GREAT, BAD, WORSE

The second day of Operation: Get a Life started out great. Right before it turned bad. And then got even worse.

But first, the good part: Mom let me take the bus to school by myself for the first time. And I’m not talking about the big piece of yellow cheese I rode in sixth grade. I’m talking about an actual city bus.

It felt really weird (in a good way) to ride through the city alone like that.

I kept looking around at all the zillions of other people and thinking about how I was one of them now.

Rafe Khatchadorian, city kid. Who’d have thunk it?

So by the time I got to school, I’d already done my at-least-one-new-thing for the day, and I was just getting started. As far as I could tell, I was going to knock this whole mission right out of the park.

And then I got to my locker. (Here comes the bad part.)

It all looked normal enough from the outside, but once I turned the combination and opened the door, it looked like some kind of alien creature had crawled in there during the night, swallowed a hand grenade, and exploded all over everything.

Okay, it was just green paint, but still—my social studies book was green, my notebooks were green, my gym stuff was green; and all of it was dripping, wet, sticky, and gross. Someone had figured out a way to pump about a gallon in through the vents on the door.

And by someone, I mean Zeke McDonald and Kenny Patel, the left and right butt cheeks of Cathedral School of the Arts. When I looked around, they were right there, hanging out by the stairs. Zeke had his phone pointed at me, and both of them cracked up as soon as I saw them. Then they just turned and walked away.

And I thought, Revenge is a two-way street, isn’t it? Maybe those water balloons were a bad idea after all.

It wasn’t over either. I was still standing there trying to figure out how I was going to unpaint the inside of my locker, when the PA system came on in the hall, and the bad part of my morning got shoved aside for the even worse part.