Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page A

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 takelong 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
    S o 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