In book three, it was a beautiful spring weekend on the Hill when four rugged kids decided to spend it camping in the woods. They were hit with a mysterious light, followed by a mysterious, uncanny stranger walking into their campsite. It didn't take the Hill kids long to discover the visitor was an extraterrestrial being. They had to look the word up.
But others knew about the visitor's arrival, such as the Air Force and the CIA. They tracked the extraterrestrial being by satellite to a trash dump on the Hill, on the edge of Philadelphia, and went after it. But the Hill kids hid the visitor underground while the CIA and Air Force searched.
These four hard-bitten and resilient kids discovered that the visitor had a brother imprisoned in Area 51, Nevada's CIA secret testing site. The visitor had come for him. With the help of a Shoshone chief on a reservation next to Area 51, and a few NASA scientists, the Hill kids tried to unite the two beings. This edge of the seat unputdownable story has an ending you won't see coming.
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Excerpt from the The Visitor
In Ant's school, St. Monica's in South Philly, in Mrs. Hamer's fourth-grade class, Frankie was put in charge of the ant farm Mrs. Hamer brought into the classroom. Frankie's seat in the last row of Classroom AA was directly alongside the art farm. Frankie watched the ants working and building tunnels the kids called hallways all day. The problem was that Frankie learned so much about how ants lived that he stopped learning to read, write, and do arithmetic. His first report card was so bad his mother had to schedule a conference with Mrs. Hamer to determine why her little Frankie was failing, although Frankie wasn't so little.
"Frankie is always talkin' about them goddamn ants," Mrs. Badami told his teacher. "Ants, ants, ants, that's all the Christ he talks about. He's gonna turn into a goddamn ant," Mrs. Badami complained. Thus, Mrs. Hamer moved Frankie's seat to the other side of the classroom to avoid being distracted by the ant farm. That didn't sit well with Frankie, who already was the class bully because he was bigger than the other children.
Mrs. Hamer pissed off Frankie when she moved him. One night, he broke into the school — he tore off shingles and, with a crowbar, went through the roof into the school's attic and down the stairs to the fifth floor. Frankie had balls. He snuck down to his classroom, stole the ant farm, and took it home. He hid the ant farm behind a bookcase in his basement.
All the children in Frankie's class knew he stole the ant farm, which was perfectly okay because if any kid squealed, Frankie would kick the crap out of him. No one in the Badami household knew there was an ant farm in the basement that Frankie kept enlarging. He tripled the Ant's food supply, added bug vitamins, and brought topsoil he stole in the neighborhood. Needing more room, the ants moved out of the small glass case. Frankie pushed the bookcase further out, and each day, he filled his pockets with topsoil and dumped it behind them. The ants did the rest, building more and more hallways.' Soon, the ants multiplied — which ants will do faster than rabbits. Frankie had thousands and thousands of ants in his ant farm behind the bookcase and fed them double the amount of food you would typically feed ants. Soon, however, the ants needed even more room and moved into other parts of the house.
Frankie built ant farms under beds, behind the sink, behind the couch, and anywhere he could dump dirt without it being seen. The ants kept multiplying, and Frankie kept adding dirt. By Christmas, Frankie's house was infested with thousands of ants, and then his mother finally noticed. One night, she was watching Gunsmoke, and she noticed the lamp move on a corner table next to the bookcase.
She got up, went over, and moved the lamp back into place, and that's when she saw the ants. There were only a couple hundred of them until she followed a line of them back behind the bookcase. She went to the other side of the bookcase and pulled it out from the wall. She went berserk. "Jesus Christ," she screamed, "look at all these goddamn ants." She started seeing ant trails everywhere, and she followed them.
"Where the hell are these goddamn ants coming from?" she yelled. And it wasn't just at Frankie's house. The ants started spreading to other homes on the McKean Street block. "How did we get all these goddamn ants?" Mrs. Badami screamed. But the next words out of her mouth were, "Frankie! Get the fuck down here."
The neighbors on McKean Street were mad as hell. Every family on the block had to hire an exterminator to come and get rid of the ants. Mrs. Badami beat Frankie just short of his life, and word got around South Philadelphia about the ant infestation and how it came about.
From then on, Frankie Badami was known as Ant Ant in South Philly. "Hey Ant, Ant, how many ants did you have in your house? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Ant Ant knows them ants. Huh? Son of a bitch."
Therefore, mob boss Angelo Morello selected three made men to find them aliens: Ant Ant, Tony "Eggs" Ferelli, and Thomas "Tommy Sneakers" Vallaro. The boss thought that since aliens might be involved, Tommy Sneakers should be there, you know, "In case those little bastards run for it. Nobody could ever outrun Tommy Sneakers, not even a punk from outer space."
Ant Ant was a shoo-in to be picked because of his reputation for ants and dirt, and them ants live underground, Morello theorized. Because at the meetin' at Bookbinders, Tommy Rossilli told Morello that the CIA told him that the aliens might be underground.
"Listen, Ant Ant knows dirt and what's underneath everything," Morello concluded.
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