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Middle School: Too Uncool for School By James Patterson and Martin Chatterton

In this hilarious installment of a #1 New York Times bestselling series, Rafe is finally getting a taste of the cool life—but his problems are red-hot! Rafe Khatchadorian has never been cool. But all that changes when he becomes the guitarist in an awesome rock band and wrangles a part-time job at Hills Village's trendiest new coffee shop slash yoga studio. No more being at the bottom of the middle school food chain—Rafe is finally going to be popular! He just has two teeny problems: the awesome rock band is led by none other than the school bully. And the band actually isn't awesome—they absolutely stink, and Rafe has to whip them into shape for the Best Band Competition. With Rafe's newfound coolness on the line, will he find a way to hit the stage in style, or is he doomed to dorkdom forever?

Duration:: 3m
Broadcast on:: 20 Jan 2025
Audio Format:: other

Now, the bad thing about being Chuck Thompson's victim is that Chuck gets ideas from time to time. And when he gets one of those ideas, guess where he takes them. That's right, straight to me. Last Tuesday, just after school had finished, my friendly neighborhood bully cornered me with a total doozy. I was practicing staring into space when Chuck stomped over, took off his headphones, jabbed a finger the size of a hot dog and bun into my chest and asked me if I played guitar. "No," I said, hoping that I'd just gotten myself off the hook with whatever lousy idea he'd dreamed up. Although I hadn't exactly been paying much attention to what Chuck had been doing, now that I stopped to think about it, he had started wearing headphones and t-shirts with band names on them. Maybe this guitar thing had something to do with that? "Chuck," I'd me suspiciously. "I thought you played guitar," he said. Like maybe I was a secret guitar player who was holding out on him. "You sure you don't play guitar, Caccidorian?" "Yep," I said, nodding. "I mean, nope, I mean, yep, I'm sure, but no, I don't play guitar." Smooth, huh? Even when Chuck isn't pounding me, the sheer anticipation of getting pounded has that effect on me. "Whatever," Chuck said with a shrug, "you'll learn, I'm learning the drums, it's easy." So, that was it. I was learning guitar. It seemed that this time Chuck had gotten it into his head that he was going to form a band. Plus, I was going to be the lead guitarist in that band. He told me he'd already recruited Jason Chang, another one of his favorite victims, on the keyboard, and was looking for a bass guitarist. That's how he said it. He was looking, as if he were a band manager or something. "By the way, we're called the Village People," he added. "A dim memory of my mom singing along to a group of cowboys and construction workers popped into my head." "Um, aren't they already a band?" I asked. "Well, we're people, and we're from a village, right?" Chuck said. He cracked his knuckles and stared at me from under that overhanging forehead of his. "Anything you say?" I said, and raised a fist in the air. "Yay, the Village People!" Chuck nodded. "And we're going to win the crummy best new band competition. I already entered us. We've got six weeks to get good." I should mention that the crummy he's talking about is KRNY, the Hills Village radio station. Their annual best new band competition comes with a $5,000 cash prize. Only thing is, the competition is for bands who can, you know, actually play. We had absolutely zero chance of winning. I didn't even know what kind of band Chuck wanted us to be. Punk, thrash, grunge, rap, Hungarian folk metal. "What kind of band are we?" I asked. I'd realized by now that nothing on the planet was going to stop Chuck from either one making me be in his stupid band, or two pounding me into mush. Unsurprisingly, I opted for number one. "How would I know?" Chuck growled. "That's your job, Caccidorian! You're the creative genius! Right genius? Duh!" "Yep, so no pressure." [BLANK_AUDIO]