She climbed the long ladder, crawled into the fort, and spotted them. They were lying in a corner like a big, crumpled insect. She scooped them up and put them on.

“Oh! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” she gasped.

A sudden noise broke through the trees. It was a long, crackling sound like a piece of dry wood splintering, and it came from nearby—two or three houses down, maybe. Megan stood still and listened. A minute later, she heard the noise again, but this time it was louder—crrraaackkk! Then she heard a grunt, as if someone had been hurt. She ran to the wall of the fort and looked up and down the neighbors’ lawns. Nothing. The dark landscape was creepy. She whistled and called her next-door neighbor’s dog.

“Patches? Is that you? Are you—?”

She heard the noise again, louder than ever. CRRRAAACKKK! Then a thump, a thud, and another grunt.

Megan and her friends kept binoculars in the fort. She found them and balanced the lenses on her nose. Magnified, her neighborhood looked even darker than before, and the houses seemed to be trembling—until she realized that her hands were shaking.

“The zoo,” she whispered.

She ran to the opposite side of the fort. The only thing separating her neighborhood from the Clarksville City Zoo was a long, winding concrete wall. From Fort Scout, she had a clear view over this wall. In daylight, she could watch the giraffes, bears, seals, and hippos as they ran, swam, and lazed about. She steadied the binoculars and stared into the zoo. Lampposts illumined the paths, but the exhibits were too dark to see.

She heard the crushing sound again and realized that it wasn’t coming from the zoo. She dashed back to the opposite window and scanned the neighbors’ yards once more. Nothing. Nothing but grassy lawns, trees, and rooftops.

The grunting echoed between the houses. Megan pushed up the binoculars so suddenly that they clinked against her glasses. Now, she was more than creeped out—she was downright scared!

“C’mon, Meg,” she said. “Nothing’s out there. Quit freaking yourself—”

She gasped. Something was there! Some kind of creature was walking on a gable rooftop, three houses down.

“What is that?” she whispered.

She focused the binoculars and discerned five creatures creeping across the roof. A sixth was climbing the branches of the oak tree beside the house, making the limbs break. That was the sound she’d heard—branches breaking. Suddenly, the creature leapt from the shaking tree, flew through the air, and landed on the house with the others. It stomped up to the roof peak and bounded onto the chimney.

The other five creatures were small and hunched over. Their long arms dangled at their sides, and as they walked, their shoulders rocked like a seesaw. Megan continued to watch them until she realized what they were. Monkeys! It seemed impossible. Monkeys had escaped the zoo and were climbing over a house in her neighborhood.

One monkey leapt from the edge of the rooftop. Megan had a clear view of its silhouette in front of the moon. Its feet hit the gutter of the adjacent rooftop with a clang, and the other monkeys followed, effortlessly jumping the distance between the houses.

“No,” she said as she stared in disbelief. “Nunh-unh.”

The monkeys jumped to the next house, and the next, and then disappeared into the shadows. Silence and stillness descended over the neighborhood.

“Noah …”

Megan hurried down the ladder and rushed into the house. Her older brother would know what to do. She flung open his bedroom door, startling him out of his sleep.

“Wha—?” Noah gasped. His hair stood out in all directions, reminding Megan of sunrays in a cartoon.

“Noah—outside!” she blurted out. “Quick!”

“What?”

“Now!”

She ran back through the house. Noah chased her outside. They dashed across the yard and climbed up to Fort Scout.

“What are you—?”

Megan snatched the binoculars and shoved them at her brother. “Here!”

“Here, what?”

“Look through them!” She pointed toward the rooftops. “Over there—I saw monkeys!”

“Megan!”

“I saw monkeys! On the rooftops!”

Her older brother looked her up and down. “You’re nuts.”
“Just see for yourself!”

Noah peered through the binoculars. He searched the landscape for more than a minute without saying a word. Then he handed the binoculars back to his sister and said, “Yep! You’re nuts.”

“Noah! I saw them. I’m telling you—”

He climbed down the ladder, saying, “What are you doing out here so late anyway? You’ll be sooo dead if Mom catches you out here.” He reached the ground and turned to run toward the house, calling, “Come inside!”

Megan watched him run back into the house and close the door on the night. She turned her attention back to the rooftops and her neighbors’ yards. She studied the shadowy landscape for nearly an hour, but nothing unusual happened.

“I know I saw them,” she said, trying to convince herself.

She climbed down from the fort, returned to the house, dropped into bed, and stared at the ceiling.

She couldn’t sleep. At two o’clock in the morning, she rolled out of bed and sat at her desk. Nervous, she drummed her fingers on the desktop and shifted her eyes. Her gaze stopped on a single book standing on its edge. A diary. A recent gift from her mother, the diary lacked its first entry. Megan snatched it up and opened to the first page. The binding was so stiff that she had to press down the cover before it would lay flat. She stared at the page. It was ridiculously colorful—red paper with purple lines and blue stars in the corners.

In class, she’d learned about brainstorming—scribbling down ideas as quickly as possible. Her teacher had said it was a way to make sense of something that was difficult to figure out. Megan grabbed a pencil, chewed on the eraser for a moment, and started to write.

Date: April 18, 2006.
Time: 11:00 or something.
I went outside because I forgot my stupid glasses in Fort Scout again. When I climbed up …

She wrote for an hour. Then she closed the notebook, set it aside, turned off the light, and climbed back into bed. An hour later, she fell asleep without knowing that she’d just completed the first pages of a journal that would eventually alter the course of the world.

************
After the Discovery
May 26, 2006

Fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs hopped down the long zoo corridor, jumping and tumbling over each other as they scrambled forward. Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! The sticky pads of their feet slapped the floor and sounded like exploding miniature firecrackers. A hundred aquariums lined the walls. Occasionally, a frog leapt sideways and stuck to the glass for a few seconds.

The fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs hopped into a small exhibit at the end of the corridor—the special exhibit that a young girl had snuck into just minutes earlier. They found exactly what they feared—nothing! The girl was gone. Three sheets of notebook paper lay on the ground—colorful red pages with purple lines and blue stars in the corners. Torn and crinkled, the pages were still fluttering as they settled on the floor.

The fourteen red-eyed leaf frogs didn’t know the pages were from the diary of a girl named Megan Nowicki, who months earlier had spotted monkeys escaping from the zoo. They stared at the pages. Then, whipping the sheets with their long, sticky tongues, three leaf frogs picked them up.

And so the story began.