The Pun Detective Heads to His Headquarters! (Part 2)

I hung my head. It was fourth period, language arts class, and by now the fact that I hadn’t seen hide or hair of grandpa or Lily was, if the places my mind was wandering were any indication, beginning to get to me in a serious way. The suspense was driving me nuts. I knew they were going to appear, probably as if out of thin air, to drag me even deeper into the magical world of puns, and I wished they’d just get it over with already. I wasn’t sure how many more waking nightmares I could take on a Tuesday afternoon.

A voice from the front of the classroom (I stood all the way at the back, or near it, usually) broke me out of my haze. It was a voice that projected effortlessly, authoritative but not overbearing. The kind of voice that makes you trust a person instantly. It was the voice of my language arts teacher, Ms. Flamberge, and it said:

“In the back, pay attention!”

Oops. She noticed me zoning out.

Or so I thought.

The hurried and perturbed “S-sorry!” that came from my left a moment afterwards said otherwise.

It was Six-Eyed Sheldon, shaking off a hypnopompic grog. He was standing right next to me, in the back row of the class, and Ms. Flamberge was apparently talking to him, not me. And I was lucky for that. Getting called out in class now would just make this awful situation even worse. I’d been hearing whispers all day about the incident in the cafeteria yesterday. Well, more like suppressed giggles. Miraculously, I hadn’t been called out about it yet, but it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, I could kiss what little social standing I had to begin with goodbye. I probably wasn’t going to live this down for the rest of high school. Maybe even longer. I could picture it now: the same stifled laughter haunting me for the rest of my life, right until the very end, there in the background even as they lowered my casket into my grave.

“Here lies Wallace Wade,” my tombstone would read. “Who… pff… who… opffftfftftf… Who got so scared just asking out a girl that he wet his pants and passed out! Ahahahahaha! What a loser!”

Hey, the whole wetting myself and passing out thing happened later! That wasn’t part of it at all, stupid tombstone. And wait a minute. I didn’t even wet myself. I just accidentally sat in pee. Jesus. If whoever was writing the epitaphs in my daydreams was going to embellish things, would it have killed them to make me look better and not worse?

Oh wait. I was the one writing them. Shoot.

I was dreading lunch. It didn’t matter what they were serving today; all that was on the menu for me was a heaping helping of humiliation. If I could help it, I wouldn’t even eat in the cafeteria. That wasn’t the sort of spotlight I ever wanted to be in.

At the moment though, Sheldon was the one sweating in the spotlight. Literally. Sweat was beading up on him like he was a popsicle on a July afternoon, and his face was flushing faster than a brand-new toilet. The fact that it was Ms. Flamberge’s class he’d got caught sleeping in made matters worse for him, I suspected. Sheldon may have had a girlfriend, but he was still among the 50% of guys in our class who were crushing hard on Ms. Flamberge. By the way, I didn’t count myself among those numbers, but I, uh… didn’t blame them either.

Sheldon rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as fast as he could and fumbled around in his backpack for his textbook. As much as the guy got on my nerves, I had to admit what he’d been doing was impressive. I didn’t know too many people who could fall asleep standing up. In fact, I didn’t know anyone else who could.

To make matters weirder, this wasn’t like Sheldon at all. Sheldon had always been a straight-A student. More than that, he was a teacher’s pet. He sat in the front row of class every day back when we had chairs, knew the answer to every question in the book (even the extra practice problems at the end), and generally acted like he thought school was just about the most important thing in the world. He also genuinely thought he was better than everyone else and was more than a little difficult to get along with.

Well, all that changed not too long ago. It all started about two weeks ago, around a week after school started. That day, everything was different about Sheldon when I walked into fourth period language arts, which was the only class I had with Sheldon cause he was in the smart classes for every other subject. And he would have been in honors LA too if it weren’t for a single unfortunate comma splice on a test in the April of ninth grade, a blunder that I and the rest of that class didn’t hear the end of for weeks.

Anyway, I walked into class that day only to find Sheldon standing in the back row. That was enough to stop me in my tracks, especially since he’d chosen the usually empty space next to mine.

But that wasn’t all. A sight far more surprising greeted me that morning.

Six-Eyed Sheldon — the honors student, the one who had won perfect attendance awards every year since kindergarten, the guy who cried when he got an A- on a test, the one who brought all his books to school every day, all crammed into a malformed YanSport that was bursting at the seams and that looked like it weighed about three tons — was sleeping.

In class.

Well, a few minutes before class technically. But still.

And things had been that way ever since. Forget conscious. Sheldon, once the perfect student, would now show up to class barely cognizant, stand in the back row with all the kids who didn’t care a lick about being there but were too dumb or scared to skip (and with me — I cared at least a little bit, but I was never any good at school, and so I naturally gravitated toward the back of the class).

And it kept happening every day. As soon as he got to class, he would fall fast asleep, almost instantly.

I got the impression Ms. Flamberge knew it too. Usually, she didn’t tolerate any fooling around in her class and wouldn’t hesitate to enact her signature penalty, known and feared far and wide, on anyone she caught talking, texting, snoozing, or doing anything else she deemed “not conducive to a productive classroom environment.” Her words, not mine. Go figure.

Ms. Flamberge’s signature penalty, by the way, was to run laps around the building while holding a cinder block. And yes, it was as excruciating as it sounds.

What ever happened to standing out in the hall? That’s what I wanted to know.

Still, if she did know that Sheldon had been dozing off where he stood, Ms. Flameberge hadn’t said anything about it these past few weeks. She might’ve been going easy on him since he was usually such a teacher’s pet. That was what I thought anyway. Apparently sucking up works. Who would’ve guessed?

Well, it looked like she’d had enough.

I looked to my left. Sheldon was quickly devolving into an apologetic amoeba, a single cell designed to repeat over and over how sorry he was for having fallen asleep while he should have been taking notes diligently and paying his utmost attention.

Cry me a river.

Ms. Flamberge wasn’t buying the apology. “If you’re so sorry about your behavior,” she said, “then do something to change it. I don’t know what circumstances you might be dealing with in other classes or outside of school, and I’m here to help if you need it, but my class is not a free nap period. Remember that, Sheldon.”

“Aw, go easy on him,” said a kid near the front row, one of the biggest clowns in class. “Sleeping in class while standing up is pretty hard to pull off. It’s impressive!”

“Oh?” said Ms. Flamberge. “And you would know?”

“Yeah, I’ve tried it a bunch of times. Never could manage to do it, so I gave up. That’s why I started standing in the front row again.”

The class laughed at that and started talking, settling broadly on our lack of desks and chairs as its topic.

Eventually, someone said something like, “You don’t know how hard we have it, Ms. Flamberge. You always had desks when you were in school.”

Ms. Flamberge shook her head. “Believe it or not,” she said. “I didn’t. In fact, I was in just about the same boat as you all when I was a student here. Oh, right. Did you all know I went to this school too? Well, I suppose now you do.”

The end of The Pun Detective Heads to His Headquarters! (Part 2)!
To be continued in Part 3!