60 pages • 2 hours read
Chris Tebbetts, James Patterson, Illustr. Laura ParkMiddle School, The Worst Years of My Life
Fiction | Graphic Novel/Book | Middle Grade | Published in 2011A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Not Fitting Into Middle School
Rafe first describes HVMS as a penitentiary for children his age, indicating that he is extremely uncomfortable as a new sixth-grader. Within the first couple of hours, he encounters a bully who will become his nemesis, has a teacher yell at him, hears from his one true friend that he will never be a popular, high-achieving student, and learns that a 26-page book of rules will guide all his conduct. Rafe responds to the tsunami of new, oppressive experiences by inventing a game, Operation R.A.F.E., centered around the rebellious idea that he will break every single rule in the code of conduct at some point during the school year. He commences this plan by setting off a fire alarm to disrupt the opening assembly.
Rafe does not present himself as malicious, which causes the reader to speculate about why he decides to be creatively disruptive. Throughout the narrative covering six months of the school year, readers learn that—in addition to dealing with bullies in school and at home—Rafe has low self-esteem. Unlike other students, he has no real friends. Rafe’s family endures the hardship of a subsistence life exacerbated by his mother’s unemployed, live-in fiancé. Lurking in the background is the specter of unresolved grief over the death of his twin, Leo, the cherished brother Rafe refuses to release. When administrators reach out, asking to confer with his mother, Rafe erases their voicemail and burns their correspondence. Ultimately, faced with expulsion and the likelihood of repeating the sixth grade, Rafe still completes his final project, a mural on a blank wall of the school depicting his allegorical view of HVMS as a medieval castle guarded by teachers and administrators in the form of hideous creatures, with himself as a knight trying to free his fellow students.
Because he is incapable of dealing with the reality of middle school, Rafe envisions all that happens as a series of fantasies. Some of them are escapist and pleasant, as when he imagines that Operation R.A.F.E. will become a video game, transforming him into someone so wealthy that he can pay someone to go to school for him, or when he dreams up a sportscaster who is calling the play-by-play of Rafe as an athlete trying his best to break all the rules. However, his fantasies become much darker whenever teachers and administrators step in. He imagines these adults as torturers, interrogators, demonic lizards, and wicked dragons. Consistent throughout is Rafe’s perception that he is trying to free other students from overbearing, unnecessary guidelines. He believes middle school is hard enough without the code of conduct. Middle school is a difficult transition for the best of students. For Rafe, however, it is overwhelming, and he cannot learn how to cope as ordinary students do.
Dealing With Bullies
Rafe’s first hour at middle school includes an encounter with a capriciously cruel bully, Miller the Killer. Rafe’s first description of arriving home after school begins with him dealing with Bear, his potential stepfather, who demands that Rafe sign up to play football as “the one thing you’re actually good at” (40). Readers may perceive that, from Rafe’s perspective, the HVMS Code of Conduct is an extension of the pointless, persistent bullying he experiences.
The two forms of bullying Rafe deals with are realistic, pernicious, and disempowering, each in its own way. Miller first picks on Rafe because Rafe is physically afraid of him. As the narrative progresses, Miller continues to find different, illogical reasons to persecute Rafe. In the heart of the story, the two form an odd bond, as Rafe describes it, when Miller steals his Operation R.A.F.E. notebook and—despite the vice principal breaking up a fight between them and Rafe humiliating Miller with 100 distributed copies of Miller as a chicken—they maintain their agreement for Rafe to buy back his notebook one page at a time. In a final act of vengeance, Miller leaves a full photocopied set of the notebook’s page for Jules, sparking a hostile exchange between her and Bear.
Bear’s noxious presence vacillates between passive bullying—simply occupying the couch and remote and unrelentingly controlling the television—and active bullying, as when he constantly attempts to set down punishment for Rafe’s actions. The ultimate act of persecution comes when Bear learns that Rafe drew the mural on the HVMS wall, and Bear chases Rafe madly through the house until Rafe locks himself in the bathroom.
Dealing with bullies, standard fare for most middle school students, forces Rafe to be creative and adaptive. When he can no longer endure Bear’s badgering, he resorts to yelling back at him, though Rafe loathes this inadequacy since it creates stress for his mother. When Bear crosses the line and pushes his mother off the porch steps, Rafe responds by fearlessly pushing Bear away and standing between them until first responders arrive. Rafe’s final encounter with Miller is also a violent one. When Rafe enters the school with Jules for an administrative conference, Miller taunts him about the photocopied notebook, and Rafe immediately attacks him. Readers may perceive that Miller viewed his relationship with Rafe as kind of a contest, with the delivery of the notebook as his winning score—until Rafe did the completely unexpected and attacked him. The authors depict the bullying and responses in a realistic fashion, allowing readers to evaluate potential ways to deal with bullies and possible outcomes.
Self-Expression Through Art
On one occasion, when Principal Dwight summons Rafe to his office for misbehavior, spells out his transgressions, and asks for a response, Rafe replies that Mr. Dwight has confused him with his twin brother. This would have been a clever, ironic, prescient response—if Rafe actually said it. Quickly, Rafe reveals he had only fantasized these words. In reality, Rafe is not a talker. The only real person he tries to explain himself to is Jeanne. His mother, the school administrators, and Mrs. Donatello all seek an explanation from him about his actions, receiving no satisfactory responses.
Though Rafe remains silent, his drawings continue unabated, giving the reader and any observant character in the narrative the opportunity to understand Rafe’s perceptions and intentions. While Rafe seems incapable of verbalizing anything but apologies, his art conveys precisely what he thinks. The ultimate prophetic expression of Rafe’s vision of middle school and his place in it comes in the form of the HVMS blank wall mural. The authors’ description of Rafe’s carefully planned panoramic drawing and the way the mural seems to come to life and dictate its progression is typical of the creative process of an inspired artist:
After a while I was running around like crazy, working over here, working over there, and getting up on an old trash can to reach the higher parts when I needed to. 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 shapes and pictures were coming right out of my hand. It was an amazing feeling (239-40).
Rafe feels consigned to expulsion and repeating sixth grade as he sits in the principal’s office. When Donatello enters and describes him as a budding artist who deserves a chance to attend an art-based middle school, she stuns Rafe. This is not only because he expected no one to come to his aid but also because he had never perceived his art as having any merit. Summarily, when his mother produces the notebook pages, Rafe assumes castigation is certain. Again, he feels astonished when his mother builds upon the idea that Rafe expresses himself artistically and that allowing him to develop that ability will heal him and build trust between Rafe and school administrators.
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