Sunday Drive

Middle School, My Dear Watson -- Part Two

(below is the second installment in my new middle grade book about Sherlock Holmes in middle school. You can read Chapter One here. Please let me know what you think, and if you have any appropriately aged smart kids — I’m talking to you, Doug Lanzo — please share it with them and give me their critiques. Next installment here.)

ELEMENTARY MIDDLE SCHOOL, MY DEAR WATSON — continued

CHAPTER TWO

Let me tell you something about myself. I almost always wear underwear. I even wear underwear under my pajamas at night. I just like the way underwear feels. So most of the time, if you were trying to guess who wasn’t wearing underwear in a room and you guessed me, you’d be wrong.

But that day you’d be right.

As Holmes started walking to the back of the classroom, I was thinking Please don’t sit next to me or everyone will know I’m not wearing underwear! But I was also thinking How does he know I’m not wearing underwear?!

I looked over at Mary. She frowned at me, like she felt sorry. There was an empty desk between her and me, and then another empty desk between her and Jim Moriarty, who is the smartest kid in class. I tried to send mental signals to this weird skinny boy in the gravy boat hat, the one who was coming closer and closer: Don’t sit next to me! Sit next to Moriarty! He’s popular enough to handle it! I’m just a new kid, too!

And the weirdest thing is, as Holmes got within five feet of me, it was like he did understand what I was thinking, because he suddenly stopped and turned his head, like he was going to sit next to Jim.

But then he looked at Jim and his lip kind of curled, like he’d smelled something bad. And the next thing I knew he was sitting next to me.

Every kid in the room just about died laughing.

Ms. Hudson got the class to calm down pretty fast, but I knew that for the rest of the day people were going to be asking me if I was wearing underwear, and some of the wilder guys would probably even try to pull my pants down to see. I just hoped they wouldn’t try it in some public place.

And I had just one person to thank for this. My new classmate, Sherlock Holmes.

I gave him a mean look. Holmes sort of whispered under his breath, “Sorry about that, old bean.”  It didn’t exactly make me feel any better.

We ate lunch together anyway. Like I said, we were the new kids. Holmes was a weirdo. I was a weirdo and I didn’t wear underwear. It was like we were toxic.

It was pizza day. Cafeteria pizza isn’t like real pizza, but it’s better than what they usually serve, by a lot. Holmes was eating his with a knife and fork. We didn’t talk for a while. I just sat there watching him cut his pizza into little bites and force them onto his fork (which he held upside down, like royalty). His table manners were amazing.  After a while I said, “How did you know?”

He shrugged. “Nine parts observation, one part deduction. I saw the girl, Mary Marston. Scrupulously clean clothing, but a little threadbare. An intricately woven braid in her hair, but it was lopsided. These things were done with a vast amount of care and affection, but probably without a lot of money or skill. Judging from the braid, I’d say she’s being raised by a single father.”

I nodded. Mary’s Dad doesn’t have much more than a fuzz of hair on his head, so it’s not  exactly surprising he makes Mary’s braids lopsided, but it’s nice that he tries. He probably follows a Youtube video or something.

“So,” continued Holmes, “We’re looking at a home headed by a father who is scrupulously attentive but lacking what we’ll call domestic expertise. Such a parent would no doubt insist that his daughter eat breakfast before school. But he would not have the skill to make Eggs Benedict or Oatmeal or anything similarly wholesome. That pointed to something pre-made, something portable. She probably ate it on the bus, on the way to school, judging from the large smear on her cheek. If the smear had been purple, I might have thought she’d had toast with jam for breakfast. But the smear was brown. Chocolate. Thus: Pop-Tart.”

“You only looked at her for a second,” I said. “You saw all that?”

“Everybody sees all that,” corrected Holmes. “The trick is to train yourself to notice it.”

Then we stopped talking for a second. Holmes got busy eating pizza. And I said, quietly, “I wasn’t talking about the Pop-Tart, anyway.”

“I know,” said Holmes.

“Then how…?”

Holmes gestured at my right hip. My jeans had pulled down – this is a side effect of my limp – and my shirt had pulled up because I was sitting. There was a big bare gap on my hip. It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t wearing underwear. “Oh,” I said.

“Yes,” said Holmes. “Some things are easier to notice than others.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said, as I yanked up my pants, “My Mom forgot to do the wash, and then dumped everything in at the last minute this morning without even checking, so I couldn’t even wear dirty –”

“You don’t need to explain,” said Holmes. “Everyone goes commando sometime.”

I was not comforted.

Then it got quiet again. Holmes dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a napkin and pushed his tray away. “You’re attracted to Mary Marston,” he said, out of nowhere.

“What?” I said.

“Romantically,” he said. “Sexually.”

“I KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN!” I yelled.

“Moderate your tone,” said Holmes. “People are staring.” I didn’t bother telling him that people were staring anyway. He was still wearing that stupid hat. So I just said, quietly, “No, I’m not.”

“Have it your way,” he said, with a little shrug.  “But it might interest you to know that she reciprocates.”

“What’s that mean?”

“She likes you back.”

Huh. “What makes you say that?”

He shrugged again. “Some things are so obvious that you don’t need to be a detective to see them.”

“And that’s what you are,” I asked, “a detective?”

He looked up from his tray. He looked me straight in the eye. He said coldly, confidently, proudly, “I am the world’s first and only Middle School consulting detective.”

I invited him to my house to hang out after school.

CHAPTER THREE

The Case of the Missing Math Tests

Everybody knew who stole the math tests. It was obvious.

Holmes and I are in Ms. Hudson’s home room, but we also have Ms. Hudson for math. Ms. Hudson teaches the most advanced math class. I’m pretty good at math and I really try to get good grades in that class. Holmes is about as good as me, but he doesn’t seem to care about grades very much. I have to care about grades because I want to go to med school someday.

The best math student is Jim Moriarty. The second best is Shonda Bridgeman. She’s also pretty much the only competition Jim has for the title of “Smartest Kid in Class.” The difference between them is that Jim is a stone-cold genius at math. He’s like… lazy, and I guess he likes letting the rest of us know it. He doesn’t have to work at it all. Sometimes it looks like he’s not even paying attention, and then he’ll raise his hand and correct Ms. Hudson when she’s doing something wrong.

Shonda has to work at it. She’s a genius at writing and spelling, and she plays piano with the city orchestra, but math does not come naturally to her at all. But she’s not the kind of person who likes to take second place in anything, so she works and works at it, and always volunteers to do extra work, and is always raising her hand and asking questions. It’s pretty annoying, actually.

I’d gotten to know Sherlock pretty well by the time the math test happened. He was definitely a weird guy, but it was a good weird, an interesting weird. He said he was training his brain to become the finest machine for crime detection in the universe.

“Why?” I asked him one time.

“Why not?” he replied. I didn’t have an answer for that.

He knew all kinds of facts about all kinds of things. He noticed things: which kid needed a new pair of shoes; which teacher was trying to quit drinking coffee; which cafeteria lady had lost her sense of smell. He said he’d made a study of all the different kinds of chewing gum on the market and could identify any gum by looking at a dried up wad stuck to the sidewalk.

“Why?” I asked again.

“You never know,” replied Holmes, “when information like that could be useful.”

“You’re completely right,” I said, “I’ll definitely never know that.” But, as time would tell, I was wrong about that, actually.

I didn’t really get to see Holmes put his crime detection machine to work until the math tests went missing.

It was the first math test of the year. I think Ms. Hudson was just gauging us to see where we were at, and to get us used to studying and taking tests again, after the summer break. The specific subject was exponents.

Ms. Hudson had passed the test paper out to everyone. Then we were all supposed to fill it out as quickly as possible. As soon as we were done, we could go to the auditorium, where the 8^th Grade was having a talent show. The entire school was going to be there.

Jim finished his test almost immediately. He basically finished it before I was done with the first question. Then he took his paper to the front, dropped it in the box on Ms. Hudson’s desk, and slowly walked out of the room. Lazy.

One by one after that other kids finished their tests and walked out. I was finished and ready to leave myself, but Holmes signaled for me to stay. He wanted to wait for Shonda.

Shonda, as I’ve mentioned, had to work at math. And normally she worked her behind off. But there was a problem. Earlier in the week, our history teacher, Mr. Gladstone, had mentioned that Shonda might like an old TV mini-series called “I, Claudius” about ancient Rome. He mentioned it in a kind of off-hand way. He wasn’t ordering her to watch it or anything, he just knew that Shonda is a fiend for history, and it just occurred to him that she’d like it.

Here's the problem: Shonda went home and looked up “I, Claudius” on her computer. And she started watching it. And did I mention Shonda is a fiend for history? Shonda didn’t like “I, Claudius” – she loved it. She binge-watched it. She watched it once and then she watched it again. She read the book the mini-series was based on while she was watching the series. She was obsessed.

The end result was that by the time Friday rolled around, not only had Shonda not studied for the math test, she basically hadn’t even slept for a week, and she was staring down at her test paper, bleary-eyed and almost crying.

After a while Ms. Hudson cleared her throat and said, “It’s time, Shonda.” Shonda nodded like a doomed convict going to the electric chair and she put her paper in the box. Me and Holmes followed her.

“Why did we wait for Shonda?” I whispered to Holmes, as we walked to the assembly.

“Just a habit, old boy,” whispered Holmes. “When you have a chance to see something unusual, it often pays to look at it.”

The assembly was fun. The 8^th graders are pretty talented, and even the ones who aren’t talented were fun to watch. This one girl, Quanita, did a roller skating exhibition to the tune of the song “Muscle” by Diana Ross, but Quanita didn’t know how to stop her roller skates, so the whole exhibition was Quanita skating across the stage, slamming into the wall, then getting up and doing it again.

The whole school was there – teachers, administrators, and students – except for Mrs. Pinchuk, one of the 6^th grade home room teachers, who had broken both her legs in a car crash on the second day of school and was going to be gone for at least a month.  

Everyone was really enjoying the show except for Shonda. Now that the reality of the situation had sunk in – she knew that the test was over and that there was nothing she could do to fix it – she was actually, really, starting to cry. It was kind of heartbreaking (even if she is annoying). After a while she whispered into Ms. Hudson’s ear. Ms. Hudson nodded, and Shonda left the auditorium. When she came back, maybe twenty minutes later, her eyes were still red but she looked calmer, and more at peace with herself.

The only other person to leave the assembly the entire time was Jim Moriarty, who asked to be excused right after Shonda came back, but he was only gone for like a minute.

Anyway, the explosion happened when the assembly was over and Ms. Hudson went back to her classroom. The box on her desk was empty. The math tests were gone.

Like I said, we all knew who did it. It was obvious. Only two people had left the assembly the entire time, Shonda and Jim, and Jim had no reason to want the test to disappear. But Shonda… well, if we had to take the test again on Monday that gave her the whole weekend to study. She could pretend like this whole “I, Claudius” thing never happened.

The whole class was brought back to Ms. Hudson’s room. She asked if anyone knew what had happened to the test. But she was really asking only one person.

Shonda’s story was: she’d gone to the girls bathroom, sat on a toilet, and cried as hard as she could. Then when she couldn’t cry anymore, she’d washed her face and gone back to the auditorium.

The only other person who’d left was Jim, and his story was even simpler: he’d gone to the boys bathroom, he’d peed, he’d washed his hands, he’d come back.

Now Shonda was really crying, and she was standing in the corner of the room sobbing to herself because no one believed her. Meanwhile the teachers and Dr. Lestrade, the principal, were searching everywhere for the missing tests. They couldn’t have gone far. When you leave the auditorium, first you pass the girls bathroom, then the boys bathroom, then the teachers lounge where the teachers have their cubbyholes to hold their personal belongings, and where they drink coffee (except for Ms. Bulak, who’s trying to quit) and complain about the students. Then you get to Ms. Hudson’s room, and that’s the end of the hall.

But everyone already knew what had happened to those tests. Shonda must’ve flushed them. Holmes wasn’t so sure. “Watson,” he said (he’d started calling me Watson), “You use the bathrooms at this school, don’t you?”

I nodded. I knew that Holmes didn’t use the school bathrooms. A lot of kids didn’t.

“What would you say is the flushing power of the toilets?”

I thought about that. The toilets were old, they only had a little puddle of water at the bottom of them. It was hard to flush even a Kleenex down one. “They’re pretty weak,” I admitted.

“And we’re supposed to believe that Shonda tore up and flushed 26 math tests – of two pages each, making 52 pages total – down those weak toilets in fifteen or twenty minutes?”

“It’s definitely a stretch,” I said, “But it’s going to be pretty tough to disprove.” Anyway, it was the only solution that made any sense. The tests weren’t anywhere. The teachers had searched all the desks, all the lockers, anywhere they could have been. They even looked in the teachers lounge, under the rug, behind the couch – anywhere someone could have stashed the tests. They were just gone.

“Let’s talk to Shonda,” suggested Holmes.

I gave him a look. I don’t like to talk to Shonda when she isn’t the most hated person in school – but right now she definitely was. She was still standing in the corner crying. Even her friends were keeping their distance. “Come now, Watson,” continued Holmes. “You’re going to be a doctor, yes? Well, who knows what kind of doctor you’ll be. If you become a psychiatrist, it will be useful if you have some experience talking to diseased minds.”

“Like Shonda,” I said.

“Precisely.”

So we walked over to Shonda. On the other side of the room I saw Jim Moriarty watching us – he smirked and said something to Mary Marston, but I guess she didn’t hear him because she just watched us walk and frowned.

“It’ll be okay, Shonda,” I said, trying to be doctorly, comforting.

But she was not in the mood to be comforted. She was hysterical. “Is this going to go on my permanent record?” she sobbed. “Is this going to keep me out of Yale?”

Like I said, she’s annoying. Most people would be upset that everyone thought they were a thief. Shonda was just worried about her college applications. After a little while we got her to calm down and talk sense. “I didn’t take them,” she said. “I never would.”

“Because it’d be wrong?” suggested Holmes.

“Because I’d get caught,” answered Shonda.

“That’s just as good,” said Holmes.

At that point Ms .Hudson walked over with Dr. Lestrade. They both had very serious looks on their faces. “Excuse us, boys. We need to talk to Shonda alone,” said Ms. Hudson. Shonda looked like she was going to have a heart attack.

“No need, Ms. Hudson,” said Holmes. Then he raised his voice, so that the whole class could hear. “You’re going to ask her where the tests are. I can assure you she doesn’t know.” Everyone was looking at us now.

“Listen, you –” said Dr. Lestrade. His big red face was getting bigger and redder than usual – I think he was a P.E. teacher before he was a principal -- but Holmes just ignored him. He raised his voice even louder and kept talking. “Only two people in this room know the whereabouts of those test papers. I happen to be one of them, and I’ll be happy to tell you whenever you’d like.”

Then he turned and looked straight across the room at Jim Moriarty. “Or would you like to tell them, Jim?”

Come back next week for the solution to “The Case of the Missing Math Tests.”