Mr. Lemoncello and the Titanium Ticket

by Chris Grabenstein

  “I bet he’s going to open up the secret building!” said a third kid. “After all, those mirrored walls are kind of silvery!”

  Simon wished his grandfather hadn’t outlawed all things Lemoncello. The twenty-fifth annual company picnic, with all its games and surprises, sounded like fun. But Simon had never been to one.

  At lunch, Simon sat by himself in the cafeteria. He was only two tables away from where Jack McClintock sat with his usual crew. Jack was wearing a green, brown, and tan camouflage T-shirt and olive-drab cargo pants. The camouflage didn’t really make him disappear or blend in with his surroundings. It made him look like a tree eating a cheeseburger.

  “I picked up some major intel this morning,” Simon heard Jack say to a kid at his table. Jack had a very loud voice. “This weekend, after the picnic, four kids are going to be the first ones to see what’s inside the new building.”

  “No way!” said one of his buds.

  “Way. You have to earn your way in by being a top finisher in the sidewalk board game, which they say is going to be more like an incredible obstacle course this year.”

  “Cool!”

  “But—you don’t make it to that unless you win a bunch of preliminary games in the carnival tents first.”

  “You’ll do good at those, Jack. You crush all those Lemoncello riddles. You’re like a mastermind!”

  “Guess it comes from living out at the factory,” said Jack.

  “Hey, Jack,” said another guy at the table. “Have you ever tried to sneak in? Get a peek at what’s going on back there?”

  “Negatory. It’d be a waste of time. Mr. Lemoncello has rigged up a series of lockboxes that are tougher to crack than any combination or code.”

  “How come?”

  “You have to answer six riddles. Two at each of the three gates. And the riddles? Trust me, guys—they are impossible to solve. The toughest ones Mr. Lemoncello has ever come up with.”

  Simon couldn’t help but grin.

  He’d answered all six!

  * * *

  —

  After lunch, Simon had a free period in the library. He was working, by himself, in the maker space, putting the finishing touches on a towering, six-foot-tall K’nex and Lego Ferris wheel.

  He’d used over 8,550 different pieces. The wheel would turn thanks to a motor Simon had improvised out of Circuit Cubes. Carnival music would be supplied by a recycled MP3 player linked to the motor’s on-off switch. There was a pneumatic tube elevator that shot action-figure passengers straddling a Ping-Pong ball up to the top of the Ferris wheel.

  Simon had been working on the project every day for two weeks, encouraged by Mrs. Jill Merkle, the school librarian. She was the one who helped Simon find the bits and pieces he needed to make his idea leap to life—including some tiny finger puppets she had from her days as an elementary school librarian. The miniature people would ride in the cars of Simon’s wheel.

  “You know,” Mrs. Merkle told Simon, “this is exactly how Mr. Lemoncello got started.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. When he was your age, he used to go to his local public library, where the librarian would let him tinker with his ideas. She even lent him things out of her desk drawer, like a Barbie doll boot. That’s why there’s a boot token in his Family Frenzy board game.”

  “Cool.”

  “Very. You ready to give your wheel a whirl?”

  “Just about. I need to snap together a few final circuits.”

  “Well, let me know before you flip the switch. I want to be here for the grand opening. Maybe shoot a video.”

  Mrs. Merkle bustled off to see what all the noise and commotion was on the other side of the carrels separating the maker space from the rest of the library.

  Simon soon found out.

  It was Jack McClintock, wearing a pair of Lemoncello Virtual Reality Goggles. He came stumbling into the maker space, blindly swinging a pool noodle.

  “Jack?” said Mrs. Merkle. “Put that down.”

  Jack remained oblivious. He was wearing noise-reducing headphones, too.

  “This is so cool!” he shouted. “There’s a castle. And dungeons. And dragons!”

  “Jack?” Mrs. Merkle tried again.

  But behind the goggles, Jack couldn’t see what his virtual sword was about to do in the non-virtual world.

  He gave the pool noodle a swing, and Simon’s view of the coming disaster seemed to shift into slow motion.

  Nooooooo! cried a panicked voice inside his head.

  Mrs. Merkle’s hands flew up to her head as her eyes bugged out.

  Jack’s foam stick smacked the side of Simon’s Ferris wheel. His masterpiece exploded. Eight thousand, five hundred and fifty different pieces went flying.

  When Jack finally heard all the plastic clattering, clinking, and skittering across the floor, he tipped up his VR goggles, took off his headphones, and surveyed the scene.

  “Hooah!” he said. “Awesome. I slayed the dragon and whatever Skrindle was playing with! I should earn bonus points for that.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Merkle. “You should earn a detention! Come with me, Mr. McClintock.”

  She led Jack to her desk.

  Simon didn’t say a word.

  Inside, he was furious. Outside? He kept quiet, and after mourning the ruins of his two-week project for a moment, he started cleaning up the mess.

  Simon Skrindle hadn’t been dealt the best cards in the game of life.

  Both of his parents had passed away when he was an infant.

  “Tragic accident in Asia” was the only thing his grandfather ever told him about the particulars. His grandmother would just get weepy.

  After school, Simon trudged up the front porch steps of his grandparents’ two-story frame house on Oak Street. He checked out the newspaper-retrieving gizmo he’d rigged up on the front lawn. It was basically a little red wagon that Simon had repurposed with grooved cog wheels that could roll on slanted rails elevated over the stoop’s five steps.

  When a newspaper landed in the bed of the wagon, its weight depressed a swivel pad, which released a bungee cord attached to an anchor hook sunk into the lawn. That caused a counterweight attached to a cable on the porch (it weighed one pound more than the wagon with a full Sunday newspaper in it) to slide downhill into the yard, pulling the wagon up its elevated railroad.

  That way, his grandmother didn’t have to walk through the wet grass every morning in her slippers to retrieve the local paper.

  The one Grandpa Sam sent all his angry letters to.

  “Welcome home, Simon,” said his grandma when he hung his backpack on a peg in the foyer. She gave him a kiss on his forehead.

  “Hey, Grandma.”

  “How was school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Well, fine is better than bad, I suppose. Oh, Simon, I’ve been meaning to ask you: Can you please take a look at the shelf thingamajig in the kitchen cabinet over the sink? It stopped working this morning.”

  Simon had rigged up motorized shelves in the kitchen cupboards using some display cases he’d found in a dumpster behind the downtown jewelry store. With a flip of a switch, the shelves in the front would glide down while the shelves in the back slid up. Bringing the shelves to eye level made it easier for Grandma to find what she was looking for without climbing a ladder. (Grandma was almost as short as Simon.)

  “The drive chains probably slipped out of their sprockets,” said Simon, flipping out the screwdriver head on his Swiss Army knife and heading into the kitchen. “I’ll fix it.”

  “Thank you, dear.”

  Grandpa Sam was sitting at the kitchen table, watching a tiny black-and-white TV. The local news station was doing a story about the “big Lemoncello company picnic, which will feature a major announcement fro
m Mr. Lemoncello himself. Something about a titanium ticket…”

  Grandpa Sam snapped off the TV.

  “You need to fix this TV next,” he grumbled at Simon.

  “Okay, Grandpa. What’s wrong with it?”

  “It keeps talking about Mr. Lemoncello!”

  * * *

  —

  Simon had a bedroom on the second floor, but his favorite place in the creaky old house was up in the attic.

  That was his lab. His very own “imagination station.”

  The attic was always hot but Simon didn’t mind. You had to climb a drop-down ladder to get up there—something his grandparents, with their various aching joints, didn’t want to do. Simon had outfitted the ladder mechanism with a remote-controlled Clapper someone had thrown out, so the steps automatically unfolded and lowered whenever he clapped his hands three quick times. (He also said, “Open sesame,” but that was just for fun.)

  Simon had the whole attic to himself, including a dirt-streaked circular window tucked into an angled dormer. From that secret observation post, three stories up, he could watch other kids playing in their yards or doing chores or climbing into their family cars for a trip to…somewhere. Anywhere.

  Simon imagined going with them. He’d make up stories about the exotic places they were visiting, what they saw, and the incredibly fun things they did.

  Since Lemoncello (and all other) games were banned in his home (Grandpa thought games were a waste of time), Simon made up his own board games in the attic. Sometimes, he used brightly painted stones for playing pieces. Other times, secondhand action figures he bought at neighborhood yard sales or found in curbside trash bins on recycling day. That’s where Simon also found things to tear apart and put back together. Clocks (he particularly liked cuckoo clocks). Remote-controlled cars. A rainbow-colored glockenspiel with the notes written on the thick wooden keys.

  Simon didn’t tear the wooden xylophone apart when he found it on sale for twenty-five cents at a garage sale. But since it was missing its mallets, he had to improvise a new pair. He did it with two rods and a pair of round connectors from a Tinkertoy set a six-year-old two streets over had tossed to the curb when she turned seven.

  Music helped Simon think. He’d sit down, plink out a simple melody on the color-coded keys, and daydream. Einstein had his violin to help him do thought experiments. Simon had a toy glockenspiel.

  Simon had also heard that Mr. Lemoncello did his best thinking while tooting on a tuba.

  That made Simon smile. A lot of the stuff he heard about Mr. Lemoncello (his banana shoes, his head phone, his hover slippers) made Simon smile.

  He just made sure that Grandpa Sam didn’t see him doing it.

  The next day at school, Simon sat at his usual lab desk in science class: the one at the back, near the smelly chemical storage closet.

  The one where no one else ever sat.

  He was doodling in his notebook, working out his plans for a mega Lego wall project for the library. Mrs. Merkle said he could have the space for a week. Simon wanted to turn the bright-green wall into a sideways board game with pathways, obstacles, and challenges. He’d use Lego characters as the playing pieces.

  Jack McClintock swaggered into the science lab with a bunch of his friends.

  “Check it out, bros,” he said, pulling a rubber-banded stack of four-by-six note cards out of his backpack. “My dad made me some flash cards.”

  “For what?” asked one of his friends. “Algebra?”

  “Negatory. These are to help me get ready for the qualifying games at the picnic. Drill me!”

  One of his friends held up the first flash card. Because Simon was behind Jack, he could see what was printed on it:

  “Um, Leif Eriksson,” said Jack. “That Norse explorer dude from Iceland.”

  “Nope,” said his friend, checking the answer scribbled on the back of the flash card. “But ‘leaf’ is one of the words….”

  “Well, duh,” said Jack. “It’s printed like four times on the card. Uh, how about ‘Leaf me alone’?”

  “Sorry, dude,” said Jack’s friend.

  “Try again,” urged another.

  While Jack stared at the card, Simon wrote the answer on his doodle pad: Four-leaf clover.

  “Skip that one,” said Jack. “It’s impossible. Nobody could answer it.”

  “Okay,” said his friend, discarding the first puzzler. “The answer was four-leaf clover.”

  Simon grinned.

  “Give me the next one,” ordered Jack.

  His friend flicked up a second flash card:

  “Okay,” said Jack, thinking hard. “Two funnies. Four words…”

  “Correct!” said his friend.

  “Huh?”

  “Too funny for words.”

  “Exactly,” said Jack. “That’s what I said. Too funny for words. Just like Doofus McGoofus in the back row.” He jerked his chin at Simon.

  Simon ducked his head and circled the too funny for words he’d scrawled on his doodle sheet.

  “Give me one more,” said Jack. “And make it a tough one!”

  His friend flashed him a third card.

  “Okay,” said Jack. “That’s just a mess.”

  “Want me to tell you the answer?” asked his friend. “It’s on the back of the card.”

  “Negatory!” said Jack. “It’s a jumble. I can make all sorts of words with those letters. We. Boards. Boo. Robo…”

  “Um, that’s not the answer,” said his friend.

  Simon wrote down his answer, covering it with his hand so no one could see it: A bear in the woods.

  Meanwhile, Jack was still unscrambling words from the letters.

  “Beard! Woods. Bear. Bear in the woods!”

  “Correct!” shouted his friend. “Awesome, man.”

  “Thanks. It’s because I live out at the factory. I just sort of soak the answers into my brain through mental osmosis.”

  The science teacher, Mrs. Allison Bickhardt (the kids all called her Mrs. Big Heart), came into the room.

  “Good afternoon,” she said, rubbing her hands together eagerly. “Are you psyched for our field trip?”

  Simon had forgotten. Today was the day his class was supposed to go see all the amazing science, technology, and engineering behind Mr. Lemoncello’s Gameworks Factory. Soraiya Mitchell, who always got 100s on everything, had arranged the special “backstage tour” because her father was the plant manager.

  But Simon had known his grandfather would never sign a permission slip for him to go on a field trip to anywhere connected with Mr. Lemoncello. And Simon didn’t want his grandmother signing it, either, because if she did, Grandpa would get all cranky. So Simon hadn’t even bothered asking. He figured he’d just spend the rest of the day in the library, working on his Lego wall creation.

  “Here you go,” whispered Soraiya, who always sat at the lab table next to his. She handed Simon a folded sheet of paper.

  Simon was confused. “Um, what is this?”

  “Your permission slip.”

  “But my grandparents didn’t sign…”

  “Yes, they did,” Soraiya said with a smile. “I told them they had to sign a receipt for all the free Girl Scout cookies I gave them this morning.”

  “So,” Soraiya said to Simon ten minutes later, as the school bus they were riding in lumbered up the road to the Gameworks Factory, “I’ve decided you and I should be friends.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. We’re both puzzle solvers. I like the intellectual kind. You’re more practical. You build stuff.”

  Simon and Soraiya were seated next to each other in the second-to-last row.

  “I saw that Ferris wheel you were working on in the library,” said Soraiya. “Why’d you take it down?”


  “There was an, uh, accident.”

  “Really? Was the accident named Jack McClintock?”

  “Yeah.”

  Soraiya shook her head. “You should just try to avoid him. It’s like Einstein supposedly said: ‘Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.’ Oh, I saw that newspaper retrieval system you engineered in your front yard when I dropped by with the Girl Scout cookies. Totally awesome.”

  “Thanks. How’d you know where I live?”

  “I used the scientific method.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know. Research. Data.”

  Simon nodded. Slowly.

  Soraiya laughed. “I looked up your address in the school directory.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “My dad said it was very important that you come to the factory today.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I have a few hypotheses but I need to gather more data before I reach a conclusion.”

  The bus rumbled through a pair of tall wrought iron gates that seemed to magically swing open as the bus drew near.

  “Wow,” said Simon.

  “Motion detectors,” said Soraiya, with a shrug. “Passive infrared sensors. The bus entered their field and triggered the switch to an electric gate-opening motor.”

  “Look at all those cool carvings in the iron! I see a boot, a cat, a top hat, a roller skate, a penguin, a dinosaur…”

  “Those are all the playing pieces from Mr. Lemoncello’s very first game, Family Frenzy.”

  As the bus pulled closer to the factory, colored plumes of smoke shot up, creating a daytime fireworks display. The cellos atop the lemony turrets bowed themselves and played a beautiful melody that Simon recognized. Steam pipes shot up a puffy cumulus cloud that looked exactly like Mrs. Bickhardt, the science teacher. Chains rattled and the drawbridge to the front entrance started to creak down.

  “Looks like they knew we were coming!” said Mrs. Bickhardt, admiring her floating cloud. The bus eased to a stop. “Come on, you guys. It’s tour time! And I need to grab a selfie!”