The Detention Club (15 page)

I
T WAS CLOUDY ON
S
ATURDAY
when the Detention Club met up as planned behind the school. The Sweet brothers were wearing those bank-robber ski hats that cover the entire face except for holes for eyes and the nose. They looked pretty intimidating.

“This is it,” I shouted, and they shushed me. “Oh, right. Good call.”

“Let's go,” Sally said. “It's almost time.”

“Hold on, I brought protection,” Trent said, unzipping a big red bag. He pulled out a bunch of hockey sticks and passed them around.

“We're not going to hurt the thief, and we don't need those, we outnumber him six to one,” I pointed out.

“It's just for intimidation,” Trent explained.

“I'm not sure I could hit the thief with a hockey stick, if it ever came to it,” Sally said, staring at her hockey stick.

“Where's mine?” I asked.

“You're going to be out in the soccer field, so you can't have a hockey stick on you,” Trent explained.

“Why do I have to be the drop-off guy?”

“You're the littlest.”

I shivered because it was so cold out, and that made me seem legitimately scared.

“Don't worry, we'll protect you,” Hank said, clapping me on the back.

It made me feel warm inside to hear that.

“Let's go, we have to make sure we hide before the thief gets there,” Donnie said, and we made our way over to the woods next to the soccer field.

Trent handed me a piece of paper. Typed across the page a dozen times, it read:

 

Ha ha, you've just been caught!

 

“I can't wait to see the look on his face,” Sally said.

I stared out at the soccer field. A heavy wind rolled across the field, driving up the powdery top layer of cracked dirt on the ground into a poofy cloud.

“You're going to do fine,” Trent said. “You just have to be the bait, and leave the rest to us.”

Trent stepped behind a bush and crouched down, and I took a deep breath and stepped out onto the field. My ears were freezing and my feet felt heavy, but I trudged out to the center of the field. I turned and faced the woods. I looked for everyone, and even though I wanted Drew to be able to spot them for his own safety, I was kind of disappointed at how easy they were to spot. Sally had her arms sticking out from a tree, pretending they were branches, but she was shivering wildly so the tree looked alive. Donnie was holding out his hockey stick as if it was a tree limb, but there was shiny silver duct tape wrapped around the handle.

It was getting darker by the minute. All the houses across the road from the school had their lights on already. One house had a Halloween display in the yard—some plastic ghosts hanging from branches and a lit-up inflatable pumpkin by the front door. I felt something hit my nose. I stuck out my tongue and waited for a raindrop to land on it, but it was barely sprinkling. “There he is, get him!” Hugh suddenly shouted, and I practically bit my tongue off. There was a dark figure standing at the edge of the soccer field. It was Drew! He was wearing a hoodie to hide his face, which I thought was really clever.

Suddenly the Detention Club hollered as they charged out of the woods at the thief, waving their hockey sticks like flyswatters as they raced past me. Drew jumped nearly three feet off the ground. It looked like a dogfight from World War I or something, Drew running in circles as they gave chase. He broke for the woods, and the Detention Club raced after him.

“Don't let him escape!” Donnie shouted at me.

I intentionally slipped so Drew could get by me, before I got up and chased after him. Just as we'd hoped, our land-skiing abilities helped us pull away from the pack as we hurtled down the hill. I could hear the rest of the Detention Club shouting behind me, and it sounded like they'd stopped running. I glanced back and saw Donnie and Sally dragging their heavy hockey sticks on the ground.

“Get him, Pete!” Hank shouted. He was huffing and puffing.

I focused on my land-skiing technique, weaving expertly around the trees.

“You're gaining on him!” Trent shouted.

“Go, Peter!” Sally's fading voice called out to me.

I smiled to myself—I was amazing everyone with my land-skiing! I could hear breaking branches, and the occasional “Oof” behind me as the Detention Club struggled to catch up to us. I made a mental note to teach them how to land-ski in the future.

By the time we reached the bottom of the hill, I was now an arm's length away from Drew, and I made a dramatic lunge for him, grabbing hold of the hood before I let it tug out of my hand. I let myself tumble in a heap on the leafy floor and smiled as Drew kept booking it around the corner. A moment later the others crashed through the line of branches into the clearing, and I forced myself to stop giggling.

“Where is he?” Donnie shouted.

Sally had her hockey stick held out in front of her as she charged forward and nearly jabbed me point-blank in the face.

“What happened, Peter? You were right on top of him!” Trent said.

“The thief got away,” I said quickly, pretending to breathe heavily even though land-skiing, if you have good form like I do, doesn't really tire you out all that much.

At this point everyone started spazzing out and slamming their hockey sticks against trees because they were so upset. Sally hit hers on a tree near me and I got doused with rainwater.

“Could you stop doing that, please?” I asked her, but she ignored me, and kept swinging away at the trunk.

“I can't believe we lost the thief,” Hugh said.

“And the thief has seen us all, so now he'll target us more,” Trent added.

“We're all in serious danger!” Donnie said, kinda wigging out.

“I can't believe we didn't catch the thief,” Sally said. “After all this work! You have all these complicated plans, Peter, and they always fall through.”

“But we've gotten closer,” I said.

“No, you're bad luck,” Sally said, then looked down at her feet and groaned. “And now I've ruined my white shoes!”

“Okay, so you're definitely not the thief, but your ideas for catching the real thief stink,” Donnie said to me. “No more wasting our time listening to your stupid ideas.”

Even though this was different from when Drew had said it, given that I'd bungled this plan on purpose, it still hurt. I should have felt happy that things had worked out, but I recognized the expression on everyone's faces—it was the look they used to give me before all of this started. I was merely back to square one.

They left me standing there.

I watched them disappear up the hill. When they were the size of ants, I finally turned around and headed over to Brook Street. I was supposed to stop at Drew's to tell him how things went, but instead I headed straight home. My parents and Sunny were waiting for me in the kitchen. Sunny had a big grin on her face, which I knew from experience meant something really bad was about to happen to me, and I cringed. Dad pointed at the seat in front of him. “Sit.” What now, I wondered?

On the table were five pieces of paper. Each one was for a different class, but they all said pretty much the same thing—I was failing all my classes. Here's what one of them looked like:

“What have you been doing during study time?” Mom asked.

“I d'no,” I said.

She threw her hands up in the air and went upstairs. Dad took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “Your mother is very upset—we're both very upset. When you got that fourteen percent on the quiz, we thought it was just a one-time thing—maybe you overslept that day—but to see that you're failing
all
of your classes? This is just the start of middle school! What is going wrong? Why are you getting such bad grades?”

“I've been doing a new kind of studying that's eventually going to revolutionize the way we study. I can't take notes as fast as everyone else, so I've been taking digital pictures of the blackboards and studying them before tests. In theory it's so much faster.”

“What on earth are you talking about?”

“I'll show you,” I said, and led him up to the office. I opened up the folder on the screen and showed him the pics. That they were so meticulously organized kinda felt impressive, and for a second I was expecting to get congratulated for how clever I was. I looked up at him and he was shaking his head. “The only problem is your camera's not nice enough, so I couldn't actually read the notes. See? It's not my fault I have bad grades—you need a newer camera.”

“You can't take shortcuts like this,” he said. “Why didn't you come to us if you had problems?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe this is our fault,” Dad said.

“I appreciate your having an open mind about this,” I said quickly. “Um, can I go now?”

“Sit down!” he snapped. He shook his head. “I suppose you're under a lot of pressure. We want you to do as well as Sunny, but your sister does awfully well. Is that hard for you?”

I blushed.

“No, I'm just different from her.”

“But you're a bright boy, you're just as bright as she is,” he said. “Let me see your notebooks.”

We went to my bedroom. I didn't want him to see the notebooks, because I knew there wasn't really anything in them. I prayed as he looked through them that some magical elf had filled them up with good notes while I was sleeping the night before. Of course I didn't really believe it was possible, but that didn't stop me from praying. “Please help me, magical elf,” I whispered, but when Dad opened the notebooks they were all mostly empty.

“You haven't taken notes all semester!” he wailed.

“Let's not forget that a big reason for that is because I thought you had a halfway decent digital camera. And frankly, I'm a little disappointed that you aren't noticing that I didn't get a progress report from T.A.G. class,” I said, and he groaned. “Relax, Pops, here—look at this one.”

I handed over my inventor's notebook. He flipped through the pages and I was positive that seeing how the thing was practically full would make him feel a little less frustrated. Instead he waved the notebook at me.

“This is the problem,” he said. “You've been daydreaming all semester!”

“Dad, I know it's hard to believe because it hasn't happened yet, but I'm going to be a major inventor someday,” I said.

“You aren't responsible enough to be in that class right now,” he said, and I gulped. “Until you bring your grades up, you can't participate in T.A.G. class.”

“I already haven't even gone in a month because of detention,” I pointed out. “I'm going to have to make my prototype without Ms. Schoonmaker's help!”

“I mean you can't waste any more time working on your inventions—you can't participate in that inventors' fair, either.”

My stomach shriveled into itself.

“But—”

“No buts about it. Not anymore. I need you to buckle down and do well in school. Maybe in the spring you can rejoin the T.A.G. program,” he said. At this point Sunny and Mom were standing in the doorway. “If your sister can find time to study hard and still work on her inventions, so can you. Right, Sunny?”

“Right,” she said quietly. Strangely, she didn't have that evil smile on her face and almost looked like she felt bad for me, even.

After Dad left, I closed my bedroom door. I very quietly picked up the phone and called Drew. I explained what had just happened “Maybe it's finally time we consider running away,” I said.

Drew didn't say anything for a couple of seconds.

“What you need to do is win that inventors' fair on Tuesday,” he finally said.

“Didn't you hear what I just said? My parents said I can't do it anymore until I pull my grades up.”

“Look, your parents are all about results, right? Sunny wins all those medals and plaques and the talent show every year—you just need to win the inventors' fair to get back in their good graces. But also by winning you'll probably get a free pass for the semester since they can't flunk out the school's representative for the National Young Inventors' Competition, and on top of that we'll finally become the kings of the school again. Do you see? By winning the fair, you can kill three birds with one stone, like you say.”

“It's two, but it's not possible anyway—I haven't been able to go to T.A.G. class in a month, remember? I don't even have a prototype prepared.”

“You can do it, Peter,” he said. “And I'll help you—together we can come up with the winning entry. If we're both thinking outside the box, we'll set a record for being the furthest away from one, probably.”

“I don't know if it's possible,” I said, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized Drew was right. What choice did we have at this point? Besides, Dad had pounded into my head for years how important it is to stick to your strengths. Like when Mom would tell him to do the dishes for a change, he'd say, “We have to stick to our strengths, honey. Mine's mowing the lawn.” My strength, I remembered, was being an inventor. Since Drew's not a mind reader, he didn't know that I'd just come to this conclusion and figured I still needed convincing.

“Remember what you told me?” he said. “Alexander Graham Bell took a thousand tries before he finally invented the microwave.”

“It was Edison, and he invented the lightbulb,” I corrected him.