The Detention Club (11 page)

“What is it?”

“Self-lighting cigarettes,” I said, and she frowned. “Don't worry, I'm not using real cigarettes. I was going to glue phosphorus, the stuff matches are made of, onto the eraser tip of a pencil, as if it was a cigarette, and there'd be a match strike strip on the side of the cigarette box.”

“Let me get this straight—your goal is to make smoking easier for people?”

“It's an environmental invention! It would save countless trees, and gas, by eliminating matchbooks and lighters.”

“Smoking's a deadly habit, I can't condone you trying to make it easier.”

“Can you just ignore the fact that it's a deadly habit for just one minute and see the creativity behind it? I need you to think outside the box on this one.”

“It's a clever idea, I suppose, but self-lighting cigarettes would ultimately make the world a more unhealthy place to live in, which defeats the purpose of the project. I'm sorry, Peter, but you're going to have to come up with something else.”

“Fine, but can you get me out of detention now that you know it was for one of my classes? I'm supposed to have detention every day after school.”

“You still took the chemicals without even trying to get permission.”

“I didn't ask only because I knew he'd say no,” I said softly.

She exhaled, and it took a huge amount of willpower to not grimace. I made a mental note to brainstorm later an invention that would eliminate coffee breath. I wanted to tell her my idea to prove how my inventor's mind was always running, but teachers are the worst people in the world at accepting constructive criticism.

“Rules are rules, and they can't be bent. You're going to have to miss some T.A.G. classes, it seems.”

“Oh, okay, so we're not quite on the same page,” I explained. “I was thinking actually more along the lines of you getting me out of detention altogether.”

“Go to homeroom, Peter,” she said.

I tried to explain that T.A.G. was the only class I even liked, but she shooed me out, filling the room with her espresso breath with all the shooing, so I had no choice but to leave. Sunny was in the hallway, and she looked weird. That is, she always looked upset—that's how intense she was about school, but this time I noticed she had a creepy smile plastered on her face. “What's with you?” I asked.

Her smile faded.

“What?” she snapped.

“You had a big creepy smile on your face just now.”

“So?”

“Were you spying on my meeting with Ms. Schoonmaker?”

“As if I even care what happens to you,” she scoffed, and then stomped off.

I
WAS HOPING IT WOULD BE
one of those crummy Fridays that seem to last forever, but unfortunately the day passed really quickly. What a waste, usually I really enjoy weirdly fast days, but this time it was sheer torture because my body felt like it was falling down a dark hole the entire time. Before I knew it, the bell rang, and everyone left the building except me. I made the slow walk over to room 12. It didn't seem fair. Drew and I had successfully avoided the Sweet brothers all this time, and now I had been thrown to the wolves by someone in my own family.

Drew appeared in my brain as I touched the doorknob.
You need to run away right now
, he warned me.
Land-ski to New Hampshire. By nightfall you could make it!
I silently reminded Drew that this was impossible, and then prayed that by some miracle the Sweet brothers had turned overnight into good, law-abiding citizens and had gotten out of detention, but of course they were sitting in the front row. Apparently detention is the one thing they're always on time for in school. They were intensely drawing pictures and at first they didn't notice me, and I was tempted to slowly back away and just skip detention and hopefully get it changed to an at-home suspension or something, but then they looked up at me and I froze.

“You again?” Hugh said. “Sunny Lee's goody-goody brother managed to get another detention? I don't believe it.”

“I have it every day for a month,” I admitted, hoping it would make them feel less urgent about mauling me afterward.

The Sweet brothers looked shocked. And to my astonishment, they just nodded disinterestedly, then returned to drawing pictures of surprisingly realistic monsters. I handed my detention slip to Mr. Tinsley, who stuck it in a folder without even looking up at me. Hank waved me over with a strange smile on his face, and I sat down next to him cautiously, ready to up and run the moment he tried to attack me, but instead he started talking to me as if he had no recollection whatsoever of the previous month of child abuse they'd been doling out on me and Drew.

“So what are you in for?” Hank asked.

Was this a trick question? This was a pop test! What was the right answer? I had to impress him. I racked my brain for exciting answers. Defacing school property? Assault with a deadly weapon? Espionage?

“You don't want to know,” I said eventually.

They considered this for a moment.

“I guess you really aren't like Sunny,” Hugh finally said. “She'd never get detention.”

“I told you I'm not like her.”

“Street Magic's crazy!” Hank said.

“Actually, I'm Street Magic's Assistant,” I clarified, then cringed, expecting them to be mad at me. But instead they chuckled!

“If I draw you a maze, will you do me a favor and try to solve it?” Hugh asked me. I gaped at him. “I'm serious—give me five minutes, I bet you won't be able to solve it.”

What the heck was going on? I placed my book bag on the floor next to my desk. A minute passed. Then another. Just the sound of Hugh's pencil. Mr. Tinsley was sitting at his desk, grading papers and listening to classical music on his headphones. I glanced under the desk to make sure there wasn't an M-80 fizzing away under the seat. There wasn't. A minute later, Hugh put his notebook on my desk and giggled quietly as I intentionally screwed up, running my pencil into dead ends, because I thought it was another trap and that he'd beat me up if I solved it too quickly.

“You're not very good at mazes,” Hugh said.

“Actually, I am, you're just good at making them,” I replied.

“Really?” he asked. I nodded. “Thanks, Street Magic's Assis—er, Peter.”

And then he smiled at me! I'd never seen either of the Sweet brothers smile like this before. This
had
to be a trick, or probably they just had no choice but to be nice to me while a teacher sat ten feet away. I pictured the darkened hallway and it made my belly ache. While it was embarrassing to get bullied in front of everyone during school, I realized now that it was better to get bullied in public because that meant there were witnesses. The janitor was vacuuming a few classrooms away. I prayed he'd be out in the hallway at the end of detention to protect me, even though ever since I'd punched him in the face after the straitjacket incident he seemed to kind of hate me.

The late bell rang.

“Well, it's been real,” I said, slowly standing up. Hugh and Hank were whispering to each other and my heart sank—they were plotting how best to attack me. I got as far as the door before Hugh called out to me.

“Hey, Peter, do you want to hit the mall with us?” he asked.

“The mall? Why?”

Hugh almost looked shy when I said this, and I was sure he was just acting.

“I dunno, um, we could hang out is all, you don't have to if you don't want to, nobody's forcing you. I just figured since it's now the weekend, you could hang out.”

Or was he?

“Okay,” I said. “But how are we going to get there?”

“You can ride on my handlebars,” he offered.

It was nice of Hugh to pedal both of us all the way to the mall like that, but at the same time it was easily the single most terrifying ride of my life. We rode in the direction of oncoming traffic on the left side, and as strong as Hugh was, he wavered over the white line a bunch of times struggling to pedal both of us as I sat like an imprisoned bird on his front handlebars with my feet draped over the front wheel. At any moment he could have slammed on his brakes, even by accident, and I would have pitched forward and splattered all over a passing windshield. Hugh must have heard me moaning the whole time, because at one point he shouted, “Don't worry, me and Hank share bikes all the time and it's totally safe,” and he patted me on the shoulder reassuringly. But when he took one hand off the handlebars, the bike swerved inward toward a truck, and I almost had a heart attack. “Whoops, my bad,” he laughed nervously.

We finally made it to the mall in one piece, and I followed them over to Lids, a baseball-cap store, to try on dozens. I never wear baseball caps (thanks to my mom pounding the fact into my brain for years that you lose your hair if you wear them regularly), but the Sweet brothers wanted me to try on a bunch of different caps, and I pretended to be really into it.

“That one looks pretty good on you,” Hugh said, stuffing a brown Padres cap onto my head. “You should buy it.”

“I definitely would if I had any dough,” I replied. “It feels so good on my . . . head.”

“Why don't you have any money?” Hank asked me.

“Um, because I'm twelve?”

“No worries,” Hugh said, massaging my shoulders from behind incredibly hard, the way my uncle does at family reunions. I gritted my teeth and pretended it didn't kill. “You can get it another time.”

“Well, that's a relief,” I said.

We ended up trying on practically every cap in the store; it took almost half an hour. The weird thing was that the Sweet brothers seemed more interested in finding me a cool baseball cap than trying some on for themselves. Finally we made our way over to the food court, where we just sat there at a round table
not
eating anything despite the delicious smells. At some point two things dawned on me: (1) I was no longer afraid that this was a painfully long setup that was going to suddenly end badly for me, and (2) trying on caps forever and then sitting silently at a table at the food court wasn't fun in the slightest. All the Sweet brothers did was sit there staring down kids from other towns and talking about some of the caps they'd just tried on, and after a while I couldn't even pretend to be interested and just sat there with my head in my hands. But there was one interesting thing that happened—classmates who were at the mall that afternoon not only seemed terrified of the Sweet brothers, but also were shocked that I was with them! It made me feel cool to be with them. Trent and his basketball buddies looked over at me with something like . . . respect?

“Do you have detention on Monday?” Hank asked me as we walked back to the bike rack. It was dark out at this point. A traffic helicopter flew overhead, toward the highway, and I realized that I hadn't even considered the fact that my parents might be worried about me.

“I'm going to make a huge maze tonight,” Hugh said. “I guarantee you won't be able to solve it!”

“Does anyone else ever get detention?” I asked him.

“It's usually just me and Hank.”

“You're a lifer like us!” Hank said, and we all high-fived.

Then Hugh absentmindedly started giving me a wedgie, and I groaned on the inside, but Hank stopped him. “Not anymore,” he told his brother really seriously. “We don't give wedgies to fellow lifers, right?”

“No, you're totally right,” Hugh said, blushing. He smiled shyly at me. “Sorry, bud, it's like the reflex when the doc hits you on the knee with the rubber mallet, remember? Won't happen again, I promise.”

“This is a really nice moment,” I admitted, and we all kinda smiled at each other.

Even though the ride back was just as terrifying as the ride to the mall, something clicked in my brain as we pedaled back to the school, and I realized I was laughing out loud. The happy scene didn't last very long, however, because a couple of seconds later I swallowed a bug.

T
HEY DROPPED ME OFF BACK
at school and I ran home. It was almost dinnertime, but I had to stop at Drew's to tell him about my afternoon. I found him sitting up in Corbett Canyon, counting the mica stash. He looked kinda angry, actually.

“Forget the mica, and don't worry about the inventions contest, because everything just changed, big-time!” I shouted. “Guess what? I just hung out at the mall with the Sweet brothers—we're now friends!”

Drew's eyes widened.

“What? How?”

“They think I'm cool because I have detention.”

“Aren't you scared of being around them?”

“You don't get it, that means we're in the clear with them. If they like me, they have no choice but to like you!”

“That
is
great news!” Drew said, nodding his head.

“You just have to get detention next week,” I added, and Drew's smile faded. “You know, so we can all hang out after school together.”

“I'm not going to get detention on purpose, are you crazy?” he asked. “You shouldn't intentionally get detention like that. It's not good to get in trouble.”

“Sometimes you have to do things you're not happy about in order to get what you want,” I explained to him, feeling annoyed that he didn't understand how huge this all was.

“But the Sweet brothers are mean. You don't like them, do you?”

“You just haven't seen the Sweet brothers' good side. Just get detention this one time, and you'll see what I mean.”

“I don't want detention,” Drew said.

I groaned.

“Do you want to stay a nobody forever, Drew? What the heck have we been doing this whole time?”

“I don't want to be considered cool if it means giving myself detention and hanging out with the Sweet brothers.”

“Look, Drew, we've worked so hard at thinking outside the box to solve our problems, and now we're so close to actually succeeding, can't you see that? What's wrong with you, man?”

“What's wrong is I'm starting to think there was never a box in the first place.”

“Don't say that about the box!” I shouted. “What are you saying?”

“I'm saying I've helped you with all your ideas this whole time, and nothing's worked. Don't you get it, Peter? There is no box.”

“Again, you're not quite getting the box thing, it's that—wait a sec, are you actually blaming our loserdom on me, Street Magic?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“You've been the one calling all the shots,” he said. “Your plans never work, and you just keep coming up with one lame plan after another. To be honest, I haven't even been on board with your last few schemes. Buying cigarettes? Befriending the Sweet brothers? Are you crazy?”

I could feel my face turning red.

“First of all, you're not even an inventor, so I don't get why you suddenly think you're the expert on inventing things, and second, I'm the one who's been coming up with schemes and you keep messing everything up,” I explained—my voice was even a little shaky.

“How many failed schemes does it take for you to realize it's not working?”

“It took Thomas Edison a thousand tries before he got the lightbulb right,” I said.

“So you're saying you need a thousand tries?” Drew scoffed. “That would take forever, and we'd be dead by then.”

“We'd only be dead because you'd just keep screwing up your role in these schemes!”

“Well, if you're so convinced that I'm the reason we're losers, and if I'm positive you're the reason, then maybe we should have an experiment and see what happens when we're not together,” Drew suggested.

I gasped.

“Are you breaking up with me?” I asked him.

“No,” Street Magic said quickly, but he was staring at the ground. “Consider this more like a time-out.”

“Holy moly, you
are
breaking up with me!” I couldn't believe Drew. After everything I'd done for us. “Fine. Whatever you want, but I don't think you're going to like the result.”

“I don't think
you're
going to like the result,” he replied.

“Are you just going to repeat everything I say?”

“I don't know, am I going to repeat everything you say?” he replied.

I sighed. I hate when kids start repeating everything you say—there's no defense for it, really. “So what now?” I asked.

“We give it a few weeks,” he replied. “By then, one of us should be popular, and then the other admits that he was wrong and we go back to being popular together.”

“Deal,” I said, and we shook on it. “But trust me, you're in over your head, pal. Honestly, I feel bad for you, Street Magic.”

“And I you, Street Magic's Assistant,” he replied.

We just stood there for a minute, not saying anything, before I finally looked down at my watch and realized it was now dinnertime. “I should probably go,” I said.

“Bye, Peter!” Drew said cheerfully, before remembering that he was really mad at me.

And the experiment was officially under way.

It was chilly as I jogged home, and to take my mind off the cold, I replayed the conversation in my head. At first I got really mad at Drew again. How dare he suggest I was the reason for our problems! But then an uncomfortable feeling crept inside my bones, as I realized that this meant I was going to have to go it alone at school on Monday. And then I remembered that this was all Drew's fault, and I felt really angry at him again.

“How dare he!” I shouted out loud, and it made me blush, because whenever I see strangers shouting out loud to themselves on the street I think, man, what a weirdo.

I was positive my parents were going to be steaming out the ears that I was so late for dinner, but they didn't notice me when I entered the kitchen.

“Um, I'm home,” I finally said. Still nothing. “Where's the funeral?”

“Your sister had her lucky pen stolen at school today,” Mom said softly.

Sunny was pacing back and forth by the sink.

“I think whoever the thief is should be expelled when they catch him,” Sunny said. “No question. I swear, if I find out who stole my pen—”

“Relax, it's just a pen,” I said.

She glared at me.

“It's not just any old pen, it's the pen I've used to get straight A's for all of middle school. It's an official NASA astronaut's pen that I won, you can write upside down in space with it!”

“Well, that should narrow down the list of suspects—it has to be someone who owns a spaceship.”

“You're an idiot.”

“I was obviously kidding,” I replied. “Which makes you a double idiot.”

“Not if you consider that in math two negatives make a positive, in which case technically a double idiot's a good—”

“For the love of Pete, that's enough! Stop bickering, you two,” Dad said, not peering up from his newspaper. “Just make sure you both keep a good eye on your things from now on.”

“Why are you home so late?” Mom finally asked me.

“I did some work after detention,” I said, blushing.

She smiled at me.

“See? Maybe detention's not a bad thing in the end.”

“For once, I couldn't agree with you more,” I said.

I went up to my bedroom after dinner and opened my closet to get my old winter jacket out. I figured since my fingertips still hadn't thawed from my jog home an hour earlier, it was now officially cold enough that I was going to have to start wearing it to school, even though I'd probably lose it in a week. I was shocked to find Drew's jacket on a coat hanger! I guess the thief hadn't stolen it, after all. I suddenly remembered that during the summer I'd accused Sunny a bunch of times of stealing my recorder. And then when I realized I'd been storing it up at Corbett Canyon, Dad shook his head at me and said that people who are suspicious all the time are suspicious because they lie all the time. And that those who rarely lie aren't often suspicious.

I didn't believe him.