Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life Versions of Reality Quotes

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #1

Okay, so imagine the day your great-great-grandmother was born. Got it? Now go back another hundred years or so. And then another hundred. That's about when they built Hills Village Middle School. Of course, I think it was a prison for Pilgrims back then, but not too much has changed. Now it's a prison for sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. (2.1)

We're going to go out on a limb and say that Hills Village Middle School probably never was a prison. (And that it's not really that old.) Rafe actually has a pretty vivid imagination. It's what makes him such a good artist and helps him get through his year in prison—er—middle school.

Quote #2

[Jeanne] leaves the mike and comes over, right in front of where I'm sitting. Then she looks straight at me and says, "Are you Rafe?"

Suddenly, I'm feeling about as talkative as Leo, but I manage to spit out an answer. "That's me," I say.

"Do you want to maybe split a large fries in the cafeteria later?" she asks.

"Sure. I'm buying," I say, because there's a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket that I just found that morning.

"No," she says. "The fries are on me."

Meanwhile, everyone's watching. The band starts playing, the cheerleaders start cheering, and Miller the Killer chokes to death on a peanut M& M. Then I win the lottery, world peace breaks out everywhere, and Mrs. Stricker tells me that based on my all-around awesomeness, I can just skip sixth grade and come back next year. (4.14-19)

Right in the middle of Jeanne Galletta's student council speech, Rafe imagines that she walks up to him and asks him out in front of everyone. Hey, a boy can dream, can't he?

Quote #3

I'd be the first kid to ever play Operation R.A.F.E., but not the last. Someday there could 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 sixteen 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. (12.2)

What kid hasn't wanted to invent something and become the world's first teenage trillionaire? The marketing possibilities really are endless here.