The Boy Detective Fails Read Online Free PDF Page B

school?”
    “Yes.”
    “I see.” The boy detective makes another note. “What grade are you in?”
    “I was double-promoted. I am in the eighth grade.”
    “The eighth grade? How old are you?”
    “Eleven.”
    “Oh, I see.”
    The boy detective and the two Mumford children stand staring down at the small brown body.
    “So,” the girl says.
    “Yes?”
    “So, are you going to find its head or not?” the girl asks.
    “No. It does not look like it.”
    “No?” the girl asks.
    “No. I don’t think it’s very likely.”
    “You’re not a very good detective, are you?”
    “No. I am afraid I am not.”
    They stare down at the rabbit’s body then, in awkward silence, no one quite sure what should be said next.

    TWO
    It is a scientific fact: There is more crime in Gotham, New Jersey, than you may think. It may truly surprise you. It is like a terrible wax museum, haunted by the eerie faces of the recently deceased. The crime world of Gotham, New Jersey, each year, can be best viewed like this:
    19 murders
    67 rapes
    706 robberies
    739 assaults
    1,173 burglaries
    2,400 larceny counts
    1,095 auto thefts
    Crime index = 785.8 (higher means more crime; U.S. average = 330.6)
    It is a town that truly needs a boy detective. The boy detective has forgotten just how badly.
    The boy detective hoists his yellow suitcase to his side and does not move. He does not want to go inside Shady Glens Facility for Mental Competence. He does not want to live there, no, no, no, not at all. Inside, it will smell like a strange brand of instant mashed potatoes. Inside, someone will be screaming a song Billy does not know. The stillness of the angular building and the pasty pallor of his fellow patients—steady and sad-eyed in their medicated gaze, shuffling back and forth in white robes along the front lawn of the facility—give the boy detective cause to think, and what he ponders is this: that the cause of this imbalance, of theirs and his, in this day and age, remains only a cloudy vapor at the far end of some scientist’s muddled microscope. Whether it is a chemical disturbance, a psychologically traumatic event, or some inhuman environmental strain that has unhinged them and him so badly, it is the mystery of his infirmity that the boy detective finds most terrifying.
    What is also somewhat frightening is how his own treatment continues as only a highly scientific guessing game. Billy is, at the moment, being treated for several illnesses: as a major depressive and an obsessive compulsive. His own therapy combines cognitive behavioral techniques (meant to lessen his compulsion to finish crossword puzzles, close cabinet doors, complete songs other people are whistling) with a daily dose of two hundred milligrams of a serotonin reuptake inhibitor—popularly, Anafranil, or medically, Clomipramine (meant to slow serotonin absorption rates in his brain). Also, two kinds of antianxiety medication which he has been instructed to take at his own discretion: Ativan, which acts quite quickly during the onset of panic, and Seroquel, which remains in the system longer though does not work quite as fast. Why do these drugs work? We do not know. What is the cause of the illness to begin with? Who knows? No one. Strangely, it is also this mystery—the perplexity of the sickness, the cause of his unresolved unhappiness, this unanswered crime perpetrated within the shady, secret underworld of Billy’s mind—that makes the boy detective so very depressed and causes the quite obvious hand twitch which has just begun to make its appearance.
    At that moment, as he walks across the street and opens the double glass doors, the boy detective knows he is in the exact place he has feared to be: looking back over his shoulder at the inevitable world of mystery.
    It follows, then, that the boy detective thinks this : I am going to find out why Caroline committed suicide, punish whoever is responsible, and stab myself as soon as I have the