Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 7)

“Wallace Wade!” Sheldon repeated, still half lodged in the bushes. “Prepare to die… of embarrassment!”

Uh. What?

“Come again?” I said. “Look, Sheldon. Have you been following us?”

“N-no! I-I mean, maybe. Yes…” Sheldon was one of the worst liars I had ever met. The quickest way to get the truth out of him was to ask, cause he couldn’t fib to save his life.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Hold it. I’m the one asking the questions here. In Horace Walpole’s 1764 gothic novel The Castle of Otranto, what falls from the sky and crushes Conrad?”

Excuse me? The gothic what now?

“Castle of Orlando? You mean Disney World?” I asked, not sure what he was on about.

But Sheldon was marching to his own drum, and he wasn’t missing a single beat. Ignoring me, he continued: “See? Knew it. Next! Daniel Defoe’s seminal 1719 novel, styled after a travelogue, follows the adventures of this character: _________.”

A blank. A bonafide blank to fill in, just like you’d find on a quiz or a test. What was I supposed to do with a blank? I just blinked.

“Aha!” said Sheldon. “Next question. Let’s get a little bit more modern with this one. Who narrates F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece The Great Gatsby?”

“Hell if I know. I’m guessing whoever planned the heist.”

Now it was Sheldon’s turn to get all confused. He looked more puzzled than a jigsaw. I couldn’t fathom why, but served him right.

“Heist? What are you talking about?”

“Y’know. The heist. The Great Gatsby? That was what that book was about right? A group of vigilante burglars pulling off a heist called The Great Gatsby in a maximum-security museum in Paris? Honestly, Sheldon. Have you even read the book?”

“Yes. I have. Last year. We were in the same language arts class. You’re the one who obviously didn’t read… Oh, forget it. See how it feels, Wallace Wade? To be put on the spot and come up short? Now shrivel up like a dried spitball and bring on the waterworks!” He snorted a leaf or two out of his flared nostrils.

Jesus, Sheldon. Make up your mind. Do you want me dried up or hung out to dry?

“Hey Lily,” I said, trying my best to ignore Sheldon, because that was really the only way to deal with him. “How come your scanners didn’t pick up Sheldon here like they did with Black Lightning?”

Lily’s eyes went a little glassy. I guessed she was scanning Sheldon. She paused a beat, and then said, “No threat detected.”

Black Lightning yawned.

Sheldon didn’t seem too happy about that. “Ugh, really? I’ve had just about enough of you guys. It was hard enough to track you down, what with you disappearing right after school every day. I’m not going to let this chance slip through my fingers. Mark my words, Wallace Wade, you will know the agony and embarrassment I felt that day when I got the wrong answer in class and was forced through the indignity of being corrected by the likes of you. I’ll make you feel the disgrace I felt a hundred fold. A shame the likes of which you can’t even imagine. A burning embarrassment that makes your face go so red they plant you in the ground and use you as a stop sign, you C-average nobody!”

Seriously? That was what he was upset at me about? I couldn’t believe this. All of this over that stupid question about Don Quixote that I just happened to guess right in Ms. Flamberge’s class. That was… carry the 72 and ½, divide by the square root of B^2-4ac… what, like three days ago? And he was still carrying a stupid grudge? I mean, sure he was a straight-A student who never got anything wrong, ever. But this was ridiculous.

I figured I might as well break the truth to him: that I had just got lucky with my guess and that smarts had absolutely nothing to do with it. I had no clue how he would take it. Maybe, just maybe, if I was lucky, it would calm him down. If I was even luckier, it would get him off my back, at least for now.

“You know, Sheldon,” I said, “the reason I got the right answer after you got the wrong one” — he looked just about ready to burst into tears when I said “you got the wrong one” — “was actually because of you. If I hadn’t seen you droop right back to sleep in class, I never would have guessed that Don Quixote was running short on sleep too. You didn’t do it on purpose, but you still really helped me out, and I never get anything like this right, in class or on homework or tests. So, uh, what I mean to say is, y’know… thanks, man.”

I decided not to add the bit about literally nobody caring that he had gotten a single random question in class wrong.

“Huh? Oh. Oh, yeah. No problem.” Somehow, my thanking him seemed to do the trick. Like the saying went: you catch more flies with honey than you do with shit. Whoever coined this iconic phrase had obviously never seen a fly in their life. Cause flies really, really like shit. But that wasn’t the point.

“Oh, yeah. That’s weird,” I said all of a sudden. I had just remembered something strange. I thought I should probably keep my big mouth shut about it, but as usual, I just couldn’t. “By the way, Sheldon. How did you even know I got the right answer in class on Tuesday? You were super asleep right after Ms. Flamberge called on you.”

It was true. Sheldon had fallen fast asleep almost instantly after incorrectly answering the question. Well, “fallen” asleep may have been stretching it, since he impressively stayed standing the entire time, stiff as a scarecrow. Goofy looking as one too, with his two pairs of glasses inching down his nose till they were trapped in a precipitous dangle.

Well, that just about did it. Did what? Did me in, that’s what. Sheldon may as well have just rolled out of a dip in the crater of an active volcano the way he started steaming at the question. I was half surprised the bush he was still standing in didn’t catch fire right then and there. And just when I had gotten him to calm down too. Just my luck. Only it wasn’t luck. It was my big mouth, striking yet again.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 7)!
To be continued in Part 8!