Free Middle School: Get Me Out of Here! by James Patterson

as I’d seen her in a long time. Also, Dotty was making pancakes, and I
love
breakfast for dinner.
    Why would I want to mess with all that?
    So instead of having some big, uncomfortable conversation that night, we talked about painting instead. And drawing. And school. And the family of pigeons living on the roof across the street.
    I didn’t know when it was going to be a good time to start asking Mom all those Dad questions. I just knew that right now wasn’t it. So for the time being, I was going to keep them to myself and my drawing pad.
    (And to Leo, of course.)



THIRTY-TWO TRILLION AND COUNTING
    A few weeks into the quarter, Mrs. Ling came around to all the art classes and made an announcement.
    “Boys and girls, it’s that time of the year,” she said. “Time to start thinking about your projects for the Spring Art Show.”
    But of course, I was already thinking about mine. I’d been thinking about it for months.
    I’d never been in a real art show before, and I was going to make this the 195th thing on my list of 195 things. It was like the big finish line for Operation: Get a Life.
    My project was going to be awesome!
    Just as soon as I figured out what it was going to be.
    “Remember,” Mrs. Ling said, “this is your chance to really show us who you are as an artist, as well as the kind of artist you might become if you continue on here at Cathedral.”
    And that was a big part of my problem right there.
    First of all, how was I supposed to show who I was “as an artist” when I didn’t have the first clue?
    And second—hello, pressure! The Spring Art Show was my last chance to prove I belonged in art school. I still didn’t know whether I was going to make it back for eighth grade… or not.
    In fact, it seemed like the more Mrs. Ling talked, the more problems I had.
    “This is an open assignment,” she told us. “That means you can work with any materials you like, to create anything you can think of.”
    That may not sound like a problem, but it was. See, it’s one thing when they tell you to make a self-portrait, or a junk sculpture, or whatever. But when you can do
anything
, it’s like getting a multiple-choice test with one question and thirty-two trillion possible answers. Good luck choosing the right one.
    It didn’t help that all the students but me seemed to already know what they wanted to do either.



“In the meantime,” Mrs. Ling said, “to help you along, we have a lovely field trip to the Art Institute coming up. I hope you’ll use that opportunity to take in some of the amazing art in this city and get inspired to reach new heights with your own work.”
    New heights? Who said anything about
new
heights? I was still working on reaching some old heights. Or any heights.
    All of a sudden, that big finish line I’d been thinking about all year was starting to come up—
fast
.

FIVE-DOLLAR POSTCARDS, SOME GUY NAMED MONDRIAN, AND A FEW OTHER THINGS THAT WENT OVER MY HEAD
    B y the time the Art Institute field trip rolled around, I’d had lots of time to think about my project for the Spring Art Show. And after some long, hard, careful consideration, I’d finally managed to come up with… zero good ideas.
    But maybe Mrs. Ling was right. Maybe this field trip was going to inspire me to do something I’d never even thought about before. Maybe I’d get the best idea of my life here.
    And if not… well, at least it got us out of a whole morning of regular classes.
    When we got to the museum, they set us loose with our sketchbooks so we could walk around the galleries and draw whatever grabbed us. Matty seemed like he knew what he was doing, so I let him lead the way.
    For a while I kept expecting him to pull something Matty-ish, like taking money from the fountain out front, or trying to get up on the roof, or at least touching some of the stuff you weren’t supposed to touch in the museum.
    But he didn’t. As far as I could tell, he was actually interested in the art.