Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music! (Part 5)

Slinging the towel around his shoulders, Vance stepped into the locker room. I followed in his wet footsteps, socks squishy inside my drenched shoes. The locker room was a cool blue and lit by a high sky roof. What part of grandpa's rooftop-sized face it represented I couldn't tell. Even with all the cloud cover, it still lit the place decently. There had been a similar skylight above the pool. It made me feel like I was inside a prism or something. For comparison, the locker rooms they made us use for regular gym class were like being in prison, complete with the inescapable stench of BO and desperation. This place stood a whole head and shoulders above all that on the Wallace Wade Scale of Bad Smell Tolerability. Here in this brand-spanking-new building, all I could smell was the faint shock of chlorine every now and again.

We came to a stop in front of a locker in the middle of one of the long rows. Vance opened the combination lock and swung the door open. The hinges didn’t so much as squeak.

“Here you go, man. Poke to your heart’s content.”

Considering how tiny the locker was and how many violins had been stolen, poking didn’t take too long. There wasn’t even so much as a single bowstring stashed away in there. In fact, there wasn’t anything stashed away. The entire interior of the locker was spick and span. I didn’t think a single speck of dirt had ever even so much as seen the inside of this sucker.

The reason for that, I found out a few minutes later, was the backup locker. What is a backup locker, you ask? I asked too. Because I sure as hell didn’t know. Well, in Vance Valiance’s case, it’s a locker where you store all the stuff that you don’t want in your real locker. This backup locker was apparently a gift from someone on the girl’s swim team. One of the dozens of girls who had a thing for Vance. This particular girl had given him a locker as a gift. How did that work? Beat the hell outta me. The backup locker was all the way on the other side of the room. Despite this one actually having stuff in it — it was where Vance chose to keep all his gear, apparently, instead of in his real locker — it boasted about as many violins as our marching band should have had: none. While we were there, Vance grabbed his lunchbox.

After that, Vance showed me a few other places, all to prove it wasn’t him who took the violins. We went to the pool bathrooms to check Vance’s favorite bathroom stall. The inside was spacious, orderly, and, like the first locker, clean as a whistle. It almost made up for the disastrous visit to the school stall that got me roped into all of this in the first place. Almost. But hey, at this point, any trip to the can that didn’t end with me getting forcefully enlisted into a paramilitary organization was a successful one in my books.

We kept checking places where Vance might’ve hid the violins so that he could show me he was clean. We checked out Vance’s favorite shower stall, the swim team break room, the janitors’ closets, a couple classrooms, a secret trap door at the bottom of the pool, a hidden passageway behind a bookcase, the backside of a lamp. You get the picture. I also checked places that I thought of too. If I had only checked spots my prime suspect told me to check, I could turn in my badge right then and there. Not that I had a badge. But you know what I mean. I could never call myself a detective again.

I didn’t turn up a single violin, nor a peg or a tuner or even so much as a dusty lump of rosin. And I checked everywhere. And I mean everywhere. Like, “inside every zipper of every pocket of his lunchbox” everywhere. Leave no fruit or veggie unturned: that was my motto. Speaking of fruits and veggies, Vance’s lunch was more balanced than a gymnast. The lunch I had brought, on the other hand, now that I was steering  clear of the school cafeteria like my life depended on it, consisted of a single Pop Tart crumbling inside a cloudy, reused plastic bag and ¼ of a bottle of week-old 7 Up.

“Well?” Vance laughed as we walked side by side back to the pool. His stride was nearly double my skulk in length. Hands jammed in my drenched pockets, I fast walked to keep up, wishing I could be literally anywhere else doing literally anything else. “Believe me now? If you want to check out any other places, just ask. I’m an open book, man. I just hope you’re not still suspicious. Oh yeah. Also, you should talk to Striking Eyes after this. I bet you’ll get a lead if you do. Striking Eyes knows everything that goes on around here.”

I just grunted in response. I didn’t think I could take any more of this perfect storm of wholesome optimism. I’d witnessed extrovert auras before, but never one this aggravating. I never thought I’d say this, but I was actually looking forward to the start of school, which, lucky for me, was in just a few minutes. Anything to get away from here. Anything to get away from him.

The worst part of it all? Even though I couldn’t stand Vance, I had to admit it: he was the type of guy you could believe in. The type you could 👉depend👈 on. The type you’d back in an instant, even if he told you the world was flat or that hard ice cream was better than soft serve. That rare type of person who was completely open and honest with everyone, whether they were a cool kid or a bottom feeder like me. The rare type of guy that anyone could trust.

The end of Pun Detectives and the Case of the Missing Music (Part 5)!
To be continued in Part 6!