Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 It's all my parents' fault. If they'd just gotten me a phone like I'd asked them, and asked them, none of this would have ever happened. Henry has a phone. Marcela has a phone. Even Geno has a phone, and his parents are really strict--they don't even let him watch TV on weekends . But my parents won't let me have one. "When you're older," they said. And then they wouldn't even tell me what that meant. So I really think it was their fault I stole the phone. Okay, I didn't steal it, really. But I didn't look super hard for whoever it belonged to either. This is what happened. I was walking home from the park and I was playing catch with my house key. I have really good hand-eye coordination, if I do say so myself, but I was trying to do a spin-around-double-jump-eyes-closed catch, which is pretty hard. I'd done it three times in a row already, and was going for four when I tripped. Over the phone. Which was just sitting there on the sidewalk. Like it was waiting for me to kneel down and pick it up. And it worked. I mean, I swiped, and it had a whole bunch of apps on it and everything. And it was even all charged up. I know what I really should have done was tell my parents about it as soon as I got home. But they would have just taken it right away and put up signs about it on telephone poles or announced it on the internet or something, and I would have never gotten the chance to use it. And now I could show Geno that what I'd been saying all along was true, that I was getting a phone and that it had been on back order from Amazon this whole time. So I shoved the phone deep into the bottom of my backpack and went home. And headed straight to the bathroom, locked the door, and then dug the phone out to look at it again. I guess it was on a different plan than the one my parents had, because I couldn't get service at home. I tried calling Geno, twice, but the call didn't go through. It wasn't really great about connecting to the internet, either; it was taking so long to load a page that I just gave up. But at least the camera worked fine: I didn't take a lot of pictures, because I was in the bathroom and that was just gross, but I took one or two selfies just to make sure I could. And so even though it was a kind-of-stolen phone and it only kind of worked, it was still pretty cool. Excerpted from Press 1 for Invasion by J. A. Dauber All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
