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1
Seven Minutes
After Midnight
It was green.
Marvin stared up at it. He didn’t know what it was. He was lying on his back, in a sleeping bag, in Nick Tuffle’s backyard.
It glowed as it moved across the night sky.
Nick and Stuart were in sleeping bags beside him. They were asleep.
Today was Nick’s birthday. Or maybe that was yesterday. Marvin didn’t know if it was after midnight yet.
Seven kids had come to Nick’s party, although only Stuart and Marvin got to sleep over.
But Marvin couldn’t sleep. He had eaten too much cake. He had drunk too much punch. The ground was too hard.
He heard a low humming noise. The glowing green thing hovered directly above him. He felt the ground shake beneath him.
He wondered if he was dreaming. It had to be a dream. Maybe he really had fallen asleep and didn’t know it.
There was a bright flash, then the thing zoomed away. Marvin could no longer see it, hear it, or feel it.
Marvin couldn’t fall asleep after that. He stayed up all night, staring at the sky.
At least, he thought he stayed up all night. In the morning, he woke up, so he must have fallen asleep sometime. Maybe he was really asleep the whole time.
He remembered that Nick’s birthday cake was covered with green icing.
He must have been dreaming, he decided. Now that he thought about it, the green thing had looked like a flying birthday cake. The candles made it glow …
2
A Very Normal Third Grader
Nick’s birthday party was on Saturday. On Monday, a new kid came to Marvin’s school.
Mrs. North introduced him to the class. “Everybody, this is Joe Normal.”
Joe Normal stood at the front of the room, next to Mrs. North. He wore baggy pants, untied sneakers, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a Dallas Cowboys cap.
He looked just like a normal third grader.
“Where are you from, Joe?” asked Mrs. North.
“Uh … Earth,” said Joe. “Just like you.”
Mrs. North laughed. “Good answer,” she said. “But really, what city?”
“City?” asked Joe.
Marvin could tell Joe was nervous. He knew he’d be nervous, too, if he had to move someplace and go to a new school.
“Uh, Chicago,” Joe said. “Located on the southwest shore of Lake Michigan, it’s the largest city in Illinois.”
“What a show-off!” whispered Casey Happleton, the girl who sat next to Marvin.
