The Genius Factor: How to Capture an Invisible Cat

by Paul Tobin

  Nobody thought he was amazing.

  He just moved through the halls and the classrooms, unnoticed.

  Well, I thought he was amazing.

  We would wave hello in the halls. He held a door for me a couple of times. We would wave hello in the lunchroom. I held a door for him a couple of times. Liz and Stine kept asking why I was so obviously interested in Nate, and why I wasn’t talking to him if I was so interested. What I wanted to tell them was everything that had happened with Proton and the Red Death Tea Society and with Nate, but I didn’t. It never seemed right to tell them. It seemed like it was a shared secret between Nate and me, except that even we weren’t sharing the secret.

  Not anymore.

  What I wanted most of all was to tell Nate that I’d spent an entire night packing a duffel bag full of items I thought might be needed on our next adventure, because surely there would be a next adventure, right?

  Right?

  But the days and the weeks went by, and my bag was just tucked beneath my bed. Gathering dust. Full of rope. Slingshots. Peanut butter. My sturdiest shoes. A first-aid kit. More candy bars than I will admit. A good-luck charm that I decided to keep, even though it’s shaped like a cat. A lighter. A compass. A whistle. A flashlight with extra batteries. And so on, and so on.

  I played a lot of soccer.

  I thought about cats and rocket belts, and about the Red Death Tea Society and how they had interfered with Nate’s experiment, and how they’d attacked me, and what they might do next. It didn’t feel like anything was finished. I knew they were out there. Planning. I thought about what Maculte had said about Nate being alone. And he was alone. And it wasn’t right. And, for the first time in my life I felt alone, too. I was still seeing all my friends, still hanging out with Liz, still being the person I used to be, but without Nate I still felt alone.

  I found myself being suspicious of any black cars, of which I saw hundreds, but nothing ever came of it. I thought I saw Maculte in one of the cars, but it drove away before I could be sure.

  I didn’t feel like I was sure of anything.

  Not anything.

  I made extra money at my dog-walking job and I spent it on science books because … I don’t know. I just did.

  Liz Morris and I went camping one weekend with her parents.

  I thought about forming a band.

  I began to think that Nate and I weren’t going to be friends after all.

  I read a lot of books, not only the science books but others with Sherlock Holmes, or the heroes and gods of ancient Greece, who seemed to spend the majority of their time making up for horrible mistakes. I was jealous of them: making mistakes is bad, but … at least they were doing something.

  I was outside in my yard on Friday the thirteenth when the call came. I was drinking lemonade and wondering if I’d put in too much sugar. I was deciding that I had, and was also deciding that I was okay with that. I was devising my own little stories wherein Sherlock Holmes was hired to solve the mysteries of the Greek gods, and I was also watching Snarls, our cat, walking across the lawn. I was keeping a close eye on him, because I no longer entirely trusted cats.

  His ears perked up.

  He heard my phone before I did.

  I picked up my phone and looked to see who was calling.

  Nate.

  It was Nate.

  I’ll be honest and admit that I started to sweat. But I answered right away.

  “Hello?” I said. “Nate?”

  “Delphine?” he said. “I need your help. Could you come over? I’ve done something not-so-very smart.”

  By then I’d spilled lemonade all over my lawn, and I was inside my room and clutching my adventure bag in my hands.

  “I’ll be right there,” I told him.

  Acknowledgments

  A big thanks to Colleen Coover, my first reader and the one person who always thinks I’m a genius, even when I’m having trouble figuring out the curtains or how to make soup. Big thanks also to Joanna Volpe at New Leaf Literary & Media, whose advice was the first step in getting this book on the shelves. And to my agent, Brooks Sherman at the Bent Agency, the guy who took a look at the first glowing goop of this novel and decided there was something there, and then kindly used his cattle prod on the lowest setting in order to cajole me into doing the necessary revisions. Huge thanks to Cindy Loh and everyone else at Bloomsbury, because you people took a chance on me and have been unfailingly supportive and generous with your time and expertise. This would be a far lesser book without all your efforts. I’d also like to give a rousing cheer for Thierry Lafontaine for his amazing illustrations. After having written so much about these characters, it was wonderful to “see” them for the first time. Thanks to my mom and dad, for understanding that it would have done little good to punish me for all my various transgressions, and that sometimes you just have to let a little boy get bumped and bruised and … at one point … somehow manage to get his mouth chock-full of angry bumblebees. Thanks also to everyone who puts up with all the questions I ask, and thanks to people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Feynman, and Carl Sagan, who provided some of the answers.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Paul Tobin

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Thierry Lafontaine

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First published in the United States of America in March 2016

  by Bloomsbury Children’s Books

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tobin, Paul.

  The genius factor : how to capture an invisible cat / by Paul Tobin ;

  illustrated by Thierry Lafontaine.

  pages cm

  Summary: Socially awkward fifth-grade genius Nate Bannister recruits his classmate Delphine to help him reverse one of his many experiments (a dinosaur-sized invisible cat) while foiling the schemes of the world’s most dastardly organization, the Red Death Tea Society.

  ISBN 978-1-61963-840-2 (hardcover) • ISBN 978-1-61963-841-9 (e-book)

  [1. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 2. Science—Experiments—Fiction.

  3. Genius—Fiction. 4. Humorous stories.] I. Lafontaine, Thierry, illustrator.

  II. Title. III. Title: How to capture an invisible cat.

  PZ7.T5617Fr 2016 [Fic]—dc23 2015008383

  To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.