The Detention Club Read online

  “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.

  “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.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE 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 nec
klaces. 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.

  Chapter Thirteen

  SO 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.