Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life

“‘I think I’d be a good class representative because I know how to listen,’ Jeanne said. ‘And there’s nothing more important than that.’

I was listening, I was listening.

She was pretty, for sure. She had the kind of face that you just want to stare at for as long as possible. But she also seemed kind of cool, like she didn’t think she was better than anyone else. Even if she was.”

In an all-school assembly on the first day of class, Rafe is smitten by the speaker, Jeanne Galletta. Ironically, the narrative pushes them together at various points, despite Rafe’s recognition that Jeanne is from a different dimension than the one he belongs to. In describing Jeanne’s background, Rafe reveals that he came from a poorer school population and received free lunches. The authors use Jeanne to portray the perfect middle school student: sincere, innocent, beautiful, and possessing real integrity. Thus, when Rafe inadvertently causes Mrs. Stricker to send Jeanne to detention, he feels riddled with guilt.

“‘Listen,’ Leo told me, ‘you’re never going to be one of those people’—he pointed at all the student council candidates and jocks and cheerleaders sitting on chairs that have been set up on the gym floor. ‘But this,’ he said, thumping the rule book with his pen, ‘this is something you can do.’”

Rafe’s muse, the imaginary Leo, confirms what Rafe knows in depth: He cannot stand out in a positive way amid all the popular, high-achieving, and “normal” students. Therefore, Rafe feels compelled to stand out by misbehaving, something for which he seems gifted and which brings him ample attention. Unlike Miller the Killer, who also seeks to stand out by breaking the rules, Rafe commits early on that his bad behavior must harm no one.

“Bear and Mom had just gotten engaged that summer, over Fourth of July. That’s when Bear moved in. Mom asked Georgia and me what we thought about it before she said yes, but what were we going to tell her? ‘You’re about to get engaged to the world’s biggest slug?’ I don’t think she would have listened, anyway.

Now mom was working double shifts at the diner all the time just to make enough money, and Bear was spending 99% of his time on our couch […].

Bottom line? My mom was way too good for this guy, but unfortunately neither of them seemed to know it.”

Just a few weeks before this semester of school begins, Rafe’s mother brings her new fiancé, Carl, into their home, along with his large, obnoxious dog, Ditka, which is a reference to the ultimate Chicago Bear football player and coach, Mike Ditka. Large, loud, and demanding, Carl has nothing to offer Rafe or Georgia. To finance his presence, Jules must work double shifts as a server at Swifty’s Diner. As with almost all the other adults in the book, Rafe issues a nickname to Carl: the Bear, a reflection of Carl’s size and attitude.

“I’d be the first kid ever to play Operation R.A.F.E., but not the last. Someday there would be operation R.A.F.E. video games, Rafe Khatchadorian action figures (okay, so it’s not the best action hero name), a movie version starring me, and a whole amusement park called R.A.F.E. world, with 16 different roller coasters and no height requirements to ride any of the rides. The whole thing (R.A.F.E. Enterprises) would make me the world’s youngest million-billion-trillionaire, or maybe some kind of -aire that doesn’t even exist yet. And I’d pay somebody to go to school for me.”

Rafe periodically escapes into fantasies throughout the narrative, particularly when at a high emotional point—as when he fantasizes that Jeanne stops her speech during the school assembly and asks him to eat lunch with her—or, more often, when he faces conflict with adults. In this passage, he pushes negative thoughts about his school experiences aside by imagining that his personal project—breaking every rule in the school’s code of conduct in one year—will make him admired and wealthy but, above all, will get him out of attending middle school.

“I knew I was in trouble, but I’ll tell you this much: It was totally worth it. Everyone besides Donatello was still laughing, including Jeanne Galletta.

Yes!

And the whole thing was, nobody was laughing at me anymore. Now they were laughing with me. That’s like the difference between night and day. Or wet and dry.

Or in this case, losing and winning.”

Selected to read a minor part from Romeo and Juliet in English class, Rafe responds by substituting his own verses. While this delights the other children, it lands him in trouble with his teacher, Mrs. Donatello. When she keeps him after class, the teacher notes Rafe’s creativity, even in his misbehavior. With the exception of Bear, all the adults in the novel express awareness of Rafe’s gifts and the willingness to help him succeed. Despite this, Rafe believes that even his mother, whom he previously perceived as someone he could implicitly trust, has joined the ranks of other adults in being untrustworthy.

“RAFE’S NO HURT RULE: Nobody gets hurt. All risks are mine, and mine alone. NO EXCEPTIONS.

I’m not saying I’m some kind of saint. I’m not even saying this made me a better person, whatever that means. (I’m still trying to figure that one out.)”

This passage highlights Rafe’s underlying moral character. He is unwilling for anyone besides himself to suffer, even as he works diligently to become a legendary middle school outlaw. He wrestles with what his project says about him, as he implies here because he desires to be good to others. Readers may perceive two aspects of Rafe’s circumstances: he feels isolated yet makes decisions that, despite their mischievous nature, harm no one else; he cries out to make others aware of his loneliness and confusion, even as he walls himself off from those, like Donatello and his mother, who reach out to him.

“‘And Rafe? You haven’t…seen Leo lately, have you?’ she asked.

Ouch. I didn’t see that one coming.

Leo’s kind of a touchy subject in our house. This was the first time in a long time I felt like I had to tell mom a 100 percent lie, so I just shook my head no. Somehow it seemed better than lying out loud.”

Jules’s reference to Rafe communicating with Leo, who died about 10 years earlier, implies that Leo has been present to Rafe intermittently throughout his life. Jules apparently perceives that, in challenging moments, Leo’s presence takes precedence with Rafe. In denying that he has been interacting with Leo, Rafe intends to spare his mother from knowing about the conflicts in his life. Because Jules knows he is lying, Rafe’s denial only heightens her concern.

“‘I asked Mrs. Stricker to take the other students for detention today. I was hoping you and I could just talk.

Danger! Danger! Danger!

In case you don’t already know, when an adult wants to ‘just talk,’ it actually means the person wants you to talk, all about stuff you don’t want to talk about. In other words, the dragon lady had set her trap, and I’d walked right into it.”

Donatello, who steers Rafe into a personalized detention setting, expresses compassionate interest in him from the beginning of the year. As Rafe’s misbehavior continues, she is the one who sees he may benefit from non-traditional learning. By breaking a rule herself and walking into an ongoing principals’ conference about Rafe’s expulsion, Donatello presents Jules and Rafe with the possibility of enrolling him in a school for artistic children, where he may have a better chance of fitting in and learning.

“I just want to say, it’s not like I was trying to hide Leo from you—or at least the part about his not exactly being real.

I know, I know—what kind of sixth grader still has imaginary friends? But I don’t really think of him that way. It’s just that he’s always been around, and there’s never been a reason to stop talking to him.”

This is the first of two extraordinary revelations about Leo the Silent. Rafe, who begins the narrative by asking if he can trust the reader, now has to explain why he did not entrust to the reader that Leo is imaginary. The authors imply that middle school places Rafe in a crucible that he did not have to deal with as an elementary student. Rafe fears the possibility that adults want him to give up Leo because he is too old for imaginary friends. Rather, Rafe clings to the imagined presence of his brother out of unreconciled loss.

“Jeannie just looked at me, the same way mom does sometimes, and even Donatello. It was like she was trying to figure me out.

‘Why does it seem like you’re always trying to get into trouble? Jeannie said. I don’t get that.’

What I did next was probably stupid, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t know what else to say.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ I asked. I took out the HVMS Code of Conduct and showed her how I’d already crossed out a bunch of rules.

‘Yeah?’ Jeannie said. ‘So what?’

‘I’m going to be the first person to break every single one of those, I said.’ One rule at a time.’”

This exchange is unique in that, for the first time, Rafe tells another human being about Operation R.A.F.E. and explains what he is doing. Though adults have reached out to him, Rafe has rebuffed all entreaties. With Jeanne, someone he finds admirable, very attractive, and possessing great integrity, Rafe opens up completely. As the authors express it, he does not intentionally know why he is honest with her. Jeanne, herself only 12 or 13, does not know how to respond apart from keeping his secret.

“‘We never did finish our chat about Leonardo,’ Mom said. ‘I want you to know that I know you’ve been talking to him again.’

‘I don’t have to,’ I told her right away. I can stop.’

‘No, honey,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking about this. We all talk to people who aren’t there, all the time, with texting, and computers, and even answering machines. Just talk to their muses for inspiration. Some people even talk to themselves.’”

Jules, just having learned from Georgia that Rafe ran through the halls of middle school wearing only his underwear, goes into the storage room of Swifty’s Diner, followed by Rafe. Here, after she stops crying, she presses Rafe to open up to her about his behavior. She tells him that speaking to his deceased brother is not an aberration but the sort of behavior most people engage in daily without realizing it. The authors use this exchange to demonstrate Jules’s care and concern for Rafe, which she places above her own feelings and well-being.

“When Donatello came around to check everybody’s work, she stopped and looked at ours for a long time. ‘This is very creative,’ she said. ‘Very organic.’

All I know about organic is the disgusting plain yogurt mom keeps in the fridge at home, but I’m pretty sure Donatello meant it was a good thing. Nobody in the group gave me credit for the idea either, and I didn’t even care. I knew she was talking to me.”

The English teacher, who observes the group work of students, recognizes the excellence of Rafe’s presentation. Donatello already knows about his proclivity for art. On another occasion, when attempting to deepen her connection to him, she uses one of his detention hours as an opportunity for the two of them to draw together rather than do homework. To a greater extent than any of the other adults in the narrative, Donatello understands what motivates Rafe as distinct from what frustrates and hinders him.

“On top of everything else, I was still trying to be Normal Rafe and not get into any more trouble. It was working, I guess, but I still wasn’t any good at school and still hated my classes as much as ever. I thought being normal would make me feel like a better person, but so far? Not really.

But here’s the funny part. Even though I felt like I was still living in the Dark Ages, nobody seemed to notice. As far as Mom, and Jean, and even Donatello were concerned, I’d already turned over a whole new leaf.”

Rafe temporarily abandons his plan to break every rule in the conduct guidelines in an effort to relieve his mother’s stress. Others notice his improved behavior, though nothing that really matters to Rafe himself improves. Rafe struggles with the awareness that, as hard as he works to please others, no one notices his inner sorrow, isolation, and frustration.

“But I’ll tell you something else. Once I got out there on the sidewalk and realized that nobody knew who the heck I was (just like with the ninja), I started getting kind of into it.

I flapped my wings, and jumped around with my sign, and gave out flyers, and patted people on the back when they took them. Drivers honked their horns as they went by, and some of them even pulled in when I pointed the way. If I do say so myself, I was just about the world’s most awesome bake sale mascot ever.”

As a favor to Jeanne, for whom he would do anything, Rafe dons the high school mascot’s orange falcon suit and encourages people to come to a food drive. The playful anonymity fills him with joy and a sense of accomplishment. In contrast, when he takes the costume off and goes back to being Rafe in the presence of Jeanne, whose popular friends are waiting impatiently for her, his emotions bottom out. For him, the implication is that, whenever he reveals his true self, he can no longer achieve and is no longer acceptable.

“‘These aren’t too good, honey,’ Mom said. ‘What happened?’

It was another one of those questions without any good answers. I said the first thing I thought of.

‘Maybe they’re teaching the wrong subjects?’”

This interaction between Jules and Rafe takes place when she goes online and discovers his poor report card. Like his Operation R.A.F.E., which stands for “Rules Aren’t For Everybody,” his grades are not indicative of his abilities but rather an indication of his frustration with the middle school experience and the inability of others to learn and express care about his personal issues.

“It was true. I’d spent the last two months trying to be someone else—someone normal, maybe even someone good—and I wasn’t any better off than before. Mom was mad at me, Bear was more in my face than ever, and the two of them were arguing about me all the time. Not only that, but Miller was still alive, Jeanne was about to be my tutor, and I was officially one of the worst kids in school. At least when I was playing Operation R.A.F.E., I had some fun while I was being miserable.”

Rafe believes he has failed at “going straight” when he strikes back physically at the bully Miller, only to be punished for fighting. This is the low point for Rafe, as he lists the various issues weighing him down. Believing he simply cannot win, he decides to return to Operation R.A.F.E. so he can at least enjoy his creative misbehaving.

“I’m not sure what the difference was supposed to be between tutoring with Donatello and detention with Donatello, but it felt a whole lot to me like I’d gotten a bunch of detentions just for being dumb.”

The author’s observation that tutoring feels like punishment epitomizes the stigma of those who have trouble keeping up with mainstream students. Readers may perceive that the narrative is a polemic for teaching to the abilities, interests, and uniqueness of each child. The authors’ goal throughout has been to raise the awareness of middle school students that non-traditional learners are not wrong or bad but rather different in their needs and abilities.

“This was the weird part with me and Miller. We both hated each other, but even more than that, he wanted my money and I wanted my notebook back. Neither of us said anything about it to Stricker, even when we both got suspended. It was like middle school Mafia or something.”

Two elements of this passage, which takes a deep look at Dealing With Bullies, may be significant for the reader. First, the unwillingness of these two sixth graders to tell an adult about the transactions between them is a typical indication of early adolescence, that period when parents lose authority while the opinions and ideas of peers gain tantamount importance. Second, surprisingly, Rafe and Miller experience the same dilemma. Each feels he does not fit among normal students and, therefore, each seeks to mark his existence in middle school in a distinctive way. The more Rafe becomes known for his creative acting out, the more Miller feels threatened. When Miller finds and then reads Rafe’s Operation R.A.F.E. notebook and tells Rafe how pathetic he is, it is his jealousy speaking.

“‘I mean, you must have thought about this, right?’ she said.

‘Thought about what?’

‘Your grades, Rafe. You can’t get report cards like this all year long and then expect to sail right into seventh. They could make you take extra classes. They could make you go to summer school. Or—’ Jeanne bit her lip like she didn’t want to say the next part. ‘Or...they can make you do sixth grade all over again,’ she said, just before my head exploded into a million billion pieces.”

There is nothing Rafe wants more in life than to be out of sixth grade. Until the moment Jeanne explains that one potential consequence of his terrible report card is repeating sixth grade, the possibility never occurred to him. For Rafe, failing and repeating the sixth grade is tantamount to compounding the unbearable misery he has already experienced for three-quarters of the school year, coupled with the humiliation of all the middle school students knowing he failed. This is the ultimate result and penalty for Not Fitting Into Middle School. If he does repeat sixth grade, the results theoretically would not improve because the subject matter and difficulty level are not Rafe’s problem so much as the manner of education he receives.

“Bottom line? I’d broken my own No-Hurt-Rule, big time, and I didn’t need Leo to tell me what that meant: I just lost my third and final life in Operation R.A.F.E. The game was over. As far as the mission was concerned, I was now officially dead.”

When Rafe rushes out of the math classroom into the restroom, hoping Jeanne does not see him start to cry about failing sixth grade, Jeanne follows, trying to encourage him. Because being in the opposite-sex bathroom results in immediate detention, Rafe realizes he has caused Jeanne to get into trouble for the first time. This breaks down the structure of Operation R.A.F.E., knocking him out of the game and causing him to think in apocalyptic terms, as if nothing else matters anymore. This opens him, with the prodding of Leo, to plan out his graffiti project. While, for Rafe, this is simply desperation, from the authors’ perspective, it is a high example of Self-Expression Through Art.

“The whole thing started to get so big that I felt like I was inside it, even while I was still drawing. It was like Leo had said—I wasn’t thinking anymore. I was just doing it, like the marker was just another part of me, and the lines and the shapes and the pictures were coming right out of my hand. It was an amazing feeling.”

Beginning at 4am, Rafe creates a black marker mural on a blank wall of the middle school. The longer he works, the more the art takes on its own life, seeming to suggest itself. Rafe’s experience here correlates to what athletes refer to as “being in the zone” or what musicians call “flow.” From Rafe’s viewpoint, he has lost everything meaningful that he had been trying to protect and now faces another year of the sixth grade. The authors portray his mural as a form of prophetic outcry in a fashion that even the police who come to arrest Rafe find astonishing.

“‘And Mom? I’m really sorry.’ It felt like I had been saying that a lot lately. Too much, in fact. Mom reached over and put a hand on my shoulder, but seeing that bandage on her wrist just made me feel worse. ‘What happened tonight...this was all my fault. I just...I, um—’

I didn’t even know I was about to start crying. It just sort of started on its own. All of a sudden there were tears coming out of my eyes, and my face was all scrunched up, and I was bawling like a baby. The weirdest part was that I wasn’t even embarrassed. Not even with Georgia sitting there gawking at me.”

Throughout the first six months of sixth grade, Rafe has struggled to find meaning through misbehavior, tempered with desperately trying not to upset his mother, while detesting her useless fiancé, warring against a bully who has singled him out, and adoring a classmate who views him as a mission project. When he sees his mother become the second person harmed by his actions, Rafe’s emotions overwhelm him, and his grief bursts forth. The authors use this encounter to express the depths of Rafe’s longing for understanding and of his despair.

“‘And, Mom said, ‘Rafe also had a twin brother.’

Now I just wanted her to stop talking, but of course she didn’t. She kept going.

‘His name was Leonardo,’ she said.

‘For Leonardo da Vinci?’ Donatello asked.

‘That’s right. Unfortunately, Leo died very young,’ Mom said. ‘He got sick with meningitis when the boys were just three and we lost him.’”

This is the second great revelation about Leo. First, Rafe leads readers to assume he is a living—if unwelcome—classmate and friend of Rafe’s. Then readers discover he is not real, referred to by Rafe as an “imaginary friend.” Second, sitting with school administrators and Mrs. Donatello, Jules tells them the final big secret Rafe had hidden from his readers: Leo was his twin brother who died when they were three. Rafe keeps Leo alive in his fantasy. As a muse, Leo actually serves as Rafe’s creative edge, pushing the envelope by encouraging Rafe to explore ever-new artistic possibilities.