1 Coke and Pepsi

MISSION UNSTOPPABLE THE GENIUS FILES by DAN GUTMAN

Chapter 1 Coke and Pepsi There were ten items on Coke McDonald's to- do list on June 17, but JUMP OFF A CLIFF was not one of them. CLEAN OUT MY LOCKER was on the list. PICK UP MY YEARBOOK was on the list. GET BIRTHDAY PRESENT FOR PEP was on the list. PACK FOR SUMMER VACATION was on the list. But nothing about jumping off a cliff. And yet, oddly enough, jumping off a cliff was the one thing that Coke McDonald was actually going To Do on June 17. Not only was he going to jump off a cliff, but first he was going to push his twin sister, Pepsi.

Now, before we get to the cliff-jumping part of the story, maybe I'd better explain something. Why would anyone in their right mind name their children Coke and Pepsi? It was probably because Dr. Benjamin McDonald and his lovely wife, Bridget, weren't in their right minds when the twins were born almost thirteen years earlier. For one thing, the McDonalds didn't know they would be having twins until after Coke entered the world. The doctors and nurses had pretty much taken off their latex gloves and called it a day when Mrs. McDonald informed them that she felt a funny feeling deep inside—as if she wasn't quite finished. And, lo and behold, she was absolutely right! The doctors and nurses went back to work; and the next thing anybody knew, out popped a bouncing baby girl. Surprise! From the start, the McDonalds had decided to name their son Coke. Not because of the soft drink. Because of coal. According to

Dictionary.com, coke is "the solid product resulting from the destructive distillation of coal in an oven or closed chamber or by imperfect combustion, consisting principally of carbon." Go ahead and look it up if you don't believe me. I'll wait. Okay, did you look it up? Good. Dr. McDonald, a history professor at San Francisco State University, had written a scholarly book about coal's impact on the Industrial Revolution. He always thought Coke would make a good name for a boy. It's short, sweet. It has that hard K sound. Like Kodak. Katmandu. Kalamazoo. When Coke's twin sister popped out, Dr. and Mrs. McDonald were faced with a dilemma. Once you name your firstborn son Coke, you can't very well name his twin sister Rachel or Emily or anything too normal. It wouldn't sound right. "How about Pepsi?" one of the attending nurses suggested as a joke. "Coke and Pepsi."

Everyone in the birthing room had a good old laugh over that. But the more the McDonalds thought about it, the more they liked the idea. Coke and Pepsi! It was perfect! Not only that, but it fit their sensibilities. The McDonalds were second-generation hippies from San Francisco who had always disapproved of the rampant commercialization of society. Dr. McDonald was fond of telling his students that the average person living in a city sees up to five thousand advertisements every day. Five thousand ads! What better way to stick it to The Man than to name your kids Coke and Pepsi? It would be an ironic statement about how corporations control people's lives. Heck, their last name was already McDonald. Why not name the kids Coke and Pepsi? Naturally, when the local media picked up on the baby names, the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies were not happy at first. They made some noises about suing the family. Giving babies the same names as popular soft drinks

was an infringement of the companies' copyrights, the lawyers grumbled. (Yeah, as if consumers would confuse the infants with sugary carbonated beverages.) In the end, the corporate giants decided that kids named Coke and Pepsi would be the best advertising they would ever have. And it didn't cost them a dime. This, they agreed, was even better than having kids named Jimmy and Suzy walk around wearing Coke and Pepsi T-shirts. Of course, growing up with the names Coke and Pepsi can be tough, especially in middle school. Both of the twins encountered a good deal of ribbing when they got to sixth grade, especially Pepsi. "Hey, soda girl! You're flat!" But the thing is, no matter how unusual someone's name is, after you hear it a few dozen times, the name starts to fit the person, like a comfortable pair of jeans. You can't imagine that boy or girl ever having a different name. Eventually, kids stopped looking at Pepsi and