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included:
    AEON
    AGUE
    AIDE
    ALEE
    ALOE
    AQUA
    AREA
    ARIA
    ASEA
    AURA
    AUTO
    BEAU
    CIAO
    EASE
    EAVE
    EURO
    IDEA
    IOTA
    LIEU
    LUAU (This was April’s favorite, because it got rid of two U’s.)
    MOUE
    OBOE
    OLEO
    OOZE
    OUZO
    UREA
    And the five-letter ones, which got rid of even more vowels, included:
    ADIEU
    AERIE
    AUDIO
    COOEE
    EERIE
    LOOIE
    LOUIE
    MIAOU
    QUEUE
     
    April and Lucy sat studying the word lists. “About the boy from the pool again,” April suddenly said. “I’d like to try to find him one last time.”
    “Well, just see if you can remember the words on his shirt,” said Lucy.
    “I’ve done that,” April said.
    “All right then,” said Lucy. “We’ll try something else.”
    “What?”
    “ You know.”
    April did know. Lucy Woolery was an amateur hypnotist. She used an electric toothbrush with a spinning head, and she had successfully hypnotized her own father this way, getting him to walk around the house crumbling a piece of bread and dumbly repeating the words, “Bread is yummy. Bread is yummy.”
    When he came back to reality he was stunned to look down and see bread crumbs at his feet. Lucy had put a few other people into trances, too, including her cousin Wayne, and Ms. Gibney, the art teacher at school.
    But not April. Even now, on the bed in April’s room, with Lucy holding the spinning toothbrush in front of her face (she had it with her because she’d slept over the night before), saying, “Watch the toothbrush, April,” it was clear that it wasn’t going to work.
    April just lay staring at it. “No offense, Luce,” she said, “but is this going to go on much longer?”
    Lucy finally clicked off the power switch. “Forget it, April,” she said. “You’re totally unhypnotizable. You’re going to have to come up with another way to find him, wherever he is.”

Chapter Five
    THE CURSE OF THE ZYGOTES
    T he following week, far from April Blunt and far from Duncan Dorfman, on a cold, windy New York City street at eight A.M., Nate Saviano rode his skateboard toward the gates of school, his long dark hair sticking out beneath his helmet. All around him kids carried backpacks, or clutched science projects. A city bus rumbled past, and in it Nate could practically see down the throats of yawning kids. He could nearly see their uvulas, those things that looked like little punching bags in the back of everyone’s throat.
    UVULAS was a good Scrabble word to know, Nate thought.
    It seemed that everyone in New York between the ages of five and eighteen was heading to school. But not Nate. The backpack strapped to his own back, covered with buttons and pins about skateboarding, was just for show; there was absolutely nothing inside it. He wanted people to think: Oh look, there goes an ordinary kid heading to school. But this wasn’t true.
    The wind picked up as Nate coasted toward P.S. 585 in lower Manhattan. Across the street from the school was a small and not particularly nice skate park where kids often went before and after the school day. A crowd had collected, and Nate joined them, just the way he used to when he was one of them.
    He’d never expected that would ever change, and he’d been shocked when, before school started in September, his father had announced that Nate wouldn’t be returning to P.S. 585. Instead, he was going to be homeschooled. “You’ll learn a lot more at home,” his father said.
    “What?” said Nate. He couldn’t believe it. “Who’s supposed to be my teacher?” he asked.
    “Me.”
    “You’re not a teacher!” Nate shouted. And after that day, he began shouting at his father more and more. Larry Saviano was a science-fiction writer who had published a series of novels about the adventures of two astronauts traveling to the planet Zax, and who are whisked back in time. (ZAX was a Scrabble word; that was how Larry had come up with the name.)
    Very few people had read the Zax novels. Even though Larry’s books didn’t make any money, the