by Ben Mezrich
At first, Charlie thought the older kid was joking, but the look on his face was completely serious.
“I don’t know him?”
“Nope. And his name’s not Magic.”
Charlie cleared his throat.
“It’s not?”
“And I’m not Finn.”
This was getting stranger by the minute.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Billy Logan. I go to Ashbury Middle School in Wellesley.”
Charlie watched as one of the teenagers exchanged another ticket for more coins.
“So you’re Billy,” he said to Finn, who nodded.
“Yep.”
“And who am I?”
Finn raised an eyebrow beneath the rim of his baseball hat.
“You? You’re you.”
“I don’t get a fake name?”
“Why would you need a fake name?”
Charlie paused.
“I don’t know.”
Finn laughed, then turned suddenly and gestured toward the carny manning the coin toss game. The carny strolled over, and Finn handed him a pink ticket, getting three of the gold-colored coins. Then Finn looked at Charlie.
Charlie started to reach into his pocket.
“I need to go to the ticket booth,” he started.
Finn stopped him with one hand, holding his other hand down at his waist, low enough that the guy working the game couldn’t see. In his palm was a roll of pink tickets at least three inches thick.
“This should cover you for a while.”
Wow. There had to be enough tickets in the roll to play fifty times. Charlie looked at Finn, wondering if he should really take them. Finn’s face was unreadable, but there was something in his eyes that told Charlie to just go with it. So he took the tickets, tore one off, and handed it to the carny.
The gold coins felt cold against his palm. They were slightly larger than quarters, with some heft to them.
“You go first,” Finn said, stepping back to give Charlie room.
Charlie looked out over the field of plates. He’d played the game before, on previous visits to the fair and at other carnivals over the years. Of course, it was easy to hit the plates—you didn’t even really have to aim to hit a plate—but to win, you had to actually get a coin to stay on the plate, which was really hard. In fact, Charlie had never actually won anything at the game. A chart on the wall showed the prize list. One coin on a plate got you the smallest-size stuffed animal, which was little bigger than his hand. Two coins won a medium-size critter, one of the monkeys or skunks. Three coins got you a giraffe. Charlie had never seen anyone walk out of the midway games with a giraffe. But who knew, maybe today would be his lucky day.
He licked his lips, concentrating on the nearest set of plates. Focusing all his attention on the glossy center of the highest one, he took a deep breath and tossed the first coin in a nice soft arc toward the plate.
There was a loud clack, and the coin bounced up into the air, twisting and turning, then dropped off toward the floor. Charlie cursed to himself, glancing at Finn. Finn shrugged, and Charlie turned back toward the plates, readying his second coin. He narrowed his eyes, aimed right for the same plate, and clack, again, his coin bounced up into the air, ricocheted off the bottom of one of the hanging giraffes, and disappeared to the floor.
He didn’t even concentrate on the third throw, he just let fly. The coin clattered from plate to plate like a stone skipping across a lake, then vanished off the edge. Charlie sighed, stepping back. Finn patted his shoulder.
“Hey, at least you hit the plates.”
Finn took Charlie’s place at the counter, and gave him a little wink.
“Like I said, it’s all about perception. To me, those plates are as big as the moon.”
His right arm shot out, and with a flick of his wrist, he let fly one of the gold-colored coins. The coin arced almost straight up, then came down at a very sharp angle. There was a tiny clack as the coin hit one of the plates—and stopped dead, flat against the porcelain, directly in the center. The two teenagers, still watching from a few feet away, applauded, and the carny gave Finn a smile.
“Nice shot, kid. That’s one. Good luck on your second—”
Before he could finish speaking, Finn’s wrist flicked again, and a second coin flashed through the air. Up, up, up, arcing so high, it seemed to almost disappear into the jungle of stuffed animals hanging from the ceiling. Then it reappeared, heading almost straight down toward the plates. It landed on the same plate as the first coin, just a few centimeters from the center, and stuck just like the other coin, dead flat against the plate. The teenagers cheered. Charlie stared at the two coins, then looked at Finn.
“That was amazing.”
Finn laughed.
“Why, you think it’s hard to hit the moon from a few feet away?”
He tossed the third coin from his left hand to his right, held it up to show Charlie how it gleamed in the colored lights strewn along the tent struts, then flicked his wrist a third time. The coin shot through the air, again a nearly vertical path, and descended onto the same plate once again, clacking right between the two other coins. It didn’t bounce or ricochet, it just stuck there, planted like a flag on the moon.
“Holy smokes,” one of the teenagers croaked.
The carny stared at Finn, then reached above his head and pulled one of the stuffed giraffes free from where it was hanging. He crossed to Finn and handed him the stuffed animal. Finn took it with both hands. It was so big, Finn had to crane his neck to see past the thing’s body.
“Pleasure doing business with you,” he joked. The carnival worker gave him a steady look.
“Everyone gets lucky once in a while, kid. What’s your name?”
“Billy,” Finn said, smartly. Then he turned and walked away from the counter. Charlie followed.
“How did you do that? You landed your first three coins. Was that some sort of trick?”
Finn waited until they were far enough away from the coin-toss game before he leaned past the giraffe, close to Charlie’s ear.
“It’s not a trick. It’s math, chemistry, and a little physics.”
“What?”
“There he is. This should be fun to watch.”
Finn pointed with a giraffe foot, and Charlie saw Magic leaning up against another counter. This game was just as familiar as the rest, a balloon-popping game that consisted of a high wall covered in brightly colored balloons. Kids behind the counter, located about five feet from the wall, threw darts at the balloons, trying to pop them for prizes. Charlie counted four kids taking turns tossing darts, but no matter how hard the kids were throwing them, the results were always the same. The darts either missed the balloons, or hit them and bounced right off. As far as Charlie could tell, you had to hit the things straight on with enough force, and nobody seemed to be able to do so.
Magic was standing a foot back from the other kids, just watching them throw. He had three darts in his left hand, down low against his side. He looked like he was waiting his turn.
When there was a lull in the throwing, he stepped forward, passed one of the darts from his left to right hand, and took aim. His hand jerked forward, and the dart whipped through the air. It hit one of the balloons dead-on and there was a loud pop.
All the other kids turned to look. Magic just smiled, took aim with a second dart, and tossed it just like the first. There was another pop, a second balloon bursting into nothingness. Before anyone could react, the third dart was in the air. And again, pop! A third balloon disintegrated.
There was a moment’s silence, then applause. The carny running the game gave Magic a look very similar to the look Finn had gotten from the coin-toss carny, then yanked an identical oversize giraffe from the jungle hanging above his head.
Magic grabbed the stuffed animal from him, slung it over his shoulder, and turned toward Finn.
“Hey, Billy,” he said, rather loudly. “Just finished up here. M
om and Dad are probably waiting in the parking lot, so we better get going.”
He and Finn headed for the exit to the tent, giraffes in hand. Charlie had to skip to keep up, they were moving so fast. His mind was whirling. As the carny had told Finn, everyone got lucky sooner or later, sure. But was it just a double display of luck that he had just witnessed? Charlie’s number-obsessed mind was constantly calculating odds: little things, like what were the chances a particular color bird might fly by at a particular moment, or what were the chances of seeing someone he knew in a particular department store. Calculating these odds, well, it seemed really improbable. And the sure way both Finn and Magic had approached the games, the seeming ease in which they had thrown the coins and darts, it didn’t make sense. Then he thought back to what Finn had said right before they’d run into Magic. It’s math, chemistry, and a little physics. What did that mean?
He caught up to the older kids just as they passed through the threshold of the tent, and cleared his throat.
“You use math to win stuffed animals?” he asked.
Finn stopped, then turned and suddenly handed him the giraffe.
“We use math to win a whole lot more than stuffed animals. Or at least, we will. With your help.”
Charlie felt his heart pounding in his chest. He had no idea what the older kid was talking about, but he could feel the electricity on his skin, the way Finn’s words seemed to charge the very air between them. Before he could respond, Finn and Magic were moving away. Charlie finally found his voice.
“Why me?”
The two seventh graders just kept on moving. Magic gave Charlie a little wave over his right shoulder as they went.
“We’ll be in touch, kid.”
And with that, they were gone. Charlie was left standing, bewildered, at the entrance to the midway games, bathed in the colored lights of the circus tent, an oversize stuffed giraffe held tight against his chest.
4
HEY, JUST BE GLAD it’s not snowing. And if we die out here, at least we won’t have to take Mr. Marshall’s social studies exam.”
Charlie grimaced as he yanked the collar of his down jacket up as high as it would go. He was shivering so hard that he could hear his teeth clattering together, and it felt like the bones in his cheeks had turned to ice. It wasn’t supposed to be this cold so early in the fall—but then again, growing up in New England, the seasons had always seemed to rage over the calendar like hurricane-driven white-water rapids. The best you could do was dress the part. Today, for Charlie, that meant a navy blue down coat that made him look like a blueberry Michelin Man, thick jeans tucked into thermal socks, and stiff work boots that kept his toes warm but left blisters on his heels the size of golf balls. All things considered, he’d rather have dressed normally and stayed inside.
Unfortunately, staying inside wasn’t an option at eleven thirty a.m., because that was the beginning of the sixth-grade lunch period. Which meant that if he wanted to eat, he had to line up outside, single file, on a covered double-wide sidewalk, and wait his turn to pick up a plastic tray from a stack by the propped-open double doors leading inside. It seemed crazy, having an outdoor entrance to a lunchroom in New England, and every year, the school administration made plans to shift the waiting area to somewhere more reasonable. But for some reason, these plans never came to fruition. There was always some other construction project or school addition that took precedent. Charlie secretly believed the school wanted them put on ice before lunch—better to keep them from turning into wild animals in the relatively free time between classes.
Once Charlie claimed a tray and a battered fork and knife, he’d get to make his way inside. But for the moment, from where Charlie was standing—still twenty feet from the double doors, wedged between Jeremy and a British exchange student named Niles who was quietly cursing to himself as he bounced from foot to foot in a useless effort to stay warm—it seemed like they’d be stuck outside forever. Charlie would have gladly taken three of Mr. Marshall’s notoriously tricky social studies exams in exchange for a trip to the front of the lunch line—or a pair of better fitting boots.
“If you die first,” he said, eyeing Jeremy’s high-top Converse sneakers—obviously a hand-me-down from some cousin somewhere, so scuffed and worn they looked as comfortable as cotton, “can I have your shoes?”
“Don’t you get your allowance next week? Make me an offer. I don’t need all my toes.”
Charlie laughed. The thought of his allowance cheered him, because it meant another month had gone by, and the deeper he moved into sixth grade, the more routine and comfortable middle school was beginning to feel. It was already the last Thursday in September. After the bizarre and electrifying afternoon at the Halloween fair, life had almost instantly returned to the uneventful and warmly monotonous rhythm of another school year. Middle school felt just like elementary school, from the bus picking him up at his suburban home in a leafy cul-de-sac near the Newton-Wellesley line, to Jeremy and Charlie’s daily assault on the vending machine. And then after homeroom, the relentless hop from class to class, most of it mindless swatches of time to Charlie, because he was too far ahead of the curve and too smart to open his mouth when the teachers asked questions. He knew what it was like to be the kid who gave the right answer too many times.
As fascinating as the Halloween Fair with Finn and Magic had been, that had seemed to be the end of the bizarre episode; despite Magic’s farewell words, the two seventh graders had made no attempt to contact Charlie, nor had he seen either kid in the hallways in school. And the further away from that afternoon Charlie got, the more okay he was with the idea that it was just some strange moment in his life, insignificant and soon forgotten. After two weeks, the thrill of that moment had begun to fade. The more Charlie thought about what he’d seen, the more reluctant he was to delve much deeper into the matter.
It’s just math, chemistry, and a little physics.
In Charlie’s mind, there were a few too many problems with what Finn had implied with that cryptic statement. To use math to beat carnival games suggested the games had a predictive nature about them—that the games themselves had a set, mathematically precise way they were supposed to be played, and that you could somehow figure out mathematical or physical formulas that gave you an edge. Throwing a coin at a plate seemed to be a game of skill and luck, not math. And popping balloons with a dart? Wasn’t that just about how good your aim was and how strong your biceps?
Either Finn and Magic were just messing with him, or they were involved with something much more complex than Charlie could imagine. And of course, there was one other possibility—that somehow Finn and Magic had figured out a way to cheat. Charlie wasn’t a saint, but he tried to be a good kid most of the time, keeping the lying to his parents to a minimum. Telling his dad he was going to meet Jeremy at the Halloween Fair was about as bad as he got. But cheating a carnival game—that seemed plain wrong. He’d never cheated on a test—not that he’d ever felt the need to—and he’d never taken anything that wasn’t his. So if Finn and Magic were involved in some scheme to cheat at carnival games, well, that just seemed like something he didn’t want to know more about.
Whatever the case, Charlie had finally decided to put all his ruminations aside, and he’d gone back the business of being a regular sixth grader. Hanging out with Jeremy and the rest of his friends during his free time, avoiding Dylan and his gang in the halls and on the playground, studying for his classes, doing his homework, having regular dinners with his parents when they weren’t off writing papers or playing with their test tubes, beakers, and pipettes in their respective labs.
“Finally, here we go,” Jeremy interrupted Charlie’s thoughts, gesturing with a spindly arm. “We seem to be moving. If we can just get our muscles thawed enough to make it to the front of the line, we might survive another day at this prison camp.”
Charlie rubbed his hands together to get life back into his fingers, then followed as Jeremy and the rest of
the line lurched forward toward the trays. A few more minutes went by in grim silence, broken only by the sound of a few dozen boot soles scraping against the near-frozen sidewalk, and then they were working their way through the double doors, both gripping lime-green plastic trays and tarnished silverware. Charlie had found a fork with three tines intact—a coup!—but the only spoon he’d managed to track down had been flattened into something resembling a miniature shovel. No matter, Charlie was inside, his skin prickling as the heat brought life back into his zombified outer cells.
They made quick work of the food dispensary. Choosing matching cartons of whole milk from the industrial-size coolers just inside the doorway, lining up again to slide their trays down the aluminum shelving tracks that allowed the lunch ladies—flabby-armed doughy women with hairnets and white-and-pink short-sleeve buttoned coats that made them look like dental assistants—to dollop out huge spoonfuls of vaguely identifiable slop into the different hexagonal compartments dug into the trays. As usual, one of the compartments got a heavy glob of beans and rice; next to that, some sort of meat, drenched in sauce that seemed to glow beneath the fluorescent ceiling lights; and in the last compartment, bread, orange, rectangular, and mushy, that could have once been bananas, corn, or wheat.
And then they were through the line and out the other side, facing a wide room that had once doubled as a gym—until a grant from a wealthy alum with fond memories of dodgeballs and rope climbs had led to the construction of a fairly ridiculous monstrosity on the far side of the school complex, complete with fiberglass bleachers and an Astroturf track. Charlie was certain the alum had spent less time on the receiving end of those dodgeballs than he and Jeremy, but even so, you had to applaud his generous spirit.
In short, the lunchroom floor was still shiny cement covered in fading blue and red lines that had once designated a basketball court. There was still a scoreboard attached to the far wall, though the digital screen had long since faded into a gray cloud of dead pixels, and the clock had frozen in time—2:55, numbers that seemed apocryphal in that they mimicked the idea of a school day that never ended, a final class that never let out, never reached the holy, buzzer-blessed moment of 3:00.