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Catcher in the Rye . He hadn’t read a children’s book since first grade when he decided they were too easy.
    “This is totally unfair,” Pep complained. “What kind of teacher gives detention on the last day of school? We’re probably the only ones left in the whole building. Everybody else is gone for the summer.”
    A minute later, Mrs. Higgins came into the room. She was wearing white gloves. All the West Marin Middle School kids knew that Mrs. Higgins was germ phobic and obsessive-compulsive about personal hygiene. That was probably why she became a health teacher in the first place. When she was feeling particularly paranoid, Mrs. Higgins would put on her gloves. Kids would make fun of her behind her back.
    When she saw Pep and Coke sitting there, she smirked. Coke refused to give her the satisfaction of eye contact.
    “How long will this be?” Pep asked Mrs. Higgins.
    “As long as it takes,” the teacher replied.
    Pep slumped in her seat and looked at the door. It was wooden, with a thin sliver of window in it just a few inches wide. The school janitor, Mr. Rochford, walked by pushing a broom. He glanced inside as he passed.
    Mr. Rochford was a creepy-looking, extremely obese man with a big, bushy beard and mustache. As far as the students knew, he had never said a word to anybody, which led to all sorts of speculations and rumors about him. Some said he was ashamed because he couldn’t speak English. Others insisted he was a deaf mute. The conspiracy crowd claimed he had his tongue ripped while serving time in a Bolivian prison. Everybody called him Bones because he was so fat.
    Her cell phone rang, and Mrs. Higgins rushed to open her pocketbook. She said hello on the third ring, but the call was dropped.
    “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be back.”
    Mrs. Higgins went out into the hallway. The door closed behind her.
    Coke thought briefly about just picking up and walking out of there. What could Mrs. Higgins do, suspend him? It was the last day of school.

    But then the lock on the door clicked. There was no escape.
    “What do you think janitors do over the summer?” Pep asked her brother. She had a way of caring about people in whom most other kids couldn’t be less interested. “How do they support themselves?”
    “Bones is probably a part-time brain surgeon,” Coke said. “Sweeping the floor and cleaning up kids’ puke is his hobby.”
    “Funny,” his sister commented.
    “Actually, I think he might be retarded,” said Coke.
    “You’re not supposed to say retarded ,” Pep told her brother. “You’re supposed to say mentally challenged .”
    “Whatever.”
    Coke went back to The Catcher in the Rye . He didn’t feel like debating the point.
    “Do you think Bones could have been one of those guys who tried to kill us yesterday?” Pep asked.
    Coke looked up from his book and thought for a moment. His brain was stuffed with so much data, he had nearly forgotten that twenty-four hours earlier he and his sister had jumped off a cliff after being chased by lunatics in golf carts wearing bowler hats and armed with blowguns. A photographic memory only goes so far.
    “That’s ridiculous,” Coke said, looking back down at his book. “Janitors don’t kill people.”
    “Do you smell smoke?” Pep suddenly asked.
    “No,” Coke replied, clearly annoyed with his sister. “Don’t you have a book or something to read?”
    “I smell something,” Pep insisted.
    “You’re having an olfactory hallucination.”
    “Women have a stronger sense of smell than men do, y’know,” Pep told him.
    Coke knew it was true. In third grade, he’d done a science project in which he had males and females sniff various substances to determine which gender was more sensitive to smell. The girls won easily. The project was written up in the local paper and even mentioned in a national science magazine.
    “So maybe the school will burn down, and we can get out of here,” Coke remarked.
    “You