Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 10)

The last light of the day squeezing over the horizon. The dusk breeze cooling the light sheen of sweat off my body.

I knew how I should have felt, but I didn’t feel any of it.

I was floating, feet off the ground, feet dangling. Like I was suspended by invisible wires. Below, the same scene played out, the scene I had seen a million other times in a million other dreams. On a bridge that was short but also long depending on how you looked at it, young me made to hit the mystery girl he was with, smack center on that spiky, lopsided Australia birthmark of hers.

Current me was doing anything but paying attention. Currently, I was trying to see what shapes I could find in the clouds that still lingered in the darkening sky. One of them looked kind of like a llama. The rest were making the entire exercise way more difficult than it needed to be by not looking like much of anything at all. Stupid clouds.

Why was I paying attention to clouds while I was having an out-of-body experience? Simple. When you see the same thing enough times, it starts to lose its luster, and truth be told, I had never taken much of a shine to this dream. Probably because it was the one I always had whenever my syncope problem struck yet again.

But even still, no matter how I tried to pry my eyes away, the sluggish slow motion of the dream always brought them back, again and again, to kid me and his companion. And even still, no matter how drawn I was to the sight, I never lasted long before snapping awake. Not in that blood-red world. Not in that faroff shard of a past I couldn’t remember. Not in that memory of a friend I couldn’t place.

#

Not once in my life had I ever wished for Six-Eyed Sheldon to be the first thing I saw when I woke up.

But you can’t always get what you want.

Old bedsprings dug holes in my back as I sat up. I had no clue where I was. All I knew was four things.

One: tiny little dimples pocked the white ceiling, lending it the appearance of a lumpy pudding, which meant I was at school.

Two: curtains cordoned off where I was from the rest of the room.

Three: this mattress felt like it was stuffed with old slinkies hardened with rust.

And four: Sheldon was asleep in a bed next to mine.

All of which meant I was probably…

...still dreaming, I hoped. I let myself fall back to bed, only to hit the back of my head — nearly in the same place that had knocked me out — on a rock. Only it wasn’t a rock. It was a pillow.

Unbearable beds? Zero privacy? That settled it. I was in the school nurse’s office. I wished I was still dreaming. I was going to have backaches for a week after this.

I checked my phone. It was Monday. Right in the middle of fourth period — Ms. F’s language arts class — in fact. I had been out all weekend.

I realized I had about a few dozen unread messages. I flicked through them. They were from Tuesday, Lily, Greg, and Evan. From what I gathered, they had all gotten together after I passed out together and brought me here. Luckily for me, the school nurse, Ms. Lax, was a workaholic who practically lived in the nurse’s office, and was still here at the time, even though it was late on a Friday. Apparently she’d come in over the weekend to check on me too.

I’d have to thank them as soon as I could, which, when it came to Ms. Lax, was right now.

I cupped my hands around my mouth and called, “Thanks, Ms. Lax,” loud enough to carry past the curtains, but not so loud that I’d wake Sheldon.

A hand wrapped in a blue latex medical glove wriggled past a part in the curtains and extended its pointer finger. “Oh, Wallace? So you’re up. Sleep well?”

As well as someone who passed out from a bump on the head can sleep, yeah, thanks for asking. I just said, “Yep.” No need to be rude after all. Ms. Lax and I were well acquainted thanks to my syncope episodes, and I found myself in her nurse’s office way more often than I would’ve liked. On this very bed in fact. I still hadn’t worked up enough morbid curiosity to ask what that crusty yellow stain on the sheets was, but I was unfortunately well acquainted with it too. Given its place near the bottom right of the pillow, I hoped it was drool.

“How many times have I told you?” came Ms. Lax’s voice from beyond the curtain. “Call me Ms. Laura.”

That was half of Ms. Lax’s schtick: she wanted all her patients to call her by her first name. I figured the general student body would’ve been more receptive to the idea if it weren’t for the other half of her schtick: never showing her face in public. All anyone had ever seen of her was her gloved right hand, poking through curtains.

“Sure thing…”

The hand sprang into a thumbs up.

“...Ms. Lax.”

And then withered into a limp, open-palmed “what gives?” gesture before sliding back through the space in the curtain.

I fell back onto the bed again, making sure to cup my hands behind my head to brace for the impact of the pillow.

Just like always, missing two days of my life made my stomach sink like a funnel of sand, but I didn’t hold it against Tuesday for smacking me a new one. I decided not to blame her for what she’d done. It was my fault for purposely pushing her buttons.

I got up to leave, but, just my luck, Sheldon snapped awake.

“Uggghhhh… my aching back,” he whined.

“Welcome to the club.”

“Ugh, Wallace,” he said when he noticed me. “My aching eyes and ears.”

Gee, thanks. After that totally unnecessary comment, he got up himself. “Well, what are you in for?”

“In for? Come on, it’s not like this is detention. I just passed out and was brought here. I’m more curious about you. You sick or something?” It was a guess, but I didn’t think it was a half-bad one. This new sleepy Sheldon was still maintaining his perfect attendance, even if he dozed off at about the same time during fourth period every day. If he was sick, I was sure he’d still come to school and not care a single lick about infecting anyone else.

“Are you blind? Do I look sick?”

“Uh, yeah. Kinda.” Sheldon looked bad. And I mean bad. Heavy bags drooped from his lower eyelids, sagging like they were full of damp sand. Even for someone who had just woken up, his movements were exceptionally sluggish. He didn’t even have the energy to hound me about my answers in class like he was doing the other day. He had either gotten over it, or he was too tired to even try. My money was on the latter. I sure wasn’t raising any complaints, but even still, it was a little unnerving to see the spirit so thoroughly sucked out of him.

All of this from a guy who always exuded that I’m-in-bed-at-9:30-every-night-and-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn vibe. What the hack had happened to him? I had to admit, as much as I didn’t like Sheldon, I was kind of worried about him.

When I didn’t say anything, Sheldon continued. “I’m just a little tired is all. I haven’t been sleeping well lately.” He sat back down and stretched back out on the bed, relief written on his face. “All I need is another quick cat nap and I’ll be… right back…”

Before he could finish, he sunk into a deep sleep. It wasn’t until then that the reality of the situation really sunk in for me. Sliding into one of these beds was like trying to get comfy in a ball pit full of bear traps. If Sheldon could just slip away into sleep like that, something had to be seriously wrong.

“Really,” I muttered under my breath, “who can just fall asleep anywhere like that? He must be in desperate need of a…”

Wait. Hang on. What? What?? WHAT??

What was it that Sheldon had called his bouts of sleep?

Cat naps.

Cat.

Naps.

That was when it hit me. Like a ton of feathers. Or bricks. Same weight, after all. But that wasn’t the point here.

The point was I was wrong. I had been all week, ever since the beginning. Ever since Monty and Tuesday and Wednesley had given us this case, Lily and I had been going about it all wrong. It was no wonder we’d been put through the feline-finding wringer with absolutely nothing to show for it. The way we’d approached our search up until now was all backwards, all turned around and screwed up. And it was all my fault.

I was Wallace Wade, BORED. Badass Office of the Radioactive Equivoque Detectives. Key word: “equivoque” (not “badass,” unfortunately). A pun detective, essentially.

And that’s where I’d made my first mistake. This case was never about Teabone. It was never about finding a lost cat.

It was about solving a pun.

A pun was what had done this. A pun was to blame. Our true target was no cat. It was the wordplay that had gotten Wednesley and Teabone and the rest into this mess to begin with.

Much as I hated to take his advice, or his word on anything, grandpa had said it himself: “Solve the puns and you solve the problems.”

All that time we’d spent scouring the streets, searching every last nook, double checking every cranny? It might as well have been time spent chasing our own tails. Deep down, I knew: the only way to solve this thing was to figure out the pun behind it all.

And now, I realized, I had a lead.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 10)!
To be continued in Part 11!