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

after the other. My classmates are delighted. My Popularity Score climbs into double figures. But then…disaster strikes! When we move on I feel my stomach churning and the next second I’m regurgitating banana all over the pink giraffe. I get called Rafe Barf-Giraffe for the rest of the trip and my Popularity Score falls back into minus double figures.
    So I took Leo’s advice. There would be no banana-eating competition. Not on my watch.
    Next, we made our way farther up the bank, past the National Theatre, headed for the big event of the day—a tour around Madame Fifi’s House of Wax. Now, it should go without saying that even though we were pretty excited about seeing the main exhibit—Will and Kate! David Beckham! Rihanna!—we were really excited about the basement. Because in the basement was Madame Fifi’s Temple of Terrors, where you could see beheadings, guys on spikes, people on the rack, guillotines…
    In other words, the gory stuff.
    Yeah, yeah, we saw the celebrities. But honestly? Do you really want to stand eyeball to eyeball with Tom Cruise?
    You do?!
    Not me. I wanted stuff from out of my world. So I found myself hanging around longest at Henry VIII (he married six times and beheaded two of his wives!), Winston Churchill (he said “We shall never surrender” to Adolf Hitler!), Charles Darwin (it’s thanks to him we know monkeys are our ancestors!), Guy Fawkes (he tried to blow up Parliament…Wait: Are we supposed to like him or not?).
    Our tour guide was a guy called Gordon. Either he didn’t know that everyone was goofing off behind him or he didn’t care. Or maybe he had an ace up his sleeve. Maybe he knew the smirking would stop as soon as we went down into the basement. When we got to the Temple of Terrors.

I WAS KIND of sad to leave the upper floors. And also kind of…
    “Scared…?” whispered Leo.
    “No, of course I’m not scared,” I said.
    “Frightened?”

    “Frightened is the same as scared,” I told him. “And no, I’m not frightened.”
    “Browning your britches?” he asked.
    “You’re just using different words to say the same thing. No, I am not browning my britches.”
    I’ll let you into a secret: I was kind of nervous.
    Woah! I don’t mean the whole hog. Not like when Georgia freaked out at a not-that-scary episode of Scooby Doo . Just a bit crawling-in-the-pit-of-my-stomach nervous. You know the kind. Like you get when you don’t know what to expect. When your imagination has taken the words guillotine , beheading , gallows , and serial killer and started to run with them.
    “Is everyone ready?” asked Gordon, the tour guide. Before, he’d been a bit glass-eyed, like a robot delivering a pre-recorded speech. Now there was no mistaking the glint in his gaze.
    “Yeah,” we all replied, pretending like we weren’t impressed.
    Mindful of my Popularity Score (currently: -11 ), I’d decided I was going to be fearless when it came to the Temple of Terrors, so my “Yeah” was the loudest.
    “YEAH!”
    “Right, then, let’s go,” said Gordon. He went to open the door but stopped, looking like he’d just remembered something important.
    “There’s nobody in the group who suffers from a weak heart?” he asked.
    “ No ,” we replied.
    “ NO! ” came my voice, the loudest.
    “And everyone knows about the haunting?”
    “YEAH!” I shouted, enjoying myself. Really getting into the part.
    Oh . I realized I was the only one who’d replied.
    Everyone looked at me. Including Gordon, who arched an eyebrow.
    “What is your name, young man?” he asked.
    “Rafe,” I said with a pipsqueak voice.
    “And you know about the haunting, do you, Rafe?”
    I swallowed. “Yes,” I said in an even smaller voice.
    “You read about it on the Madame Fifi’s website, did you?” he asked, with a strange smile.
    “Yes, sir,” I replied.
    The whole trip was staring at me. Everyone had been dying to hear about the haunting. They weren’t sitting down, but if