The Detention Club (6 page)

P
ETER?” TRENT WAVED ME OVER
when I stepped into the lobby at school the following Monday. He was smiling at me for once, which was surprising, but I didn't have time to really think about it because for some reason the floor was covered with a thick layer of fog.

“Is there a fire?” I asked, pointing at the fog.

“Yeah, and our classmates are trapped in the gym—let's go help them,” Trent said, and we ran to the double doors and he swung them open. He started waving his arms over his head, I thought at first because he was trying to clear away the smoke, but a second later Drew walked out of the foggy gym with a serious look on his face.

Suddenly he whipped around and hollered, “Okay, everybody!”

What sounded like a fire alarm erupted overhead, and at first I thought it had to do with the smoke on the ground, but then the entire student body poured out of the gym into the lobby and mobbed me, trying to get their hands on me. At first I felt scared, like they were going to rip me into pieces, but then I realized everyone was patting me on the back.

“Surprise!” Angie shouted, beaming at me.

Trent twirled his right hand as he bowed, then pointed at a huge golden chair in the corner by the fire escape. “Your rightful throne, sire,” he said in a British accent. “For far too long you have been deprived of it.”

“What's happening?” I asked Drew.

“This was all an elaborate setup, buddy,” he replied, clapping me on the back. “Smile at the camera, you just got punk'd!”

A camera crew stepped out from behind the fog, and everyone cheered.

“Peter?” Sally tapped my shoulder shyly. “Do you think you could make me a mica necklace? The one you gave me last year that I wear in bed every night broke.”

Sally still wore my mica necklace this whole time?

“Peter?” she said, nudging my shoulder. “Peter, wake up, will you?”

“Wake up?” I waved a hand in front of her face. “I'm staring right at you.”

And then I opened my eyes and yelped. Mom was standing over me, poking me in the chest as if I was a squirrel in the middle of the road and she wasn't sure if I was dead or not. “Get out of bed, you're going to be late for school,” she said.

I sighed and got out of bed. It had been such a nice dream, but it only made real life feel even worse. Plus, whenever I have a really realistic dream, it makes me feel confused for a while, like I've just run around in circles for two straight minutes.

After breakfast I tried to play sick, but Mom wasn't hearing it.

“For one thing, you just ate three bowls of cereal,” she pointed out. “Surely you can't be sick if you have such a big appetite.”

“Would it help my case if I barfed it all back up?” I pleaded.

“Don't be gross. Now get dressed, you're late as it is.”

I met up with Drew at his house, and then we walked to school together, silently praying that the talent show hadn't made things worse. Unfortunately when we entered the lobby, it got really quiet all of a sudden and everyone stared at us. Hugh came over and clapped me on the back.

“There's Street Magic!” he shouted, and it was like he was turning a valve, because then everyone in the lobby started shouting our nickname.

The bell rang and we made our way over to the stairs. Angie and Sally blocked our path. “Hey, Street Magic,” Angie said to Drew. “You're a magician, you don't need to take the stairs, you can just blink and reappear in homeroom, right?”

Students snickered.

“Actually, I'm Street Magic's Assistant,” Drew clarified. “Peter's the real Street Magic.”

“Thanks for clearing that up for everyone,” I whispered.

“You're welcome!”

“I was being sarcastic.”

The crowd started talking again, and a minute later the homeroom bell rang. I looked over at the far wall and made eye contact with Sunny. She shook her head at me before heading up the stairs. I usually couldn't care less when people shake their heads at me, because it's always adults who do that, and I know that they're shaking their heads merely because they don't remember at all what it was like to be a kid. But for someone close to my age to do it made me so angry that it made my fingertips tingle, and I swear they looked really fat all of a sudden, as if they were going to explode. For a moment I honestly believed my fingertips were going to detonate at any moment, and I held my breath until they looked normal again. Phew. Then I pictured what my fingertips exploding would look like, and cringed.

“Gross,” I muttered, before heading up the stairs.

In math class Mrs. Ryder announced that we had a pop quiz.

“But you didn't tell us there was going to be a quiz,” I cried.

“Hence the term ‘
pop
quiz,'” Mrs. Ryder said.

“You're sneaky, Mrs. Ryder. And that is not cool. NOT COOL,” I scolded her.

The surprising thing was that everyone in class laughed, thinking I was just playfully joshing around with her. I'd never offered to answer any of my teachers' questions, and whenever I got called on I'd just shrug, so technically this was my first time saying anything during class, ever, in middle school.

“You should call them sneak-attack quizzes, instead,” I added, but nobody laughed.

Tough crowd, I thought.

I stared at the quiz and sighed. Technically, Sunny never had pop quizzes because she studied every night as if there was going to be one the next day. Nothing surprised her. The scary part was that I didn't recognize the math at all, but luckily it was a multiple-choice quiz, which gave me a fighting chance at doing really well. I'd overheard Sunny say to Mom when she was studying for the SATs that when you had no clue on a question, don't try to answer it, but I still guessed on some of them, just so it didn't look fishy.

The one bright spot that week was that it was finally time for my first-ever T.A.G. class, after school on Wednesday in the library. On Sunday night I'd gotten really excited about becoming an inventor, and since I had no idea there was going to be a pop quiz in math the next day, I didn't bother studying. Instead, I focused on brainstorming ideas, and came up with what I thought at the time were two doozies. The first one was a new kind of security system. I figured the problem with them was that even when they work, the family inside the house still gets totally freaked out and probably can't go back to sleep for a while, right? So my idea was called Mr. Home Security. I called it that because it's kinda like having a Mr. Coffee machine wired to your security system, except it's a teakettle in your bedroom. The water in the teakettle is always close to boiling on a hot plate at all times, and when the alarm gets tripped, instead of an alarm blaring inside your house, startling you out of bed, the alarm system instead triggers the hot plate to full blast. This quickly brings the teakettle to a boil, and you get woken up instead by the soothing sound of a teakettle's whistle. Then you just calmly get out of bed, lock the bedroom door so the burglar can't get inside the room and take you hostage, and then relax in bed drinking hot tea with the lights on while you wait for the local police to arrive and reset the security system.

I pictured a young couple nervously drinking their tea as they hid in the locked bedroom waiting for the police, and I figured, well, maybe one of them smokes cigarettes, especially when they're nervous. Wouldn't it be convenient, then, if cigarettes were self-lighting? I figured you could add the match-strike strip on the side of a cigarette box, and then add some chemicals to the tip of the cigarette, and then just rub the end of the cigarette against the box, and voilà, you're smoking away your worries while sipping hot tea!

This one fit under the category of “environmental/eco-friendly” inventions, according to Ms. Schoonmaker's letter, because if it really caught on, it would save:

tons of trees (matches)

gallons of gas (butane from lighters)

I glanced over at the clock by my bed. At this point, I'd spent nearly two hours coming up with ideas for inventions! I flipped through the six pages of diagrams and notes I'd already filled the notebook with and couldn't believe how much work I'd gotten done. “This notebook's writing itself!” I said out loud.

On Wednesday I showed up early to the AV room in the back of the library after school, and Sunny was already sitting there, scribbling furiously in her notebook. I sat down at the other end of the long table. “Class hasn't started yet, so what could you possibly be taking notes on?” I asked.

“I'm working on my ideas,” she said, not looking up. “You should be, too.”

“Actually, I've been working on them all day,” I said.

“You're lying—how could you? You have classes all day.”

“I guess classes are easier for me than they are for you, after all,” I said.

She frowned at me.

A minute later the other students filed in. There were eight of us in the class: me, Carson, and Angie were the three sixth graders in class; Leigh and Graham were seventh graders; and Sunny, Sam, and Courtney were in eighth. Carson was really smart, but I was just relieved that his buddy from Hemenway—the one with the gigantic head—wasn't selected. That kid was the only person in my grade that I worried about, intellectually.

Ms. Schoonmaker then showed up, carrying a folder and a tiny cup of steaming espresso. I love the smell of coffee, but I've always hated the smell of espresso. It's bitter and strong and smells like adults. This tiny cup filled up the entire room with the gross smell within seconds.

“Good afternoon, future inventors!” she said. “Well, there's not a moment to spare. In late October we're going to have an inventors' fair of our own, where you'll present a prototype—that is, a working example of your actual invention—to the student body. Then a committee will decide which one of you will represent the school at nationals in the spring.

“This room is going to be your official inventions workshop,” Ms. Schoonmaker went on. “I've set up these cubbies where you can store your projects. During your free time before or after school, you can come to the workshop to work on your inventions. But right now we're going to start out with an exercise to get your creative minds working.”

She passed out pieces of paper. On the page was a white oval in the center. The objective was to try to make some kind of creative picture using the white oval. I sat there for a few minutes just staring at the page. Everyone else was drawing furiously, but nothing was coming to me!

“Two minutes left,” Ms. Schoonmaker said.

My hands were sweaty. I looked at the white oval. What did it look like? With a minute left an idea finally dawned on me, and I hurried to get my picture drawn.

“Time's up,” Ms. Schoonmaker said. “Now what have we come up with?”

We went around describing our pictures. All the other students, including Sunny, had done one of two things: they either turned their white eggs into spiders by adding eight legs, or they made it an egg in an Easter basket. I groaned, clearly I'd done the assignment wrong. And worse—I peeked at Sunny's page—her spider of course looked like an entry in an encyclopedia.

“Mine's really accurate because I did a report on spiders last year—the white oval is the opisthosoma, but then I went ahead and drew its cephalothorax, too,” Sunny bragged.

“That is certainly very realistic,” Ms. Schoonmaker agreed.

Sunny seemed pleased. As we went around describing our pictures, my throat started tightening up, as if I'd swallowed an angry bee. I casually slid my picture under the desk and crumpled it up as softly as possible right before they got to me.

“How about you, Peter?” Ms. Schoonmaker finally asked.

“I couldn't come up with anything,” I said. “In fact, I'm not even sure where my paper is at the moment. That's strange.”

Sunny shook her head at me. Everyone looked kind of embarrassed for me, but luckily the bell rang for the late bus.

“Okay, so from now on the class will be held every Wednesday right after school in this room. For next class, I want you to prepare a two-minute speech about one of your ideas for inventions, and then we'll analyze them.”

Everyone got up to leave.

“Hey, wait a sec—where's my scarf?” Angie said, looking under the desk.

“You don't want to miss your bus, I'll do a clean sweep before I leave. You can check with me tomorrow morning,” Ms. Schoonmaker said, before turning toward me. “Peter, can I speak with you for a moment?”

I blushed. Sunny shook her head at me again as she left with everyone.

“Can I see your drawing?” Ms. Schoonmaker asked.

“I did it wrong, though,” I said.

She held her hand out and smiled at me. I slowly pulled out the crumpled paper. Instead of making it an Easter egg or a spider, I'd just colored the oval black with my pencil and drawn a stupid square around it. Underneath it I'd written a caption like in a newspaper cartoon: “Harold, the dog got in front of the camera again!” as if it was a picture of a dog's nose ruining a family photo. Ms. Schoonmaker looked at it for a couple of seconds before nodding.

“I had a feeling you'd come up with something special,” she said.

“You mean the bad kind of ‘special,' right?”

She shook her head, smiling at me.

“That everyone drew Easter eggs or spiders is fine, but those are typically the first things we think of when we see the oval. Yours shows creativity,” she said. “You're already thinking outside the box. Do you know what that means?”

“Well, clearly, I'm not in a box right now,” I said.

“No, it's an expression, and it means to think creatively, which you do.”

I would have taken it as a compliment, but the one thing worse than the smell of espresso is the smell of espresso in someone's mouth after they've sipped a tiny cup of it, and she was breathing right in my face. She must have thought I looked nervous, but really I was just holding my breath.