Never Say Genius Read Online Free PDF Page A

hand down to pull his sister up after him. They jumped off the top and landed on the floor without getting hurt. The cage was almost completely submerged in oil.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Coke said.
    Moments after they pushed open a door and ran out of the truck, Coke and Pep spotted their parents in the parking lot, walking excitedly back to the RV.
    “Oh, you kids missed something great,” Dr. McDonald told them.
    “You should have seen it!” said Mrs. McDonald. “We found the shoe store. This guy Robert Wadlow was eight feet, eleven inches tall. His foot was enormous . It was three feet long. Imagine that! A foot was three feet. Just amazing.”
    “How was the virtual french fry demonstration?” asked Dr. McDonald.
    “Very … exciting,” Coke said honestly.
    “Yeah, we really got to feel what it must be like to be a french fry,” said Pep.
    “Where’s your Cheesehead?” Mrs. McDonald asked her.
    “I … uh … lost it,” she replied. It was true, technically.
    “I paid $14.99 for that Cheesehead!” Dr. McDonald complained, his voice rising.
    “Don’t be mad, Ben,” his wife said. “It’s their birthday.”

     
    “You’re right,” he said with a sigh.
    It’s hard to be mad at somebody on their birthday. All Pep did was lose her silly Cheesehead. It wasn’t like she murdered anybody or anything.
    “Hey, how about we go to McDonald’s for dinner?” asked Mrs. McDonald. “I bet you’re really in the mood for french fries after seeing that demonstration, huh?”
    The twins looked at each other.
    “We’re not hungry,” they said simultaneously.

Chapter 4
THE FIRST CIPHER
     
    I t had been a long day. A ridiculously long day. It seemed like ages ago when Coke and Pep were being chased through The House on the Rock by Mrs. Higgins, their evil health teacher. They had clotheslined her with a piece of twine stretched across a walkway in the dark. Then they were grabbed by those two bowler dude maniacs dressed in suits of armor, who dragged them to Dr. Warsaw. He would have killed them for sure if they hadn’t snatched away his portable electronic torture device and pushed him out of the hole in the bottom of The Infinity Room. And now, this Archie Clone lunatic had nearly deep-fried them in a pool filled with boiling oil.
    Some birthday.
    The next scheduled stop was Chicago, just twenty miles away. But it’s hard to find a place to park an RV overnight in such a big city. So Dr. McDonald decided to splurge and have the family spend the night at a motel in Des Plaines. He pulled into Best Western Des Plaines Inn, just down the road on Lee Street. It would be nice to sleep in a regular bed for a change. Instead of jamming the whole family into one room, they got two—one for the kids and one for the grown-ups.
     
     
Go to Google Maps ( http://maps.google.com/ ).
    Click Get Directions.
    In the A box, type Des Plaines IL.
    In the B box, type Chicago IL.
    Click Get Directions.

     
    The twins didn’t ask for cake or ice cream or some sweet treat to top off their birthday. All they wanted to do was go to sleep, and try to forget what had happened over the last twenty-four hours. They were exhausted.
    Before Coke took off his pants, he checked the pockets and found the tickets that Archie Clone had given him for the french fry exhibit. He turned one of them over and saw this written on the back:
HATED DAY HAPPY
     
    Coke puzzled over the three words for a minute, and then handed the ticket to his sister.
    “What do you think this means?” he asked.
    Pep looked the tickets over. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
    “Do you think it’s just random words?”
    “It may be meaningless,” Pep replied, “or it may be a cipher.”
    “Oh no. Not another one,” Coke groaned.
    Pep loved ciphers. While Coke’s brain excelled at accumulating and storing huge quantities of information, Pep was good at organizing and analyzing it. She loved word games, number games, and trying to