ROUGH START

Welcome to THE PAST! Don’t worry, we didn’t go that far. Just three weeks earlier, to be exact.

I was at the tail end of a pretty lousy summer, which is supposed to be the best time of the year for most kids. Me, not so much. Camp Wannamorra had been a disaster, and my time at The Program in the Rocky Mountains just about killed me in six different ways. (Well, okay, just one way, but still…)

None of that was the worst part, though. That happened on the Friday before school started, when Mom took me to Hills Village Middle School. We had a meeting scheduled with Mrs. Stricker and Mrs. Stonecase so I could get re-enrolled there.

You remember Mrs. Stricker, right? And Mrs. Stonecase too? They’re the principal and vice principal of HVMS. They’re also sisters—for real. That’s like getting twice the trouble for half the price. Not to mention, if there was a Worldwide Khatchadorian Haters Club, they’d be the president and vice president.

So anyway, as soon as I was stuck inside that lion’s den (I mean, sitting down in Mrs. Stricker’s office), I got a two-ton piece of bad news dropped on my head.

“If Rafe wishes to come back to Hills Village Middle School this fall,” Mrs. Stricker said to my mom, “he’ll have to be enrolled as a special needs student.”

And I was like, “Say WHAT?”

But Stricker wasn’t done. She kept going, like a tidal wave of meanness that just couldn’t be stopped. “Whether he’ll finish middle school on time or have to put in an extra semester or two—or more—well, we just can’t say at this point,” she told us.

And then I was like, “Say WHAAAAAAT???”

I don’t know what they call it at your school. IEP. SPED. Special Education. Barnum & Bailey’s Three-Ring Circus. At HVMS, the kids have plenty of names for it—just not ones they say when any teachers are around.

And now I was in it.

I tried to talk Stricker, Stonecase, and even Mom out of making this horrible mistake, but they wouldn’t budge. Mom wasn’t being mean about it or anything. I know she wants what’s best for me. She just said I should give it a try.

“We’ll see how things go once the school year starts,” she said. “Who knows, maybe you’ll even like it.”

Which is such a MOM thing to say.

In the meantime, if you’re thinking this story is all about bad news, don’t worry. Some cool stuff happens too, like that first kiss, and some other things I haven’t even told you about yet.

But so far? My school year was off to the worst start ever.

And it hadn’t even started yet.