Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 15)

“With the catnapping complete,” Sheldon continued, “I was finally able to cat nap to my heart’s content. It wasn’t easy, and I won’t say it didn’t come at the cost of bits and pieces of my scholastic dignity — you, Wallace, should be all too familiar with what I mean, loathe as I am to admit — but in the end, it was all worth it. Finally, finally, I can supply my brain the sleep it needs to stay tip top while still staying up late to get my studying in. And it’s all thanks to the magic of the catnap. All I have to do is nap through language arts every day, and I’m good to go for hours more. I can go for miles and miles before I need to sleep. So to speak.”

“Even if it means missing out on language arts?”

“So be it! English can… uh… can…”

“Get stuffed?” I suggested.

“Exactly. Get stuffed. Really, an A- for a simple comma splice!? How dare they humiliate me like that?”

Seriously, dude? You’re still bitter about that? That single accidental comma splice back in 9th grade was what got Sheldon lumped in with me and rest of the dumb class instead of getting into honors English like he was supposed to. At this point, I would’ve guessed he’d let bygones be bygones. Then again, this was Sheldon we were talking about. I wasn’t surprised he’d been harboring a whole boatload of anger over it this entire time.

“But what about Ms. F?” I said. “Imagine what she thinks of you now that you’re the worst student in her class.”

Sheldon’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t play dumb. We all know you have a massive crush—”

“AAAAAaand, uh, th-that’s the story,” Sheldon interrupted. “Hahahaha. Any questions?”

So that was it. Putting aside the fact that Wednesley was apparently taking Teabone for walks on the daily like she was a dog (she did kind of act like a dog, I had to admit — wagging tail and all, and she wasn’t even afraid of the vacuum cleaner), I guessed that this was what they meant when they talked about taking things to their logical extreme.

“Oh come on, Wallace. Don’t give me that look. I did what I had to do,” said Sheldon. “My actions have made nothing but perfect sense. It’s not as if I’ve been abusing Teabone. On the contrary, in fact. See? Litterbox there, toys over there, all the food and water she could want.”

It was true. Teabone had everything a cat could want, everything a cat could ever need, all right here in this room. She had it made here, even.

“Teabone’s absence may be hitting poor Wednesley hard, sure, but sometimes sacrifices have to be made. I haven’t hurt a single hair on anyone’s head. All I’ve hurt were feelings, and those were made to be hurt sometimes. I’m sure even you agree, Wallace. See? I’ve even explained everything to you, and we’re here having a perfectly calm conversation about it. Everything I’ve done up until right this very moment has been perfectly correct. Perfectly sensible.”

No, it hasn’t, I thought. None of it has.

I was wrong. This was no logical extreme. There was no logic to this, no reason. Sheldon’s was nothing more than a scatterbrained scheme disguised as the errand of logic. I may have been an idiot, a weirdo, socially inept, a total loser, nearly an outcast, and a failure at life. And I may not have been able to get good grades like Sheldon. But even I wasn’t this dumb. Sheldon was a fool, plain and simple.

Plus, Sheldon was wrong. This was no calm conversation. Not by a longshot. The longer Sheldon kept talking, the madder I got. I could practically feel my blood about to boil. My fists were balled tight, jammed into my pockets, to keep myself from doing something my brain knew I shouldn’t, but that the rest of me was itching to. For the first time in my life, I really, truly wanted to clock someone. Even if violence wasn’t my thing. Catnapping? In cold fur? This was too far, Sheldon. How could you…?

Then Sheldon did something I never thought he’d do. Something no one else in his situation would even think to do. He moved to the bed, where Teabone was sprawled on her back, scooped her into his arms, and handed her to me…

…or rather, he would have handed her to me if she hadn’t started hissing up a storm the second he brought her close to me. He ended up transferring her into Lily’s arms, where she purred, content and carefree as ever. The final nail in the coffin of my non-starter career as the Cat Whisperer.

“Well, that’s that then,” Sheldon said. He peeled off both pairs of glasses and started rubbing the lenses down with a silken cleaner. Without those glasses, he was practically blind, minus the “practically” part. It was like he cared so little about what was happening that he didn’t even think he needed to see it all transpire. Like he didn’t give half a damn that he’d just been exposed for the cat burglar he was. “You two are playing afterschool detectives, right? That’s the word been going around at school anyway. Well, I can’t fathom why, and I have no idea how you found me out, but there’s no use putting up a fight now. You have what you came here for. So scram.”

I was flabbergasted. Was he seriously not going to put up even the slightest sliver of a fight? We’d made it all the way to the climax, but it felt like we were skipping over a step, cranking erect a big, bony middle finger in the face of traditional story structure. It wasn’t like this was a fictional story or anything — wasn’t like it was some kind of web novel — but for some reason I just couldn’t shake the sinking suspicion that we were somehow flying in the face of tradition. The feeling that Lily and me were getting let off too easy, like we had somehow won by default without even trying. “You mean… you’re just going to let us whisker— I mean whisk her away like that?”

Sheldon slipped his glasses back on, shrugged, smiled joylessly. “Easy come, easy go. Not much I can do now that I’ve been found out either. I can find some other way to get enough sleep. No, scratch that. I will find some other way. I have to. Or else my dream of getting into an Ivy League is as good as broken. But it’s not…”

I completed the sentence in my head before Sheldon could even finish speaking it: broken yet.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Kidnapped Kitten! (Part 15)!
To be continued in Part 16!