The Detention Club (2 page)

I
WENT UP TO MY BEDROOM
after breakfast to start brainstorming inventions. I had a couple unused notebooks from elementary school (they were unused because I was the second-smartest student in my grade and so I didn't need them) and I picked out one to be my official inventions notebook. The smartest kid, in case you're curious, was Carson Santiago, aka the Human Calculator—that's his nickname because he's good at math and always lugs around this huge scientific calculator everywhere he goes. I've always tried to correct everyone by telling them that, technically, his nickname should actually be “The Human Who Owns a Calculator,” but you just can't change nicknames once they're established, even if they're incredibly inaccurate.

I took out a pen and wrote the inventions notebook on the front of it in big blocky letters and then turned to the first page. No ideas magically entered my brain, so I reread Ms. Schoonmaker's letter. We were supposed to come up with two types of inventions—environmental and fun inventions. I thought, what's the most enjoyable, fun thing in the world? The answer was obvious.

Cats.

And what was it everyone loves so much about cats? That they're little, and soft. So how could I improve on the current form of household cat? The answer came to me the moment I thought up the question, and it made me feel dizzy with excitement.

Make them
smaller
.

I then spent a couple of minutes drawing really tiny cats the size of a coffee mug. Then I drew coffee mugs next to them to prove how tiny they were. But that's when reality set in. How could I possibly make cats smaller? It was pretty obvious that, as smart as I was, this idea was way out of my league, but then a couple of seconds later I realized that there
was
a way. My dad always says that sometimes it's hard to see things that are too obvious. One time, to get me and my best friend, Drew, to stop playing video games all day, he hid a broken bike reflector in the backyard and had us look for it, and we searched for over an hour before giving up and heading back in to play more video games. The point, however, was that it turned out my dad had simply put the reflector right on the railing of the deck in plain sight.

I needed a cat to test out the idea, though, and unfortunately my dad's allergic, so we're not allowed to own any. Drew, however, has one, so I picked up the phone and started dialing.

“Newmark residence,” Drew said.

“It's me. I have a question for you, but before I ask it, I have another question—can you keep an open mind when I ask you my main question in a couple of seconds?”

“I guess.”

“Okay, then,” I said, and took a deep breath. “How would you feel if—and there's no guarantee this would actually happen—Fluffy died during an experiment that had the chance to make the world a better place for everyone?”

Drew gasped into the receiver.

“That would crush me!” Drew said, then I heard him put the phone down and shout, “Fluffy? Where are you?”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” I muttered. “Well, what if I signed a written contract that said if your cat died during some experiments, I'd totally buy you a new, even better cat, would that make you happy?”

“Pete, you're scaring me,” he said. “What the heck are you talking about?”

Sunny's bedroom door opened, and I whispered into the receiver, “I can't say right now. I'll come over.”

“Why can't you just tell me now?”

“Because these walls have ears!” I shouted, but then I heard her talking to Mom downstairs.

“Well, today's Counting Day, anyway,” Drew said.

Drew was right! We'd been going crazy all summer waiting for Counting Day to come, and I guess I got so excited about the letter that morning that I forgot all about it.

“I'll see you in ten minutes,” I said, and hung up.

I rolled up the notebook and wedged it into my back pocket, then headed downstairs. Sunny was in the living room with my mom, practicing the flute. She'd been practicing a couple of hours every day all summer, when she wasn't studying for the SATs, which she's not even going to take for three more years. Mom's a nurse, and when she's home from work she usually sits there while Sunny practices, holding a metronome in her lap, which is this little box that keeps the beat (it's not much of an invention, really—basically it's a ticking clock that can't tell time) and nods along as Sunny plays the same stupid piece over and over.

“Where are you going?” Mom asked.

“I'm going to work on some inventions over at Drew's house,” I said.

Sunny kept playing, but I could tell she was listening because her eyebrows got all scrunched up, as if she was mad at her sheet music.

“That's great, sweetie!” Mom said. “You've already started a notebook?”

“You might as well book a flight down to DC in the spring so you can see me win the contest.”

Sunny blew too hard into her flute and it made an awful squeak, and I made a big show by covering my ears. “I've known about the theme for this year's T.A.G. class since the spring,” she said. “I have a whole notebook full of ideas already.”

My stomach dropped.

“I'm sure your ideas are wonderful, Peter,” Mom said.

Drew's house is a five-minute walk away, at the other end of Brook Street. We met on the bus ride home after the first day of fourth grade. I had gone over to Drew's house, and he had this huge box full of Matchbox cars on the shelf behind his desk. Even though he no longer played with them, he still collected them, and he was embarrassed when I saw them—but then I brought him over to my house and showed him my stamp collection, my marble collection, and my big bag full of twist ties that I collect every week after my mom gets groceries. I couldn't care less about stamps, and I don't even know how to play with marbles—Sunny just had a bunch of them that she lost interest in and I inherited the collection.

It turned out we're both really into collecting things, and in school this was a huge advantage. For two straight years our class won the Campbell's Soups label contest, which is this annual event to raise money for the homeless. The reason our class won was because me and Drew worked together like an assembly line, steaming the labels off of every can in our kitchen pantries in order for the labels to come off perfectly, with no rips. This annoyed my parents because they had to deal with months of Russian-roulette dinners since they had no idea what was in any of the now unlabeled cans.

“Okay, looks like we're having balsamic chicken and”—Mom would open a tin can and sigh—”pumpkin-pie filling for dinner.”

“I hate you, Son,” Dad would say.

Every day at recess Drew and I would go about collecting something, anything, just to be the best at it. By the end of recess everyone was obsessed with trying to collect it, too. One day it would be those white pebbles over by the tire swings. Another day it would be strips of bark off the dogwood trees lining the main entrance (the principal wasn't thrilled with that one). Drew and I collected a pile of acorns one recess that would have made any squirrel jealous.

For two years that's the main thing me and Drew did when we hung out—we collected stuff. And for the entire summer before sixth grade we'd been collecting just one thing: mica. Mica is that shiny, glasslike flaky stuff that you can find on boulders in the woods. It's really brittle and cool to look at, and once I peeled off my first piece, I knew I had to have more. Drew did, too. Back in the spring me and Drew realized that all the boulders behind his house are covered with the stuff, so we started collecting it, and we brought some pieces on the last day of school to show our classmates, and everyone agreed to have a contest to see who could collect the most over the summer. Drew and I made a vow to not count the collection until the end of the summer so it would be a huge surprise to us when we finally tallied the numbers.

I made the final turn onto the stretch of Brook Street with Drew's house on it. He was waiting for me out on his front stoop, and waved when he saw me.

“What's in your back pocket?” he asked.

“Which pocket?” I asked, as if I didn't know there was a gigantic notebook sticking out of it.

He rolled his eyes.

“Your back right pocket.”

“Why, that would be my right butt cheek,” I said, and we both laughed.

“Did you just make that up?” he asked.

“Yup! Now ask me what's in my left back pocket,” I said.

“But I already know the answer, Pete.”

“No, you don't,” I said, but Drew didn't believe me. “Come on, just ask me.”

“Fine, what's in your left back pocket?”

“Some lint.”

Drew looked at me.

“That's not funny,” he said.

“Oh, and my left butt cheek!” I shouted, and we howled like insane wolves.

“You should write that one down in your notebook,” he said.

I took it out and patted the cover a couple of times. “No, I can't. This is a
special
notebook.”

“What's it for?”

“My secret inventions,” I said, and Drew's eyes widened.

“Does this have to do with killing my cat?” he whispered.

I nodded really seriously.

“I thought so,” Drew said, looking behind him at the big bay window. “My mom might be listening. Let's continue this conversation in privacy, up at Corbett Canyon.”

That's one other thing Drew and I have in common: We're both incredibly suspicious of other people, usually for no good reason.

C
ORBETT
C
ANYON IS WHAT WE CALL
the tree house in the back of Drew's house. It's the name that was on one of the bottles of wine my parents received at their holiday party last winter, and I just liked the classy sound of it. The tree house isn't a traditional tree house, but an old storage shed that used to be in Drew's backyard. When his parents got divorced, his dad, before moving out, got a couple of his air-force buddies to help him hoist the storage shed up into a tree because he'd always promised to build his son a tree house. It worked out well that he never got around to it, because I doubt any tree house he made would have been as nice as the storage shed; it's got a roof with shingles and everything. We keep two beach chairs in it and a metal safe that we store important stuff in. The only bad part about it is that before it became a tree house, it was where Mr. Newmark stored his lawn mower, so there's a permanent smell of gasoline that's seeped into the wood over the years, but your nose gets used to the stench after you hang out in it for a couple of minutes.

I explained the letter to Drew.

“So what's the big invention?” he asked.

I explained my mini cats idea.

“My favorite time with Fluffy was when she was a kitten,” Drew admitted.

“See? All cat owners probably say that. And isn't it a shame you can't always have your cat in the size you enjoy her the most?

“Oh, okay, I'm seeing it! God, you're smart.”

“You'd think it would get old hearing people say that all the time, but I have to say, not really.”

“But how would you make Fluffy smaller?”

“Easy. All we have to do is this simple procedure—I hate to even call it that, really—where we make a tiny incision into Fluffy's back and take out most of her spinal cord.”

Drew stared at me for a couple of seconds.

“That's your idea?” he finally said.

At first I felt mad that this noninventor would even think to question my idea, but then I reminded myself that not all of us have vision.

“Think about it—the spinal cord is the reason why cats are as big as they are.”

“I'm not sure that would work, though.”

“Well, being an inventor's all about taking risks.”

“But she's my cat, so
you're
not taking a risk.”

“But I am, I really like Fluffy,” I said, but this didn't convince him so I added, “and I'm willing to risk our relationship, too, that's how confident I am this idea works.”

“I'd never allow it, but it doesn't even matter, you wouldn't be able to perform the surgery. You hate the sight of blood, remember?”

“Only my own,” I sniffed.

“Honestly, do you really think you could take a scalpel to a cat?”

I thought about it for a minute.

“I was kinda hoping you'd be up for the job, buddy,” I finally said. “Otherwise I won't be able to share the patent with you.”

“There has to be another way.”

I sighed.

“Honestly, Drew, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed in you.”

Nothing I said could guilt him into agreeing to operate on his own cat, though, so we just sat there for a few minutes, trying to think of less gory ways to shrink cats, but nothing came to us. It didn't matter—just sitting right next to our collection of mica made us both want to get on with the official count, so we switched gears and proceeded with Counting Day. Drew took out his clipboard and pen, and I opened up the safe and carefully pulled out the old green canvas bag his dad let him have a long time ago.

“Are you scared about going to Fenwick Middle?” Drew asked as we started carefully taking out the pieces and lining them up in rows of ten.

“Why would I be scared?” I asked. “Drew, look at all this mica around us. We had half this number of pieces at the beginning of summer. We're the best collectors in our grade, remember?”

“But half the kids are from Hemenway Elementary across town, and we don't know any of them. And there's going to be all those older kids. Remember those guys who chased us on their bikes at the beginning of summer?”

“Relax. Once we win the mica contest, it'll make us the new kings of the middle school, and everyone from Hemenway will worship us, and then on top of that, with me in T.A.G., we'll be liked by everyone else in no time.”

“Plus, your sister's the queen of the school, so that should help,” he added.

“Sunny and I hate each other, remember?” I said.

“Well, it never hurts to be related to the queen of the school.”

“You're probably right,” I admitted. “But it doesn't matter. Middle school's going to be exactly like elementary school. It's just a different building, and there will be some older kids. No big deal.”

We finished laying out the lines of mica pieces and Drew started counting them, doing the math on his clipboard. I rocked back and forth on my knees, waiting for the final tally. When he was done, he put down the clipboard and pretended to frown.

“Hit me with it,” I said.

“It's official,” Drew shouted. “We're the greatest collectors of mica in the history of mankind! We have two hundred forty pieces!”

We both fell back onto our backs and just laughed our heads off for a couple of minutes. Apparently, getting really shocking news makes you do that.

“Life can't get much better than this,” Drew finally said, sitting back up.

“You can say that again.”

“Life can't get much better than this.”

I frowned at him.

“I didn't actually mean to say it again.”

“I know, but it felt so good to say it the first time,” he replied.

“Hey, whatever makes you happy,” I said, patting my best pal on the back.