CHAPTER ONE

Waylon craned his neck. “Moon at the nearest point in its orbit—check. Clouds—check. But Joe, I’m telling you—”

“Are you sure about the clouds?” Beside him, Joe squinted at the sky. “They look so fluffy.”

“Oh, they have plenty of mass,” Waylon assured him. “A medium-sized cumulous cloud weighs as much as eighty elephants. But remember, the effect will barely be—”

“Don’t forget the Airbus A380. That plane is huge. There it is, on the horizon.” Joe flattened himself against the brick wall and chalked a mark at the top of his head.

Waylon sighed. Joe used to be the shortest kid in the class. He was pretty much normal-size now, thanks to a recent growth spurt, but he was still height-crazy. Last week Waylon had made the mistake of mentioning to him that Skylab astronauts had each grown two inches due to zero gravity. “That’s it!” Joe had cried. “Gravity is what’s keeping me down! You’re sciencey— do something!” He’d been pestering Waylon ever since.

“Remind me how this is going to work?” Joe asked now.

“Something really dense and really close, like the earth, has a lot of gravity,” Waylon explained again. “But you could counteract it a little bit by stacking the moon, the clouds, and the airbus above you. But seriously, it probably won’t be enough to notice.”

“How much?”

“Maybe an Angstrom, which is really small, Joe! It takes about twenty-five million Angstroms to make an inch.”

“I’ll take it!” Joe said. He pressed his shoulders to the wall and grinned.

Actually, Waylon was kind of excited, too. He was buying a special journal this weekend. In it, he would record his life’s work as a scientist. Lately he’d been concentrating on gravity, and he was expecting a big breakthrough soon. If today’s experiment worked, Counteracted gravity to help a friend get taller would look great on the first page of his new journal. “Here comes that plane, Joe,” he cried. “Get ready!”

Just then, Arlo Brody ran up. He flashed his teeth and head-butted Waylon on the shoulder—not hard, but still, Waylon went sprawling.

Arlo jerked his thumb and Joe trotted off with a grateful look on his face, as though he’d been waiting all recess for someone to send him away, never mind the getting-taller nonsense.

Arlo Brody was like that—he only had to suggest something and a person magically felt that it would be an incredible honor to do that exact thing. Waylon suspected the phenomenon was related to Arlo’s hair, which sprang up in yellow peaks like a crown. Arlo sure acted as if he was king of the whole school, and all the other kids acted like his subjects.

Waylon watched sadly as the clouds parted and the Airbus zoomed away. It might be a long time before there was another perfect opportunity. But just then, Arlo smiled down at him, and Waylon felt as if he were basking in the warm glow of royal rays. His mouth automatically smiled back.

Arlo helped Waylon up. “I told you yesterday, you’re on my team. You’re supposed to spend recess with us. We have a name now. Shark-Punchers.”