“Sounds good,” Matty said. Then he sat down a few chairs away from me like we didn’t even know each other. I was giving him the evil eye the whole time, but he was evil eye–proof. He just sat there holding a magazine upside down and watching to see what I’d do.
Whatever, I thought. I wasn’t going to turn back now. The other customer was already paying for his haircut, and Hairy was waving me over with this big pair of scissors in his hand.
“Next!” he said.
“Actually,” I said, “I just wanted to ask you about something.”
Right away Hairy’s face went all mean, and those two bushy eyebrows of his turned into one big shrub.
“This ain’t a library,” he said. “You want to pay for a cut, we can talk all you want. Otherwise, I got customers waiting.”
I was pretty sure a haircut would cost more than thirty-five cents, which is what I had in my pocket. Meanwhile, my throat was starting to feel like a clogged drain.
“Oh… um… I mean… I just wanted to ask if you knew—”
“Did I stutter?” he said. Or more like roared. “Stop wasting my time, Shrimpo! I’ve got bills to pay!”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but Matty sure did.
“Hey, mister,” he said. “I’m just curious. What’s it like to be the world’s tallest butt-wipe?”
That was pretty much the end of the conversation. Hairy came right for us then, looking like he was ready to kill. (And did I already mention those scissors?)
One thing I’ll say for myself—I’m pretty fast on my feet. I hit that sidewalk in about half a second flat and didn’t stop running for the next six miles. Or maybe it was three blocks, I don’t know.
Matty was still laughing when he caught up to me.
“Did you see the look on that guy’s face?” he said. “Grumpiest barber ever, no contest.”
I guess I could have been mad about him messing things up, but I was actually glad Matty was there. Besides, it wasn’t like Bigfoot Hairy was about to sit me down and break out the milk and cookies.
“But I don’t get why he acted like that,” Matty said. “I thought he was related to you or something.”
“Related to me?” I said. I figured Matty had to be joking, but he looked totally serious. “What are you talking about?”
“His name was right there on the mirror, next to his picture. Didn’t you see that?”
“What name?” I said.
“Harold Khatchadorian,” Matty said. “Why didn’t you ever tell me you were part giant before?”
SPILLING (SOME OF) THE BEANS
So that’s when I told Matty everything.
Well, not everything. I didn’t mention Leo. There aren’t too many people I trust in the world, besides Mom (and Leo, of course), but even if there were, I wouldn’t exactly start off by telling them about my imaginary best friend.
Still, I did tell him about my dad, and why we went to Hairy’s, and even about Operation: Get a Life.
I thought Matty might laugh or something when I was done talking, but he didn’t even flinch.
“And you’re doing all that just so you can stay at Cathedral School of the Farts for another year?” he said. “How come?”
“Don’t you like it there?” I said.
“Compared to what? I mean, it’s better than regular school. But, dude—it’s still school.”
I thought that was a pretty good answer. In fact, the more I got to know this kid, the more I liked him.
“You know what?” Matty said. “Forget about Hairy. Forget about all that stuff. You want to live a little? Come on.”
He was already walking back toward the bus stop. And then he was running again. Now it was my turn to try to keep up.
“Where are we going?” I said.
Matty didn’t even look back. He just kept running.
“Everywhere!” he said.
BEST. DAY. EVER!
I learned a few things about Matty the Freak that day. Things like:
His real name was Matthew Theodore Fleckman.
He came up with his own nickname, Matty the Freak, so that MTF worked either way.
He had three younger brothers, a mom, a dad, and a beagle. The beagle’s name was Bagel.
And most important of all, I learned that Matty Fleckman knew how to do more stuff for no money than anyone I’d ever met.
When we got off the bus again, our first stop was the biggest Electronics Depot Warehouse you’ve ever seen. This place practically had its own ZIP code. The whole third floor was just games, and almost all of them were set up so you could try them right there in the store.
“You just have to keep moving,” Matty told me. “Then they don’t know how long you’ve been here, and you can play all day if you want.”
After that, we hit the megaplex just up the street. It was the kind of place with superluxury seating, where you could spend a hundred dollars on snacks without even getting full, and the tickets cost fifteen bucks each.
Unless, of course, you’re Matty the Freak.
We walked right past the main entrance and around to the side of the building, where there were a bunch of one-way exit doors with no handles on the outside. No problem, though. The theater had something like thirty-eight screens, so it didn’t take long before a movie let out and a bunch of people started coming out the doors.
“Just be cool and follow my lead,” Matty said. Then he walked right into the crowd, like we were swimming upstream.
“Mom?” he started saying. “Mom? Excuse me, have you seen a tall lady with a red hat?”
I thought Leo the Silent was a genius, but this was the best move I’d ever seen. Two minutes later, we were up to our eyeballs in superluxury seating at the first R-rated movie I’d ever watched in a theater. It was called Zombomania and, believe me, I saw some stuff I definitely wasn’t supposed to—for instance, a lady who not only was a zombie but also happened to have no clothes on—the whole time.
And all I can say to that is—!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So all of that was pretty good already. But then, when the movie let out, we were starving, and Matty said he knew a place where we could get something to eat—for free, of course.
“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Where to?”
DOTTY ON THE LINE
So how’s that junk sculpture coming along?” Mom asked me while I was pretending to be hungry for dinner that night. “You’ve been working so hard on it lately.”
I told her the sculpture was going okay, which was true, but meanwhile I was also trying to erase the last five hours from my brain. I don’t know about you, but my mother’s like a mind reader that way. It’s safer if you just don’t think about the stuff you don’t want her to know.
And that wasn’t easy, because I still had about a hundred questions I wanted to ask.
Finally, after dinner, I decided to take a chance—not with Mom but with Grandma. I waited until Mom and Georgia were upstairs watching a movie, and then I found Grandma in the living room, fixing up the couch for me the way she did every night.
“Grandma?” I said. I kept my voice down, just in case.
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“You know that picture of Mom with my dad? The one of them in front of Hairy’s Place?”
“Sure. I love that picture,” she said.
“Well, I was just curious. Do you know who Hairy is? I mean, not that it really matters or anything,” I said.
“Oh, he’s your father’s uncle,” she said, just like that. “Not a very nice man, though.” Then she went back to tucking my blankets in under the cushions.
It hit me like a punch in the stomach. That big, hairy—scary—guy was my great-uncle? It seemed kind of impossible, even though it wasn’t impossible at all.
“Grandma?” I said again.
“Yeah, kiddo?”
“Do you know what his real name is?”
“Whose name, sweetie?” she said. Sometimes talking to Grandma is a little like a bad
phone connection.
“Hairy,” I said. “The guy with the barbershop. The one in the old picture?”
Grandma got this big smile on her face. “You know, that reminds me,” she said. “Have I ever shown you my old photos before? We should dig them out sometime and take a little walk down memory lane.”
Well, what was I going to say to that? Besides, it wasn’t like going back to square one. I already knew more than I did before I talked to her.
“Sure,” I told her. “That sounds good.”
She dropped a couple of pillows onto the couch and then crunched me up in one of those surprisingly strong hugs of hers.
“I love you, Ralphie,” she said. “You’re a good boy.”
“I love you too, Grandma,” I said.
And that was the truth too.
HERE WE GO AGAIN
I decided to leave the whole Hairy thing alone for a while and give him some time to cool off. Like maybe until the next ice age.
But I wasn’t quitting either. That night after Grandma went upstairs, I got right back on the computer.
This time, I typed in Luca Khatchadorian to see what I could find.
There wasn’t much, though. Almost all of it was about some kid who lived on a goat farm in some place called Latvia.
So I tried just plain Khatchadorian after that, but then it was the opposite problem: I got about two million hits.
Finally, I searched for Ralph Khatchadorian, just for the heck of it. That got me a big zero, but the message on the screen also said Did you mean “Rafe Khatchadorian?”
And I thought—I don’t know… did I?
I figured it couldn’t hurt to click anyway.
The first thing on the list that came up had my name right there, and something about Cathedral. Then, when I clicked on that, it brought up my student page on the school’s site, with a bunch of pictures, artwork, and other stuff.
The only problem was, I didn’t have a student page on the school’s site. I knew we were allowed to set them up, but the only people who did that were the ones who had eighteen thousand friends they could collect and show off.
And whoever had set up this page was no friend of mine.
The more I looked at it, the more I forgot why I had sat down at the computer in the first place. I wasn’t thinking about Luca Ralph Khatchadorian anymore. Now I was thinking about Zeke McDonald and Kenny Patel.
And revenge.
Again.
“Hey, Leo?” I said.
“What’s up?” he said.
“I need to call a time-out in Operation: Get a Life.”
“WHAT?”
“Just for a few days,” I told him.
“Why?”
“Because of the No-Hurt Rule,” I said. “I think I’m about to break it, and I don’t want to be in the game when I do.”
W-A-R
RE-REVENGE
The next day at lunch, I took Matty into the computer lab and showed him the fake page Zeke and Kenny had made.
Before you could say “payback,” he already had an idea. He pulled out his notebook right there and started drawing, really fast, the way he always does.
“We’re going to get them back the same way they got you,” he said.
“You mean like another web page?” I said.
“No, something better,” he said. “But when it happens, they’re going to know exactly who did it to them, and they’ll never be able to prove it.”
See, this is why it’s good to have a professional freak on your side. I didn’t even know what Matty’s idea was, and I already liked it.
Meanwhile, he just kept scribbling and drawing, scribbling and drawing.
“So, the junk-sculpture crit is this Friday, right?” he said. “That means Thursday fifth period, everyone’s going to be finishing their sculptures and leaving them in the back of Mrs. Ling’s room.”
“Yeah?” I said. “And?”
“What time does fifth period let out?”
“Eleven forty-five,” I told him, because I always know when lunch is.
Matty wrote Ling and 11:45 on two different parts of the page. That’s when I realized what he was drawing. It was a map of the school. But I still didn’t understand why.
“I’m thinking we’ll need maybe five minutes before Mrs. Ling comes down,” he said, and wrote that too. “Then maybe another three minutes until—”
“Slow down a second,” I said. “You’ve got to catch me up here. What happens at eleven forty-five on Thursday?”
Finally, Matty put down his pen and gave me this look like he was sitting on the world’s best secret. Which he kind of was.
“Just the first professional art-napping in the history of Cathedral School of the Arts,” he said. “That’s all.”
A REALLY GOOD PLAN
If you haven’t already noticed, Matty the Freak never does anything halfway. That’s one of the things I liked about him. By fifth period that Thursday, we had the whole plan figured out, right down to the last detail.
It wasn’t like we were going to keep Zeke’s and Kenny’s sculptures. We were just going to hide them up on the roof until they took down that stupid RAFE K page of theirs. As soon as they did, they’d get another note in their lockers, telling them where to look. If they knew what was good for them, the whole thing would be taken care of by the crit on Friday.
And Matty was right. It didn’t matter whether they knew this was coming from me or not. In fact, I wanted them to. This was war, after all—the kind where you’re supposed to know exactly who your enemy is.
I know I sure did.
OPERATION: ART-NAP
All through fifth period that day, I could barely concentrate on finishing my own sculpture. I’d made a little couch out of pieces of scrap wood. Then I’d made a little man out of wire and covered him with a thin piece of aluminum that I molded like a blanket. It wasn’t a self-portrait, exactly, but I was trying to “bring my life to my art,” like Mr. Beekman was always telling us to do. I called it Kid Sleeping on Couch. (I couldn’t think of anything else.)
Finally, the bell rang for lunch. Operation: Art-nap was a go!
First, Matty and I put our sculptures on the back table and headed downstairs, like everyone else. But then, when no one was looking, we cut around through the auditorium and out the other side. That’s where we could watch for Mrs. Ling in the hallway. As soon as she came around the corner with her lunch tray and went into the teachers’ lounge, we headed upstairs again. Thirty seconds later, we were back in Mrs. L.’s room, and it was totally deserted.
So far, so good. Matty grabbed Kenny’s sculpture, and I took Zeke’s.
Kenny had made a palm tree out of a plastic pipe and a broken umbrella, all covered with cut-up pieces of cereal boxes that he painted brown and green. It looked okay, I guess.
And as for Zeke’s sculpture—well, you’d have to torture me and then pay me a thousand bucks to say I liked anything about Zeke McDonald. But he was obviously going to get an A, like always.
First, he’d built this metal cube out of steel rods and hot glue. Then he strung the whole thing with fishing line and hung about a million little rusted screws and gears and springs inside. It was like a mobile in a cage, and it made this cool sound if you blew on it.
And yeah, okay, it was maybe just a little… tiny… bit… awesome.
Still, all I could think about was how Zeke’s and Kenny’s brains were going to melt right out their ears when they found out their art had been ’napped. I threw my sweatshirt over the cube to keep it from making too much noise, and we headed straight for the door.
That’s when we hit our first roadblock.
As soon as I checked the hall, I saw one of the janitors, Mr. McQuade. He was parking his big rolling trash can outside the boys’ bathroom—which was also right across from the stairs to the roof, where we needed to go.
I stepped back and pointed. “What do we do?” I whispered.
Just then, Mr. McQuad
e opened the bathroom door and went inside.
“Go!” Matty said. “Now!”
Before I could think about it, he went out ahead of me, and I followed him up the hall. All we needed was half a minute to get past that door and up to the roof.
And then—roadblock number two.
When Matty got to the stairs, he stopped short. I almost crashed into him, and Zeke’s sculpture started clanging under my sweatshirt. My heart started clanging pretty hard too.
WHAT? I said, not even talking, just mouthing it now.
Matty pointed down, and mouthed back: SOMEONE’S COMING.
Sure enough, I could hear a voice at the bottom of the stairs.
“If you’ll all follow me this way, I’ll show you our visual arts wing….”
It was Mr. Crawley. He was always giving tours of the school, which I hadn’t even thought about—until now.
And now he was headed right for us. It was too far to try to get back to Mrs. Ling’s room. The boys’ bathroom was off-limits with Mr. McQuade in there. And trying to get up the stairs to the roof was way too risky.
I looked at Matty. Matty looked at me.
HIDE, he mouthed, and we scattered.
I did the first thing I could think of: I scrambled right up and into that big trash can. It wasn’t easy, either, with that sculpture under my arm, not to mention that the whole can was on wheels. By the time I was pulling the lid over my head, I could just see the girls’ bathroom door swinging closed behind Matty, and I thought—much better idea.
But it was too late to change my mind. All I could do now was sit there in the dark and pray that Mr. Crawley would be gone before Mr. McQuade ever came out of that bathroom.
And if you’re thinking that was too much to hope for—you’re right.
Obviously, I couldn’t see anything from where I was, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened next. I guess that garbage barrel must have rolled right in front of the bathroom door while I was climbing inside, and I guess Mr. McQuade must have come out a second later, because the next thing I felt was a hard BUMP! against the side of the can…