B005N8ZFUO EBOK by David Lubar Page A

as simple as I’d hoped. After spending most of Saturday trying to study Flinch without being obvious about it, and learning absolutely nothing, I realized it might be better to get more information first. So I decided to do some research. If I was right, everything I knew about the world was about to change. Everything I knew about the whole universe, for that matter.
    After breakfast Sunday morning, while all my classmates were hanging out and relaxing, or spending quality time at home with their parents, I went to the school library down on the first floor. The librarian—I think it was the same guy who taught the history lecture—seemed shocked to see someone. Or annoyed that I had disturbed his nap. I’m not sure which. Either way, I had the place pretty much to myself.
    I wasn’t exactly sure where to start, so I wandered around reading the titles of books on the shelves. I knew I could look something up on the computer catalog that listed all the books in the library, but I didn’t even know what to look under. It was like trying to find a word in the dictionary when you didn’t know how to spell it. But at least the library didn’t have as many books as the dictionary had words.
    “Can I help you?” the librarian asked after I’d scanned the shelves for ten minutes or so. He walked over toward me, but stopped several feet away, as if I might be contagious. I guess it drove him crazy watching me search the shelves like someone trying to find the right variety of soup in the supermarket.
    “No thanks, I’m just looking.”
    He gave me that special smile teachers use with students who aren’t very bright. “Well, if you tell me what you’re looking for, I can help you find it.”
    I shrugged. “I won’t know what I’m looking for until I find it.”
    “Suit yourself. But call me if you need help.”
    “I will.” I resumed my search. There was a lot of interesting stuff. There were some books about dinosaurs and tanks and outer space. All the books looked pretty worn. The ripped covers were wrapped in yellowing
plastic. A lot of them were patched with tape that had turned stiff and brittle. I flipped open a couple of the books and checked the dates. Most of them were written years ago. I guess an old book is just as good as a new one if it has the facts you need. But at first I didn’t see anything that would do me any good.
    Then I got warm. I spotted a book called A Skeptical Look into the World of the Unexplained . That seemed worth a shot. I took it to one of the tables and started flipping through the pages.
    The guy who wrote the book talked about all kinds of unexplained phenomena like ghosts and stuff, and he tried to explain them in normal terms. Some of the unexplained stuff he’d investigated was obviously fake. He’d caught people making thumping sounds and pretending it was a ghost, or using hidden springs to make objects jump off a shelf. There were all kinds of frauds out there. Some of them were after money, and some just wanted attention.
    I wasn’t interested in the fakes. The most important thing I got from the book was a list of the words for what I wanted to learn about. I’d brought a notebook with me. I wrote down the words— clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis , and several others. Then I went to the computer—it was an old piece of junk with a green screen, and the software was pretty lame, but it had all the books in the library on file so you could search for titles and subjects. I noticed the librarian giving me a smug look, like he’d won some sort of contest. I ignored him.
    I searched the computer for the words I’d found. There weren’t any books on the subjects. That didn’t surprise me. It wasn’t the sort of thing a school library would have. So I tried the encyclopedia. Bingo. I found short articles under several of the words. And I learned a couple more words from those articles, especially the part at the end where they say see also . I added those