Read The Detention Club for Free Online Page B

couldn’t remember a single second of anything my teachers had said, besides gushing about how amazing Sunny was.
    â€œIn science class we learned about, um . . . hair,” I finally said.
    â€œWe never learned about hair in science class,” Sunny said, with a suspicious look on her face. “But I know everything about it.”
    â€œWell, they must have realized they didn’t teach your grade the right things and have been changing the curriculum,” I said. “Did you know that even kids lose hair?”
    â€œOf course,” Sunny said. “Humans have between 100,000 and 150,000 hair follicles on their scalps. The hairs grow back when you lose them.”
    That’s another annoying thing about Sunny. Anytime I try to say anything, she jumps on it to prove that she’s already an expert on the topic, so I didn’t ask her what a follicle was, even though I was really curious.
    â€œAnd then in my other classes I found a ton of hair on the carpets at school,” I went on. “Janitors collect them in these human hairballs, and I was thinking maybe for my invention I could set up a factory where they straighten it out and glue it together to make wigs. That way we wouldn’t waste the hair that we lose.”
    â€œThat’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard in my life,” she replied.
    â€œWell, I like that it’s giving you ideas for inventions,” Dad said.
    I was grateful that he backed me up, but my good feelings toward my dad only lasted a few minutes. After dinner he laid a bombshell on me, as if the first day of school hadn’t been upsetting enough. Now that I was in middle school, he expected me to spend two hours every night after dinner studying, and even worse, I couldn’t watch TV or play video games until after study time was over!
    I sat at my desk looking at the class outlines I’d received, and then flipped through the two textbooks I’d brought home. I’d left the rest of the books in my locker back at school. I opened my notebooks, but of course they were completely empty.
    Ten minutes later my mom checked in on me and saw me staring at the wall.
    â€œPeter, let’s focus now,” she said. Then she went into Sunny’s room, and I heard her mutter, “Wow, your notebooks are almost a third full already, and it’s only the first day of school!”
    â€œDo they give out a medal for that?” I muttered, but they didn’t hear me. I pictured Sunny in her room, beaming up at my mom, and it made my ears burn. I reminded myself that deep down Sunny was jealous: In order to be the queen of everything, she had to spend all her free time busting her butt just to hold on to the position, while I could coast and get the same grades.
    Mom left Sunny’s room, so I quickly opened up a notebook and started scribbling random numbers in it. When she reentered my room, I held my arm out stiffly, as if I was trying to maintain deep concentration. I even closed my eyes, and started muttering. “Okay, square root of 3, minus the subtotal of negative 42, carry over the x , and—”
    I peeked out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was backing out of the room with a smile on her face. When she was gone, I stopped pretending and looked down at the paper. I hadn’t been paying attention as I scribbled, and across the top of the page it read:
    3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+3+
    I continued pretending I was doing homework for a couple minutes. I wrote random numbers down on the page and kept babbling made-up formulas and stuff. It was kinda fun to pretend at first, but it turns out that faking doing homework is actually really tiring, and I wondered if it would be less of a hassle to just do my homework for real. But since I hadn’t written down the assignments, I couldn’t test out this theory, even if I’d wanted to. So instead I put down my pen, sat back, and just thought about the day,