Mezrich Ben - Charlie Numbers and the Man in the Moon

To our little angels, Asher and Arya

you are our beacons on this jet plane of life

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 allBen, for giving me two amazing children and one pug, and for believing in me and giving me the strength and motivation to bring Charlies adventure to life.

Tonya Mezrich

Theres 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 wasnt in school. He wasnt at home. Heck, he wasnt 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 Institutions 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 biplanes 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

Theres nowhere to go, kid. Game over.

The voice came from Charlies left, and not far away. He didnt 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 mans voice, Charlie guessed the man had already crawled halfway across the iron catwalk that ran beneath the suspension pipeswhich 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. Hed been more interested in puzzles, graphs, cardsanything even vaguely scientific. As much as he disliked the nickname that had been following him around since hed 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 museumdirectly 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, Lindberghs 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 mankinds 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 countrys largest museum dedicated to flightfifty 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 museums second-level balcony, twenty feet in front of the biplanes propeller, but still a good thirty feet below.

It didnt 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 CleanerCharlies best friend had endured a cornucopia of nicknames tied to his unique physical characteristics, before the middle-school mob had settled on Diapers. Had Jeremys mother not mistakenly filled his backpack with his baby sisters 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 schoolhed 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 Smithsonians 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 choicehe 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 arms 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.