Ms. Gassias better not be counting on much class participation this morning. I can hardly keep my eyes open. It’s tough to get a good night’s sleep when every time your lids close, visions of your parents dancing in front of the whole school fill your head. If you can call what they were doing “dancing.” I can’t believe anyone actually did that. And dressed like that when they did it. With my luck, Bula inherited their brains, and I’ll get stuck with their dance moves and sense of style.

I’m sitting in the back of the class, with Spotch, Rand-El, and Brian. Zot’s in this class, too, but she’s strictly a front-rower, so that the teacher can clearly see her hand raised to answer every question. Grimnee sits up there, too, but her hand stays down on her desk.

We need to talk about our plan to destroy the Zorb, but it looks like that will have to wait until lunch. Somebody just walked into the room, but it’s not Ms. Gassias.

Giggles fill the classroom. I mean, how could they not, right?

“Yes, go ahead and laugh. But I’ll have you know that Pphhfftt is the third most popular surname on my planet, right behind Bbrraapp…”

Louder giggles.

“… and Bblleecchh.”

Riotous laughter. One kid even falls out of his chair, but he was pretty slippery to begin with.

“It pleases me that our names bring you all such joy. Hopefully, this writing assignment will as well—a two-page paper titled ‘What Gives Me Strength.’ I know you have a big dance tomorrow, so we’ll make this due the following day.”

“A paper? But this is math class.”

“Alas, I am not a math teacher. I am a writing teacher. And what you will write is a paper on what gives you strength.”

“You mean like push-ups and stuff? Or protein shakes?”

“No, I mean your inner strength. You all came here from distant worlds to start new lives. What is it that helps you handle everything that is being thrown at you every day? This certainly isn’t an easy situation to be in. I’m looking for thoughtful, well-written papers that you can share with the class.”

Share with the class? Thoughtful and well written? Dang. This is definitely not going to help me lose my nongenius genius label.

“As for today, I haven’t had time to prepare a lesson, so we’ll be watching an informative film.”

Mrs. Pphhfftt turns out the lights and starts the informative film. It’s called Hygiene Hints for Space-Bound Students.

Spotch, Brian, Rand-El, and I all rank pretty high on the cleanliness scale, at least compared to some of the kids at this school. So we decide to put the next thirty minutes to better use. We huddle up and go over the revised Zorb Destruction Plan, which is basically the same as Brian’s original plan except for one detail.

“Whatever! Tell you what. Let’s just call it the Ray That Shrinks Things. How’s that?”

“Actually, that sounds a little awkward.”

“Yeah. How about just Shrink Ray? It’s a lot simpler and to the point.”

“I think what Kelvin’s trying to say is we can use the ray to shrink the whole containment vault, with the Zorb inside it, down to nothing.”

“Exactly. But the ray only works at extremely close range, so we have to get in tight. We can use Brian’s original idea of having Lightyear hork up a copy of my dad in order to get past the sentry robots. Then we shrink the Zorb until it’s gone. Or at least so small that nobody will ever find it. Easy as pie.”

“I don’t know. I still think we should leave it up to the adults.”

“Already tried that, Rand-El. Now it’s on us to do something. And the sooner the better. When we get home today, Spotch and I will get Lightyear to make a copy of my dad. Rand-El, you and Brian get ahold of the Shrink Ray.”

“How the heck are we supposed to do that?”

“You’ll think of something. Then we’ll meet outside my dad’s lab at eight o’clock. I still have the duplicate key card from a couple months ago. We can hide the ray and dupli-Dad in the lab until we’re ready to use them.”

Just then, from somewhere in the room, comes the sound of someone… uh… cutting the cheese. Very loudly.