Chapter 1

Results

The only thing Josh Willett liked about homework was how quickly he could access his assignments. All he had to do was turn on his laptop, then click the SIXTH-GRADE HOMEWORK portal he’d bookmarked on his browser at the start of the school year.

This system let Josh zoom through his homework so he could get back to the things he cared about most--like a new coding problem, or a new digital animation project, or a new action sequence for the online game he wanted to build. Because Josh always had something new to work on, a plan he was hatching. And usually, it involved his computer.

On this Monday evening in mid-September, without taking his fingers off the keyboard or his eyes off the screen, Josh sat at the kitchen table and crushed his homework for math, science, and social studies in less than twenty minutes--including the time it took to post each finished assignment.

Then he clicked the link for his ELA class.

The image of a handwritten note popped open on his screen:

Homework due Tuesday

Describe something you think is beautiful. Make your description at least one hundred words long. Avoid cliches, and remember this advice from page 70 of The Elements of Style: “Write in a way that comes naturally.” Copy your final draft onto lined paper in blue or black ink, and turn in the assignment Tuesday at the beginning of class. As always, neatness counts.

Mr. N

The assignment itself, plus the way it had been written by hand, plus the whole “neatness counts” thing? All of it made Josh scowl and grit his teeth. A chore like this should only take about ten minutes: type it, format it, spellcheck it, post it, and whoosh! Done.

But having to write out every language arts assignment in ink on paper? It was annoying, slow, and totally pointless--not to mention bad for the environment. Didn’t Mr. N understand anything?

It wasn’t that Mr. N was mean or unfair. He just seemed so backward. And also dull--except for the way he dressed.

He owned at least ten Hawaiian shirts, and he wore one each day, along with surfer shorts, hiking socks, and sandals. He would wear cargo pants, but only if the outdoor temperature got below sixty-five degrees. His dark red hair never looked completely tamed, especially when he rode his bike to school. Some days it seemed like he was trying to grow a mustache. Or a beard. Or both. Plenty of people in Southern California wore casual clothes, but at Clara Vista Middle School? Mr. N could win a prize for Least-Dressed-Up Teacher every single day.

The most backward thing about Mr. N? He was the only teacher in the whole school who didn’t let kids use laptops in class. He claimed there was no rule saying he had to allow them. Josh had checked the school handbook after getting the first assignment, just to make sure.

Josh wasn’t sure if Mr. N even owned a computer. There was a rumor that once he’d had a big argument with Mr. Ortega about posting his homework assignments on the school website. Mr. N had told the principal that writing assignments on the board in his classroom was enough--and he didn’t mean one of the SMART Boards that every other teacher used. No, Mr. N had an actual chalkboard that he could move around the room on wheels. The whiteboard was there, but Mr. N kept it hidden behind a huge poster about the parts of speech.

And that miserable little grammar book, The Elements of Style? Most of it was over a hundred years old.

Almost every day Mr. N made the entire class open to a certain page, and then some poor kid would have to stand up and read something out loud. If you forgot to bring your copy to class, you’d get a red mark in the gradebook--and three marks made your whole grade drop five points.

Antique books, ancient chalkboards, handwriting on paper--Mr. N’s class felt like being stuck inside a broken time machine. . . . More like a time-wasting machine. It was so frustrating to Josh, who just wanted Mr. N to appreciate the world his students were actually living in.

But grumbling was also a waste of time, so Josh opened a new document on his laptop. He had to write out the final copy by hand, but he always typed his first draft--like a normal human being living in the twenty-first century.

Something beautiful . . .

Josh stared at the empty document on his screen, watching the cursor as it blinked and blinked. He had no ideas, not even a bad one.

But as he looked at that blinking cursor, he decided it must be appearing once each second--a half second on, a half second off. He opened the stopwatch app on his iPhone and ran a quick test.

Yup, one blink per second.

And Josh understood why.

The cursor blinked once each second because somewhere inside his laptop there was a line or two of computer code. A programmer had written that code, which told the computer what to do. And the computer obeyed--it had no choice. Because good code is like a set of unbreakable rules. And if the programmer gets everything right, that code keeps working, and working perfectly, practically forever, and . . .

And that’s what I’m going to write about!

A few hours earlier during his after-school coding club, Josh had finished writing a perfect Python loop statement--a sequence of instructions that repeated itself until a specific goal was met. And that loop was beautiful! A flurry of words rushed into his mind, and Josh’s fingers zipped around the keyboard. Six or seven minutes later, the counter at the bottom of his document showed he had typed 136 words, just like that.

After some quick proofreading, he began writing his final copy on a sheet of lined paper. Neatly. Josh knew he had scrunchy handwriting. But his spelling was perfect, and his sentences made sense. The page looked clean and organized, and word after word flowed onto the paper in bright blue ink.

With only four sentences left to copy, disaster struck. The pen skipped, and the dry point almost tore his paper--it was out of ink.

Josh shook the pen and tried it again. Nothing.

He banged it on the edge of the kitchen table, but that didn’t help either, so he dug around in his backpack and found two other pens.

He tested one on a scrap of paper. Black ink.

He tried the second. More black ink--and he needed blue ink to match what he’d started with for Mr. N, the neatness nut.

I guess I could start over and use black ink . . . ?

Josh shouted, “Hey, Mom?”

“I’m right here, and quiet down--Dad’s putting Sophie to bed.”

Josh hurried through the doorway into the family room.

“I need a pen with blue ink so I can finish Mr. N’s homework.”

“Check the middle drawer of my desk.”

Josh opened the drawer, and the first pen he tried? Blue ink.

“Got one--thanks!”

Back at the kitchen table, Josh was about to start writing again. Then he noticed something printed on the side of the pen--one word, in bold black letters:

Frindle®

It was a word he’d never seen before, which made him curious. And Josh did what any other plugged-in kid would do: He searched the word on his browser--f-r-i-n-d-l-e. And then he hit return.

Whoa, 270,000 results?!

After clicking a few links, Josh opened up the images that were part of the search results--a lot of images. The very first picture showed some kid on a TV talk show, smiling at the camera and holding up a pen. And in another image halfway down his screen, Josh saw a close-up of a pen that was exactly like his mom’s!

He dashed back to the family room.

“Hey, Mom, where did you get this pen?”

She looked, and then smiled. “I’ve had that since sixth grade. Everyone at my school started calling pens frindles, and when those showed up in stores, I bought a couple--so did all my friends. It was kind of a big thing for a while.”

“Is it okay if I use this one to finish my homework?”

“Sure, but then put it back, please. That might be a collector’s item someday.”

Josh hurried back to the table to finish his homework, shaking the old pen as he went. Three minutes later he was done with his final draft, and even though the ink from his mom’s pen wasn’t a perfect match, it was definitely blue.

He returned the pen to her desk, then went back to his computer. The picture results were still on his screen, and Josh clicked the photo of that kid holding up his pen on a talk show. The enlarged image gave him a good look at the boy--red hair, glasses, freckles, and a wide smile.

Josh read the words below the picture:

Nicholas Allen, age 11, inventor of the word frindle.

“Cool,” he whispered, impressed that a kid his age was an inventor.

He looked at the boy’s face, and then leaned in closer to the screen, still looking.

Josh whispered, “No way!”

He clicked back to his homework assignment page, then back to the school’s home page. He kept clicking links until there was a second photo open on his screen, and he put the two pictures side by side--the boy on the left, and the new photo on the right.

Then Josh almost stopped breathing. The kid on the left was eleven, and the man on the right was at least thirty, but Josh was sure he was looking at two photos of the same person.

And that man on the right? It was his language arts teacher, Mr. N--also known as Mr. Allen Nicholas.

Chapter 2

Binary Question

Josh loved writing programs for computers, because computers demanded perfection. The answer to the question “Does this program work?” had to be either YES or NO. It was never MAYBE.

He also loved how computers made billions of exact calculations every second by using binary code. Binary code was so simple--nothing but ones and zeroes. Those ones and zeroes worked like tiny switches inside a computer, and those switches were either ON or OFF--just like YES or NO. Never MAYBE.

So when Josh had a problem to solve, he usually tried to turn it into a binary question--a simple question with only two possible answers, like TRUE or FALSE, YES or NO.

And on Tuesday morning at school, Josh wanted to answer this binary question:

Mr. N and Nick Allen: Are they IDENTICAL or DIFFERENT?

The night before, Josh had started to doubt his discovery about Mr. N--maybe it was all a coincidence. And to cure this uncertainty, Josh had done more research and kept careful records of what he found.

After taking another long look at those two pictures--the kid holding up his frindle, and Mr. N’s photo from the school website--Josh had dragged a copy of each onto his desktop, along with one of the frindle pen images. He discovered an old article about Nick Allen and frindle in the Westfield Gazette, the newspaper in the kid’s hometown; then an article about Nick’s fifth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Granger; and a third article about Bud Lawrence, the man who had started a company to sell those frindle pens all over the country. With so many links to explore, after only half an hour Josh had copied over fifty different photos, articles, and documents onto his desktop.

Josh actually had two desktops: the digital desktop on his computer screen, and the physical desktop on a desk in his bedroom--and his physical desktop was a wreck. Along with all the papers, notepads, pens, and pencils, there were also coding books and manuals, used worksheets, his dad’s old calculator, a plastic flowchart template, and at least a dozen scattered sticky notes, plus two broken hard drives, a tangle of cables and power cords, and a camera he hadn’t used since he’d gotten half an iPhone for his twelfth birthday--his mom and dad had paid for half, and he had paid for the other half with money he’d been saving since the beginning of fourth grade.

The desktop in his room had been cluttered for years, but the desktop on his computer? Josh cleaned it up at least once a day. His laptop was crammed with thousands of photos and assignments and apps and documents and programs and projects, but all of them were tucked away inside labeled folders. Whenever his digital desktop got messy or crowded, it was never a problem because the fix was only a few clicks away.

And on Monday night, all of Josh’s research--a jumble of JPEGs and DOCs and PDFs--neatly vanished from his home screen into a new folder. Josh smiled as he typed a name for this folder: THE FRINDLE FILES. It sounded like a Netflix series about a secret investigation, or maybe a sci-fi thriller about alien robots.

There were fifty-three items in this folder, and all but a handful were about that boy, Nick Allen. Josh had information about how the word frindle had been invented, how it had spread across the country, how teachers from Maine to Hawaii had tried to stop kids from using the word, and how millions of people had bought frindle pens and T-shirts and caps.

It had been simple to track Nick Allen online. He started out in Westfield, New Hampshire, and eventually went to college at the University of Massachusetts. Josh had even found a front-page article about Nick from the student newspaper: UMASS Freshman Created Frindle. But after college? Nothing. It was as if Nick Allen had gone off to live alone in the woods--or been abducted by alien robots.

Josh had found only three items about Mr. N that seemed worth keeping: that school website photo; an article from four years ago in the Clara Vista Condor about new teachers in town; and another brief news story showing him and his wife and their newborn daughter. All the other information he’d found was more recent stuff about Mr. N at the middle school.

Josh had also worked out a rough timeline: Nicholas Allen had finished college in 2009, then disappeared, and Mr. Allen Nicholas had popped up in Clara Vista, California--eight years later! It was quite a mystery--and the name for his data folder seemed like a perfect fit.

But Josh had also realized that unless he could prove that Nick Allen and Mr. N were IDENTICAL, all this digital information meant nothing. And by bedtime on Monday, he had come up with a plan to continue his research the next morning at school--in real life.