Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music! (Part 1)

Before I knew it, fall was in full swing. Gray sheeted the sky almost every day, and the unmistakable scent of cold had definitely infiltrated the air. One morning before school started, I was hanging out at HQ when Greg showed up.

“Hey, dude,” he said, “what are you doing?”

“Math homework.” I was hunched over, scrawling formulas I was supposed to memorize but, let’s be honest, never would. Frankly, I was paying more attention to how much pressure I was putting on the paper than to any of the answers I was putting on it. One false move and the array of shaky cardboard boxes I was still using as a makeshift desk was liable to come crumbling down, one corrugated block at a time. This stupidly fragile excuse for a desk may have been alright for standing and sipping tea at, but it sure wasn’t good for much else.

“Nice. For Mrs. Roach’s class, right? Let me copy.”

“Sure,” I said. “Once I’m done copying it.”

“Once you’re done copying it? Don’t tell me you’re…”

“Copying Evan’s homework. Bingo.”

“Dude, come on. You know you can’t 👉depend👈 on him. He does his homework while looking at his phone. None of his answers are ever even legible, let alone right. I mean, look at this thing.” He grabbed the sheet I was copying from. “It’s a scribbly mess!”

“Yeah, well at least he did it,” I said, snatching the paper back. “Which is more than you and me can say.”

“Yeah, I know, but…”

“No buts. Handing in something is better than not handing anything in at all. Even if none of the answers make any sense. By the way, the reason I didn’t do my own homework is cause I’ve been too busy with my RED stuff. What’s your excuse?”

“Too busy with work.”

“Uh huh.”

“And, uh, video games.”

“Uh huh.”

“And I just didn’t want to! Come on, what is this? What are you, the homework police?” Greg was playing with the light switch, fingering it on and off. He was probably thinking doing that would somehow fix the constant flicker. Not gonna happen, buddy. The bulb was still loose and busted. I had already gotten used to it flicking on and off all day. I hardly even noticed it now. That was why I had been too lazy to change it.

“Besides,” Greg continued, “not all of us can go on fun adventures like you, Mr. Wallace ‘I’m Dating the Hottest Girl in School’ Wade.”

I stopped scribbling, and the tip of my pencil snapped. Stupid 0.5 lead. Next time I’d make sure to grab a 0.7.

I stood up straight and sighed so hard and so deep that I bet my lungs were the size and shape of shriveled prunes by the time I was done. “Not that again,” I said. “Listen. Two things. First of all, I’m not—”

“Dating Lily. I know, dude. Believe me. I know. But not like anyone else does.”

Ever since Lily and I cracked the Teabone case, not to mention the few other minor pun-related incidents that followed, we’d become the talk of the school. Nothing new about that, really. I’d been a public laughing stock for weeks now. But now, everywhere I went, the murmur in the air had shifted from how much of an embarrassment I had made of myself to why Lily and I of all people were an item.

The answer?

We weren’t.

And we never would be.

I didn’t even have the guts to ask her out, for god’s sake.

But try getting anyone else to believe it.

In other words, I was still a laughingstock, only now add a bunch of jealous guys who were after Lily into the mix. I could practically feel the stares of hatred slithering up my back whenever I so much as walked down the hall. To make matters worse, Lily had returned to her part-time lunchroom duties now that there hadn’t been any major cases to solve, and so her fanclub of not-so-secret admirers had only grown, both in number and in how much they had it in for me. Hence, why I was spending so much more time in HQ, my safe haven.

The cherry on top of the pitiable sundae that my life had become was that, as always, Lily seemed completely oblivious to it all. Though that was probably a good thing.

“And second of all,” I said, “she’s right here.” I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder.

“Huh? Oh-oh shoot! Hey, Lily.” Greg waved feebly.

Inconspicuous as ever, Lily was standing in the corner, next to the window, leaning over a smallish table where I had put my cactus. Sometimes I wondered how she’d garnered any admirers at all, what with her uncanny tendency to go unnoticed. “Hello, Greg,” she said.

“Hey, Lily, what are you even doing anyway?” I asked. I turned toward her, making sure not to move my hand at all as I did. I was still feeling the pangs of pain from when Sheldon had slammed it with the door. Though the worst of it had mostly subsided. Now, it just felt weird. Like how a tangled slinky would have felt if it had a central nervous system, I thought.

“Showering the cactus,” she replied.

With love, right? Please say you’re not drenching the poor thing again.

“Not to worry, Boss. I am not giving it more water than it needs. I have taken a page out of your cactus care book. Multiple pages actually. To tell the truth, almost all of them.” She pointed to the trash can in the corner. Stomach sinking like a weight, I peered in. Inside were the guts of my favorite cactus care guide, a physical copy that didn’t exist anywhere online and that I knew I’d never be able to find in stores again. “I found most of the information in the book to be superfluous to the task at hand: caring for a miniature potted acanthocereus tetragonus cultivar specimen, known among succulent enthusiasts as the ‘fairy castle cactus.’ So I took the liberty of dispensing with the extraneous information and retaining only what was necessary.”

That was when I saw it. My cactus guide, lying flat on the bookshelf that lined the wall near where Lily was. And “lying flat” was an understatement. Lily had removed so many pages that my poor book was practically paper thin. The only thing more gutted than it was me. I felt just about ready to burst into tears. And the worst part about all of this was that Lily was still watering the thing despite the fact that she had clearly leafed through the book enough to know better.

Curious, I circled around to check out what Lily was really doing. Well, she was showering the cactus alright, tipping the watering can over the plant’s spiny top and letting its contents flow. But it wasn’t water that was flowing. It was sunlight. Well, more like the light of a phone with its brightness cranked up to max and a picture of the sun — one of those fiery close-ups where you can see all the flares and prominences — on the screen. This was what Lily had attached to the spout of the watering can that she was currently tilting over the cactus.

“I have finally learned what cacti truly need to prosper, Boss: a little bit of water and a lot of sunlight. Since it’s been so cloudy outside lately, I am providing the necessary sun.”

Before I could even voice any one of my dozen objections, we were interrupted by a ringing from the sun. I mean, uh, from Lily’s phone. A second later, my phone started going off too, blaring the red-alert alarm ringtone I reserved for my least favorite person. You know who. The one who had set all of this in motion to begin with. The one none of us — not me, not Lily, not Greg — would even be here if it hadn’t been for. My glasses-wearing good-for-nothing of a grandpa and princ— excuse me, kingcipal of the school, William Wade.

And if gramps was calling, it could only mean one thing.

Wallace Wade, Badass Office of the Radioactive Equivoque Detectives, and Lily Lilac, robo-maid assistant and human-in-training, had an all-new case on our hands.

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