Never Say Genius (18 page)

“We should probably head back down,” Pep said. “Mom and Dad told us to meet them on the bench out front at five thirty.”

“Relax,” Coke told his sister. “Hey, check this out.”

There was a door off to one side, where most people would not see it. The word RECORDING was above the door, and next to the letters was a little red lightbulb that was lit up.

“It’s a studio,” Pep said. “They probably record music or commercials in there.”

“Let’s go in,” Coke said.

“We’re not allowed in there,” said Pep.

“Says who?” Coke replied. “I don’t see any ‘Do Not Enter’ sign. It’s a museum. It’s open to the public. We paid our admission. Come on.”

He pulled open the door. Reluctantly, Pep followed. They were in a tiny room now, not much bigger than an old-fashioned telephone booth. There was another door on the other side. The first door clicked shut behind them.

“I don’t like this,” Pep said nervously.

“Shhhhh,” her brother said.

He pushed on the other door, and it opened into a larger room dominated by a huge control panel with hundreds of dials, knobs, and switches on it. Neither of the twins had ever been in a recording studio before. It almost looked like the cockpit of a plane.

There were three large chairs in front of the control panel. All of them swiveled around, as if on cue.

There were three people sitting in the chairs—the two bowler dudes and Mrs. Higgins.

“E
eeekkk!
” Pep screamed. “It’s them!”

Coke turned to grab for the door handle. It was locked. They were trapped. Again.

“Well … well … well,” said Mrs. Higgins.

The bowler dudes smiled and laughed their stupid laughs. Each of them had a club, like the kind policemen carry. They hit the clubs rhythmically into the palm of one hand.

“How did you get in here?” Pep demanded.

“The question isn’t how we got in here,” Mrs. Higgins replied. “The question is how are
you
going to get
out
?”

“Good one, Mrs. H.,” the mustachioed bowler dude said, chuckling.

Coke looked around quickly. They were at the very top of the pyramid-shaped building. He could see the Lake Erie waterfront and the sky through the glass windows surrounding them on all sides. The only exit was locked. They were outnumbered. He had no weapons, while both of the bowler dudes had clubs. There was an electric guitar sitting in a stand on the floor. But what was he going to do, hit somebody over the head with it? It was a bad situation.

Pep couldn’t help but marvel at Mrs. Higgins. One day she was working as a paid assassin for Dr. Warsaw. The next day she managed to get a job working in the public relations department of the Chicago Cubs. And now she had somehow talked her way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe she was right—she
did
have good people skills.

“That wasn’t very nice what you kids did at Wrigley Field,” Mrs. Higgins said, wagging a finger at them. “The fans were very upset that the Cubs forfeited the game.”

“It was
your
fault!” Pep shouted. “You told us there was a bomb in the dugout! You gave us those T-shirts! You almost got us killed!”

“I’ll try harder this time.”

“Good one, Mrs. H.,” said the clean-shaven bowler dude.

Both bowler dudes laughed and slapped the clubs into their palms. There would be no way to overpower them.

“What are you going to do now,” Coke asked, “blow up the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?”

“Heavens no!” Mrs. Higgins replied. “I
love
rock and roll. Put another dime in the jukebox, baby!”

One of the bowler dudes flipped a switch on the control panel, and heavy metal music filled the studio.

“Ah, Megadeth,” Mrs. Higgins said. “My favorite slash metal band. And I can really relate to this album—
Killing Is My Business … and Business Is Good
.”

The bowler dudes chuckled.

“Good one, Mrs. H.,” they both said.

“Stop saying that!” Mrs. Higgins scolded them. “It’s annoying.”

“Yes, Mrs. H.”

“You kids like loud rock music, don’t you?” she asked sweetly. “I’ll just turn this up a little.”

She turned a dial on the control panel, and the music got louder. Both bowler dudes took earplugs out of their pockets and stuck them in their ears.

“You’re smart kids,” Mrs. Higgins continued. “I’m sure you know that sound travels in waves through the air. You can’t see them, but you can feel the vibrations.”

“We don’t need your boring science lesson,” Coke spat.

“You’re right, Coke,” she agreed. “I don’t want to bore you. I want to
kill
you.”

“Good one—”

“Shut up!” Mrs. Higgins hollered at the bowler dude, causing him to stop talking instantly.

“I
told
you we shouldn’t have come in here!” Pep said to her brother, tears running down her face. “You should listen to me for a change!”

“Don’t bicker, kids,” Mrs. Higgins said. “It will all be over soon.”

She turned the dial again, and the music got louder.

“The human ear is a marvelous organ, isn’t it?” Mrs. Higgins said. “Sound waves enter the outer ear like a funnel, and they shoot through the ear canal to vibrate the eardrum.”

“We don’t care what you have to say!” Pep yelled. But Mrs. Higgins kept right on going.

“There are three tiny bones in your middle ear, and they intensify the vibrations and deliver them to the inner ear. That’s where the cochlea is. It looks like a little clamshell, and it’s filled with fluid. The sound waves make the fluid move. There are thousands of tiny hairlike cells in there that connect to the acoustic nerve, which sends electro-chemical signals to the brain. And that’s how you hear things. Isn’t that interesting?”

“No!” Coke shouted over the music.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Mrs. Higgins said. “I was boring you again, wasn’t I?”

She turned the dial, and the volume went up some more. The music had became uncomfortably loud.

“Turn it down,” Pep said, putting her hands over her ears.

“Did you say turn it up?” asked Mrs. Higgins, giving the dial another twist. “Sure.”

“No, I said turn it
down
!”

“Can’t hear you,” shouted Mrs. Higgins. “It’s quite noisy in here.”

“Turn it
down
!” Coke screamed.

Mrs. Higgins turned the dial the other way, and the volume went down so low that the music could barely be heard. The twins took their hands off their ears.

“But Coke,” Mrs. Higgins said, “I thought you
liked
your music loud.”

“Not
that
loud,” he replied.

“You know all about decibel levels, right?” Mrs.Higgins asked. “The sound of human breathing is about ten decibels.”

She turned up the volume on the control panel slightly. Megadeth’s “The Skull Beneath the Skin” was playing.

“Normal speech is sixty decibels.”

She turned the volume up a little more.

“A vacuum cleaner is eighty decibels.”

She twisted the dial again and put on a set of noise-canceling headphones over her ears.

“A motorcycle is a hundred and five.”

Twist.

The twins put their hands over their ears again. Pep was getting a headache. Mrs. Higgins leaned toward them, her eyes flashing.

“Pain begins at a hundred twenty decibels,” she shouted over “The Skull Beneath the Skin.” “A jet taking off is a hundred forty. At one hundred fifty, your chest wall starts vibrating. At one hundred sixty, the thin membrane of your eardrum is shredded instantly. At one hundred eighty, your hearing tissue dies. The small bones in your ear snap, like twigs. And you know how glass will shatter at very high frequencies? Any sound louder than one hundred eighty decibels will literally make your heads explode!”

“I love a happy ending!” yelled the clean-shaven bowler dude.

“They’ve got some really powerful speakers in this studio,” hollered Mrs. Higgins over the music. “They can pump out more than two hundred decibels of sound. Of course, nobody would ever turn them up that high. It would be …
dangerous
.”

“You’re crazy!” Pep yelled, holding her hands tightly over her ears. “Let us out!”

“Get this on tape, boys,” Mrs. Higgins shouted. “I want to record the sound of their heads exploding, so I can play it over and over again to cheer me up when I’m in a bad mood. This is what they get for killing my boyfriend.”

The mustachioed bowler dude pushed a button on the control panel. Mrs. Higgins cranked up the volume one more time.

“Turn it off!” Coke begged. “Please, turn it off!”

Instead of turning it off, Mrs. Higgins yanked the dial right out of the control panel. There would be no way to turn it left or right. The volume was locked into place.

“I hate to be a party pooper, but we should go,” Mrs. Higgins said, getting up from her chair. “It’s way too noisy in here.”

She went to the door and opened it with a key. The bowler dudes followed her out, pushing the kids away so they couldn’t do the same. Just before the door closed, Mrs. Higgins poked her head back inside for a moment.

“To paraphrase the Who,” she said, “I hope you die before you get old.”

The door closed with a sharp click.

Coke and Pep looked at each other helplessly. Then they turned around and pounced on the control panel, turning every dial and flipping every switch in the hope that one of them would turn down the music.

Nothing worked.

Coke looked around. If he could destroy the speaker, the sound would stop. But the speaker was behind a thick metal screen.

And then he got an idea. He reached into his backpack and pulled out his roll of duct tape. He handed it to Pep.

“What do you want me to do with
that
?” she shouted over the music.

“Wrap it around my head!” he shouted back. “Cover my ears!”

She did what he said, pulling the tape around and around her brother’s head, trying to avoid covering his eyes. Then he took the roll of tape and did the same to her. They looked like a couple of mummies, but the sound reaching their ears was significantly reduced.

Duct tape truly
is
the solution to just about any problem.

“We gotta get out of this place,” Coke shouted to his sister, “if it’s the last thing we ever do!”

“What?” Pep asked, unable to hear a thing.

“Never mind,” Coke said, grabbing the electric guitar on the floor. He climbed up on the control panel and tapped the neck of the guitar against the glass ceiling of the studio.

“What are you doing?” Pep screamed. “Don’t break the glass! We’ll get in trouble!”

“What?” Coke asked. He hadn’t heard a word she said.

He took the guitar again, and this time rammed the neck
hard
against a panel of the glass. It shattered, falling inside the studio and nearly hitting Coke on the way down. He rubbed the guitar against the remaining shards of glass to knock them out and make the opening a little larger.

“Oh, and I suppose you’re going to climb up there and slide down outside of the pyramid,” Pep shouted. “You’re crazy!”

“What?”

“Forget it.”

Coke put the guitar back in its stand and climbed up on the control panel again. Then he reached up and pulled himself through the hole he had made, grabbing onto the frame around the window. He was on top of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He reached his hand down to help Pep climb up there with him.

“I can’t do it!” she screamed, shaking her head.

“Come on!”

She stepped up on the control panel tentatively, reached up, and took her brother’s hand. He gripped it tightly and nodded his head to encourage her.

“You can do this, Pep,” he said.

“What?”

He pulled her up and she held on for dear life. She managed to get her legs up on the window frame and squeeze through the opening. She was outside. She looked around to see the Cleveland skyline on one side and Lake Erie on the other. They were so high. The music was no longer blasting at their ears.

“Okay, let’s go!” Coke said. “We’ll slide down together!”

“No way.”

“Come on,” Coke said, “just like we used to do it on the slide at the playground when we were little.”

She crawled over his leg so she could sit in front of him, with his arms and legs wrapped around her.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Hold on,” Coke replied. “Close your eyes.”

She did, and he pushed off. They began to slide down the pyramid, slowly at first. When it seemed like they were picking up too much speed, Coke pressed the bottoms of his sneakers against the glass to slow them down. When he felt in control again, he eased up on the “brakes” and let them just slide.