Free The Detention Club by David Yoo Page A

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.
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œActually, I’m Street Magic’s Assistant,” Drew clarified. “Peter’s the real Street Magic.”
    â€œThanks for clearing that up for everyone,” I whispered.
    â€œYou’re welcome!”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œGross,” I muttered, before heading up the stairs.
    In math class Mrs. Ryder announced that we had a pop quiz.
    â€œBut you didn’t tell us there was going to be a quiz,” I cried.
    â€œHence the term ‘ pop quiz,’” Mrs. Ryder said.
    â€œYou’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.
    â€œYou 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