Okay, Now I’m Awake
Wow,” Georgia said, standing next to my bed. “Are you hard to wake up, or what?”
Or what. I still had a few more weeks of summer vacation left, and I wanted to make them as good as possible. And by “good,” I mean as Georgia-free as possible. She’d been home from Camp Wannamorra for two whole days now, and that was two too many, if you ask me.
Unfortunately, that morning, everything was about to take a King Kong–sized turn for the worse.
“I have some bad news for you,” Georgia said. But I didn’t give her the chance. I got out of bed and shoved her right back into the hall where she came from.
“Come back when I’m awake,” I said.
“But you are awake,” Georgia said as she started to push her way back into my room.
“Yeah, thanks to you,” I grumbled. And then—SLAM! I shut the door in her face before she could get on even one more of my nerves.
Anyone want to bet whether or not that stopped her? (Spoiler Alert: It didn’t.)
“Your school is closed!” she yelled from the hall. “Airbrook Arts is shutting down—permanently!”
See, this is what I mean about Georgia. Only she could think that was bad news. For me, it was more like the opposite—NO SCHOOL! And this was no dream either. This one was for real.
I turned right around and opened the door again.
“Seriously?” I said.
“Seriously,” she said. “And Mom needs to talk to you about it, right now.”
“Okay, but first—LOOK OVER THERE!”
“Where?” Georgia said, just before I whipped past her, ran across the hall and into the bathroom, and locked the door behind me.
Georgia absolutely hates it when I get to the bathroom first.
“Open up!” she said, pounding away. “I haven’t even gotten to the real bad news yet. Are you listening?”
“NO!” I said.
“If you aren’t listening, how could you answer me?” said my super-logical, super-brainy, super-loser sister.
“I’m busy! Just go away!” I said. It turned out that the bathroom wasn’t such a great idea after all. Now I was trapped, and there isn’t a door in the world that can block out my sister’s voice once she gets going.
“Listen to me, Rafe!” she shouted. “Airbrook Arts is closed for good! Haven’t you figured out what that means yet? There’s nowhere left for you to go—except back to Hills Village.”
That part hit me like a slow-motion hammer to the head.
“What?” I said. “Hang on… wait… what?”
I was pretty sure I’d heard Georgia right, but I needed to be positive. If what she said was true, then I might have been better off falling from that cliff for real.
“You heard me!” she shouted on the other side of that door. “YOU’RE GOING BACK TO HILLS VILLAGE MIDDLE SCHOOL!!!”
