The Detention Club (5 page)

T
HE NEXT MORNING AT SCHOOL,
Sunny suddenly started acting differently around us. She didn't complain when Drew offered to carry her schoolbag to homeroom, and before second period she even showed up at my locker and asked if I'd bring her flute down to the band room for her. Before every period she found us and let us run errands for her: carrying her books, shutting her locker for her, sharpening pencils for her before class started . . . and it wasn't until lunch that I realized what she was doing.

“Forget this,” I said, after me and Drew had raced down to the vending machine outside the cafeteria to buy her a bag of chips. “She's not trying to be a decent sister, she's just using us for slave labor.”

“What kind of a person would do such a thing?” Drew asked, his face all twisted up as if he'd bitten into an apple with a worm in it. “That's so deceptive.”

We caught up to her in the hallway—and I made a big show of opening up the bag of chips right in front of her and eating a couple, then offering some to Drew, who chomped loudly right in front of her face.

“We're eating your chips, what are you going to do about it?” Drew asked.

“You paid for them with your own money, so I'm totally fine with it,” she said, and headed into her class.

“It's also kinda lame that she always has to have the last word on everything,” he added.

I sighed.

At lunch Drew and I were miserable. “I really want to get an ice cream, but I spent all my extra dough on those chips,” I whined.

“I don't want to sound the alarm bells too early, but it might be time to start thinking about running away,” Drew suggested.

“I don't think we're there yet, but I'll take your suggestion under consideration.”

“There goes another scheme down the drain. . . . I can't believe this is happening to us,” he said. “Do you think we're being punished for something?”

“You mean by God?” I asked. Drew nodded. “I don't think so. We didn't do anything wrong. And I go to church every Easter. That better count for something. Where's this coming from, anyway?”

“We were popular last year. Maybe that's why this is happening.”

“Being popular isn't a crime. And we weren't mean to people like they are to us. I was always nice to Carson, for example. Remember that time in fifth grade when I let him eat some of my Tater Tots at lunch?”

Drew's eyes lit up.

“I remember that day,” he said. “He didn't even ask, you just offered them to him totally out of the blue. You didn't have to do that.”

“I know, I was being nice!” I said.

“So, what then? Is it just bad luck?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I have to pee,” Drew said.

“Do you tell me that because you know it's going to make me have to pee, too, or do you just really want me to know?”

Drew thought about it for a second.

“I guess a bit of both.”

I sighed. We ditched our lunch trays and went to the bathroom off the lobby. Of course, the Sweet brothers were standing by one of the sinks, filling it with wet paper towels.

“Hey, boys, we've been looking for you two!” Hank said.

“Do these guys even go to class?” I whispered to Drew.

“We really have to stop using this bathroom,” he whispered back, and I glared at him.

“Actually, I left my wallet in the cafeteria,” I announced, starting to back out.

“Oh darn, I did, too,” Drew said.

“Everyone else keeps them in their back pockets,” I told him.

“Yes, that does make more sense—oof,” Drew said, bumping into the wall as we headed for the door. “Let's now go get our wallets and put them in our back pockets so in the future—”

“Hold it!” Hugh shouted.

We froze.

“Now come forward,” Hank said.

We did. It was like they had invisible remote controls for us or something. And then they gave us our very-first-ever atomic wedgies. The elastic band of my underwear actually snapped in half, and the Sweet brothers laughed.

“See you soon,” they said, high-fiving on the way out.

“You know, I've always been scared of getting a wedgie, but that didn't really hurt at all, I have to admit,” Drew said.

“Why's your voice so high all of a sudden?” I asked.

Drew shrugged. I stared at my reflection in the mirror as I tucked the elastic band back into my pants.

“What are we going to do about this, Peter?” he asked. “I mean, forget about becoming popular, I now just want to make it out of sixth grade alive.”

Next to the mirror was a poster for the talent show, being held that coming Friday. I'd gone the last two years because Sunny played her flute for the show. She won both times. Suddenly it dawned on me that I was staring at the solution to all our problems.

“Drew, I think I just figured out a way we could kill two birds with one stone.”

“What are you talking about?”

I looked at him.

“We're going to win the talent show.”

I watched a smile slowly form on his face. It was like watching the sun rise.

“That's a great idea!” Drew shouted, but then his smile faded. “What's wrong?”

“Sunny always wins the talent show! No matter what we do, she'll win, because she plays the flute like a pro.”

Drew twisted his mouth for a couple of seconds.

“Well, then maybe we can join her act and win the thing with her?”

“I told you I'm done trying to be nice to her!”

“What choice do we have?” he asked.

I didn't say anything. Drew was right. Maybe Sunny wasn't as popular as I'd assumed, but she was still the most important student in the school because she got the best grades, was the president of so many clubs, and won the talent show every year. To win it with her would only make everyone think we were important, too, which would at least be a step in the right direction.

After school Drew came over to my house and we went up to my bedroom, where I converted my bottle-rocket launcher back into a recorder. Then we went downstairs and snuck up on Sunny as she was practicing the flute. I started trying to play along with my recorder while Drew started hitting my old lunch box like it was a tambourine—it was really loud, and startled Sunny. Old bread crumbs from really good sandwiches from my past sprinkled out of the lunch box onto the carpet like snow.

“What do you think you're doing?” she asked us.

“Oh man, this sounds great, why didn't we think of this before?” Drew said, banging away at the lunch box. “We could probably get a record deal if we played for the right people.”

“You know, Sunny, Drew has a point there,” I said. “We should perform together at the talent show on Friday. I heard that talent scouts from Hollywood will be in the audience.”

“There is no chance we'll play together,” she sniffed. “You guys are horrible.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, and started rocking out on my recorder again. Sunny rolled her eyes.

“Do you even know any other songs besides ‘Three Blind Mice?'” she asked.

I sighed. In order for her to need my help someday, I'd need to actually have something to offer her.

“I was thinking you could play a fancy version of it with us.”

“Leave me alone, you're wasting my time,” she said, and we trudged out of the living room. We went over to Drew's house and got online to the school's website to sign up for the talent show, even though we didn't even have an act for it, and that's when we saw the Lost-and-Found Forum for the first time. At the top it read:

“At least we haven't lost anything in school,” Drew said.

“You're a really positive person, you know that?” I told him.

He smiled at me.

“Well, I eat right,” he said.

“That doesn't make any sense,” I replied.

We tried to figure out what we could do for an act. It was kinda depressing to realize that, outside of collecting mica, we weren't really that good at anything else.

I sighed.

“Isn't there anything else we're good at besides collecting?” I asked Drew.

“I have that magic set in my bedroom from a long time ago.”

“Now, there's a start. Let's check it out,” I said, trying to feel hopeful.

Unfortunately it was a basic kid's set—just a bunch of stupid coin tricks and some colored scarves for beginner-level juggling.

“Coin tricks aren't nearly exciting enough. Where'd you get this, anyway?”

“At the pawnshop.”

“Maybe they have advanced sets or something.”

We rode our bikes over to the pawnshop. The creepy owner was sitting behind the cash register, reading an issue of
Guns & Ammo
.

“Do you have any advanced magic sets?” I asked him. “Something that involves a lot of smoke and stuff? Or something that would cause a really huge but safe explosion?”

He led us to the back of the store, where there were two aisles full of magic stuff: a magician's hat and wand, some used kids' sets just like the one Drew already owned. I groaned. Drew noticed a weird jacket hanging from a hook at the end of the aisle.

“What's that?” he asked.

“An authentic straitjacket from an old asylum,” the store owner said.

“What's a straitjacket?” I asked.

“They keep mental patients in them so they don't bite their arms off.”

“Yuck,” Drew said.

“But what the heck does that have to do with magic?” I asked. “Shouldn't that be in the insane-asylum aisle?”

“It's an old magic trick—Houdini used to escape from one hanging upside down. After two minutes you run the risk of getting brain damage.”

“Perfect!” I said. “I have a pretty big brain, so I can afford to lose plenty of brain cells. How much?”

“It's for an adult, so it's too big for you,” he said, hanging the jacket back on the rack.

“Even better,” I said. “That'll make it easier to get out of.”

“We don't do returns here. I don't want your parents coming in here mad at me for selling you something you can't use.”

“So you're trying to talk us out of buying it?” Drew asked. “What kind of a salesman are you?”

The owner stared at us for a couple of seconds and realized we were dead serious. Then he took the straitjacket back down, and we followed him up to the register. Drew also bought the magician's wand and hat, along with a red plastic cape from an incomplete, used Superman costume. We immediately brought our loot back to Corbett Canyon and spent an hour putting the straitjacket on each other. There were all these straps, but we figured out that if you kept it loose enough you could squirm out of it, eventually.

The rest of the week we went straight to Corbett Canyon after school each day to work on our act. Drew prepared his spiel as the magician, while I kept practicing getting out of the straitjacket on my own. I got good enough at it that I figured I could do it just as easily upside down. On Thursday afternoon we met with the janitor and he helped us set things up on the stage of the auditorium. The act would require that I use a harness (which the janitor had because he used it for cleaning the windows on the second floor of the school) tied to my feet so I could hang upside down. By the time Friday night rolled around, we were convinced that our act could beat Sunny's boring flute performance and solve all of our problems.

T
HE AUDITORIUM AT SCHOOL WAS
already packed when we showed up for the talent show Friday night. Everyone in school was there, along with everyone's parents. I could see my mom and dad in the third row, looking through the program. Sunny was up last, while we were the fourth act. I felt nervous peeking out at the packed audience and just wanted to get the act over with, but there was a delay when the third act—a seventh-grade girl in a pink tutu, couldn't find her ballet shoes and ended up having to do the dance in her sneakers. At one point she tried to stand on her tippy toes and almost fell into the first row. When it was finally our turn, the janitor helped set up the act behind the closed curtains.

He'd secured a rope to the metal girder above the stage, and we positioned a ladder directly underneath it. I climbed up the ladder, sat on the top, and put on the straitjacket. Drew secured the straps, and then we attached the rope to the harness around my legs. When Drew was in position offstage, we gave the janitor the thumbs-up, and he cranked the curtain open. The crowd murmured as I waved at everyone from atop the ladder in the center of the stage. Drew walked out into the middle of the stage, wearing the cape and magician's hat, waving the plastic wand in his right hand.

“People of Fenwick!” Drew shouted. “Many of you don't know me and my partner Peter yet, because this is our first year at the middle school, but my name is Drew Newmark, and in addition to being best buddies with Peter Lee, who's sitting right up there—hi, Peter!—in addition to being best friends, we're also . . . practicing musicians!”

“Magicians,” I corrected him.

“Magicians!” Drew said. “Anyway, our hero is David Blaine. Growing up we were obsessed with his bootleg ‘street magic' videos, and he inspired us to study all the masters. So today we're going to re-create one of Houdini's most famous acts. As you can see, Peter is trapped in a real straitjacket, which they use in mental asylums so the patients don't bite their own arms off. On the count of three, Peter's going to hang upside down from this girder and escape from this straitjacket, but it's very risky. He'll have to do it in under two minutes, because after that an upside-down human starts to lose brain cells, and he could black out and get serious brain damage.”

The principal and vice-principal stared up at me from the first row with shocked looks on their faces.

“Okay, here we go, this is very dangerous—one, two three!”

And then Drew shoved the ladder away and I immediately swung upside down, and my head banged against the ladder really hard, and everyone in the auditorium muttered “Oof,” and I shouted, “I'm okay, ouch, okay, look at the clock on the wall, I have two minutes before brain damage starts setting in,” and I started furiously squirming in the straitjacket.

It was actually pretty awesome at first. In twenty seconds I got one arm free, and the audience cheered. The plan was working!

“I taught him that move,” I heard Drew say. He looked up at me. “You're doing great, buddy, just keep squirming the way I taught you. That's it. . . .”

But then something went wrong. Well, what went wrong is that nothing else happened. The more I struggled, the more the straps tightened, and I couldn't dislodge my right arm, and my left hand couldn't undo any of the straps.

A minute and a half passed, then two minutes.

“As Peter spins around during his struggle, you can see that his cheeks are turning pink, and now you'll notice that his forehead is visibly darkening as well,” Drew said to a stunned audience.

This made me panic, and I started struggling harder. Principal Curtis looked over at the janitor, motioning for him to help me out.

“I'm fine,” I screamed, practically out of breath, and the janitor took his hands off the ladder, as if it was boiling hot. I started twisting harder, and I could feel my face turning purple. A couple of seconds later I officially blacked out and went limp. According to Drew, my eyes became pure whites, since my pupils were drifting into the back of my head, and the audience gasped. The janitor then rushed up the ladder, pulled off the harness, carried the now unconscious me down, and unstrapped me from the straitjacket. I suddenly came to and immediately started struggling to free myself from the straitjacket again, even though I was no longer wearing it, and then I realized the janitor was on top of me, and in a panic I punched him in the nose. The principal nearly had a heart attack considering the future lawsuits he'd be facing for having allowed a Fenwick student to pass out hanging upside down from the rafters in a straitjacket during the annual talent show, and it was somewhere around this point when everyone in the auditorium started laughing like crazy. Drew groaned when he heard one of the Sweet brothers holler, “Give it up for Street Magic and Street Magic's Assistant, everybody!” and everyone started chanting a new nickname:

“Street Magic! Street Magic!”

By the time the next act finally went on (after a short delay while the gym teacher forced me to inhale smelling salts even though I was already resuscitated), Drew and I had slunk over to this empty room that had a cardboard sign on the door that read
greenroom
. The room wasn't actually green, so I felt like I had the right to swipe the sign down and rip it into a million pieces because it made me feel better. Drew locked the door and sat down next to me. I was so mad that I refused to talk to him at first.

“Say something, Peter,” he said. “I get the feeling you're upset with me.”

This made me explode, and I shoved him in the chest.

“You made the straps too tight!”

“No, I didn't!”

Drew started bawling, and I had no choice but to console him, even though I was still furious with him because I have this embarrassing disease (similar to my peeing disease) where if anyone near me cries long enough, I end up crying, too. I guess my mom has a point when she says I'm so emotional. Whenever I cry, she instantly bear-hugs me and refuses to let go, even if we're out in public, saying things like, “Don't ever change, Son,” and “You're so brave to let it out!”

“Now everyone's going to think I'm friends with a magician.” I sighed.

Now he shoved me in the chest.

“What are you talking about? This was your idea!” he screamed. “Everyone's going to call me Street Magic from now on.”

“You're the one who claimed to be a magician!” I replied, but he started getting teary-eyed again, so I immediately switched gears. “Take it easy, buddy, it's actually a cool nickname. You sound like a new Transformer or something.”

He smiled at me.

“Thanks, Peter,” he said. “You're my best friend.”

I sighed.

“No, Drew, I'm your
only
friend, remember?” I corrected him.

“Well, you're that, too,” he replied.

Outside we heard laughter in the audience. I opened the door and we crept over to the side of the stage. Sunny was trying to play her flute, but all the kids in the audience were laughing and talking as if she wasn't there. I heard the occasional “Street Magic” and blushed.

“Everybody, quiet down!” Ms. Schoonmaker, the host for the talent show, shouted into a mic as she bounded across the stage. “Let's give each performer the same due respect. Sunny, why don't you start over.”

Sunny's face was bright red. The crowd finally quieted down, and she started playing her piece again; she looked as if at any moment she was going to bite the flute in half. She didn't have any reason to be mad, though, because she ended up winning a third time anyway, which sealed our fate.

“It's been nice knowing you,” I said to Drew when it was all over.

There was a reception out in the lobby afterward with tables full of cookies and treats, but Drew's mom grabbed him and made him leave immediately, and Sunny headed straight for the car, so we had to leave, too. I looked back sadly at all the desserts. During the car ride home, Sunny completely lost it with me.

“You ruined my performance!” she screamed.

“Are you crazy? Who cares, you won the contest!” I shook my head at her. “It saddens me, really, to see firsthand just how spoiled great whites can be.”

“Great whites?” Sunny said. “Are you even on this planet right now?”

“Sunny, I know you're upset,” Mom said soothingly. “But Peter's right, you did win the contest again.”

Sunny glared at me.

“I hate you,” she muttered.

“I think you're giving yourself permanent wrinkles by glaring all the time,” I said back to her.

“Knock it off, you two,” Dad said, rubbing his temples with one hand as he drove with the other.

“I'm actually being serious,” I said.

“Peter, just be grateful you didn't hurt yourself,” he said. “And Sunny, I'm proud that you composed yourself while everyone was so loud, and still managed to play. It's a testament to—”

I stopped paying attention, because I was now picturing the Sweet brothers shouting, “Give it up for Street Magic and Street Magic's Assistant, everybody!” and having to face them on Monday. Maybe running away wasn't a bad option, after all.