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course!” Allan slapped himself in the forehead as if it should have been obvious.
    “A sleeping cat is a threat only to a dream mouse,” the boys said in unison.
    High fives.
    “Dream mouse?” Aunt Judith asked, confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    They shrugged. “Maybe we should ask the rodentexpert,” Allan suggested, with a glance at the bookshelf.
    “Well, Roderick?” Edgar prodded.
    Once again, Roderick Usher was noncommittal.
    Aunt Judith clapped her hands in her best teacher style. “All right, enough of this lollygagging.” She set the sleeping-kitten poster aside and picked up a sheet of paper from her desktop. “This is a letter from the Baltimore School District.” She waved it in the air before flattening it on her desk to read. “It says that in seven days a representative will visit us to evaluate our ‘educational environment and processes’ in order to give final approval for our home school. It’s important, boys. So let’s get started.”
    For Aunt Judith’s sake, they sighed and took their seats.
    Hours later, upstairs in their room, the twins wrote a note to their former classmates:
    The Seventh Grade Class
    c/o Stevie Harrison
    Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin Middle School
    345 Carmello Court
    Baltimore, MD 21215
    Hi, colleagues,
    Since we still aren’t allowed to use computers or cell phones (who’d have thought that changing the numbers for every cell phone on the East Coast would be such a big deal?) snail mail will have to suffice. Oh well, it’s not as if we have anything very timely to report here at “Aunt Judith Academy.” She’s doing her best, but it’s not exactly Hogwarts.
    Anyway, we appreciate the “Save the Poe Twins” petition you all got together, even if Mr. Mann tore it up. Uncle Jack thinks we’ll be back in class next school year. That’s only ten months away (or seven, if you don’t count summer vacation). In the meantime, who’s looking out for you guys? And who’s keeping things interesting?
    If only a little adventure would come knocking on our door…. But that only happens in stories, right?
    Bye for now,
    E and A
     
     

    WHAT THE POE TWINS DID NOT KNOW…
    From the Desk of
    P ROFESSOR S. P ANGBORN P ERRY , P H D
    NOTES FOR EXPERIMENT
    a) Recent scientific experiments indicate that a tiny, subatomic particle afloat in space may be paired up with another like particle in such a way that if the two are separated, even by distances as wide as the whole universe, they still remain mysteriously connected. Whatever affects one affects the other, simultaneously. What joins them, even when they’re apart? It’s a mystery…. But it’s real. Scientists call it “quantum entanglement.” Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
    b) Now, imagine if the two joined objects were not mere particles but human beings. Two bodies, two locations, but one shared mind…. You could send one halfway across the world and the other would still know what his partner was seeing, thinking, doing.And vice versa. Instantaneous communication…Imagine the possibilities for political, scientific, economic, and military power!
    THE FOLLOWING IS
    THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION:
    What happens if one of the entangled pair of boys is not merely removed from his brother to some distant location on the earth but is killed? Will the remaining boy suddenly know nothing more of his deceased partner? Or, as I believe, will he still be linked to his brother and thereby linked to the mysterious world of the dead, the “afterlife”?
    Imagine the power to be gained by controlling the remaining boy and thereby gaining private communicationwith the next world. The only price for such an endeavor would be the death of one of two boys who are so identical that to kill one would merely be to correct a redundancy. Truly, who needs both Edgar and Allan Poe in our world? Yes, this is the secret purpose of my experiment. To gain control of the two boys, terminate one,