Middle School: How I Got Lost in London (8 page)

I’VE GIVEN YOU
a break from My Roll-Call Nightmare but it’s the same as Miller and his glowering: Unless I tell you otherwise, just assume we had a roll-call.

By now Miller was saying my “Here” for me. And everyone was yukking it up. Him most of all, but all the other kids too. And I even caught Mr. Dwight smiling. I wasn’t even bothering to say “Here” anymore. What was the point? My archenemy was doing it for me.

After the HMS
Belfast
we visited a replica of Francis Drake’s
Golden Hind
. Then we made our way to the Tate Modern—a huge, cool art gallery, with a giant pink giraffe standing on a piece of grass out front. We joined other sightseers to have our lunch, right by the legs of the pink giraffe.

We all had bananas in our packs. Like I’d predicted, nobody wanted their soft, warm banana.

“Should I try the banana-eating competition?” I whispered to Leo the Silent. I sat by myself with my backpack on, nursing my
-11
Popularity Score.

“Uh-uh,” warned Leo.

I thought about ignoring him. I imagined a scene in which I eat everyone’s bananas, one after the other. My classmates are delighted. My Popularity Score climbs into double figures. But then…disaster strikes! When we move on I feel my stomach churning and the next second I’m regurgitating banana all over the pink giraffe. I get called Rafe Barf-Giraffe for the rest of the trip and my Popularity Score falls back into minus double figures.

So I took Leo’s advice. There would be no banana-eating competition. Not on my watch.

Next, we made our way farther up the bank, past the National Theatre, headed for the big event of the day—a tour around Madame Fifi’s House of Wax. Now, it should go without saying that even though we were pretty excited about seeing the main exhibit—Will and Kate! David Beckham! Rihanna!—we were
really
excited about the basement. Because in the basement was Madame Fifi’s Temple of Terrors, where you could see beheadings, guys on spikes, people on the rack, guillotines…

In other words, the gory stuff.

Yeah, yeah, we saw the celebrities. But honestly? Do you really want to stand eyeball to eyeball with Tom Cruise?

You do?!

Not me. I wanted stuff from out of my world. So I found myself hanging around longest at Henry VIII (he married six times and beheaded two of his wives!), Winston Churchill (he said “We shall never surrender” to Adolf Hitler!), Charles Darwin (it’s thanks to him we know monkeys are our ancestors!), Guy Fawkes (he tried to blow up Parliament…Wait: Are we supposed to like him or not?).

Our tour guide was a guy called Gordon. Either he didn’t know that everyone was goofing off behind him or he didn’t care. Or maybe he had an ace up his sleeve. Maybe he knew the smirking would stop as soon as we went down into the basement. When we got to the Temple of Terrors.

I WAS KIND
of sad to leave the upper floors. And also kind of…

“Scared…?” whispered Leo.

“No, of course I’m not scared,” I said.

“Frightened?”

“Frightened is the same as scared,” I told him. “And no, I’m not frightened.”

“Browning your britches?” he asked.

“You’re just using different words to say the same thing. No, I am
not
browning my britches.”

I’ll let you into a secret: I
was
kind of nervous.

Woah!
I don’t mean the whole hog. Not like when Georgia freaked out at a not-that-scary episode of
Scooby Doo
. Just a bit crawling-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach nervous. You know the kind. Like you get when you don’t know what to expect. When your imagination has taken the words
guillotine
,
beheading
,
gallows
, and
serial killer
and started to run with them.

“Is everyone ready?” asked Gordon, the tour guide. Before, he’d been a bit glass-eyed, like a robot delivering a pre-recorded speech. Now there was no mistaking the glint in his gaze.

“Yeah,” we all replied, pretending like we weren’t impressed.

Mindful of my Popularity Score (currently:
-11
), I’d decided I was going to be fearless when it came to the Temple of Terrors, so my “Yeah” was the loudest.

“YEAH!”

“Right, then, let’s go,” said Gordon. He went to open the door but stopped, looking like he’d just remembered something important.

“There’s nobody in the group who suffers from a weak heart?” he asked.

“
No
,” we replied.

“
NO!
” came my voice, the loudest.

“And everyone knows about the haunting?”

“YEAH!” I shouted, enjoying myself. Really getting into the part.

Oh
. I realized I was the only one who’d replied.

Everyone looked at me. Including Gordon, who arched an eyebrow.

“What is your name, young man?” he asked.

“Rafe,” I said with a pipsqueak voice.

“And you know about the haunting, do you, Rafe?”

I swallowed. “Yes,” I said in an even smaller voice.

“You read about it on the Madame Fifi’s website, did you?” he asked, with a strange smile.

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

The whole trip was staring at me. Everyone had been dying to hear about the haunting. They weren’t sitting down, but if they had been sitting down they would have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the scary story of the Temple of Terrors haunting…

Only for the whole thing to be spoiled by me.

“Excellent,” said Gordon. He clapped his hands. “Then without further ado, let us proceed.”

He opened the door to reveal winding stone steps that led down into darkness. Everyone else glared at me. All except for Miller, that was. He just glowered as usual.

My Popularity Score took another dip.

Current Popularity Score: -22

Down we went. Down into the depths of Madame Fifi’s. It was so much darker than it had been on the upper floors.

At the bottom we heard a rumbling sound. One of the girls gasped but Gordon assured her it was just a passing London Underground train.

(Okay, I admit—it wasn’t “one of the girls” who gasped, it was me. Like I say, it was dark, and when I gasp I sound like a girl anyway.)

Wax figures seemed to loom at us from the gloom.

“Cool,” we said as we peered at heads on spikes, victims on racks, murderers caught in the act. Really gross, scary stuff. And not just really gross, scary stuff, but really gross, scary stuff that had
actually happened
.

All I’ll say about a guy called Vlad the Impaler is that the clue is in the name. And as for Countess Bathory—guess what she figured would be good for her skin? That’s right: blood. She actually kidnapped girls and…took a bath…in their…

Too much information?

Sure. Too much information.

“Cool,” we said. And yes, I know it doesn’t sound like we were taking the whole real-people-dying-gruesome-deaths thing all that seriously, but listen: They died their gruesome deaths a really long time ago. Which makes all the difference. Which means you can say “Cool” without feeling too guilty about it.

“Now, Rafe…” said Gordon. We stopped near a scene of a woman being put to death by seventeenth-century witchfinders.

“Here,” I said, out of habit.

“Since you know all about the ghost of Madame Fifi’s, I expect you can tell us all about the famous Temple of Terrors wager?”