Think your school is strange? Feel like you don't quite fit in? Fourteen-year-old Sherman Capote is an Air Force brat used to moving schools. But he's never been to a place like Groom Lake High, the high school for aliens at Area 51. It's a totally alien environment filled with cliques and bullies, but he makes friends with a gang of galactic misfits: Octo, a quick-witted Ventitent (a twenty-tentacled "octopus"), Houston, a moody robot, Sonya, a rebellious lizard, and Juliet, an omnipotent goddess. But when the school bully, Ned, initiates a War of the Worlds, Sherman and his new friends must set aside homework, first crushes and high school proms to save the world.