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showed a thirty-five percent increase in long-and short-term memory in subjects who chewed gum.”
    Gerard turned and looked at Maggie with enough smugness to make his point but not enough to get smacked across the chest.
    “It also increases alertness,” continued Mr. Cheeseman. “I’ll take a piece if you can spare one, Gerard.”
    “Dad, if you’re getting tired I could drive for a while,” said Jough.
    It was true that Mr. Cheeseman had taught his son to drive when Jough was just twelve years old. This may seem like a highly irresponsible thing for a parent to do, but in their current situation, his father weighed the risks and thought this would be a good skill for Jough to have. That way, if anything were to happen to him, Jough would be able to drive Gerard and Maggie to safety or to get help.
    “It’s okay, Jough. I’ll let you know if I need your help. But thanks anyway.”
    “No problem,” said Jough, barely hiding his disappointment.
    “When are we gonna get there, anyway?” asked Gerard, handing his father a piece of gum.
    “It’s hard to say,” said Mr. Cheeseman, “considering the fact that I’m not sure exactly where we’re going.”
    “Maybe this time we could stay long enough that I could try out for summer league baseball,” Jough said.
    “That would be nice,” said Mr. Cheeseman. “I’d like to see you use that screwball I taught you.”
    “I’d like to continue my archery lessons,” said Maggie.
    “I’d like to join the Cub Scouts,” said Gerard.
    “I’d like to get a paper route,” said Steve.
    “Grrrr,” Pinky growled at the one-eyed sock puppet.
    “I’m hoping we can do all those things,” said Mr. Cheeseman. “Believe me, I’m just as tired of this lifestyle as you are. But you all know why we have to live this way, so let’s just make the most of it and hope that it will all be over soon.”

    To look at the handsome, bespectacled driver of the heavily loaded white station wagon, you might never guess that Ethan Cheeseman was a veritable genius and one of the greatest inventors of this or any other century.
    To be fair though, none of his inventions would ever have been realized if he hadn’t been introduced to an equally brilliant scientist with long auburn hair named Olivia Lodbrok. (That is not to say her hair was named Olivia Lodrok but that the woman herself was named that. It had never occurred to the woman to name her hair.)
    Olivia was a strikingly beautiful woman despite the fact that her large black-rimmed glasses covered nearly half her face. She had that rare face that could survive the addition of large black-rimmed glasses. In fact she was so beautiful that you could affix just about anything to her face—a giant squid, for instance, or a toy tractor, or a handlebar mustache—and she would still be every bit as attractive.
    Olivia and Ethan fell madly in love, and the rest is history.
    Truth be told, that’s only an expression and the rest is not history. Not all of it, anyway. Quite a bit of it is, in fact, biology, as several years later Ethan and Olivia were married with three young children that you now know as Jough, Maggie, and Gerard. And though these were not their names at birth, I will refer to them by these names so as not to create unnecessary confusion.
    Up until two years ago, Jough, Maggie, and Gerard were three of the happiest children there ever were. They attended school and had many friends. Jough, despite his problems with balance, was able to play baseball and touch football with the other neighborhood children with the help of his specially made earmuffs. He was popular and a good student, though he was secretly very annoyed by the fact that his younger sister had skipped ahead two entire grades and now sat directly in front of him in homeroom.
    Maggie, like her mother, was smart as a whip and at the top of her class in just about every subject. She had received nothing but straight As since first grade, when they first