6 Detention

Chapter 6 Detention The McDonald twins didn't know they had been selected to be part of a special program for gifted and talented students. A letter informing their parents of that fact had arrived at their house two months earlier, back in April. But unfortunately, Dr. McDonald assumed the letter was just another school fund-raiser and threw it in the trash without opening the envelope. Now it was June 18, the last day of school, and nobody was paying attention in class. How could you? West Marin Middle School was air- conditioned; but for some mysterious reason, in June, the temperature in half of the classrooms was up over ninety degrees and in the other half you felt as if you were going to school in an

igloo. Early that morning when the teachers arrived at school, one of them found two backpacks labeled MCDONALD leaning against the front door. These were the backpacks that Coke and Pep had abandoned at the top of the cliff the day before. There was no note, no explanation of who had dropped them off. They were returned to the twins during homeroom. "Later," Jimmy Erdman said to Coke in the hallway after sixth period. Jimmy Erdman was not part of the YAG program. He wasn't gifted or talented. Far from it. He was barely passing. Jimmy and Coke didn't have a whole lot in common. Jimmy had no interest in books, learning, science, or anything that involved too much thinking. He had little intellectual curiosity. But the two had known each other since first grade.

Most people tend to drift away from their childhood pals as they develop new interests and new friends. But Coke and Jimmy never did. There was a comfort level there. It's easy to trust somebody you've known all your life. "Later," Coke replied, and headed down the hall to the health room. The health teacher, Mrs. Audrey Higgins, had that look on her face. It was the look that said she hated her job, she hated her life, and she hated the kids she had to teach. And they hated her right back. "Today we're going to learn how to brush our

teeth, correctly," Mrs. Higgins informed the class. Coke groaned, and Mrs. Higgins probably heard it. He found it inconceivable that sixth graders had to be taught how to brush their teeth or that precious class time would be wasted on something so commonsensical. He looked around to see if anybody else in the class saw the ridiculousness of it all. They just stared back at him blankly. Zombies. Mrs. Higgins was a tall woman with short hair. She squirted a dollop of hand sanitizer, which she always kept on her desk, and rubbed the stuff into her palms. Then she picked up a toothbrush. "Grasp the handle firmly," Mrs. Higgins told the class, "and always brush up and down. Never side to side." Coke had no real problem with Mrs. Higgins's tooth-brushing technique. But he did have an interest in busting chops, especially when it came to grown-ups.

"What's wrong with brushing from side to side, Mrs. Higgins?" he asked politely. Mrs. Higgins stopped for a moment to look at Coke. She was used to kids like him: bored, supersmart know-it-alls who amused themselves by asking dumb questions. "If you brush from side to side," she explained slowly, as if he was developmentally challenged, "your teeth will grow in crooked. That should be self-evident, Mr. McDonald." It also should have been the end of the discussion, but Coke couldn't let it drop. "Why would they grow in crooked?" Coke asked. "If you put an equal amount of pressure on the teeth as you brush to the left and an equal amount of pressure as you brush to the right, the pressure on both sides would be equal; and the teeth would have no reason to grow in anything but straight. Unless, of course, you're claiming that Newton's third law of motion is incorrect. That is, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

A few of the boys in the back snickered. They had no idea what Coke was talking about, but they could tell he was giving Mrs. Higgins a hard time. She looked at Coke wearily. She'd had enough of him and his attention-getting devices. "That's detention for you, McDonald." "What?" Coke shouted. "What did I do? You're gonna give me detention because questioned you about how to brush teeth? Are you kidding me? It's the last day of school! I was just exercising my freedom of speech." "Your freedom of speech ends at my ears," Mrs. Higgins said. "This is child abuse; that's what it is!" She ignored him. The bell rang, and everybody pushed through the front door chanting the chorus of Alice Cooper's "School's Out." Coke trudged to the detention room. It was a depressing, windowless room in the basement of the school. On the whiteboard, somebody had scrawled: PAY ATTENTION AND AVOID DETENTION. Coke was