My Gym Teacher Is an Alien Overlord Read Online Free PDF Page A

planted herself down beside me.
    OK. There was one.
    There was the snick of a key turning in the front door. Zack tended to use his bedroom window these days, which meant it had to be Dad. He was home late from the office again. Mom and Dad both worked at a big insurance company in town. The company had had to pay out a lot of money following all the damage caused by the Nemesis asteroid. Even though Star Guy had stopped the main asteroid, he couldn’t prevent hundreds of small chunks of rock getting through. They broke windows, cars—and even sank a ship. All of them were insurance claims. My parents had been working like crazy for weeks to clear the backlog.
    Dad appeared in the living room doorway. He looked even more tired than usual. With his sunken eyes and pale, drawn complexion, he hovered on the threshold like a vampire unable to enter without an invitation. “Hey, Luke, good day at school?”
    â€œDon’t ask,” said Mom, before I could reply.
    He caught her eye and in one of those this-is-not-for-children’s-ears voices said, “Can we have a chat?”
    She turned to me and raised a warning finger. “When I come back I’m checking your history.”
    They disappeared into the kitchen, and I got to work. I wasn’t worried about Mom checking my Internet history, since she’d find nothing. I was a ninja piloting a stealth fighter dipped in invisible ink.
    As I started my search I couldn’t help thinking about Lara. She was great at this kind of thing. I missed her. Back before she got her superpowers we could talk for ages, but now there was an invisible barrier between us. And not one of the cool ones. The kind that made it difficult to know what to say around her.
    The results of my search were displayed before me. I found the news report I’d watched with Mom, and fast-forwarded to the moment just before the planes fell. I played through the section one frame at a time until I found what I was looking for. In the top left corner, half hidden by a cloud, was a flash of light.
    â€œWhat are you up to?”
    It was Zack. I’d been so focused that I hadn’t heard him come in. He had shed his superhero costume and now wore regular clothes, although they were noticeably clean and pressed, and his hair was spiked with gel.
    â€œI think you should see this,” I said.
    He yawned. “Can it wait? I’m completely zonked. After I stopped those planes from crashing, I had English with Mr. Bonnick. If you think catching three airplanes is hard . . .” He shook his head. “And then I was hanging out with Cara.” He tugged at his collar and preened in the mirror.
    Cara was Lara’s older sister, and my brother had a crush on her that was stronger than the Hulk’s grip. But he wasn’t
hanging out
with her. At least, not the way he made it sound. Zack was tutoring her in physics, though he liked to pretend otherwise. Sadly for him, his crush only went one way. I may have been powerless, but I knew my brother’s weak spots.
How’s her boyfriend?
I thought. One of Zack’s superpowers was telepathy—and being brothers, we had a special telepathic bond. So I knew my question would boom inside his head in surround sound, which would make it even more irritating.
    â€œThat’s it!” he yelled, turning the same color as an enraged Commander Octolux. “One more inappropriate use of my telepathic power and I’m blocking you. Got it?”
    He was overreacting. It wasn’t as if I used our telepathic link for trivial reasons.
    â€œYes, you do,” said Zack, reading my mind. “All the time! Last week you used it to ask me to pick up a bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips from the corner store.”
    â€œWell, we’d run out.”
    Zack threw up his hands in exasperation. “I wasn’t even in the corner store! I was locked in fierce hand-to-hand combat with a man in a lion