Chapter One Excerpt:

My name is Skate Tate. I’m eleven years old and I’ve just about finished my first day of sixth grade at Biddle Middle. Actually, my first day has just about finished me. Skate Tate at Biddle Middle. It sounds like a Dr. Seuss book but it’s not .... It’s my life.

I’m the kind of kid who likes things that she likes to stay the same ... and now a lot of things are different. I have a whole new set of teachers. None of them know me, so they all call me Sarah Kate, my legal name. I have to convince them to call me by my nickname, Skate.

I don’t think that it should be such a big deal for teachers to call me Skate. They really never knew me as Sarah Kate. it shouldn’t be that hard to remember my name, even if it’s not the one that is on their class list. After all, they have to call the school by a new name, too. It used to be called Clearglenn Regional Middle School. Now it’s named for a principal, Clarence Biddle, who retired last June after twenty-seven and a half years. The rumor is that they promised to name it after him to get him to leave. Once, he lost an entire package of standardized tests. He left them at the Dairy Queen and the tests came back covered in chocolate-vanilla swirl with sprinkles all over them. So they convinced him to retire and now the school is named Biddle Middle.

Biddle Middle is so much bigger than Sendak Elementary. Five different towns send kids to this school, which is in Hammersmith, New Jersey. Hammersmith also has the local shopping mall. That would be very convenient if school officials scheduled shopping as one of the class electives ... but they don’t.

Back at Sendak Elementary, I had a routine and I liked it. Every day, I would walk to school with my cousin, Susie. That took five minutes, forty-two seconds once we left her house, which is two minutes from mine. Running took three minutes and nineteen seconds. Hopscotching our way there took seven and three-quarter minutes. (We stopped doing that after third grade.) We’d go to the same classroom, with the same teacher. Then after school, we would go over to one of our houses and hang out, do homework together, and talk about just about everything. Then each of us would have dinner at our own house and then talk some more on the phone.

Now we have to ride the bus, which takes almost an hour each way. By car, it only takes about twenty minutes but, no, the bus stops every few minutes to pick up people. This morning, at the beginning of our first day, the ride was fun. We got to see a lot of kids from our town, Chelsea. Then there were four more towns and a gazillion more stops. A lot more kids got on. Some of them I knew from Soccer League, but a lot of them were strangers ... and some of them were just very strange .... Three boys I never saw before got on and pretended that they were ducks. They duck danced their way up the aisle and sat way in the back, talking in some sort of duck language. A lot of the kids on the bus acted like it was a totally normal thing, the duck boys. Then, in the two rows in fornt of us, four eighth-grade boys decided to hold a farting contest ... and there was no place for Susie and me to move. The bus driver stopped the bus four times to yell at everyone.

And today was just the beginning of a year of bus rides.