Cheesie Mack Is Sort of Freaked Out by Steve Cotler

Author:Steve Cotler [Cotler, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-36990-9
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2014-08-25T16:00:00+00:00

Lana wasn’t jumping around. She was excited … but she was also thinking. “Hold it. No one is going to believe us. We don’t have any proof.”

“I know what to do,” I said quickly. “Oddny! Is the pattern still going on?”

She looked into the telescope and then back at me. “Yes!”

I pulled out my cell phone, selected movie mode, and held it up to the eyepiece. “I hope this works.”

After a minute (I counted one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, all the way to sixty), I stopped recording. Then everyone leaned in to watch what I’d shot. It was a little blurry and a little shaky, but you could see stars (they flickered a bit) and one tiny dot of light that blinked on and off with the prime-number pattern.

“This is the thing best ever!” Oddny said. She was so excited, she couldn’t get her words straight.

“Hold on,” I cautioned. “We cannot go blabbing about this until we find out if it actually is what we think it is.”

The girls were barely listening. They were back at the telescope, taking turns looking at what they thought were signals from aliens.

I mouthed “Glenn” to Georgie, then acted out sending a text while shaking my head. I needed Georgie to tell Glenn to stop signaling.

With her eye to the telescope, Lana asked, “How can we do that? Who can we ask?”

I pretended like I was thinking hard, then said, “How about we show this video to Mr. Amato tomorrow before school? And, Oddny, you should get to show it to him. You figured out what it was.”

“Absolutely right,” Georgie said. His phone was back in his pocket. He had sent the text.

“I agree,” Lana said.

Oddny acted kind of shy but also very excited and proud. “Okay, I’ll do it. But you guys come with me.”

“It’s gone,” Lana blurted.

“What?” Oddny and I said simultaneously.

“The blinking. It just stopped,” Lana said.

“NO!” Oddny wailed.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I have the video.”

Oddny calmed down a bit but was still very excited. “One more thing. Mr. Amato and lots of scientists and astronomers are going to want to know where in the sky we saw it. Is there a compass or something on this telescope?”

I told you Oddny is really smart. I took the pen and paper from Lana and wrote down the telescope position numbers I had memorized. But of course, I pretended to read them off the gauges or scales or whatever they call them.

Mr. Shen called from inside, “Cheesie! Your father is on his way over to pick up you and Georgie.”

Lana and Oddny each looked for the blinking light again.

“Darn,” Lana muttered.

“Double darn,” Oddny double muttered.

I packed up the telescope and went downstairs. A few minutes later my dad pulled into the Shens’ driveway and popped the trunk. I put the telescope in and whispered to Georgie, “You and I—and don’t forget Glenn—just pulled off the most Massive Halloween Prank …”

He pounded me on the back and shouted, “… in the history of the universe!”

Lana and Oddny waved from her porch.

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