The Detention Club (8 page)

W
HEN
I
GOT TO
D
REW'S HOUSE
, I told him what happened, and he patted me on the back. “Well, on the plus side, that shirt's going to last you a lot longer, since the collar's all stretched out,” he said.

“Now's not really the time to be making lemonade,” I said.

I explained what the Sweet brothers had said during detention, and we decided that we had no choice but to take martial-arts lessons immediately. The trick was going to be convincing our parents to let us learn how to become deadly weapons. I gave my parents a long spiel over dinner about how I wanted to be there for them when they got old, which meant I'd need to learn how to defend myself in the present. I thought the speech went pretty well, but at the end of it my parents were frowning.

“I don't want you using that stuff on your classmates. It can only lead to trouble.”

“But I need it to be able to defend myself!”

“Violence never solves anything, Son,” Dad said.

“What's the point of wars, then?” I asked. “We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the American Revolution.”

“That's different,” he said, but he couldn't elaborate so I knew I was right.

I made my eyes look real big and wet, as if I was a cartoon deer or something.

“I just want to have the skills so I can defend myself,” I said in as pitiful a voice as possible. I even sniffled a little. “Who's going to take care of you when you're really old, if I'm not around?”

“Is anyone picking on you?” Mom asked. “Tell me who it is, and I'll call their folks right this second and put a stop to it.”

I knew she was trying to be nice, so I didn't have the heart to explain to her that this was probably the worst idea in the history of parenting.

“I just don't think taking martial-arts lessons is a good idea,” Dad added. “You have all this aggression inside you.”

“No, I don't!” I shouted, feeling really angry all of a sudden.

“Remember when we went to that park one time, and you kicked that dog as it ran by?” my dad asked.

“I thought it was going to bite me!”

“End of discussion, Peter,” my mom said. “Honey, I have an idea. Why don't you try writing a letter to whoever is bothering you? I'm sure they'd understand.”

“That's a wonderful idea,” I said. “I don't know why I didn't think of it first, to just put it into words, of course . . .”

“That's the spirit,” Mom said, pumping her fist.

“I think he's being sarcastic, honey,” Dad said to her.

Even though Drew and I didn't have any classes with each other, I told my parents I was doing a project with him, and they let me go over to his house after dinner. I figured it wasn't lying because, technically, we were working on a project together: a project to save our own lives. We tried to work on his mom, thinking maybe if we got her on our side, she could convince my parents to let me take martial-arts lessons, but she was no better, because she's a dental assistant.

“Just win over your enemies with smiles, that's the best defense, boys,” she suggested. “Because as everyone knows, smiling is infectious. Peter, do you need any floss?”

I sighed.

“No thanks, Mrs. N. I still haven't quite finished the container you gave me last week.”

Drew and I went outside and started pacing back and forth under Corbett Canyon. I kicked at a tall weed sticking up out of the grass, but since I don't know martial arts, I missed.

We climbed up into the tree house. The moon was full, making the inside of the tree house glow a dull blue. I put on my nighttime reading helmet but didn't bother turning on the headlamp. The helmet is made of hard green plastic, with leather straps. My mom was so excited when she got me this ugly thing, but I have to admit it served its purpose—every weekend this past summer, I read comics late at night with it on.

“I guess I'm going to have to start wearing this stupid helmet to school for protection,” I said.

“We're dead meat,” Drew said. “And there's so much I never got to do in my life . . . I never did get to ride in a helicopter, for instance.”

“Maybe we can teach ourselves martial arts,” I said. “If we put our heads together we can come up with our own form of fighting. We can call it Peter Drew Fu or something.”

“Or Drew Peter Fu,” Drew suggested.

“No offense, but that has a terrible ring to it,” I said.

That weekend we invented our own form of martial arts. We realized we had to use our main strengths (namely, lack of size and slightly-above-average speed) to our advantage. To be honest, it was pretty basic, consisting of only two moves:

Move #1. Shoving someone in the back before they have a chance to realize you're even there, followed by

Move #2. Running away.

We focused our training mostly on the second move, “land-skiing,” all afternoon. Behind Drew's backyard is a thick forest full of evergreens that severely slopes all the way down to the main road. Land-skiing is this thing I came up with where you just start running as fast as you can down the steep hill, and because the ground is covered with slippery pine needles you eventually start gliding in your sneakers. I got the idea because of the way I'd flown down the stairs so fast after detention, escaping the Sweet brothers. The key to land-skiing is you have to jump to the side in order to weave around the trees, and we quickly became experts at weaving down the hill like this.

It's really fun (and incredibly dangerous).

On Monday it was time to test out what we'd learned. In the lobby before homeroom we saw the Sweet brothers in the corner, and they looked bigger than I'd remembered. The thought of actually trying to shove them didn't seem so bright an idea anymore. And we couldn't really use our land-skiing abilities, because the hallways were flat. “We could run away,” Drew suggested. “We could start land-skiing right now, and by nightfall I bet we could hit the New Hampshire border.”

Instead we thought outside the box and came up with an alternate solution, using the school's circular shape to our advantage: Basically, after every class I'd head to the left no matter what to get to my next class, even if the next class was closer by heading to the right. Then, if I spotted the Sweet brothers coming my way, I'd simply change directions, allowing me to avoid the Sweet brothers altogether. Drew used the same strategy.

It wasn't a perfect solution, though. The main problem was that it sometimes meant we had to do up to two laps around and we'd end up late for class (and really sweaty, too), but we figured it was worth not having to get bullied by the Sweet brothers. All day long we didn't run into them at all, thanks to our system.

Another good thing was that for the first time I noticed that we weren't the only kids being bullied by the Sweet brothers. It turned out just about everyone else was scared of them, too. Before English class I saw the Sweet brothers terrorize some seventh-grade girls from behind by shouting in their ears, and the two girls ran away, squealing. After math class I saw Carson get shoved into the lockers by Hank Sweet, and before social studies I was standing in the doorway and saw Trent changing directions right before he got to our class because the Sweet brothers were approaching him.

Apparently we weren't the only ones who had figured out this strategy.

Y
OU KNOW, AT SOME POINT
we're going to get unlucky and run right into them,” Drew said on our walk home from school the next day.

“I know,” I agreed. “Which is why we need to get going with the plan to trick everyone into thinking we're popular in every other town besides Fenwick.”

We sat in Corbett Canyon making up our new identities: By day, we were the mysteriously isolated Peter and Drew, but outside of school we were the most popular kids in the neighboring town of Halliston. On weekends we went to birthday parties with all the cool kids at Halliston Middle and simply had no time to attend parties in Fenwick.

“But how can we prove we go to parties in Halliston?” I asked Drew.

“What about digital pictures?”

I put a hand on Drew's shoulder.

“There aren't actually any parties we're going to, remember?” I said real slowly.

“I know. I mean we could make fake pictures.”

A good chill ran through me, as opposed to the bad kind you get right before you throw up.

“Drew, I have good news,” I said. “You've officially gotten out of the box.”

He beamed.

“Really?”

“You are box free, my friend,” I said, and we high-fived. “Okay, so here's the deal. Tomorrow after school I'll borrow my dad's digital camera and we'll take a bunch of fake action shots of us hanging out at parties. What I need you to do is pick up some cheap party decorations so we can make the inside of the tree house look like someone's birthday party. Oh, and you need to order a birthday cake at Stop & Shop, which we'll pick up tomorrow. It should read, ‘Happy Birthday, Emma!' because there aren't any Emmas in our grade.”

“How much does a birthday cake cost?” Drew asked.

“Does it really matter?” I asked him.

“Kinda. I'm the one paying.”

“You're wrong. There's no price to thinking outside the box.”

“Okay, honestly I'm still not solid about this box thing.”

“Forget the box! Just make sure you order the cake tonight. I have to go home for dinner. I'll bring the camera with me to school so we can come straight here afterward.”

We shook on it.

All day long in classes the next day I was itching for school to be over so we could take our fake party pics. Students furiously scribbled notes as usual, but I couldn't concentrate. I would try to take notes for a minute, but my mind would wander. At the end of the day I ran into Sunny in the hall, and she asked me if I was ready to discuss my ideas in T.A.G. class.

“It's not until Wednesday,” I corrected Sunny, patting her on the head. “You must be pretty high-strung these days, huh?”

“Today
is
Wednesday, genius,” she said.

“Crap.”

I took off to find Drew the second the bell rang. He was waiting for me by the entrance. “I forgot I have T.A.G. class now, I'll meet you at Corbett Canyon afterward.”

I showed up late for class and already the room reeked of espresso, as Ms. Schoonmaker walked around the table. “As you're focusing on building your prototypes throughout the semester, you're also going to have to prepare your pitch describing the invention at the fair. So for today's class, let's go around and have you each describe one of your invention ideas to the class, and the rest of us will offer our two cents about it.”

I glanced over at the cubbies on the shelves and groaned. Almost everyone had a big box or bag of some sort in it, along with pieces of wood, a hammer, an industrial-sized bottle of Elmer's glue, and a ruler. My cubby, of course, was empty. Sunny's yellow duffel bag was so full, it stuck halfway out of her cubby!

“Now, why don't you all take out a piece of paper and start listing the pros and cons of your invention, while I run down to the teachers' lounge for a refill,” she said, waving her empty espresso cup (wafting the smelly fumes) as she left the room.

Everyone took out their notebooks. I was frazzled that I'd almost missed class, and that I seemed to be the only student who hadn't already started working on a prototype, but when I opened up my inventor's notebook I relaxed a little, remembering that I'd filled in a third of it with really good ideas.

When Ms. Schoonmaker returned, Carson started describing his idea—a calculator holder on his belt buckle, which we all quickly shot down because he'd be the only one to use it. “But more people would want to buy calculators if they had a place to wear it,” he said in defense.

“That might be what some call a niche product—meaning, it's for a very specific consumer. We want to think broader,” Ms. Schoonmaker said.

The good news is Sunny's idea didn't seem that promising, either. Her idea was to have glass pots for plants, so you could see the roots and stuff, like an ant farm. And there'd be a thermometer on the side of the pot, to tell you the temperature of the soil.

“Then if a plant wasn't doing well, we'd know it's because the soil's too cold,” Sunny said. “Or if the soil's too dry, or overwatered.”

“Very interesting,” Ms. Schoonmaker said.

“Unfortunately it's still a niche product, just like Carson's calculator holster. Only plants that can afford health care would be able to buy it,” I said. Everyone stared at me. “That sounded funnier in my head.”

“Peter's right, though,” Graham countered. “An ant farm is cool because you get to watch them build societies and stuff. A plant's roots, on the other hand, would barely move. It would be boring to watch.”

Sunny's cheeks looked like they were boiling.

“It often takes several attempts before you hit on the right invention, or even perfect a promising one. It took Thomas Edison a thousand tries before he got the lightbulb to work, and he never thought of them as failures. I believe he said something to the effect that the lightbulb was an invention with a thousand steps,” Ms. Schoonmaker said. She looked at me. “How about you, Peter?”

“So, let's see—so many ideas to choose from, oh, here's one. I have an idea for something I call the Urban Sound Machine. It's for city people like Carson.”

“City people?” he said.

“Remember when you moved here from New York and you hated how quiet it was?” I asked Carson, and he nodded suspiciously. “Well, this would be a sound machine to help city people sleep when they're in quieter areas. For example, there would be a setting on the dial that makes it sound like a construction worker's outside your window, working a drill all night long.”

“Have you ever even been to a city?” Carson asked me.

I ignored him and described the other settings, but everyone frowned.

“The home-invasion sound would give older people heart attacks,” Sunny said.

“No, it wouldn't—it's the quiet that city people hate, isn't that true, Carson?”

“Let's bring it down a notch, Peter,” Ms. Schoonmaker said.

“That was just when I first moved here,” Carson said. “Now when I visit my uncle in the Bronx, I can't stand how loud it is.”

Sunny pretended to look really thoughtful by twisting her mouth and tapping the table with her pencil. “Maybe this is more of a gag gift, Peter?”

“It's not a gag gift!” I shouted.

The late bell rang.

“Look!” I said, pointing at Carson. “Everyone jumped a little in their seats when the bell rang except him.”

Ms. Schoonmaker put down her mini cup of espresso.

“Peter, what did I say about shouting in class? Okay, good session, everybody, being able to really think about and critique each other's inventions helps develop the creative mind. For next time, I want you to write a one-page description of the invention you want to focus on this semester, and try to think ahead of time about why people would possibly say no to it.”

Sunny was smiling at me as we left the library.

“Urban sound machine?” she said. “What were you thinking?”

“Hey, look,” I said, pointing at the spider plant in the corner. “I think that leaf just moved . . . how fascinating.”

It was starting to get dark when I got outside, and we hadn't even taken our fake party pics yet! I booked it all the way to Drew's house, climbed up to the tree house, and groaned. He hadn't decorated the inside so it would resemble a real party, like I'd instructed him.

“What the heck have you been doing all afternoon?” I asked.

“I ate a snack inside,” he said, and I scowled at him. “What? That takes time.”

“Where's the cake?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“Drew, it's getting dark out!”

“Wouldn't the party be at night?”

“I guess you're right. Come on, let's go get it and then set things up.”

I had to borrow his dad's old ten-speed, but the seat was so high that I could barely pedal, so I ended up sort of rowing with my legs. We finally got to Stop & Shop and picked up the birthday cake. When I saw it, I started feeling better—it was perfect! It read in cursive, “Happy Birthday, Emma!” across the top with blue icing. Drew had five bucks left over, so we visited the florist next to the bakery and bought a red rose to add to the fake decorations. We discovered that the premade bouquets had this wet green foamy square inside the pots that the flowers stuck out of, and it felt neat to poke our fingers into them. But then the florist yelled at us for ruining the bouquets and we took off before she could arrest us.

We biked back, and Drew got some birthday candles in his kitchen. We took it up to the tree house, then set up a tiny table to go with our two beach chairs inside. We positioned ourselves around the lit candles and put on big smiles as if we were having a great time watching the imaginary Emma blow out her candles. It took some practice, but we figured out eventually how to shoot it so it looked like we were at a huge party. Drew would wear a long-sleeve shirt so his elbow would be in the corner of the picture, and I'd be next to him. Then he'd change his outfit so it would look like I was standing next to someone else in the next pic.

I even convinced Drew to put on a few of Mrs. N's dresses to impersonate actual girls at the party—I made sure to only include Drew's shoulder in the shot so it looked like I was standing next to a hot girl, or at least a girl with a really hot arm. When we were done, we looked through the photos, and I had to admit they looked pretty authentic.

“Do you really think this will work?” Drew asked.

“There's nothing like cold, hard proof to convince everyone we're cool,” I said.

On Thursday morning Drew and I took out the camera in homeroom and started looking at the pics. I fake-laughed really loudly to get everyone's attention. As I'd hoped, everyone huddled around us to see what we were looking at. The plan was working!

“Oh man, that one's so embarrassing,” I said, staring at a picture of me with a big mouthful of cake, giving the photographer two thumbs-ups—a girl in a strapless red dress had her left arm draped over my shoulders.

“What are those pictures of?” Shawn asked.

“Oh, our friend Emma's birthday was on Saturday, we had no choice but to go to Emma's because she went to our birthday parties this summer, and anyway I forgot until this morning that her mom's camera was broken, so I'd let her use mine,” I explained.

“Where was the party? Why's everything made out of wood?” he asked.

Shawn was right. I looked at the pictures for the first time as if I was someone else, and it really did look like they were taken inside a tree house.

“Her parents are crazy about wood paneling,” Drew said.

“That's Emma,” I said, pointing to another picture of me standing next to Drew's shoulder, when he was wearing his mom's yellow dress. I silently prayed nobody would recognize the remarkably Texas-shaped mole on his shoulder, but otherwise Drew was so scrawny that he did make for a pretty good imitation of a girl's shoulder.

“These are action shots of when Emma blew out the candles,” I explained. “I'm laughing so hard because they were trick candles and kept relighting. It was funny because she has pretty bad asthma and was starting to hyperventilate or something.”

“Why did her mom take all these pictures of just Peter? Why wouldn't she take pictures of her own daughter blowing out the candles?"

“Um, we're family friends, we go to Maine together for a week every summer,” I said. Luckily, the bell rang and I quickly turned the camera off. “Okeydokey, time to put the party shots away.”

Everyone looked really confused. Drew sighed.

“Okay, everyone, quiet down, I have an announcement to make,” Mr. Davis said. “It seems a fair number of students have lost personal items since school started, and Principal Curtis has instructed us to remind you to keep better track of your belongings. Make a mental check before you leave each class to make sure you haven't left anything on your desks, that sort of thing.”

“Wait a sec—where's my hat?” Shawn asked, acting really panicked.

“It's on your head,” Sally said.

Shawn felt his head and sighed really loudly. Then he got that panicked look in his face again.

“Wait a sec—where's my shoes?”

Everyone laughed.

“Okay, knock it off,” Mr. Davis said, but even he was smiling.

Drew poked me in the ribs.

“You should be the one coming up with hilarious jokes like that,” he scolded me.

“I know,” I said sadly.

At the beginning of each class that morning, I showed the pics to more classmates, and the results were mixed at best. They weren't nearly as impressed as I thought they would be, but on the other hand, not a single student accused me of faking the party pics, and I figured that was better than nothing. Plus, there was an added bonus. In English class I was feeling guilty that everyone was taking notes the whole time, but then when the bell rang, Heidi suddenly realized her mechanical pencil was missing, and I think Mr. Vensel was just as bored as everyone else, because he immediately got down on his hands and knees to help her look for it. Anyway, it was this moment when it dawned on me that I could simply take secret pictures of the chalkboard instead of having to take notes! My idea was that the night before a test or something I'd simply zoom the pictures on my dad's computer and study the photographs until I learned everything. Maybe this thinking-outside-the-box thing hadn't changed our lives just yet, but it certainly had its benefits.