really knows what he got locked up for.”

  “Maybe he robbed a bank,” Cav said.

  “Maybe he killed someone,” Dweebs said.

  “Whatever it was, his time in prison only made him smarter, scarier, and more dangerous,” Smurf said. “By the time he got out and started coming here to Camp Wannamorra, Legend knew he had two choices. One—play by the rules. Or two—don’t get caught. You can probably guess which way he went.”

  “And to this day, he’s never been caught for anything again,” Bombardier said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Every summer there’s at least one giant bad thing that happens at camp,” Dweebs said. “Something that nobody gets busted for—”

  “Even though everybody knows who did it,” Cav said. “You know what I’m sayin’?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “A few years ago, there was this counselor who ate some of Legend’s trail mix without asking,” Tunz said. “That night, the guy got a whole bottle of Ex-Lax in his dinner. He went into the latrine a few hours later and didn’t come out until the end of the summer.”

  “Then there was the time somebody put a cow in the infirmary—” Smurf continued.

  “He made a cow sick?” I said. “What’d the cow do to him?”

  “No!” Smurf said. “It was the nurse he was mad at. She made him sit out of a kickball game when he had a head cold. So that very night, he walked the cow right in there, closed the door, and left.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said. “You guys don’t really believe all this stuff, do you?”

  Smurf shined his flashlight right in my eyes! “The point isn’t whether it’s true or not. The point is—do you really want to find out?”

  I hadn’t thought about it that way.

  “No,” Smurf said. “You don’t. Otherwise, you’ll end up like… Petey Schwartz.”

  “Who?”

  Everyone was already quiet, but now they all got even quieter. Smurf started whispering again.

  “Petey Schwartz was the only kid who ever told on Legend. We don’t know what he tried to bust him for, but it obviously didn’t work. Two days later, Petey went on a nature hike and ‘accidentally’ fell off a cliff—”

  “I wouldn’t say he fell, exactly,” Bombardier said.

  “Either way,” Smurf said. “He landed in the hospital with a broken leg and never came back to camp. Not even to get his stuff.”

  “And Legend was the one who pushed him?” I asked.

  “Yes… no… and maybe,” Smurf said.

  There were still a bunch of important questions I wanted to ask, but just then we heard footsteps outside. A second later, Legend came strolling back into the cabin.

  “So, ummmm… that’s how you tie a double knot,” Smurf said.

  “Ohhh,” Tunz said.

  “Got it,” Cav said.

  “Thanks, Smurf,” Dweebs said. “Good to know.”

  Cav turned on the lights, and we all went back to whatever we were doing before.

  Because even though Legend was one of us, and probably our best weapon against the Bobcats, he was also… Legend. And you could never be too careful around him.

  Just ask Petey Schwartz.

  TIME-OUT: SCORECARD EDITION

  Yeah, that’s right. Only seven days to go. Seven days and counting. You haven’t forgotten about that part, have you? Because, believe me, it’s coming. Hard and fast. With no way on earth to stop it. That’s what some folks call fate.

  Not that I had any idea I was going to wind up getting kicked out of there. In fact, it felt like things were going kind of, sort of, almost so-so, which was at least better than terrible, how it all started.

  So let me give you a quick recap. Here’s where everything stood at this point, on the Rafe Khatchadorian Scale of 0 to 10.

  Norman: On the one hand, some of the Muskrats were actually calling him Norman by now. On the other hand, most of the camp wasn’t. And on the other other hand, I still didn’t understand what Norman was doing in the same classes as me. It just didn’t add up.

  School: I mean, come on—it’s summer school! If Katie Kim weren’t one of my teachers, I’d have to give this one a 0.

  Reading: That’s right—off the charts. For me, anyway. Not only had I finished that Hugo Cabret book Norman gave me but I’d started reading the next one, Holes. I don’t think anyone back home would believe in a million years that I was on my second book of the summer. Even I didn’t believe it, and I was there.

  Bobcats: Mostly, it was all bad news with them. They’d already gotten us bad a bunch of times, and we still hadn’t managed even a tiny bit of revenge. The only reason I’m giving myself two points is because things had gone a little quiet on the Doolin-and-fiends front. (But just wait. It doesn’t stay that way.)

  Girls: If daydreams counted, I’d get an 8. But they don’t. (I wish!)

  So, like I said, everything was just kind of so-so. I was st
ill hoping it would get better, but if you read the beginning of this chapter, then you already know what was about to happen to my “average score.” It was going way down.

  Just like me.

  You ever heard of below 0?

  DEAR JEANNE GALLETTA

  Since I already had out my paper and pen, I figured I might as well keep going.

  Maybe I could improve my “average score” in the “Girls” category. If Katie Kim was going to be a guaranteed 0, could Jeanne Galletta change my score?

  Jeanne was nicer to me than anyone else when I went to Hills Village Middle School, and I was still thinking about her all the time. She wasn’t my tutor anymore, and she wasn’t my friend, exactly, but she also wasn’t not my friend. She’d even written me a couple of e-mails when I moved to the city and told me to “keep in touch,” whatever that meant. So I wrote her a letter.

  Actually, scratch that. I wrote her about six letters. But that just turned into about six different ways to sound stupid. Or babyish. Or desperate. Or all of the above. Which is why they ended up in the garbage and not in the mail.

  Here—see for yourself.

  CAMP DANCES SUCK

  The next night (six days left and counting) we had our first all-camp dance. I’d never been to a dance before. In middle school, stuff like that was for kids who knew how to dance and who also had someone to dance with. If Major Sherwood hadn’t forced us to go, I would have hung back and spent the night doing something I liked better. Like maybe pulling my teeth out with a pair of pliers.

  But right after dinner, they told us to get ready, and we all hiked around the lake over to the girls’ side to “have some camp fun.” And to “show camp spirit.” And to “let off steam.”