Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 1)

Ever get the feeling that the world is conspiring against you? After the day I’d had, I sure did. But if there was any doubt left, what happened after school blowtorched it clean into fiery oblivion.

It was late afternoon, right after school had let out — before the final bell had even stopped ringing, in fact. I was still standing in class, packing up, letting my aching arms rest, and contemplating why making us use our textbooks for an hour straight when we didn’t have desks to put them on and instead had to hold them for the entire period wasn’t a violation of the Geneva Conventions. For anyone who doesn’t know, the weight of a high school textbook correlates inversely with the value of the material contained therein. This is why most of them are so heavy.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text. It was from grandpa. Now that school was over for the day, he wanted me to head straight to HQ, he said, where I was to meet up with Lily.

That was quick, I thought. I’d only been out of class for roughly two and a half seconds. Grandpa sure didn’t spare any time seeing to it that I was on the job. But apparently, there was no time to waste. If grandpa’s message was to be believed, we already had our first pun case on our hands. Something to do with the karate club.

The other thing grandpa didn’t spare, I found out, was emojis. His text was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with a bunch of 😉 (stop), entire rows of 😗 (please stop), more 😎 (probably meant to evoke the shades he wore all day and night in real life, but still annoying, so stop) than I’d ever before seen in a single place , a couple 🐬 (why? stop), and a sickly green 🤢. Placed directly after my name no less.

Putting aside for a moment how offensive it was to tell your own grandson he made you want to hurl, this was a greater concentrated burst of emojis than I thought I had ever seen in my life. Why did old people always go this overboard with the emojis? Just because you have hundreds of options at your ancient fingertips doesn’t mean you have to make it your mission to use as many of them as possible. It was like they were trying to be irritating.

In grandpa’s case, that was probably true. Either that, or he was doing it to make fun of me. Probably both.

Whatever. That wasn’t the point. The point was that there was something wrong at the karate club, and a pun was probably behind it. Truth be told, I had forgotten we even had a karate club at school. Now if only I, and everyone else, could forget about our new little pun detective club, life would truly be swell.

My spirits swelled with the thought, soared high amidst blissfully billowing clouds, silky sky, and the clean whistle of a wind hung with cool notes of frost and softened by the light of the sun. Down below those heavens, on a blessed green earth, was human society: people, cities, countries, cultures joined hand in metaphorical hand in the utopic harmony of eternal world peace.

Just as I was imagining how amazing the world could be if I wasn’t a RED, my phone buzzed again, dragging me right back down to the mess called reality.

This time, the text was from Lily.

Unlike grandpa’s, her message was short and to the point, straightforward and unlaced with unnecessary bits. I figured she got all the frills she needed from the fancy lace on her clothes, and maybe that was why her message style was so terse. Or maybe it was because she was a robot still learning how to be human. Whatever the reason, I appreciated the lack of incomprehensible emojis.

What I didn’t appreciate was what the text actually said. Which was something to the effect of, “Get to HQ now, jackass.” She worded it a lot more politely of course. I'm paraphrasing. But that’s what she meant.

Geez, Lily. I’ve only been out of class for — I checked my bare wrist — four and a half seconds now. Give me a minute, why don’t you?

I expected this kind of behavior from grandpa, mostly because I knew he was completely incapable of emitting even the slightest shiver of reason, or empathy for that matter. Common sense and care for his fellow man were foreign concepts to him too. But Lily and I were partners, right? I wished we were on the same wavelength here. Or that she’d at least give me time for a bathroom break.

Or time to grab a bite before we got to work, especially considering I’d gone without food for over 24 hours now. I decided a pit stop was in order, so on my way back to my new HQ in the Old Building, I made a quick detour to the West Wing, where the school store and vending machines were. I considered chancing things at the cafeteria for a second — it was usually open for about half an hour after school ended — but decided against it. My embarrassing mishap there yesterday felt like a lifetime ago for me, but judging by the whispers I was still hearing as I skulked, starved and annoyed, down to the West Wing, it was still fresh on the mind for everyone else.

I waited seconds that felt like hours for the slowest vending machine in history to drop my sandwich into its chute. The sandwiches from this vending machine tended, in my experience, to be about as dry and crusty as the surface of the moon, and I wagered they were probably about as old too. On top of that, they were seasoned with a curious substance that I could only assume was all-natural human eye crud harvested directly from the source. Which is to say that they were godawful. But even that couldn’t stop my mouth from watering. Hunger truly is the best spice. As soon as the clingwrapped meal hit metal, my hand was in the machine’s maw, pawing it out.

Before I could get my belated lunch in my hands, and then into my mouth and finally into my stomach, though, I got a text. Another one from Lily. Come to think of it, how had she even gotten my number? I thought. But the answer was obvious: grandpa.

“Are you coming?” it read.

“Jesus, lady. Give me a second, will you?”

“I have,” said Lily. “293 of them to be exact.”

If my heart hadn’t stopped for a split second, it probably would have rocketed up my esophagus and straight out of my mouth.

There was Lily, right behind me — literally right behind me, inches away — right where she definitely hadn’t been seconds ago.

Look. Lily. This whole silent approach thing? Not working out. And neither will this partner thing if you keep sneaking up on me like that.

That was what I wanted to say. Instead, I just heaved, whiteknuckling my knees for support, trying to catch the breath that the shock of Lily’s latest little sneakup may as well have dropkicked out of me.

“Well? Are you coming?” Lily repeated, wholly unfazed by any of this, seemingly.

“Y-yeah,” I gasped, “just let me grab m— whoa!”

Before I could even get so much as a complaint out of my mouth, Lily snatched my hand and dragged me off. Fast. Too fast for my last, desperate claw at the sandwich still in the vending machine chute to serve as anything but a sad reminder that fate had, it seemed, only one thing and one thing alone in store for me, and it started with a “d” and ended with an “isappointment.”

Was I ever going to get to eat anything? Ever again?

Farewell, my beloved sandwich. I hardly knew ye.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 1)!
To be continued in Part 2!