Middle School: How I Got Lost in London

by James Patterson

It seemed like hours later when we came to the last bit of the tour—a storeroom where the old, unused exhibits were kept. Then Albert gave me my gift— my gift to help beat the bully—and I tucked it in my backpack.

  And then, as the battery on my phone ran down to nothing, I managed to get one last picture: It was Albert, standing next to a waxwork of Elizabeth I.

  He posed, smiling. Then he indicated to a side door leading onto the street, which hung open.

  “And there we have it,” he said as he ushered us out. “Dawn is about to break, and I must continue my rounds.”

  I stepped outside, where the sun was just coming up on a chilly morning. Then turned to him. I wanted to thank him for the gift and for the tour. And to say they were great but…uh, how do you figure I’m going to get back to the Mercury Lodge when I don’t know where the heck I am, don’t have any money, and the battery on my phone just died when I took your picture?

  But he wasn’t there. And the door had slammed shut. Leaving me standing on the street in the middle of London, in the early morning, without even the taxi fare to the hotel.

  Gulp.

  “Where to now?” I asked Leo.

  A couple of cars passed, but otherwise the street was deserted. And not in a good way. There was a rattle that my imagination insisted was a rat, but it turned out to be a McDonald’s carton blowing in the breeze. Even so. It was eerie, being so deserted.

  “Back to the river bank?” suggested Leo.

  And seeing as that was one of only two places in London I was familiar with, it seemed like the best idea at the time.

  I may have been lost but I reckoned I was clever enough to make my way back to the river bank. That much I could manage.

  Okay, so the signs to “South Bank” helped.

  The point is, I got there. And after worrying it would just be me and a couple of chainsaw-wielding psychopaths, I was pleased to find myself in the company of other people. Real people, who weren’t waxworks or security guards who pulled confused faces when you said words like “iPod” or “computer.” Just your average, normal English early birds: yawning men in suits on their way to work, runners, people beginning to set out stalls…

  …and now me.

  I don’t know if anyone’s ever described me as “resourceful,” but now was as good a time as any to start. Because right then was when I had my Brilliant Idea. I made my way to the spot where I’d seen the sidewalk artists the day before, whipped out my pencil and sketch pad, and said to the first person who came along, “Caricature, sir?”

  IT WAS THANKS to my night at Madame Fifi’s that I had the celebrity images fresh in my head.

  My first client wanted a caricature of himself with David Beckham, and I was able to oblige. A pretty good likeness of them both, even if I do say so myself. Off went my first satisfied customer.

  Along came another. An older lady who wanted herself with Brad Pitt.

  Then came a young guy who wanted himself with a soccer player called Wayne Rooney. Someone I hadn’t even heard of until a few hours before!

  And then, when morning had well and truly broken, and the tourists began to gather, I found myself drawing girls with Justin Bieber and One Direction, guys with Angelina Jolie, middle-aged ladies with Princess Diana. The money was beginning to roll in.

  I moved farther along the bank until I came to Waterloo Station, where I packed my things away. I checked my money. By now I had enough for the taxi ride to the Mercury Lodge. But heck, I was having a great time. Why return to the relentless torture of Miller the Killer, the indifference of Jeanne Galletta, and the scorn of everyone else? Not only was I reaping money but also the thanks and praise of my customers.

  I was, for perhaps the first time since I’d left Hills Village, having an absolutely brilliant time.

  So I took the London Underground. I went to Piccadilly and saw the sights. Then to Leicester Square, where I set up stall and drew more caricatures. Across the square there were preparations for the night’s premiere of the new Transformers movie, and I could see camera crews setting up.

  Moments later, who should come by but David Beckham.

  David Beckham!

  He spotted a caricature of himself. There was an awkward moment when I thought he might object to it. But no.

  “I larve it,” he said in his English accent. “Cor blimey, apples and pears, you’ve done a great job, Rafe. In fact, I larve it so much I’m going to buy it off ya for two thahsand parnds, and give it to my wife Victoriah so she can hang it in our bathroom. ’Cause she likes nothing better than looking at pictures of me when she’s on the loo.”

  (Which is another thing that English people say that’s different. They say “on the loo” when they mean “using the bathroom.”)

  I couldn’t take two thousand pounds for the picture. It was far too generous of him. So instead I accepted one thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine pounds. And he was so pleased to get a bargain that he invited me to the premiere of the new Transformers movie. So along I went, me and Leo on the red carpet. Where I caught the eye of Megan Fox, who’s even more gorgeous in the flesh than she is in the movies, if that’s possible. And I guess Megan thought I was cute because she insisted on getting our photograph, and…

  Oh. It’s that unbelievable, is it?

  MEGAN FOX WAS the giveaway, wasn’t it? After all, she left the Transformers franchise, so what would she be doing at the premiere of the new movie? Gah!

  Okay, you got me bang to rights. I made some bits up. Yes, the bit about Megan Fox, and the whole Transformers routine, and David Beckham and his two thahsand parnds. And maybe I kind of exaggerated how popular my caricature service proved to be.

  And also how good it was.

  But, look, the important thing is that between my (okay, limited) artistic abilities and the kind hearts and goodwill of a few English early birds I was able to earn the taxi fare back to the Mercury Lodge. And it was just after 7 a.m. when I eventually arrived.

  If I’m honest, I expected to find the place in uproar when I returned. After all, they must have noticed me missing by now. But no. Instead I found the hotel sleepy—more staff around than guests. My absence had gone unnoticed. The truth was, I didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved by that.

  I crept back up to my room. The room I shared with Miller the Killer. There I found him sleeping soundly. Look at him there. So cute.

  I plugged in my phone. Then I went to my backpack and took from it Albert’s gift—a wax severed head. I placed it on Miller’s pillow, right next to his head. So that this bloody, severed head would be the first thing he saw when he woke up. With the scene set, I took a step back, picked up my phone, aimed it at Miller, and hit “record.”

  “MILLER!” I called.

  The bully’s eyes sprang open, only to be confronted by the gory head on his pillow.

  My phone caught every delicious moment. First Miller squealed like a baby. Then he got himself in a mess trying to escape the head—which ended up rolling into his lap so that for a moment he sat with it between his legs.

  Then he tried to push the head off his bed. It developed a life of its own and I got some great footage of him juggling the severed head and whimpering at the same time.

  Until, at last, some combination of realizing that (a) I was standing there pointing my phone at him and laughing and (b) the head was a wax head—I mean, even in the grip of shock and terror some tiny bit of Miller’s brain must have realized that the wax head felt wrong somehow.

  And so, eventually, he stopped.

  And he looked at me.

  He was just about to leap out of bed and give me a beating when I showed him that with one push of a button I could text the footage to everyone. Very slowly… and…patiently…I explained that I was going to make a deal with him. That the footage of him screaming like a baby— not to mention the whimpering—would never see the light of day as long as he stopped ragging on me and the rest of the group.

  He agreed, of
course. What choice did he have? (And, yeah, not long after we arrived back at school, Miller cornered me in the bathroom after lunch, held my head over a toilet until I gave him my phone, and then deleted all the footage.) But the point is that for the rest of that Living History trip he was a pussycat. Not a single cuss escaped his lips, not one wedgie from his fist, not a flick of his fingertips. The bullying stopped. All because of me.

  Trouble was, nobody knew I was responsible.

  My good deed went unnoticed.

  To make matters worse, I didn’t even benefit from winning William’s Wager.

  “I’ll tell them you spent all night in your bed,” sneered Miller that morning. And that was it: any chance of glory dashed.

  Just you wait till the journey home, I thought darkly.

  You better pray they’re not serving spaghetti Bolognese.

  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.”

  It 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.

  Okay, 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.

  I’ve seen enough movies that I know when you first get to prison, you basically have two choices: (1) pound the living daylights out of someone so that everyone else will think you’re insane and stay out of your way, or (2) keep your head down, try to blend in, and don’t get on anyone’s bad side.

  You’ve already seen what I look like, so you can probably guess which one I chose. As soon as I got to homeroom, I went straight for the back row and sat as far from the teacher’s desk as possible.

  There was just one problem with that plan, and his name was Miller. Miller the Killer, to be exact. It’s impossible to stay off this kid’s bad side, because it’s the only one he’s got.

  But I didn’t know any of that yet.

  “Sitting in the back, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I told him.

  “Are you one of those troublemakers or something?” he said.

  I just shrugged. “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “’Cause this is where all the juvies sit,” he said, and took a step closer. “In fact, you’re in my seat.”

  “I don’t see your name on it,” I told him, and I was just starting to think maybe that was the wrong thing to say when Miller put one of his XXXL paws around my neck and started lifting me like a hundred-pound dumbbell.

  I usually like to keep my head attached to my body, so I went ahead and stood up like he wanted me to.

  “Let’s try that again,” he said. “This is my seat. Understand?”

  I understood, all right. I’d been in sixth grade for about four and a half minutes, and I already had a fluorescent orange target on my back. So much for blending in.

  And don’t get me wrong. I’m not a total wimp. Give me a few more chapters, and I’ll show you what I’m capable of. In the meantime, though, I decided to move to some other part of the room. Like maybe somewhere a little less hazardous to my health.

  But then, when I went to sit down again, Miller called over. “Uh-uh,” he said. “That one’s mine too.”

  Can you see where this is going?

  By the time our homeroom teacher, Mr. Rourke, rolled in, I was just standing there wondering what it might be like to spend the next nine months without sitting down.

  Rourke looked over the top of his glasses at me. “Excuse me, Mr.Khatch . . . Khatch-a . . . Khatch-a-dor—”

  “Khatchadorian,” I told him.

  “Gesundheit!” someone shouted, and the entire class started laughing.

  “Quiet!” Mr. Rourke snapped as he checked his attendance book for my name. “And how are you today, Rafe?” he said, smiling like there were cookies on the way.

  “Fine, thanks,” I answered.

  “Do you find our seating uncomfortable?” he asked me.

  “Not exactly,” I said,
because I couldn’t really go into details.

  “Then SIT. DOWN. NOW!”

  Unlike Miller the Killer, Mr. Rourke definitely has two sides, and I’d already met both of them.

  Since nobody else was stupid enough to sit right in front of Miller, that was the only seat left in the room.

  And because I’m the world’s biggest idiot sometimes, I didn’t look back when I went to sit in my chair. Which is why I hit the dirt as I went down—all the way down—to the floor.

  The good news? Given the way things had started off, I figured middle school could only get better from here.

  The bad news? I was wrong about the good news.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781448185795

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Young Arrow, 2014

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  Copyright © James Patterson, 2014

  Illustrations by Graham Ross

  James Patterson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Young Arrow