Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon by Ben Mezrich & Tonya Mezrich

Author:Ben Mezrich & Tonya Mezrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

10

“I CAN SEE WHY they chose this place,” Kentaro squealed, his face inches from a rattling square of glass overlooking a stretch of sand that ran horizontal to the asphalt parking lot. “This wind gets any stronger, this bus is going to be airborne too!”

“From flying boats to flying buses,” Jeremy chimed in from the seat ahead of Kentaro. “If we can just work our way to planes, we’ll be in business.”

Charlie ignored Jeremy’s facetious comment. Kentaro had it right, he thought, looking out the window from his own seat, halfway down the near empty bus they’d been trapped inside for the long five-and-a-half-hour trip from Washington, DC, to Kitty Hawk.

They had chosen the famous location from the list of possible field trips that each team had been given when they’d checked in to the competition. Charlie could tell by the sparseness of the bus that they were the only team that had picked what had to be the farthest excursion, distance-wise, but he didn’t care: He could see firsthand many of the reasons Orville and Wilbur Wright had made the choice of the Atlantic-beachfront testing ground for their first attempts at heavier-than-air flight. The frequent, gusty winds. The fact that the nearby North Carolina town had been home to less than sixty families back in 1900, when the Wright brothers had practiced their craft. And maybe most important, nearby small, rolling hills and soft sands for when something, inevitably, went wrong.

The bus pulled to a creaking stop at the edge of the parking lot, and Anastasia signaled the kids to file out. Mr. Porter stared down at the kids menacingly as they walked past him. Charlie wasn’t sure if that was his intention, or if it simply had to do with the way his eyebrows were shaped. Charlie followed Jeremy, Kentaro, Crystal, and Marion outside. There were only three other tourists.

“Feel that Atlantic Ocean breeze,” Crystal said, once they’d all made it off the bus and were strolling past the Wright Brothers National Memorial Visitor Center.

“We don’t have much time here, so let’s be efficient about this excursion,” Anastasia said. Porter nodded in agreement.

Charlie shielded his eyes as he surveyed the area: sunlight streaming around the Wright Monument at the top of Big Kill Devil Hill flashed like the beam of a lighthouse. Past the monument, there was just a long, rolling swath of sand and hills. He watched as a single seagull flapped past, wings fighting against the breeze, a vision of feather and beak circumnavigating the monument in an elegant arc.

“Hard to imagine,” he said, “but when the Wright brothers set up shop here, flight was something reserved for birds.”

It was a compelling moment, standing in that historical spot. During the bus ride, they’d had a lot of time to go over the Wright brothers’ journey to a working plane, reading from a trio of books Crystal had downloaded from the Internet onto her phone. From 1900 to 1903, the brothers had tried many iterations of their

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