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

That’s what happened to me. I remembered all those times I’d gotten into trouble that year—and all those times Matty had gotten away.
    I’m not saying I blamed him. Most of it was probably my own fault. Or even
all
my fault.
    But this time I hadn’t done anything wrong. And I couldn’t afford to pretend that I had.
    “It’s not my backpack,” I said. “I didn’t put that pen in there.”
    “Well, whose pack is it?” the guard said.
    “I don’t want to say,” I told him.
    “Then you’re going to have to come with me.”
    “Rafe, answer the question,” Mrs. Ling told me. “Whom does that pack belong to?”
    My heart was bouncing around like a pinball, and I still wasn’t exactly sure what to do. At least, not until I looked out into the lobby one more time. That’s when I saw Mr. Crawley herding the whole rest of the seventh-grade class toward the exit. And you’ll never guess who was right there in the middle of the crowd, trying to make a clean getaway and not even looking at me anymore.
    Actually, you probably can guess.
    “It’s Matty Fleckman’s,” I said.

MAD MATTY
    I didn’t get to find out what happened to Matty after that. All I knew was that he didn’t ride the bus back to school, and neither did Mr. Crawley. And I guess he admitted to taking the pen—or maybe they even had it on a security camera—because I wasn’t in trouble anymore.
    That night, I tried tracking him down with everything but bloodhounds. I called him a bunch of times, but he never answered. I e-mailed him twice, but I didn’t hear back. I even texted him from Mom’s phone and said that it was about “homework,” since Mom could see what I’d written, and I couldn’t exactly say it was about “the pen you might or might not have tried to get me to steal for you.”
    That was the thing. I didn’t know if Matty hadtried to set me up at the museum or if he really was going to come back and steal that pen for himself.
    So I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be mad at him, or if he was mad at me… or both… or neither… or
what
. In fact, it was driving me kind of crazy.
    Finally, around nine o’clock, the phone rang. I ran into the kitchen to pick it up, but Grandma beat me to it.
    “HELLO, AND WHAT’S SO IMPORTANT THAT SOMEONE HAS TO CALL MY HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT?” she said.
    No surprise, whoever it was hung up.
    “Hmm,” Grandma said. “I must have scared them off.”
    As soon as she left the room, I took the phone out on the back stoop and closed the door behind me. Then I dialed Matty’s number.
    I didn’t really expect him to pick up—but then he did.
    “What?” he said.
    “Did you just call me?” I said.
    “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Hang on a second. Don’t go away.”
    I heard him put down the phone. Then it was just quiet.
    And then it stayed quiet for a long time. In fact, it probably took about three minutes before I finally figured out what was going on.

    I guess that answered one question, anyway—about whether Matty was mad at me. And now that I knew, it made me think of something else. Something much scarier.
    Let me put it this way: If I was going to count down the top five reasons why it was good tohave Matty the Freak for a friend, it might look something like this:

THE FIRST PART OF THE WORST PART
    R emember how I said earlier that Matty never did anything halfway?
    That’s what I was afraid of. I’m not going to say I was paranoid when I got to school the next day, but I did feel a little bit like I was being hunted.

    It didn’t take long to find out what was going to happen next either. The closer I got to my locker, the more I saw people in the hall looking at me and whispering to each other.
    And here’s what they were whispering about:

    I guess the good news was that all the paint was on the outside this time. Any other day and I might have thought Zeke and Kenny had struck again.
    But that “GET A LIFE” was like code. Matty was the