Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 3)

Earringguy didn’t peel his orange. He ripped it into pieces and ate it off of the skin. We ate as he talked.

“It all started at the end of last year, back when I was a junior and Tuesday here was just a sophomore. Oh yeah, I’m Monty, this is Tuesday, and the one over there on the floor is Wednesley. Anyway, last year we also had another guy in the club. His name was Theodore Thurston. Theo for short. Wednesley’s a freshman right now, so this was before he joined the club.

“Well, you probably figured this out as soon as you walked through the door, but karate’s never been the most popular club on campus.”

I refrained from telling him that I’d figured that out before we’d walked through the door, what with its location in this deserted corner of campus. Or that I only found out we had a karate club at all about 15 minutes ago.

“Truth be told,” Tuesday added, “we’re not even a real club.”

For a sliver of a second, Monty shot her a look you could sharpen a knife with.

“What?” she said. “We have to give them all the details or else they can’t help us. You know that.”

Monty sighed. “Tuesday is right. We call ourselves the karate club, but officially, as far as the school is concerned I mean, we’re not really a club. We’re more like… the karate kids. Or, uh, the karate people. Or something.”

Well, I didn’t know one way or the other whether they were the best around, but something was obviously keeping them down. Especially Wednesley, who, at the moment, seemed to be doing his best clam imitation. He was still cross legged, clamping his upper body shut with his lower. I could practically taste the scoliosis in this kid’s future. It tasted… good. Who knew the road to permanent back problems could be so tangy and refreshing?

Oh wait. That was the orange.

“The reason for that,” Monty continued, “is cause you can’t become a club at this school unless you have at least four people and the signature of one advisor. At least not officially. Not on paper. And the karate club’s never had more than three people at a time. This year it’s me, Tuesday, and Wednesley.”

“And last year it was both of you, Monty and Tuesday…” I said.

“... minus Wednesley, plus Theo Thurston,” Lily finished for me. I wanted to show them that I was listening and keeping track of the story, and I guessed Lily picked up what I was putting down. If only we could be on the same wavelength like this when it came to literally anything else. We’d probably make a great team.

“Exactly,” said Tuesday. “See, Monty? They’re pretty good.”

Now probably wasn’t the time to tell them that this was our first case ever.

“Yeah,” agreed Monty. “But we haven’t even gotten to the good parts yet. Or the bad ones.”

With that ominous statement out in the open, Monty continued: “I’ve loved karate ever since I can remember. But in all my years at this school, and even before my time, the karate club has never had enough members to be recognized officially. Basically, we’re just a group of people hanging out over a shared interest in karate.

“That’s why I had a goal — a goal to turn karate around around here. To get it recognized as an official club. One way or another, I’d do it, I always promised myself. Cross my heart, hope to die, all that. For three years, I put my all into it. Promo posters, booths on club days, demo sparring matches, exhibition matches at the talent show. You name it, we did it, all for the club. All so we could finally make karate an official thing around here. That way, it wouldn’t fade away once we graduated. Tuesday here was a huge help through all of it. She joined when I was a sophomore. We were the only ones in the club at the time. But nothing we did seemed to stick. Except us that is. Cause we were stuck.”

“Stuck in a rut…” I said.

“Stuck between a rock and a hard place…” Lily added.

“And most importantly,” said Tuesday, “stuck at three members for the longest time.”

“That’s right,” said Monty. “No matter what we did, nobody seemed to want to join us. And now that I’m a senior… well, I guess you can see that I never achieved my dream.”

He forced a laugh past a grimace. For the first time, he broke eye contact with me and Lily, his eyes darting away, more than a little pained.

It was a sad story, and a stark reminder that that was just how life went sometimes. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you just don’t make it. I knew that firsthand; after all, here I was on my first RED mission when I could have been doing literally anything else. Like sleeping. Or clipping my toenails. Or taxes. Still, Monty’s troubles far outranked mine on the woefulness scale. I could hardly even imagine being so passionate about something only to fail completely and utterly at every turn.

“Oh, come on,” said Monty. “Don’t look at us like that.”

I hadn’t realized I was looking at them like anything.

“We don’t want your pity. We want your help,” he said.

Then, all of a sudden, Monty was the one looking at us. And he was sure looking like something alright. The way he said what he said then, severe, unwavering, stuck in my mind long after the fact: “Not yet. It’s not over yet. My dream may be close to breaking, but it’s not broken yet. I’m a senior now. I have a year left to make us official. So I’m doing what I can for the club.”

If I had known what those words meant at the time, I may have been able to avert a lot of what happened next. But you know what they say about hindsight. It’s a real bitch.

“That’s right,” agreed Tuesday. “We’re all doing what we can. Besides, we didn’t call you here so we could all feel sorry together. We called you here because we have a job for you.”

It looked like it was finally time for our part in all of this. My mind bounced about the sob story we’d just been told like a superball on steroids. What could they possibly need us for? Maybe, I thought stupidly, they’d have us stand on a street corner and flip signs that read “Sign up for karate club today and receive your very own air guitar* posi-lutely F-R-E-E! *(case not included)”

Oh god, ow! I dropped my sign in my daydream and damn near took off my big toe. Of all the daydreams to wear socks with sandals in. Meanwhile, Lily was tossing her sign high in impossibly twisting arcs, twirling it like she’d been doing this for years. She probably had for all I knew.

Why oh why was it that, even lost in my own thoughts, I was still about as cool as a flaming hot garbage fire?

“Uh… got something on your mind there?” Tuesday said. “You look kinda spaced out.”

“Sorry,” I said, regaining my composure. For some reason, my big toe actually kind of hurt though. Whoever coined the phrase “mind over matter” obviously never had daydreams where he played the starring role as the butt of his own bad slapstick routines.

Compared to what came next though, none of that mattered at all.

Our actual job, what Lily and I were actually called to the karate club to do, was something so totally out there, something so completely unexpected that I could never have predicted it.

Monty, earring glinting, now on his second orange, looked straight into my eyes then and said, “We need you to find a cat.”

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 3)!
To be continued in Part 4!