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

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
, justfor 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.”



RE-REVENGE
    T he 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 professionalfreak 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