The Detention Club (7 page)

“So relax! Don't stress about showing your ideas in the future, okay?”

I wasn't listening to her at this point, though, for Ms. Schoonmaker had accidentally given me the advice Drew and I had been searching for all this time. I was so excited that I ran all the way to Drew's house to give him the good news. Well, I ran halfway, then got winded, and half jogged the rest of the way, poking my hands into my ribs to stifle the cramps.

Drew was sitting in the tree house when I showed up. He'd laid out the mica all over the floor and was staring at it. He glanced up at me with a guilty look on his face.

“I couldn't help it,” he said. “It still looks so cool to me. Am I crazy?”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “Because I have amazing news. I realized we've been thinking the old ways of doing things would make us popular in middle school, and we just have to change with the times.”

“Okay!” he said really excitedly, before getting a serious look on his face. “Wait—what are you talking about?”

“I just found out in T.A.G. class that I'm really good at thinking outside the box. There are only a few people on the planet with this skill, and the others are all adults,” I added, figuring it was probably true. “What that means is we have to think creatively. Being great collectors doesn't mean anything at Fenwick Middle. Carson was right, collecting stuff
is
so fifth grade. We have to come up with new ways of making our mark.”

“How do we do that?”

I thought about it for a couple of seconds.

“Honestly, I have no idea, but just realizing this feels like a big step. We'll just think outside the box, and I bet we'll figure out a way to solve this. We'll finally become popular, and because of that the Sweet brothers will probably back off and pick on someone else.”

Drew cheered.

“I knew you'd save us!”

* * *

“How was your first T.A.G. class?” Mom asked at dinner. “It must be exciting for you two to be in a class together for once.”

“It's embarrassing,” Sunny said. “Peter couldn't even do the exercise.”

She handed Mom her ultrarealistic picture of a spider.

“First of all, it wasn't a drawing contest, and Sunny did it wrong like everybody else,” I said. Sunny's eyes narrowed. “The point was to be creative, and everyone drew spiders and Easter baskets.”

“What did you draw, Peter?” Dad asked.

“I made it look like a dog's nose ruining a photograph,” I said, and my dad nodded.

“That is clever!” he said, and Sunny blushed. I felt a delicious chill run through me—apparently defeating Sunny was the most incredible feeling in the world! It was one thing for Ms. Schoonmaker to compliment me, but it felt ten times more satisfying to see my sister admit that I'd one-upped her.

“I could get used to this,” I muttered.

“What's that, honey?” Mom asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

Sunny frowned at me, not realizing that she was giving me a really nice present. I knew Sunny would never do what I said, so I tricked her by saying the exact opposite of what I wanted. “Please stop frowning,” I pleaded, and sure enough, she glared even harder at me! This was the first time I'd ever felt like I was truly smarter than her, like I had an invisible remote control or something, so I added, “Please don't bare your teeth and growl at me.”

“You're being weird,” she said, and turned away from me.

I guess the batteries in my invisible remote control had run out.

T
HE PROBLEM WAS, NO THINKING-OUTSIDE-THE-BOX
ideas came to us at first, which made the rest of the week even more frustrating; but when Drew and I showed up at school the following Monday, an opportunity finally presented itself. Practically everyone in our grade was walking around the lobby before homeroom wearing candy necklaces. “Where'd you get those?” I asked Carson.

“Everyone got them at Angie's party on Saturday,” he explained.

It turned out that Angie'd had a huge boy-girl party that weekend. Drew and I listened in on some conversations in homeroom and overheard everyone talking about it. Apparently her parents planned on chaperoning parties regularly at their house from now on because they didn't want kids hanging out in dangerous places, unsupervised. It looked like we were the only ones in sixth grade not invited, because just about everyone seemed to be wearing these stupid candy necklaces that they'd gotten as door prizes or something. “Now everyone who didn't know we're nobodies will see that we don't have candy necklaces,” Drew cried. “It's like they're wearing a badge or something.”

He was right. But then I got an idea. “Remember what I said last week?” I asked him. “This is a perfect chance for us to think outside the box!”

Drew cocked his head to the side like a dog when you try to have a meaningful conversation with it.

“Refresh my memory about this box you're talking about,” he said.

“C'mon,” I said, grabbing his arm. We snuck over to the art room, where we cut pieces of yarn and made our own necklaces. Then we just walked around all morning sucking on our strings and pretending to feel bad that we'd finished all the candy. My theory was that everyone would assume we'd gone to the party and therefore assume we were cool, too. Unfortunately a real candy string necklace is made out of this thin gray, rubbery string, and all we had to work with was this fuzzy yellow yarn, so it didn't even look real.

“I have little pieces of yarn stuck in my throat,” Drew said.

“Just keep licking,” I whispered, even though he was right, because a couple of seconds later I coughed up a hairball.

“Well, that's a first,” Drew said.

So the fake-candy-necklace idea didn't work, but at lunch Drew and I came up with different get-popular-quick schemes to trick students into thinking we were cool, and all afternoon we tried them out. Unfortunately none of them worked, because Drew wasn't very good at following the plan. The most promising idea I'd come up with was to spread a bunch of “cool” rumors about each other.

 

Did you hear about Peter's surgery?

 

or

 

Have you seen Drew? I know he rescued all those elderly people from the overturned bus, but . . .

 

I walked around real slowly all day, holding my left side, the side I'd supposedly gotten a kidney removed from, but nobody bothered to ask me what was wrong. I asked a dozen different people if they'd seen Drew, pretending to be really panicked. I said I was worried that Drew had gotten hurt internally when he saved all those old people, and like a cat he'd crawled off someplace on his own to die by himself. (Cats get embarrassed that they look undignified when they have death spasms.) But each time, the student would just go, “What are you talking about? He's standing right over there.”

Sure enough, Drew would be down the hall, waving at us with a goofy smile on his face. I dragged him into the bathroom after sixth period.

“The rumor doesn't make any sense if you don't make yourself scarce, for the entire day,” I yelled.

“Sorry,” he said. “I keep forgetting that part. Should I hide now?”

It was too late—everyone knew the jig was up—but I let him hide in a locked stall anyway, figuring he deserved some sort of punishment for not executing the plan right.

Drew looked really pouty on the walk home from school that day.

“Look, it's not your fault that you couldn't hear the bell for class when you were hiding out in the stall all afternoon,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Don't beat yourself up over it.”

“It's not that,” Drew said. “I just can't get over how suddenly this all happened. So out of the blue.”

“I know,” I said. “People look at us as if they don't remember how things were for the last two years. How is that even possible?”

“It's like we've all of a sudden woken up in another town. Like it's the same town but on another planet or something, where people have no memory of what—”

But I wasn't listening to him anymore. Something he'd said had startled me. “You're a genius,” I cut him off.

He blushed. Then, when I didn't say anything more, he said, “Would it make me less of a genius if I asked how?”

“It all makes sense to me now,” I went on. “Look, let's consider the facts: One, everyone thinks we're losers. Two, we didn't go to Angie's big party last weekend, which we've established is proof that we're considered losers, right?”

“Okay, but I still don't get how that makes me a genius.”

“I haven't gotten to that part yet! Let me ask you something, Drew. Why is it that we weren't at Angie's party?”

“Because she didn't invite us, and because we're losers?” Drew replied.

I sighed.

“Nope, it's because we're popular in
other towns
,” I said, smiling. “And thanks to our busy, regional social lives, we just don't have time to hang out with our own classmates.”

“Wait—seriously? Why didn't you tell me we were popular in other towns?” Drew's eyes grew wide.

I sighed again. I tend to sigh a lot around him.

“We're not, actually, but that's what we're going to make everyone else think—which will explain why we don't go to cool parties on the weekends, and why we never hang out with anyone else during school. Once people realize that everyone in our neighboring towns loves us, they'll have to think we're cool.”

“But how do we do that?”

“It's easy, we just make up a second life that we have, and casually let people know about it,” I said. “It's not like they can find out the truth—nobody knows anyone from those other towns.”

He thought about it for a minute. Then his face lit up.

“That just might work,” he said. “But how was that my idea?”

I smiled at him.

“You said it was like we'd woken up in another town,” I said.

“I'm smarter than I thought,” he said.

“Well, don't get too excited,” I told him. “We have work to do. Tonight I want both of us to think outside the box and come up with ideas for how to make people think we're popular in other towns.”

I jogged home the rest of the way.

S
O WHAT IDEAS DID YOU
come up with?” Drew asked when I showed up at his house the next morning.

“Sunny practiced the flute all night, and I couldn't concentrate at all,” I said. “What annoyed me was that she already won the stupid talent show, so why's she practicing twice as hard as before?”

“Maybe she's as focused on winning in her own way as we're focused on trying to trick people into thinking we're popular,” Drew said.

I stared at him for a moment.

“What are you, her shrink?” I asked, and he shrugged. “So what's your idea?”

“Mine's dumb. I thought maybe we could pretend to talk to cool people from other towns on my cell phone.”

“That's actually a pretty decent idea, Drew.”

“Really? So I'm finally thinking outside the box?”

“You're not quite there, yet, but you're definitely close,” I said. “You still have one toe sticking inside the box.”

“God, I hate boxes,” he said.

“Now you're sounding like you don't know what the phrase means, again.”

“Dang it.”

After lunch I used Drew's cell phone to pretend I was getting the third degree from a girlfriend from another town as popular students walked by. Cell phones are banned until the end of the school day, so I made sure no teachers were around.

“But . . . yeah, but . . . I know . . . no . . . you see . . . will you just give me a . . . that's not what I . . . I told you that . . . ,” I stammered. Then I sighed dramatically, rubbed my temples with my eyes closed the way Mom does after she talks to me for more than five straight minutes, and then I held the phone away from my ear, making eye contact with Angie. I rolled my eyes and made the cuckoo sign with my free hand, then put the phone back to my ear.

“I know . . . ,” I said into the phone. “Look, if it makes you feel better, I'll . . . but . . . but . . . I didn't know she was your sister . . . but . . . don't worry, I don't care if your best friend wants to date me . . . I wouldn't intentionally do that to someone at a party in a town I don't even live in . . . it's not my fault—hello? Hello?”

Defeated, I stared at the phone for a couple of seconds before hanging up. I could feel Angie staring at me—it was
working
!

“Every single one,” I muttered to himself. “Every girl in my life . . .”

“I'm telling a teacher that you're talking on a cell phone,” she said.

We watched her walk away.

“Um, that didn't work so well, Peter,” Drew said.

“Maybe if you hadn't stood next to me, smiling like crazy the entire time, it would've seemed more convincing,” I scolded him.

“You really have to give me these instructions beforehand,” Drew said.

Unfortunately Angie wasn't kidding. She immediately told a teacher about my cell-phone use, and the worst possible thing happened next. I got paged to visit the office a minute later and was informed that I had my first-ever detention after school. Just saying the word in my head gave me the creeps.
Detention
. Trent's friend Lance had said that the Sweet brothers were in detention all the time! Just picturing the Sweet brothers waiting for me in a darkened classroom, in the empty school after the buses took off, was enough to make me seriously consider running as hard as I could into the nearest wall—so I'd have to get airlifted to the hospital or insane asylum or something. By the afternoon everyone seemed to have heard the news, and everything people said about detention only made me feel more nervous. Carson leaned over in social-studies class when Mrs. Farley started writing on the chalkboard.

“I wouldn't go if I was you, Peter.”

“Have you ever been to detention?” I asked him.

“Of course not,” he replied. “But I've heard rumors. It's where the bad people go. The dangerous people.”

“‘Dangerous people?'” I repeated. That sounded terrifying. “Do they even go to our school?”

“Psst, Peter,” Donnie Christopher, the Hemenway kid with the gigantic head, whispered. “Can I have your watch? It's not like you're surviving detention, anyway.”

“Don't say that!”

“Peter!” Mrs. Farley snapped. “You already have detention, and if anyone wants to join him this afternoon, by all means, speak up.”

Apparently word had spread among the teachers that I was in trouble, too.

After school I made the slow march over to room 12, where detention was held. I tried calming myself down as I walked, reassuring myself that Carson was just trying to scare me and probably no other kids would even be there. He was the last person who would know what detention was like, anyway, right? What creeped me out was that it was so empty and silent in the hallway as I walked toward my fate. Weirder still was the fact that, even though I was heading toward detention rather than trying to make my escape, I realized I was tiptoeing, even though nobody was around to hear me.

The door to room 12 was closed. I placed my right hand on the knob, but before turning it I said a little prayer to myself. “You're going to be okay,” I whispered. Then I opened the door and my stomach immediately fell. The Sweet brothers were sitting in the front row! Mr. Tinsley waved me over to the front desk.

“You're late,” he said. Which made sense—tiptoeing isn't exactly the fastest mode of transportation these days. “Since this is your first time, let's go over the house rules. You are to sit there and do homework. You are not allowed to get up from your seat unless I give you permission. You can talk quietly, but if I hear you over my headphones you will instantly get another detention. Understand? Now let me sign your detention slip.”

I tried to communicate with my eyes that I was in serious danger, but he just scribbled his signature and stuck it in a folder, and without looking up, said, “Grab a seat.”

“Well if it isn't Street Magic's Assistant,” Hugh said, smiling so broadly that I could see the sides of his molars. My lord, they were going to
eat
me. “You're not alone, are you?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

Hugh and Hank looked at each other before breaking out in mad laughter.

“Oh, this is going to be fun,” Hank said.

That's how evil the Sweet brothers were. I mean, I would never consider it “fun” to torture something weaker than me, because I'm not a psychopath. Like on the rare occasion when I spend a couple of minutes smushing ants with a basketball in the driveway, I don't think, Oh boy, killing these little ants is fun, yippee! It's just something kids my age do when they have a basketball and there are a lot of ants on the ground. It's embedded in our DNA, as my dad would say, that you simply have to smush them. It's more like a job, really; there's no “fun” involved—that's just twisted.

I looked over at Mr. Tinsley and he just nodded sleepily at me, totally unaware that my life was in danger. He had headphones on and was reading a book. A rubber band hit me in the back of the head. I pretended I hadn't felt it, even though it stung really bad, given the fact that Hugh was sitting approximately three feet away from me. He shot another one that clipped my ear.

“You better tie your shoes well, Street Magic's Assistant,” he said in a normal voice, not bothering to whisper because Mr. Tinsley's headphones were blaring. “Because the second you get out that door, we're coming after you. And we'll be looking for you and Drew especially during the day—we're making you our special projects for the semester.”

Basically for the entire detention I sat there three feet away from two thugs who wanted to jump me. It reminded me of an exhibit at the museum of prehistoric times—I was the mastodon frozen in midgallop while there were two frozen cavemen, forever about to chuck their spears at me. In my head I mapped out alternate escape routes. My best chance was to head straight for the stairs, bolt out the back, try to lose them in the woods, backtracking to Drew's house.

The bell rang, and I immediately bolted out of the room, but in my panic I made the wrong choice and headed down the hallway rather than over to the stairwell ten feet to my left. The Sweet brothers chased after me. They didn't say anything as they chased me down the hallway, and once again the silence kinda freaked me out. I didn't think I could outrun both of them, and I suddenly remembered this movie where a guy in a fighter jet slams on the brakes and the enemy jets fly right by—I figured I'd stop suddenly, and once they ran by I'd simply head back the other way, so right then I screeched to a halt.

Looking back, it wasn't a horrible plan—I'm smaller than them, so I probably can change directions faster, the only problem was they weren't nearly as close to me as I'd thought. Instead of being an arm's length behind me, they were more like fifteen feet behind me, and so by stopping I allowed them to catch up to me. They looked surprised.

“Um, thanks for stopping?” Hank said, confused at first that I'd suddenly given up when in reality I was pulling away from them. Since I'm a fast thinker, I thought maybe I could turn this into brownie points with him.

“You're welcome,” I said, praying with my eyes open that they'd high-five me and that would be it. Instead Hugh turned me around and gave me my second-ever atomic wedgie, ripping the elastic band of my favorite pair of underwear (it was my favorite because it was the pair I was wearing when I first discovered mica, a year earlier). I let out a yelp.

“Sorry, pal,” he said, clapping me really hard on the back. “It's like that reflex test at the doctor's—they hit your kneecap with that rubber mallet and your leg shoots out.”

“Don't take this the wrong way, but I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about,” I admitted.

“I'm just saying it's kinda like that—whenever I see your pants, I can't help but want to give you a serious wedgie,” he explained.

They laughed.

“If I wore shorts, would you have the same reaction?” I asked.

“Are you being obnoxious?” Hugh said.

“No.”

“Well, then the answer is yes—any kind of pants I think would do it.”

“Maybe the solution is for you to stop looking at my pants,” I offered, and this made Hugh really mad.

“I was about to let you go, but your big mouth got in the way again,” Hugh said.

As he grabbed my shirt from behind, I shouted, “Stop looking at my pants!” and tugged away as hard as I could—and miraculously wrenched myself free. I bolted back toward the stairwell and practically launched myself into the air at the top of the stairs. I flew down the three flights and out the exit doors, positive they were going to tackle me at any moment, but when I finally looked behind me, the Sweet brothers were standing at the window on the second floor, gasping for breath and glaring at me. I didn't realize it at that moment, but I'd just made a major discovery that would help me in the future.