Middle School: How I Got Lost in London (12 page)

YOU KNOW WHAT
a P.S. is? It’s a postscript. A little bit of extra information when the main show is over. And this here is the postscript to my Living History trip to London.

First, when we’d returned and I wrote up my report, complete with the pictures I’d taken that night, I ended up getting full marks.

[Pause for applause.]

But there was something weird, too. When I went through the pictures—well, you remember I took one of Albert standing next to Queen Elizabeth I, right before my phone battery died? When I looked at the picture, there was no Albert.

Elizabeth I was there.

But no Albert.

You know what else was weird? When I looked online to see the story of the Madame Fifi haunting, it turned out that the ghost was a Victorian night watchman killed during a freak flood of the basement one night.

A night watchman called Albert.

“Pretty strange, huh?” I said to Leo the Silent. And thinking about it, Leo and Albert had been real friendly that night. They’d got on great.

“Yeah,” agreed Leo. “Pretty strange.”

I
t feels as honest as the day is
crummy
that I begin this tale of total desperation and woe with me, my pukey sister, Georgia, and Leonardo the Silent sitting like rotting sardines in the back of a Hills Village Police Department cruiser.

Now, there’s a pathetic family portrait you don’t want to be a part of, believe me. More on the unfortunate Village Police incident later. I need to work myself up to tell you that disaster story.

So anyway,
ta-da
, here it is, book fans, and all of you in need of merit points at school, the true autobio of my life so far. The dreaded middle school years. If you’ve ever been a middle schooler, you understand already. If you’re not in middle school yet, you’ll understand soon enough.

But let’s face it: Understanding
me
—I mean,
really
understanding me and my nutty life—isn’t so easy. That’s why it’s so hard for me to find people I can trust. The truth is, I don’t know who I can trust. So mostly I don’t trust anybody. Except my mom, Jules. (Most of the time, anyway.)

So . . . let’s see if I can trust you. First, some background.

That’s me, by the way, arriving at “prison”—also known as Hills Village Middle School—in Jules’s four-by-four. The picture credit goes to Leonardo the Silent.

Getting back to the story, though, I
do
trust one other person. That would actually be Leonardo.

Leo is capital
C
Crazy, and capital
O
Off-the-Wall, but he keeps things real.

Here are some other people I don’t trust as far as I can throw a truckload of pianos.

There’s Ms. Ruthless Donatello, but you can just call her the Dragon Lady. She teaches English and also handles my favorite subject in sixth grade—after-school detention.

Also, Mrs. Ida Stricker, the vice principal. Ida’s pretty much in charge of every breath anybody takes at HVMS.

That’s Georgia, my super-nosy, super-obnoxious, super-brat sister, whose only good quality is that she looks like Jules might have looked when she was in fourth grade.

There are more on my list, and we’ll get to them eventually. Or maybe not. I’m not exactly sure how this is going to work out. As you can probably tell, this is my first full-length book.

But let’s stay on the subject of
us
for a little bit.

I kind of want to, but how do I know I can trust
you with all my embarrassing personal stuff—like the police car disaster story? What are you like?
Inside
, what are you like?

Are you basically a pretty good, pretty decent person? Says who? Says you? Says your ’rents? Says your sibs?

Okay, in the spirit of a possible friendship between us—and this is a huge big deal for me—here’s another true confession.

This is what I
actually
looked like when I got to school that first morning of sixth grade. We still friends, or are you out of here?

Hey—
don’t go
—all right? I kind of like you. Seriously. You know how to listen, at least. And believe me, I’ve got quite the story to tell you.

O
kay, so imagine the day your great-great-grandmother was born. Got it? Now go back another hundred years or so. And then another hundred. That’s about when they built Hills Village Middle School. Of course, I think it was a prison for Pilgrims back then, but not too much has changed. Now it’s a prison for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders.