by Ben Mezrich
To our little angels, Asher and Arya—
you are our beacons on this jet plane of life
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
David Gale, thank you for wholeheartedly getting behind this second book in the Charlie Numbers series and giving me a chance to coauthor it with my husband. As a steadfast editor with a stellar team, especially Amanda Ramirez and Jenica Nasworthy at S&S Books for Young Readers, you have made all of this possible. To our agents Eric Simonoff and Matt Snyder, we are forever grateful to you. To my dear friend Titi Dang, thank you for your never-ending kindness and support. Ellen Pompeo and Chris Ivery, we are thrilled and excited to be working with the whole team at Calamity Jane, especially Laura Holstein, to bring this series to the screen. A special thanks to my parents, Ron and Fu-mei Chen, for giving me the foundation to live and carry out my dreams, and to my three wonderful, supportive siblings, Sonya, Oliver, and Tree.
And most important of all, thank you to my love, my all—Ben, for giving me two amazing children and one pug, and for believing in me and giving me the strength and motivation to bring Charlie’s adventure to life.
—Tonya Mezrich
1
There’s a fine line between flying and falling.
The only real difference is what happens when you hit the ground. . . .
TEN MINUTES PAST NOON on a Thursday in late January, and Charlie Lewis was trying to figure out how everything in his life had gone so utterly wrong. He wasn’t in school. He wasn’t at home. Heck, he wasn’t even in Massachusetts. He was, in fact, crouched low in the egg-shaped cockpit of a one-hundred-year-old, rickety wooden biplane hanging fifty feet above the vast and open main atrium of the Smithsonian Institution’s Air and Space Museum, trying not to think about the long drop down to the unforgiving marble floor below.
The more he trembled at his predicament, the more the biplane quivered and swayed beneath his weight. Above him, he could see the single, coiled wire leading from the center of the biplane’s upper wing to the stabilizing pipes crisscrossing the arched ceiling of the atrium. He had no idea how strong the coil was, or how it was attached to the pipes, but he knew that the wire was the only thing between him and a harrowing plummet down, down, down—
“There’s nowhere to go, kid. Game over.”
The voice came from Charlie’s left, and not far away. He didn’t need to look to know that his pursuer was getting closer by the minute. Each time Charlie blinked, he could see the man in his memory: square face beneath a frighteningly perfect crew cut, oversize muscles bulging beneath a dark tailored suit, sweat stains seeping through the collar of an ever-present white dress shirt that always seemed to be two sizes too small. From the sound of the man’s voice, Charlie guessed the man had already crawled halfway across the iron catwalk that ran beneath the suspension pipes—which meant he was just a few yards away from the biplane now, and getting closer by the second.
Game over. Charlie finally forced himself to glance over the edge of the swaying cockpit, and found himself staring straight down those fifty feet to the atrium floor below. He was immediately hit by a wave of vertigo but fought through the dizzying sensation. The main floor was fairly crowded for the middle of the day: maybe two dozen people, mostly tourists. Bright colored sweatshirts, baseball hats, mothers pushing carriages, tour guides corralling charges. From so high up, they all looked like little dolls, the type Charlie had never really played with as a kid. He’d been more interested in puzzles, graphs, cards—anything even vaguely scientific. As much as he disliked the nickname that had been following him around since he’d inadvertently aced a test geared toward high school freshmen when he was in fourth grade, “Numbers” really did fit him. At twelve, he was already flirting with college-level mathematics; sometimes his teachers at Nagassack Middle School in Newton, Massachusetts, asked him for help with their syllabi. Even so, as smart as he was supposed to be, Charlie seemed to have a knack for getting himself into situations like this.
Well, maybe not like this. The biplane jerked beneath Charlie as the man on the catwalk moved another foot closer, and Charlie gasped, his fingers tightening against the edge of the cockpit. The vertigo doubled in intensity, and Charlie willed himself to focus, pinning his gaze to one of the iconic displays on the ground floor of the museum—directly beneath the biplane, planted on a swath of orange-red carpet that extended from the glass entrance at the front to the stairs leading up to the various levels and exhibits.
Even from above, Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis was inspiring; covered in silvery fabric, with its bulbous gas tank up front, the modified Ryan Airlines model had been the first airplane to be flown solo and nonstop across the Atlantic in 1927, completing the trip from New York to Paris in thirty-three and a half hours, touching down at Le Bourget Field in front of an audience of more than one hundred thousand. At the time, the plane had signified one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments. Now it sat kitty-corner to the rust-colored Apollo space capsule that had carried astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins home from the moon in July of 1969, in the center of the country’s largest museum dedicated to flight—fifty feet below a swaying biplane and a terrified, too-smart-for-his-own-good sixth grader, who was about to do something incredibly stupid.
Charlie pulled his gaze upward from the Spirit of St. Louis and the space capsule, pausing when he reached the museum’s second-level balcony, twenty feet in front of the biplane’s propeller, but still a good thirty feet below.
It didn’t take him long to spot Jeremy “Diapers” Draper, his best friend and fellow sixth grader from Nagassack Middle. With his bright shock of red hair, stretched-out frame, and stringy arms and legs, Jeremy was hard to miss. Even pressed up against the second-floor glass railing, trying to hide himself in a crowd of raucous high schoolers in matching gray athletic jerseys, Jeremy stood out. Bean Pole, Scarecrow, Pipe Cleaner—Charlie’s best friend had endured a cornucopia of nicknames tied to his unique physical characteristics, before the middle-school mob had settled on Diapers. Had Jeremy’s mother not mistakenly filled his backpack with his baby sister’s disposables, and had Jeremy managed not to trip during lunch hour in the last week of fifth grade and spill said backpack all over the lunchroom, in full view of the entire middle school—he’d have been Scarecrow or Pipe Cleaner until the day he shipped himself off to college.
Diapers was a tough label to wear in the Lord of the Flies environment of Nagassack Middle, but at the moment, Charlie would have happily traded nicknames with his friend, if doing so could somehow have magically transported him from the cockpit of the biplane to the safety of the Smithsonian’s second-floor balcony.
Unfortunately, Charlie knew, there was no such thing as magic. Only math. But sometimes math could be a sort of magic; at the moment, with the crew cut bearing down on him and the biplane dangling beneath his weight, Charlie had only one choice—he was going to have to use math to do the most magical thing mankind had ever achieved.
He was going to have to use math to make himself fly.
Charlie took a deep breath, then reached behind himself in the cockpit and unzipped the backpack that was hanging from a strap around his left shoulder. He retrieved a pair of gardening shears then quickly zipped it shut. He held them at arm’s length, inspecting the sharpness of the blades, the way the light glanced off the smooth, almost glassy metal. Then he rose to a near standing position in the cockpit and raised the shears toward the coiled wire that held the biplane in place.
“Kid, are you nuts?” the crew cut hissed from just a few feet away on the catwalk.
But Charlie was already gone, his mind lost in a swirl of
calculations: The length of the biplane’s wings and the amount of air they would displace. The volume of the atrium and the distance to the second-floor balcony. The angle of descent and the weight of the plane’s wooden frame, fabric covering, and propeller.
The tensile strength and physical diameter of the coiled wire that held the biplane to the ceiling and the torque-based cutting power of a pair of steel gardening sheers.
“Kid, don’t do it. Kid!”
But Charlie was already reaching for the wire.
2
Newton, Massachusetts, Ten Days Earlier
“BAKING SODA, SALT, WATER, some vinegar, a little milk for color, and good old-fashioned playground dirt. I think we’re in business.”
Charlie watched Crystal Mueller as she carefully placed the supplies, one after another, across the picnic table in the back corner of the playground. First, the two bright orange cartons of Arm & Hammer that Charlie had just pulled out of his backpack, along with the milk and vinegar. Then the canister of salt that their diminutive friend, Kentaro Mori, had borrowed from the lunchroom ten minutes earlier—when the recess bell had first rung, signaling the beginning of the brief twenty minutes of shared freedom before fifth-period English began. Followed by the plastic pitcher of water that Marion Tuttle had siphoned from the water fountain behind the swings at the other end of the playground; the chubby redhead had needed to unscrew the side panel of the fountain to reach the water pipes—the fountain hadn’t worked properly since an eighth grader had tried to use the poor device as a football tackling dummy two months earlier. And finally, a plastic bucket full of moist dirt that spring-limbed, giraffe-height redhead Jeremy Draper had dredged out of the flower bed that ran behind the seesaw. The dirt had been the most difficult to procure, since the seesaw was the kind of prime playground real estate that attracted the sort of sixth graders who wore Little League baseball uniforms to school, even when they didn’t have a game scheduled until the following afternoon. But Jeremy had somehow dug enough dirt to satisfy Crystal without catching anyone’s attention. Which, for the most part, was the daily goal of kids like Charlie, Jeremy, Kentaro, Marion, and Crystal.
Just get through the day without catching any unwanted attention.
“So what the heck does salt, baking soda, water, and dirt have to do with Utah?” Jeremy asked as he stuck a pipe-cleaner finger into the dirt before Crystal shooed him away. “And how is this going to help us with our geography project?”
“Have you ever been to Utah, Jeremy?” she asked.
Jeremy shook his head. Crystal rolled her eyes, then turned to Charlie.
“Did you bring the ceramic casserole pan?”
Charlie dug into his backpack again, retrieving one of his mom’s baking pans.
“You didn’t say anything about ceramic. I think this is aluminum. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Not for me. But the salt’s going to wreck it.”
Charlie was fairly certain that Crystal could burn a hole in the pan and his mother would never notice. A double PhD in virology and biology, his mother was usually at the university until well after Charlie was in bed, lights out; she hadn’t cooked anything in the kitchen in as long as he could remember. She wasn’t going to miss the casserole pan any more than Charlie’s dad—an engineer and MIT professor with multiple PhDs of his own—was going to notice the missing battery-powered hot plate Charlie had borrowed from the camping supplies that had been collecting dust in a corner of their home garage.
“I think an A is worth a ruined casserole pan,” Charlie said, retrieving the hot plate and placing it next to the other items on the picnic table.
Crystal smiled as she went at her work, attacking the boxes of baking soda with her fingernails. Of course, As weren’t a rare commodity for any of Charlie’s group of friends: the Whiz Kids—a nickname that Charlie’s parents had coined for the group, who had a combined IQ well in the stratosphere. Kentaro, despite his miniature size, was a linguistic giant, a wizard with anything that contained letters and sounds. Marion—though in a constant life-or-death struggle with allergies to just about everything organic that lived on land, sea, or air—was a master artist. Jeremy, like Charlie himself, had mad math skills and had been acing AP math and science classes since he’d turned eleven. And Crystal might as well have had her own PhD in geology. Her knowledge of rocks far surpassed most of the teachers at Nagassack Middle School.
Crafting a salt flat out of common household items for a report on Utah was decidedly simpler than the working model of the Hoover Dam they’d built a year earlier for their report on Nevada, or the HO-scale diorama of Niagara Falls—with running water—they’d created the year before that. But Charlie and Jeremy had been catching up on missed schoolwork since their recent trip to Incredo Land, the amusement park in Florida; a sort of “working” vacation during which they, along with a group of other sixth and seventh graders, had used their mathematical skills to take down a series of carnival games. Charlie hadn’t seen the others, the mysterious Finn or the oddly beguiling Sam, since he’d been back, except in passing—hallways before class, far corner of the lunchroom—but he’d had too much on his plate to really notice. The Utah geology project was last on a long list of assignments with deadlines coming fast; he was only glad that it was a group project, rather than something he’d have to complete all on his own.
Behind her thick glasses, Crystal gazed at the lines on a Pyrex measuring cup, pouring in just enough of the salt and leveling it off at the two-cup mark. Then she shifted toward the casserole pan.
“This should be the exact right proportion. Mix this in with the water; I’ll start heating the dirt.”
Charlie took the cup from her hands as she turned toward the hot plate. He was about to pour the salt into the pan, when out of the corner of his eyes he saw a flash of motion. He just had time to make out the shape of a football, flying in a perfect spiral toward him—when he felt the hard thud of leather against his chest, and the measuring cup went flying into the air. Kosher salt billowed in a blizzard around his head, and when the salt cleared, Charlie was bent over, catching his breath, staring down at a pair of scuffed high-top sneakers. Sneakers so large they could only belong to one person.
Dylan Wigglesworth. Double the size of an average sixth grader, with thick dark hair sticking out from beneath a Little League baseball hat and arms the size of train pistons. The thick-necked behemoth motioned to his two henchman—Liam Anthony and Dusty Bickle, curly-haired thugs in matching striped jerseys—to find the football, which had ricocheted off of Charlie and was now sitting squarely in the casserole pan.
“What are you doing Num-bers? Baking brownies for the teachers? Running low on big fat butt kisses?”
Charlie could feel his face turning red as he picked up the measuring cup. Dylan never seemed to tire of torturing the Whiz Kids: tripping them in the hallways, throwing food at them in the lunchroom. The teachers at Nagassack mostly turned a blind eye to the bullying; as long as Dylan kept it out of the classrooms, the teachers figured it was kids being kids. Which meant the Whiz Kids had to deal with it on their own, in any way they could. Usually, their tried-and-true methods were staying out of sight or running for the hills. Neither seemed an option at the moment.
“It’s just a geology project. Nothing exciting, Dylan.”
Dylan’s foxlike eyes shrunk as he grabbed one of the boxes of baking soda and shook it up and down. The white powder puffed into a huge cloud in the air, billowing down to the pile of salt on the ground. “Let it snow!”
Liam and Dusty howled in delight. Charlie felt his anger growing—he had to do something, fast—but the simple physics of the situation made standing up for himself incredibly dangerous. Dylan was stronger than all of the Whiz Kids put together, not even factoring in his two sidekicks. Charlie’s only chance was to use his brain, not his body. And he had to work fast. He could see the crowd of sixth graders growing behind Dylan; they were attracting a heck of an audience. Bra
ins to trump body—or maybe there was a way to use both.
Charlie glanced at the football, which Liam had retrieved from the casserole pan. Then he looked toward the supplies still lined up behind Crystal on the picnic table: what was left of the salt, one remaining box of baking soda, vinegar, milk, water. The hot plate, already heating up, on the table between Jeremy and Kentaro. A thought stirred inside Charlie’s head. Could it work? Could he pull it off?
He made a sudden decision and pointed toward Liam and the football.
“Dylan, I can see that baking’s not really your thing. So, how about a little football-throwing contest—me against you?”
Dylan stared at him, as a hush moved through the crowd of onlookers.
“You’ve got to be kidding. I could throw you farther than you could throw that football.”
“I’m sure you’re right. Should be an easy win for you. So you’re in? Unless, of course, you’re chicken.”
Charlie regretted the words the minute he’d said them. Bright red cauliflowers spread across Dylan’s cheeks, and for a brief second it looked like he was going to throw a punch. But even through his rage, Dylan could sense the change in the playground air—now almost every sixth grader within a hundred yards was watching, waiting to see how it all played out.
“It’s your funeral, Numbers. I’ll beat you in the contest, and then I’ll beat you in real life. How about you throw first?”
Dylan nodded at Liam, who tossed the football in a high arc toward Charlie. Charlie missed the catch, and the ball landed in the mud between his feet. As he bent to pick it up, he signaled Crystal and Jeremy in for a quick huddle.
“Are you nuts?” Jeremy hissed. “You can’t throw a football ten feet. Dylan’s going to crush you.”
Charlie aimed a surreptitious finger toward the picnic table.
“Crystal. Two tablespoons of vinegar. Two cups of milk. Into the casserole pan, and get it on the hot plate as fast as you can.”