Also by Kristin Mahoney
Annie’s Life in Lists
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2019 by Kristin Mahoney
Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Hyesu Lee
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781524765132 (trade) — ISBN 9781524765149 (lib. bdg.) ebook ISBN 9781524765156
The illustrations were created digitally.
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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Contents
Cover
Also by Kristin Mahoney
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1. The Assistant Principal
2. The Friend You Don’t Recognize Because She Turned into a Whole New Person Over the Summer
3. Your Homeroom Teacher
4. The Disappointing Turtle
5. The Scary Teacher
6. The Huggers
7. The Teacher Who Thinks She Knows You Well
8. The Kid with Questionable Hygiene
9. The Kid with the Locker Above Yours
10. The Gooser
11. The Crusher
12. The Other Alien
13. Your Favorite Teacher
14. The Math Teacher
15. The Renegade
16. Layla, the Parkwood Middle School Superfan
17. Syd the Tomato Kid
18. The New Houseguests (Strictly Speaking, Not People)
19. The Binaca Lady
20. The Principal
21. Your Old Best Friend’s New Best Friend
22. The Kid Who Talks to His Lunch Box
23. The Serious Lunch Monitor
24. Benjamin Franklin
25. Your Boss
26. Sadie Hawkins
27. Charlie
28. The Cackling Eighth-Grade Boys
29. Laura (and Mary)
30. Dj Dave
31. Dj Z
32. Officer Baldwin
33. Officer Perry
34. Scooter
35. Granola
36. Finley
37. The Gooser’s Neighbor
38. The Graffiti
39. Mad Music Mom
40. Your Sister
41. The School Custodian
42. The SS 1400
43. Keira
44. Officer Delgado
45. The Vandal
46. The Rat(s)
47. The Tough Nut
48. It’s Complicated
Acknowledgments
For Alice and Lucy, the sisters who teach me so much
May you always find your people
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
—Marcel Proust
I get by with a little help from my friends.
—The Beatles
Dear Louisa,
Today was the last day of school before Thanksgiving break. The end of my first few months of sixth grade. Since school started, you’ve been asking me what middle school is like. And since then, I’ve been saying things like “It’s fine, whatever.” I know this is not a helpful answer. I know you are dying to know what to expect when you start at Meridian Middle School in two years. I know I’m supposed to give you the scoop, show you the ropes, hand you the keys (and a bunch of other clichés Mom and Dad used), because I’m your big sister.
The truth is, I’m still figuring it out myself. It’s only been a few months, and it’s hard to respond to questions when you’re still working on the answers. And the fact that this particular school year has started out as the weirdest ever…well, that hasn’t helped.
But I will say I’ve had time to reflect on your question over the past couple of days. (You know how you don’t really do anything during the last few days of school before a break? That’s still true in middle school.) So while the teachers have been showing movies and tidying up their classrooms and the other kids have been passing notes and falling asleep at their desks or doodling on their sneakers, I’ve been reflecting. (Reflecting is a big thing middle-school teachers are into. You’ll see.)
So, what is middle school like, you ask? (And ask, and ask.)
There are a few things I can tell you:
It’s nothing like elementary school.
Lockers are not as exciting as everyone thinks they’ll be.
You might be on your own without some of your closest friends. Take me and Layla, for example. She’s been my best friend since we were three, and all through elementary school at Starling. But Starling kids split up for middle school, and just because she lives one street over from us, she has to go to Parkwood Middle School and we have to go to Meridian. So I had to start a new school without my oldest and closest friend.
You will have no idea where to go. I don’t just mean getting lost in the building (although that happens), but you won’t know which people to go to, because you won’t know who your people are. You may think you will, but you won’t. More on that later.
The time goes by differently. For one thing, you change classes and teachers for each subject, which sounds like it would make the day go faster. But with certain teachers, it actually makes fifty minutes feel like a year. Like, you look at the clock, and then look up at it again about a month later (or so you think), and it has advanced one minute.
Time passes differently in other ways too. In elementary school, you talk a lot about the seasons: the changing leaves, the snow in winter, the flowers in spring. There’s a harvest festival, a Thanksgiving celebration, a winter concert, a spring fair. They have some of that stuff in middle school. But mostly the year passes with people. The people you notice right away. The people you notice much later. The ones who notice you way before you notice them. And vice versa. The people will surprise you. For better and for worse.
So the best way to tell you about middle school is to give you a heads-up about the people you’ll meet. Sure, some of these might be different for you in a couple of years…but this should give you a pretty good idea. Besides, all I can tell you is how it happened for me. So here you go, Lou. These are the people you’ll meet in middle school.
Love,
Augusta
I wish I could tell you that the first person I saw on the first day of school was someone I knew. It was not.
I made Dad drop me off two blocks from school that morning. This was partly because I wasn’t sure what the routine was in middle school, and I didn’t want to be the only kid whose parent took them right to the front door. But this was mostly because Dad’s car was in the shop again and—as you may recall from the first day of school, Lou—he had borrowed the radio-station van to drive for a few days. Some people’s parents have a clean, fancy company car to drive for work; lucky us that our dad gets a bright green van that actually has WOLD: YOUR FAVORITE OLDIES painted on the side in orange letters. For first-day-of-school arrival? No thank you.
As I rounded the corner by Meridian Middle, I saw a crowd of kids who were all complete strangers. They also all looked way older than me. And they seemed like they all knew each other. I knew that more than half the kids at Meridian Middle were coming from a different elementary school than ours, but it still seemed like I should know someone. I started wondering if I was in the right place.
Turns out, I was not. And apparently I had I am in sixth grade—please help me written on my forehead, because a teacher holding a clipboard actually pointed at me and yelled across the heads of the other kids, “You! Glasses! Blue backpack! Sixth grade?”
You wouldn’t think that “glasses” and “blue backpack” would be sufficient identifiers. I mean, other kids had glasses and blue backpacks. But I guess this teacher’s pointing was laser-sharp, because about a hundred kids turned and looked right at me after he yelled.
“Um, yes?” I answered, almost in a whisper (and still wondering where the heck everyone I knew was).
“What was that?”
“Yes. Sixth,” I said, slightly louder.
“Back door!” the teacher yelled. “Didn’t your parents get the email?”
By this point the teacher was making his way over, clapping students on the back, saying hello, and telling some of them to spit out their gum. He was wearing a golf shirt with the school logo on it. The shirt strained over his belly and was tucked snugly into his khaki pants. I wondered how he got his shirt to stay tucked so tight, especially with a big belly. Did he buy extra-long shirts?
“Did your parents get the email?” he asked again.
“I’m not sure?” I said. Since the weekend before school started had been one of our weekends at Dad’s apartment, it was possible I wasn’t operating with complete information. (You know he’s not so great about reading emails thoroughly.) I began to wonder what else he’d missed.
“Well,” the teacher explained, “this is the eighth-grade entrance. Sixth graders go to the back.”
“Oh, okay.” That seemed pretty inhospitable to me, making the new kids go to the back door. But I wasn’t going to argue. I turned and started walking down the path that wound around to the back of the building.
“Heeey, Little Gus!” I heard someone call. I knew it had to be a kid from our neighborhood, since he was calling me Gus and not Augusta. I turned and, sure enough, there was Rob Vinson, talking to some other eighth-grade boys. Even though Rob is kind of dopey, he’s usually an okay kid. He’s always been Mom and Dad’s first choice to walk Iris when we’re gone on a day trip somewhere, and he was never jerky to us like some of the other older neighborhood boys were. So hearing his familiar voice on the first day of school was simultaneously comforting and embarrassing. (Why did he have to call me Little Gus in front of everyone else? Ugh.)
“It’s my neighbor!” Rob announced, not that the boys he was with seemed to care.
“What are you doing on this side of the building, Little Gus?” he asked.
“I got the entrance wrong. That teacher told me to go around back,” I said, pointing to the man with the super-tight tuck-in.
“That’s not a teacher, Gus,” Rob said. “That’s an assistant principal. Mr. Wyatt. You don’t want to tangle with him.”
“I didn’t tangle with him,” I said. “He just told me I had the wrong door.”
“Okay, well, watch yourself with that one. If he told you to go to the back door, you’d better go fast. Why are you still standing here?”
“Because you’re still talking to me!”
“Nah, you better go, Little Gus!” Rob shooed me away like I was a pesky dog, never mind that he had been the one detaining me.
I rolled my eyes and went around to the back of the building. And that’s where I saw all the kids I knew. All the kids whose parents had read the email properly.
That night I got in a fight with Mom because I told her she needed to make sure Dad read his emails all the way through. And I may have said something like “If you guys still lived together, we wouldn’t have these problems.” And then Mom felt like dirt, and so did I.
I don’t know if you remember that fight, Lou, or if you even heard it. You were standing at the kitchen sink making one of your “potions.” (This one contained olive oil, flower petals, and dish soap.) It seemed like you were in your own world. Until you announced that the potion was going to be a special doggy-fur conditioner for Iris, and Mom took one look at it and said there was no way you were going to rub olive oil on the dog.
That’s when you snapped back into our world and asked what we were talking about, and I just said, “School.” That was the first time you asked me to tell you what middle school was like. That was the first time I said, “It’s fine, whatever,” and went upstairs to my room.
Anyway, now you know a little. Sixth graders go to the back door. And don’t tangle with Mr. Wyatt. He was the first person I met in middle school. And unfortunately, I would meet him again.
I figured that as I rounded the corner to the back of the building, everything would fall into place. I’d be surrounded by people I knew, and middle school would start feeling the way it was supposed to. And for a second, it did. I spotted Jason Cordrey, Mekhai Curry, and a few other boys I’d known since kindergarten. They looked the same, and they were doing just what they always did last year: trying to spin each other around by their backpack straps.
The next person I recognized was Addison Aldrich, standing near a picnic bench with the same pose she’d had every day as she held court during recess in fifth grade: backpack loosely hanging off one shoulder, right leg ramrod straight, and left foot poised on tiptoe, as though the ballet flats she owns in every color were actual toe shoes. Addison and I had never really hit it off. We tried being friends for about five minutes in second grade, but then she dared me to smear peanut butter on Jason Cordrey’s pencil. Jason has a bad peanut allergy. I wouldn’t do it. Addison called me a chicken, flipped her hair at me, and walked away. Yeah. She was a hair flipper already in second grade. Enough said.
Anyway, on the first day of school Addison was talking to a girl who looked familiar. I figured the girl must be in seventh grade, or even eighth, because she was tall, with huge hoop earrings, and maybe even had a little bit of makeup on? No one I knew in my grade wore makeup yet, not even the girls in Addison’s crowd.
I heard someone yell, “Hey, Marcy!” and I looked around. The only Marcy I knew was Marcy Shea. I never told you this, but even though Marcy and I had been friends since first grade, she was kind of bugging me last year. Layla was in a different fifth-grade class, and we weren’t allowed to sit with other classes in the cafeteria. So Marcy always had to sit beside me at lunch, put her sleeping bag beside mine at slumber parties, and ask if I would ride on the bus with her on field trips (like a month before the trips even happened, just to make sure there was no chance I’d sit with anyone else). I don’t know why it bugged me so much; I’d never minded hanging out with her before. It just felt like at the same time Marcy needed to be together constantly, I started needing to be in my own space more. Not just around Marcy, but with other people too. Mom. Dad. You. (Sorry.)
It was like
I didn’t just need physical space; I also needed space in my head. For all the things I was starting to wonder about more, like what other people thought of me, and whether my jeans were too short or my laugh was too loud or my water bottle was a stupid color.
I felt like I needed space to think about other things too, specifically all the extra thoughts I was having after Mom and Dad told us they were splitting up. I mean, some of the things they brought up in that conversation were things that never even would have occurred to me, but now they were all I could think about. Like when Mom said, “We want you to know this isn’t your fault.” Well, yeah. Did you ever for a second think that the divorce was our fault, Lou? I didn’t. What could we have done to make our parents get divorced? Sheesh. And when Dad said, “We will find a way to make this work, and you will not have to go to court to choose between us.” Ummmm, okay. I never even knew that was a thing that could really happen. But now I was thinking, Wait…could that really happen? And the way Mom laughed nervously and said “Of course not!” after Dad brought it up made me wonder even more.
I don’t know about you, but when I am thinking thoughts like Am I going to have to choose between my parents in court? or even Why am I the only one in this class with an orange water bottle?, it makes me feel—I don’t know—prickly. And if someone grabs my arm and says “Sit beside me on the bus!” while I’m quietly wondering if I’m to blame for my parents’ divorce, well…sometimes it’s all I can do not to jerk my arm away and yell, “Sit by yourself!”
The 47 People You'll Meet in Middle School Page 1