Middle School: My Brother Is a Big, Fat Liar by James Patterson Read Free Book Online Page B

“Wait! This doesn’t really have anything to do with me—”
    “YOU GUYS WILL REGRET IT FOREVER IF YOU BACK OUT NOW,” Rhonda insisted. “HOW WILL YOU PERFORM NEXT YEAR IF YOU BAIL ON THIS YEAR’S BATTLE?”
    Mari turned to Patti. “Rhonda has a point.”
    She does?
    “SO WHAT IF YOU’RE NOT PERFECT?” Rhonda was clearly in the zone. She wasn’t about to stop screeching now. “ROCK IS NEVER PERFECT!”
    “She’s right!” Nanci twirled a drumstick. “Let’s rock!”
    “Yeah, let’s go for it!” Patti agreed.
    Mari turned to me. “What do you think, Georgia?”
    I looked over at Rhonda’s beaming face.
She really, really thinks we’re good
, I realized. It was kind of inspiring.

    “Let’s do it,” I said.
    Rhonda let out a shriek that might have been a cheer. I clapped my hands over my ears but smiled. Rhonda was our biggest fan, and I didn’t want to let her down.
    Of course, she might just be completely insane.
    But I didn’t want to let her down anyway.

Grandma’s Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown
    I was almost home from school when I saw him:
    Rafe.
    We had managed to avoid each other in the morning. Airbrook Arts starts forty-five minutes later than HVMS, so I ate a piece of pie for breakfast and snuck out early. But I couldn’t avoid him forever.
    Rafe had paused midstride too. For a moment, we both stood stock-still, like mirror images. I guess we were both waiting for the other to make the first move.

    I knew the same question was on both of our minds:
Who’s going to pull the next prank?
    True, I had pulled the last one. And yet that prank was an epic fail for me, and a big, fat win for Rafe. So whose turn was it? Would the next victim be Rafe? Or me?
    “What are you planning?” Rafe demanded.
    “Nothing,” I said. “You?”
    “Nothing.”
    His hands were empty, so I decided to trust him.I guess Rafe made the same decision about me, because he nodded, and we started up the walk to our house. We walked up the steps. Rafe opened the door….
    Wait—is this the right house?
    “Surprise!” Grandma Dotty cried. She was sitting on a hideous flowered couch. “I got my things out of storage and decided to freshen up the decor around here.”
    It wasn’t that our apartment looked awful…. It was just that it looked exactly like Dotty’s old house. I looked at Rafe. Rafe looked at me.
    “This is bad,” Rafe whispered.
    “Wait till you see what I’ve done with the other rooms!” Dotty chuckled.
    “Other rooms?” Rafe repeated, but I was already racing up the stairs. I threw open the door to my personal space.
    “What’s this?” I shrieked. “Where’s my stuff?” My room now had a couch, a plant, and an empty birdcage. I yanked open the closet. Nothing. “Where’s Mr. Bananas?” My stuffed monkey had disappeared, along with my Most Outstanding Effort medal, my favorite blanket, and my
bed
.

    I heard Rafe howl next door and raced to see the destruction there.
    “This looks way better than it used to,” I told him.
    “It’s horrible!” Rafe cried. “I can’t find anything! Where’s my favorite drawing pen? Where’s the painting Mom made for me? Where’s last Thursday’s leftover pizza? This room is about as fun as… a prison cell.”

    “This is a disaster!” Rafe wailed. “That pizza was my science project!”
    “We have to tell Grandma to put everything back where it was,” I said.
    “She probably has no clue how to do that,” Rafe pointed out. “And she might not want to. She’s kind of…” His voice trailed off.
    “Dotty?” I suggested.
    “Exactly.”
    We needed to come up with a way to make Dotty
want
to give us back our stuff. Suddenly, it came to me.
    “Listen, Rafe,” I said, taking him by the shoulder. “I have a plan. But I’m going to need your help.”
    Rafe looked suspicious. “What’s the plan?”
    “We have to convince Grandma to get all our old stuff out from wherever she put it,” I said. “Let’s tell her we’ll have a