Middle School--Born to Rock Read online

  “Are those detention slips?” I asked, once I saw the little pink pieces of paper in her hand.

  “Yes, they are,” Mrs. Stricker said. “Unless someone’s hair is on fire or a wild animal has been set loose in the halls, there is never any reason for that kind of screaming in my school. Not to mention the cell phone.”

  Believe me, I know what a detention slip looks like, and it’s not because I’ve had so many of them. It’s because Rafe could wallpaper our whole apartment with the ones he’s gotten.

  I couldn’t even argue with Mrs. Stricker. The fact was, we had broken the rules. Mom wasn’t going to be too happy about this, either.

  Rafe, on the other hand? He’d probably be proud of me.

  As we came out of the bathroom, Missy and her regal court of butt-kissers were standing right there, watching us.

  “Oh, was that you in there?” Missy asked. “I thought it was a bunch of stray cats dying. So I thought I should report it to Mrs. Stricker. Sorrr-eee!”

  “I knew it was them,” Chloe said. “But I thought all that screaming was their ‘band practice.’”

  “How can you tell the difference?” Alicia said. “They stink!”

  “It’s We Stink,” Nanci said.

  “Same thing,” Missy said, and the other two cracked up like Missy would immediately dump them if they didn’t laugh their heads off.

  I could still hear them laughing as Mrs. Stricker marched us toward the office. And all I could think about was sticking the Princess Patrol into a giant egg capsule, attaching it to a weather balloon, and sending the whole thing out over the Pacific Ocean.

  Hopefully never to be seen again.

  The Detention Song

  A Walking Disaster

  As soon as detention was over, the girls and I agreed to race home, get our stuff, and meet at the We Stink studio. Which is really just my garage.

  The deadline for contest entries was coming up fast. We had to pick a song, make our video, and get it online, ASAHP (as soon as humanly possible).

  So I definitely had a lot on my mind. I also had a lot in my hands, including my backpack, my lunch bag, and my egg capsule, with the egg still inside.

  All of which means I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going as I hurried home.

  IMPORTANT FACT #4: For me, hurrying is a little slower than it is for some people. My left leg is two centimeters shorter than my right leg. When I’m standing around with bare feet, I call myself the Leaning Tower of Georgia. I have to wear special shoes to make up the difference. My doctor says I’ll probably outgrow it by the time I’m an adult. But in the meantime, I limp a little bit when I walk.

  Also, my head was so full of fantasies about meeting Lulu and the Handbags, I didn’t notice that I’d taken the “dangerous” way home until it was too late. And that meant I went right past the Trillin estate.

  Yes, estate.

  I’m not going to lie. Missy’s family has the nicest house in Hills Village by a mile. It’s surrounded by big, high gated walls, and out front there’s a big statue of Major Zachary Hills. He’s the founder of our town (we named it after him!), and also Missy’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. Of course.

  “Nice walk!” somebody yelled out.

  I looked up, and it was Missy with her dog, Benjamins, coming down the driveway and out through their gate.

  “Do you use that strut on the runways in Paris?” Missy asked.

  And I thought, seriously? This girl had everything you could possibly want from the catalog of life, and she still had to make fun of the way I walked?

  I know it shouldn’t have hurt my feelings, because Missy is an evil troll. It doesn’t seem fair that someone who doesn’t have any feelings can hurt yours. But it did.

  And that’s probably why I snapped.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I popped open that capsule of mine. I reached in. I took out my egg. And I winged it right at Missy—and made a direct hit.

  “You IDIOT!” Missy screamed. “Do you know how much this T-shirt cost?”

  I’m not normally the type to throw eggs at people. Even at evil people. That’s more of a Rafe move than a Georgia move. But now I was going to pay a Rafe-sized price, because Missy was letting her giant Doberman off the leash and pointing him my way.

  “Sic ’er, Benjamins! Eat the geek!” she said.

  I may be a little slow, but I’m not bad at climbing. So I went for the nearest high thing I could, which was the wall around the Trillin estate. It’s all covered in ivy, and just like that, I was heading straight up before Benjamins could find out what I tasted like.

  I also kept looking back. That was another mistake. Because at the top of the wall, there was a big concrete planter. It was the kind of thing you might look at and think, “I sure hope nobody ever bumps into that and knocks it off the wall.” You might not even guess someone my size could be strong enough to do that.

  But you’d be wrong.

  “Watch it!” Missy screamed, just before I plowed into that planter…

  … and just before it tipped right off the wall…

  … and landed on top of Major Hills’s statue…

  … and knocked his head clean off.

  I had just decapitated Major Hills, the village hero. Also known as Missy’s great-great-great-great-grandfather. And now his head was rolling to a stop in the Trillins’ driveway.

  Something told me I wasn’t going to make it to band practice on time.

  Head Honcho

  I’d always been curious about what the inside of the Trillins’ mansion looked like. But this sure wasn’t the way I wanted to find out.

  When Mom showed up, I was sitting there, drinking water with a lemon slice in it, like I’d been booked into the world’s nicest prison.

  I felt awful. I hated making trouble for Mom, just as much as I hated the way Missy kept glaring at me. You would have thought I’d declared war on all of Hills Village, starting with her family.

  So when Mrs. Trillin told Mom they weren’t going to make me pay for putting Major Hills’s head back on, I almost wanted to kiss her. (Mrs. Trillin, I mean. NOT Missy.)

  “Well, that’s very generous,” Mom said. “But I do feel as though Georgia should contribute somehow.”

  And that’s when Missy smiled for the first time. Which made ice cubes run through my veins. Believe me, I know what makes Missy Trillin smile, and it has nothing to do with rainbows and puppy dogs.

  “I have an idea,” Missy said.

  And I thought—

  No, no, no, no, no…

  “Georgia could work here until she’s paid off her share,” Missy said. And I thought—

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

  “Like as a personal assistant. I mean, Mommy’s assistant, of course. Not mine,” Missy said.

  ARE YOU KIDDING ME????

  I could think of a zillion things that sounded better than this. In fact, the list was infinite, because there was nothing I wanted less than a prison sentence at the Trillins’.

  “Well, I could use some help around the house a few days a week,” Mrs. Trillin said.

  I tried to speak up. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea—”

  “Excuse me?” Mom said to me, staring like I was in no position to complain. Which I wasn’t. Whatever happened out there at the gate, I was the one who’d turned Major Hills into the headless non-horseman. Also, that fresh egg on Missy’s shirt didn’t exactly help my case.

  And now Mrs. Trillin was offering us the biggest discount on statue heads anyone had ever seen.

  In other words, I didn’t have a choice. And just like that, I was the newest member of the Trillin estate staff.

  Which also meant working for Missy.

  It was like the end of the world. Only worse.

  Tick-Tick-Tick

  Meanwhile… tick-tick-tick… the contest deadline was coming faster than mold on Rafe’s dirty gym socks.

  When the band finally got together the next day, we had less than an hour to make our video and get it online. So we just propped Nanci’s phone against a paint can in the garage, turned on the camera, and stood there playing our best song. It’s called “Let’s Shake on It.” I wrote the words and Nanci wrote the music. Hopefully it was a Lulu-worthy song, even if it was a lame video.

  Either way, we got it posted to the contest site at 4:56, with four minutes to spare. And now came the hard part.

  “How are we going to get people to vote for us?” Nanci asked.

  “We have to tell everyone we know about this,” Patti said.

  “It’s going to take more than that,” I said. “We should keep making videos, and posting pictures of the band wherever we can, with links to the voting page—”

  “Who’s going to see all that? We don’t have any followers,” Mari said.

  “Then we need to get some!” I said.

  “How do we do that?” Nanci asked.

  “By putting up videos and pictures and… oh, wait,” Mari said.

  I guess that’s what you call a vicious circle. How were we supposed to get people to vote for us when we didn’t have any people?

  “What if we played a whole bunch of shows?” I said.

  “I like that,” Nanci said.

  “Ooh!” Mari said. “We could play free bagel Sunday at my dad’s used car lot!”

  “Do a lot of people come to that?” Patti asked.

  “Well… no,” Mari said. “But the bagels are really good.”

  “Maybe we could play at school,” Nanci said. “Like at a pep rally or something.”

  “Except—” Patti looked away.

  “Oh, right,” Nanci said.

  “Mrs. Stricker,” we all said at the same time. We weren’t exactly on Mrs.
Stricker’s best side that week. More like her worst side.

  “You know what your problem is? You’re not thinking big enough,” one of the girls said. “Not nearly big enough.”

  Except, it didn’t sound like a girl. It sounded like a boy. In fact, it sounded a whole lot like—

  “Rafe!” I said. There he was, darkening my studio door. “This is a closed rehearsal. Get out!”

  “I was just taking out the trash, but I couldn’t help overhearing. It’s like your ideas are so bad, they’re hurting my ears.”

  “Goodbye!” I picked up my guitar. “You were just leaving.”

  “You shouldn’t think about getting votes,” Rafe blabbed on.

  “We shouldn’t?” Patti looked at him with her head cocked to the side.

  “No. You should think about getting famous. Then the votes will take care of themselves. If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it right.”

  But I wasn’t going to listen to someone with his own permanent chair in the detention room tell me about right and wrong. Especially when that someone was Rafe.

  “ONE! TWO! ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!” I shouted, and we started jamming out instead. I knew that would get rid of him. And it did.

  “You’ll be back!” Rafe yelled, even though he was the one running for the door. I didn’t even know what he meant by that.

  At least, not until later, when I figured it out the hard way.

  Partners!

  The next day, Mrs. Hibbs announced the new project for science.

  “Does anyone know what a Rube Goldberg machine is?” she asked. We all shook our heads no, so she showed us some amazing videos.

  Rube Goldberg machines usually complete a single, simple job, like turning on a light switch or opening the front door of the house or heating up a frozen pizza, but in a really crazy, complex way.

  Say, for instance, you wanted to hand in your homework with a little flair.

  They’re made from all kinds of different stuff, and you can use whatever you can find around the house, or in the garage, or at the junk heap. They teach you about physics and engineering and creativity.

  I already liked the whole idea of this assignment. And then it got even better.

  “All right, everyone,” Mrs. Hibbs said. “You’ll be working in pairs on your machines. So please pick out a partner and get those brains storming!”

  And guess who came straight over to me? Hello, Sam! Hello, awesome!

  “Georgia, do you want to work on this together?” he asked.

  “Sure!” I said. “That would be great.”

  “Cool,” he said. “Because I really like—”

  “I like you, too!”

  “—what you did with the egg challenge.”

  “Oh.”

  I’m surprised I didn’t set off the smoke alarm, because it felt like my face was on fire. Even Sam turned red.

  Remember when I said how nice it would be if I could see into the future? Well, that goes double for time travel. Because I would have given anything to get a little ten-second do-over just then.

  Lucky for me, Sam was extra-nice about it. He just pretended nothing had happened and kept going.

  “Do you want to work on it after school?” he asked.

  “Sure!” But then I remembered that I had to report to the Trillin estate at four sharp.

  “Oh, wait. I can’t. I have to, um… babysit, my, uh… brother.”

  Rafe was a few feet away, sitting there with his head upside down, trying to see something under his desk. Typical.

  “Your older brother?” Sam asked.

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it,” I whispered.

  I couldn’t help myself. Even a crazy lie was better than admitting to Sam that Missy Trillin was my new boss.

  “How about first thing next week?” Sam asked.

  “That works!” I said.

  “Right after school on Monday?” he said.

  It was turning back to awesome, all over again. Except then I said, “Sounds like a date!”

  Which is, trust me, not what you want to say to a boy right after you’d accidentally told him, “I LIKE YOU, TOO!” It was just like getting a do-over after all, because now I was just as embarrassed as I had been ten seconds earlier—if not more embarrassed.

  But as he stood there smiling at me and I stood there smiling at him, I started to wonder if I shouldn’t feel completely sorry for myself. Even though I probably set a world record for blushing that day, I thought that maybe Sam wasn’t being nice just for the sake of being nice. And maybe he wasn’t just looking for a science partner, either.

  Maybe, I thought… just MAYBE… Sam Marks was starting to like me the same way I liked him. And with any luck, this new assignment was going to give me a chance to find out.

  That is, if I didn’t embarrass myself to death in the meantime.

  First Day, Worst Day

  When I rang the Trillins’ doorbell that afternoon, I had one thing on my mind: HOW CAN I GET OUT OF THIS?

  The short answer was: I couldn’t. Not for now, anyway. The deal was for two days a week, 4:00 to 5:30, for the rest of the school year.

  Still, I was going to keep my eyes, ears, and brain peeled for any possible exit strategy. Because this was 100 percent the worst thing that had ever happened to me in middle school.

  And it hadn’t even started yet.

  “Georgia! Right on time!” Mrs. Trillin said when she answered the door. “Come on in, I’ll show you around.”

  She took me down a long hall, then through the enormous shiny kitchen that would’ve made my mom drool, a family room with at least four couches, another hall, out some French doors, and across the yard. Along the way, I saw maids in pink uniforms, a cook in a white uniform, and a couple of gardeners in green coveralls.

  What I didn’t see, thank goodness, was any sign of Missy. I’d kind of expected her to pounce the second I showed up.

  Finally, we came around the corner to the swimming pool, where there was a whole other house that looked about as big as our apartment.

  “Have you ever vacuumed a pool before?” Mrs. Trillin asked me.

  I looked at the long pole and hose thingy she was holding out for me to take.

  “Is it like vacuuming a rug?” I asked.

  “Not exactly.”

  That pool was HUGE. Something told me I was going to be vacuuming it for the rest of the school year. But as long as I was outside and away from the Missy Danger Zone, it could have been worse.

  After Mrs. Trillin showed me what to do, she handed me a little walkie-talkie with a headset. She called it a “house radio,” because I guess you need that kind of thing when your property is big enough to cross state lines.

  “Channel one is Nicole in the kitchen, channel two is Bobby, our head groundskeeper, and I’m on channel three,” Mrs. Trillin said. “Just give a shout if you have any questions.”

  Then she said, “I’ll leave you to it”—and disappeared back into the house.

  It wasn’t so bad at first. All I had to do was run the vacuum across the bottom of the pool, back and forth… and back and forth…

  … and back and forth…

  Before long, I was a million miles away, thinking about some day in the not-too-distant future when I’d be cleaning my own giant swimming pool. Because that’s just the kind of internationally famous rock star I’ll be. The kind who likes to keep it real.

  So when Lulu and the Handbags fly in for a jam session at the studio (the one I’m going to build behind the pool house), I’ll want to make sure everything is just right for them.

  I mean, maybe it will be a little awkward after I beat Lulu out at the Grammys that year, but we’ll work it out. Lulu’s cool that way. She’ll see my potential, and next thing you know, we’ll be back at the Grammys together, performing our mega-smash duet, “Pool Girls.”

  Then Lulu will score another number one hit of her own. Then I’ll score another number one hit. Then Lulu. Then Georgia. Back and forth…

  … and back and forth…

  … and back and forth…

  … and there I was, still cleaning the Trillins’ pool. It was all just a nice little dream bubble while I passed the time.