Alberto pushed past Zach so he could reach the door first. Joey Turley was the regular pizza delivery guy on Saturday nights, and he always drove a beat-up, dirt-colored Ford Pinto. Despite the darkness outside, he could see a long, low-slung car idling next to the curb. As they passed through the living room, Zach glanced out the front window. Zach hurried toward the front door, followed closely by Jake and Alberto. His mom and dad had barely been gone five minutes. Zach frowned and glanced at his official Darth Vader watch, which was guaranteed water-resistant to one hundred meters. “Just pizza,” Alberto muttered hopefully, licking his lips. Zach mumbled something about a trick of light and sound - then he nearly jumped when the doorbell rang. This time, there was nothing unusual about the sequence, and the boys all shrugged at once. “And turned into charcoal by an air temperature of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit,” added Zach.īefore Jake had a chance to reply, there was another flash outside, then a rolling thunderclap. “And get fried by one hundred million volts of electricity.” “Maybe we should go up on the roof,” Alberto said. They knew the events were out of order, but they also knew it was impossible. That’s not normal.”Īll three boys looked at each other. “I mean the thunder came first, then the lightning. “What do you mean, weird?” asked Alberto. “Whoa! That was right overhead,” Jake said. The floor shook, and the windows rattled, followed almost immediately by a brilliant flash that lit up every window in the kitchen. They arrived at the kitchen in a pack-just as a mighty crash of thunder rang out. The three friends ran out into the hallway, then pushed and shoved all the way down the stairs. “Last one there gets the short end of the deal!” “There’s only eleven Oreos left, and eleven isn’t divisible by three,” he said. “How about Oreos while we wait?” Zach suggested, throwing a pillow back at Alberto, who grabbed it in midair with his teeth and pretended to eat it. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Alberto, throwing a comic book in Jake’s general direction. as in cheese, pepperoni, and more cheese.” “In order for the twin to finish its plans for world conquest, it needs fuel. “That’s because Alberto doesn’t realize he has a parasitic alien twin living inside his body,” said Jake. “You’re always starving,” Zach said, which was true enough. “How come your mom waited so long to order the pizza? I’m starving.” Alberto flopped down onto a beanbag chair and started complaining almost immediately. They dropped their coats in a pile on the floor and darted up the stairs, following Zach into his bedroom. “Up here!” Zach hollered from the top of the stairs. When the door slammed closed behind the boys, Nerd Night had officially begun. “It should be here in forty-five minutes or so. “I just ordered the pizza,” Zach’s mom hollered over her shoulder. Jake and Alberto showed up at Zach’s house right as his parents were rushing out the front door, already late for their bowling league. Jagged bolts of lightning ripped across the evening sky. The seventh Nerd Night of 1978 started out during a freak winter thunderstorm. They called their weekly ritual Nerd Night. The stratovolcano had been the site, in 1948, of one of the most famous UFO sightings of all time. Sometimes they’d even haul out Zach’s telescope and scan the night sky-or just keep an eye on Mount Rainier, which loomed like a ghost on the horizon. They’d play video games, read comics, solve complex math problems, and argue about the latest UFO sightings. Each week, they’d get together at one of their houses for pizza and a Star Trek rerun. It was their Saturday night routine that made life in Athena almost perfect for Jake, Zach, and Alberto. Sometimes, Zach’s mom joked that a mysterious force had brought the boys together, what with the shared birthday and the big brains and all. People in Athena got used to seeing the threesome huddled together, poring over math textbooks or drafting ideas for new inventions (flying cars were high on their “must create” list). In 1978, Jake, Zach, and Alberto really were the three smartest boys on earth. They simply assumed that if there were three brains like theirs in a small town like Athena, Oregon, then surely there must be a lot more out there somewhere. And if they noticed in that time that they were more intelligent than those around them, they didn’t think too much of it. They spent most of their time together, just the three of them, all through their childhood and into middle school. which is probably why they didn’t realize just how unusual they were. The boys were inseparable from that point on. On their first day of kindergarten, Jake, Zach, and Alberto discovered that they shared the same birthday, April fifteenth-also the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci.
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