Twelve-year-olds Oliver Beane and Frankie Figge are starting middle school in their suburban town of Lake Grove Glen, but from the beginning things seem a little weird, starting with the mysterious girl Matilda Sandoval who seems to know a lot about the boys, and continuing with a series of apparently random events that may not be random at all; somehow it all leads back to Preston Oglethorpe, a former student genius at their school who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in applied chaos theory at twenty-eight, and then mysteriously disappeared--and if the boys (and Matilda) can just connect the dots maybe they can figure out who or what is manipulating their lives, and why.