SINCE I REALLY did not want caviar for dinner-or ever-I sent Mr. Gout out for some KFC original recipe. I knew my friends, especially Joe, would never forgive me if I didn’t summon them for the Colonel Sanders gorge fest. Joe nearly cried with happiness when he saw Mr. Gout come in the door with the big red-and-white buckets.

Then Dana, Willy, Joe, and Emma and I said good night to my parents and hopped into the Ferrari. The only problem was the five of us couldn’t fit in a two-seater sports car.

“Leave Dana here,” said Joe.

“No way,” said Dana, “You’re the one who smells like Colonel Sanders’s gym shorts.”

“I’ll stay behind if you guys want,” said the ever-sacrificing Emma. “Even though all I smell like is coleslaw because nobody ever asks what I want to eat for dinner.”

Emma always serves us a generous helping of grief for eating meat.

“Hey, you kids,” said Dad, who was standing on the front lawn, laughing at us along with Pork Chop. “Take the minivan,” he suggested. “I made some modifications that will help quite a bit with your, um, errands tonight.”

Willy had already clambered out of the overstuffed Ferrari and was sliding open the minivan’s side-panel door.

“Dudes. You gotta come check this out!”

DAD HAD CONVERTED the minivan into a cross between Scooby Doo’s Mystery Machine and a NASA command center.

The spacious, now shag-carpeted interior was blinking, pulsing, and humming with sensor displays, joysticks, trackballs, touchpads, data visors, relay panels, heads-up displays, sampling hoods, and holographic imagers.