“Is this about the incident with the burning curtains?” I whisper to Miss Piffle with a sad, trembling voice. “It wasn’t my fault!”
“What burning curtains incident?” she snaps, her face transforming instantly from concern to suspicion.
“Never mind,” I mumble, desperate for some way to change the subject. “Maybe my parents are trying to get ahold of me. They went to Las Vegas for a few days to relax, gamble, and get away from me and my annoying sisters.”
Miss Piffle seems to file this tidbit of information away for later use, probably at the next parent-teacher conference. “I have no earthly idea what the problem is,” she sniffs. “It just says you are to report to the office immediately.”
“Oh, sure,” I say with a crooked smile. But my upset stomach tells another story: Any time you’re yanked out of class in the middle of your first oral report, it probably isn’t for splendid news.
“Before you go, we should discuss something,” Miss Piffle says, arching the twin caterpillars she uses for eyebrows. “Your biographical report appears to be about Sherlock Holmes. Are you aware that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character?”
“That’s what I like best about him,” I peep, although I’m really thinking that I have no earthly idea what the word “fictional” means.
To be perfectly honest, my teacher has what’s called a unibrow, which means her eyebrows connect in the middle above her nose. So her eyebrows look like one long, hairy snake. It makes concentrating nearly impossible.
Miss Piffle can read my mind like an extremely short book. The hairy snake goes wild.
“Class, can anyone tell Sherlock what the word ‘fictional’ means?” Miss Piffle calls out.
After what feels like several million seconds, Sharon Sheldon speaks up. “‘Fictional’ means not real. A fictional character is made up, like for a book or movie.”
“Thank you, Sharon,” Miss Piffle beams proudly.
“Whatever,” I hear Sharon Sheldon sigh from behind me. She’s one of the smartest, most popular kids at Baskerville Elementary School, but her big brother is a gorilla who just happens to wear pants.
Miss Piffle sinks the caterpillars as low as they’ll go. I know this look; she’s about to drop the hammer on me. “As a result of this breaking news, Sherlock, you will have to find another character to do your oral report on, preferably someone who actually lived and breathed.”
“Hey, why don’t you do your oral report on Inspector Wink-Wink?” my best friend, Lance Peeker, booms through the silence. Of course, as with anything Lance says, the class explodes with laughter, like I just sat on one of those farting whoopee cushions while getting hit in the face with a banana cream pie.
I feel more like I’ve been hit in the stomach with a park bench.
How could the world’s greatest detective, my hero, The Great Detective himself, not be real? There are thousands of movies about him—and I have almost every one of them!