Read Middle School: How I Got Lost in London for Free Online

parnds . And maybe I kind of exaggerated how popular my caricature service proved to be.
    And also how good it was.
    But, look, the important thing is that between my (okay, limited ) artistic abilities and the kind hearts and goodwill of a few English early birds I was able to earn the taxi fare back to the Mercury Lodge. And it was just after 7 a.m. when I eventually arrived.
    If I’m honest, I expected to find the place in uproar when I returned. After all, they must have noticed me missing by now. But no. Instead I found the hotel sleepy—more staff around than guests. My absence had gone unnoticed. The truth was, I didn’t know whether to be offended or relieved by that.
    I crept back up to my room. The room I shared with Miller the Killer. There I found him sleeping soundly. Look at him there. So cute.
    I plugged in my phone. Then I went to my backpack and took from it Albert’s gift—a wax severed head. I placed it on Miller’s pillow, right next to his head. So that this bloody, severed head would be the first thing he saw when he woke up. With the scene set, I took a step back, picked up my phone, aimed it at Miller, and hit “record.”

“ MILLER! ” I called.
    The bully’s eyes sprang open, only to be confronted by the gory head on his pillow.
    My phone caught every delicious moment. First Miller squealed like a baby. Then he got himself in a mess trying to escape the head—which ended up rolling into his lap so that for a moment he sat with it between his legs.
    Then he tried to push the head off his bed. It developed a life of its own and I got some great footage of him juggling the severed head and whimpering at the same time.
    Until, at last, some combination of realizing that (a) I was standing there pointing my phone at him and laughing and (b) the head was a wax head—I mean, even in the grip of shock and terror some tiny bit of Miller’s brain must have realized that the wax head felt wrong somehow.
    And so, eventually, he stopped.
    And he looked at me.
    He was just about to leap out of bed and give me a beating when I showed him that with one push of a button I could text the footage to everyone. Very slowly… and…patiently…I explained that I was going to make a deal with him. That the footage of him screaming like a baby— not to mention the whimpering—would never see the light of day as long as he stopped ragging on me and the rest of the group.
    He agreed, of course. What choice did he have? (And, yeah, not long after we arrived back at school, Miller cornered me in the bathroom after lunch, held my head over a toilet until I gave him my phone, and then deleted all the footage.) But the point is that for the rest of that Living History trip he was a pussycat. Not a single cuss escaped his lips, not one wedgie from his fist, not a flick of his fingertips. The bullying stopped. All because of me.
    Trouble was, nobody knew I was responsible.
    My good deed went unnoticed.
    To make matters worse, I didn’t even benefit from winning William’s Wager.
    “I’ll tell them you spent all night in your bed,” sneered Miller that morning. And that was it: any chance of glory dashed.
    Just you wait till the journey home , I thought darkly.
    You better pray they’re not serving spaghetti Bolognese .

YOU KNOW WHAT a P.S. is? It’s a postscript. A little bit of extra information when the main show is over. And this here is the postscript to my Living History trip to London.
    First, when we’d returned and I wrote up my report, complete with the pictures I’d taken that night, I ended up getting full marks.

    [Pause for applause.]
    But there was something weird, too. When I went through the pictures—well, you remember I took one of Albert standing next to Queen Elizabeth I, right before my phone battery died? When I looked at the picture, there was no Albert.
    Elizabeth I was there.
    But no Albert.
    You know what else was weird? When I looked online to see the story of the Madame Fifi