The Mysterious Benedict Society

eyes. “But I shouldn’t complain. They were very nice to let me continue to the third stage even though I missed a few questions. Very generous of them —”

“Wait a minute,” Reynie said. “How could you possibly have missed any? Did you circle the wrong letters by accident?”

Sticky seemed embarrassed. He shuffled his feet as he spoke. “Oh, well, I suppose the questions were easy for you, but for me they were rather difficult. Time ran out before I could answer the last three, so I had to just circle some answers and hope I’d get lucky. I didn’t, of course. But as I said, they were very forgiving.”

Reynie couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mean you knew the answers to those questions?”

Sticky grew more dejected with Reynie’s every question. Tears brimmed in his eyes as he said, “Well, yes, I suppose I do look rather stupid, don’t I? I look like a person who doesn’t know any answers. I understand that.”

Reynie interrupted him. “No, no! I didn’t mean that! I meant that I’m surprised anybody knew the answers. One or two, maybe, but certainly not all of them.”

Sticky brightened, smiling shyly and straightening his back. “Oh! Well, yes, I suppose I do know a lot of things. That’s why people started calling me Sticky, because everything I read sticks in my head.”

“It’s perfectly amazing,” Reynie said. “You must read more than anybody I’ve ever met. But listen, once you figured out the test was a puzzle, why didn’t you just solve it that way? It would have saved time — you could have finished it.”

“A puzzle?”

“You didn’t notice that the answers were all right there in the test?”

“I did notice that a lot of information was repeated,” Sticky reflected, “but I didn’t really pay attention to it. I was concentrating too hard on getting the answers right. That question on colloidal suspensions really had me sweating, I can tell you, and as I said, when I’m anxious I can get mixed up.” After a pause, he sighed and added, “I tend to get anxious a lot.”

Reynie laughed. “Well, you didn’t know it was a puzzle, and I didn’t know any of the answers, but we’re both here now. We’d make a good team.”

“You think so?” said Sticky. He grinned. “Yes, I suppose we would.”

The boys waited there for some time, discussing the curiosities of the day. Sticky was more relaxed now, and soon the two of them grew comfortable together, joking and laughing like old friends. Sticky couldn’t stop giggling about Rhonda Kazembe’s crazy getup, and Reynie smiled until his face hurt when Sticky told him more about hanging upside down in the storm drain. (“My shoes started to slip off in her hands,” Sticky recounted, “and for a second I thought she was going to take them and leave me down there under the grate. I panicked and started wriggling like crazy — I think it was all she could do to pull me back up without dropping me!”)

Then Reynie told Sticky about the pencil woman’s sneakiness regarding the phone call to Miss Perumal.

Instead of laughing, as Reynie had expected, Sticky slipped back into his nervous behavior. He began polishing his spectacles again, even though he’d just done it minutes before. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, I tried to call my parents, too. Same thing happened. But in the end it was fine. She called them. Nothing to worry about.”

Reynie nodded politely. He saw perfectly well that Sticky was trying to hide something. Maybe he hadn’t thought of calling his parents and felt guilty about it now? But Reynie decided not to press him on the matter — Sticky seemed uncomfortable enough as it was.

“So where do you live?” he asked, to change the subject.

This only made Sticky polish all the harder. Perhaps he simply disliked personal questions. “Well,” he began. He cleared his throat. “Well —”

Just then the door flew wide open, and a girl raced into the room carrying a bucket. She was extremely quick: One moment she was bursting through the door, golden-blond hair flying out behind her like a horse’s mane, and the next she was standing right beside them. Sticky leaped back in alarm.

“What’s the matter?” he cried.

“What’s the matter with you?” the girl replied calmly.

“Well . . . what were you running from?”

“From? I wasn’t running from anything. I was running to this room. Old Yellow Suit told me to come down here and wait with you two, so here I am. My name’s Kate Wetherall.”

Sticky was breathing hard and casting glances at the door, as if a lion might fly in next, so it fell to Reynie to introduce them. “I’m Reynie Muldoon and this is Sticky Washington,” he said, shaking her hand and immediately regretting it — her grip was so strong it was like getting his fingers caught in a drawer. (Sticky noticed Reynie’s pained expression and quickly thrust his own hands into his pockets.) Rubbing his tender knuckles, Reynie went on, “I think the question is why you were running instead of walking.”

“Why not? It’s faster. Now I’m here with you boys instead of trudging along the empty hallway, and it’s much better, isn’t it? You seem like nice fellows. So why do they call you Sticky?” She touched Sticky’s arm. “You don’t feel sticky.”

“It’s a long story,” Sticky said, regaining his composure.

“Let’s have it, then,” Kate said.

So Sticky told her about his name, and then Kate revealed that she had always wanted a nickname herself. “I’ve tried to get people to call me The Great Kate Weather Machine,” she said, “but nobody ever goes along with it. I don’t suppose you boys would call me that, would you?”

“It does seem a bit awkward for a nickname,” Reynie said mildly. “It takes a long time to say.”

“I suppose it does,” Kate admitted, “but not if you speak very quickly.”