by Ben Mezrich
Curiouser and curiouser.
Miranda must have noticed the look on his face, because she grinned.
“Yes, Charlie, the class trip this year is to Incredo Land, and happens to fall right when this promotion is going on. Which means that a student from Nagassack, if he or she is really, really lucky, might just have a chance to spin that wheel and win that prize. Which, if you’re interested, happens to be eight lifetime tickets to all the Incredo Land theme parks. There’s also a little cash prize, which can go to the charity of the winner’s choice.”
Charlie raised his eyebrows.
“Eight lifetime tickets, that’s a pretty incredible prize. But really, I don’t know what any of this has to do with us.”
Finn leaned toward him.
“It has everything to do with us, Charlie.”
“Why is that?”
“Because this year, six weeks from now, actually, we are going to beat that wheel.”
Charlie looked at Finn, and saw that he was dead serious. Then Charlie shifted his attention to the other kids, and they were all nodding in agreement. He shook his head.
“It’s not possible. I mean, even if one of us was lucky enough to get to spin the wheel, it’s random, there are five possible outcomes, you’d have to guess right and there’s no way you could know. It’s just not possible.”
“Oh yes it is,” Miranda interrupted. “And there won’t be any luck involved.”
Charlie paused.
“You know how to beat the wheel?”
“No, actually. You do.”
Charlie rocked back on his feet. He was stunned by her simple words and the matter of fact way she’d said them. At the same time, something clicked in the back of his mind, just an inkling, but he was beginning to understand why he was there. Why they had chosen him.
Like Finn had said, there weren’t any coincidences.
But before he could respond, Miranda was moving to her left, toward the edge of the vast purple curtain that closed off the back part of the room. She reached for the material, then turned back toward Charlie.
“But first we have to get to the wheel. Which isn’t easy. Thousands of kids try to get to the wheel each year, but only one gets to give it a spin.”
Part of Charlie wanted to walk right out of there, but his feet felt like they were glued to the floor.
“And how do we get to the wheel?” he asked.
Miranda smiled. With a flourish, she yanked back the velvet curtain.
“First, we’re going to need to win a game.”
6
IT WAS THREE GAMES actually, or one game broken into three parts.
Charlie stood frozen in place as the curtain swept all the way back to the blacked-out windows, revealing the far half of the art room. All the furniture had been removed, and in its place, well, it took a few minutes for Charlie to believe what he was seeing.
Carnival games. Just like in the tent at the Sherwood Halloween Fair. Life-size and seemingly reconstructed with the utmost precision, the three games were spaced out from each other to fill nearly every inch of the semicircular area. Two of the games—a balloon-dart game like he’d watched Magic beat at the fair, and a coin toss like the one Finn had decimated—were to his right, and to his left, a common rope ladder game. Charlie had seen the rope ladder before, had even tried it once or twice. Basically, it consisted of an angled rope ladder that started at the floor and ran up, at a forty- or fifty-degree angle, to where it was affixed to the wall. At the peak of the ladder was a little bell; the object of the game was to climb up the ladder and ring the bell. It sounded much easier than it actually was; the ladder would twist and turn under your weight, and Charlie had never seen anyone actually make it to the top of the ladder—other than the people who worked the game, who usually performed the feat to get you to believe it wasn’t rigged, that it was indeed possible.
“You guys must really like carnival games” was all Charlie could think to say.
There was a moment’s pause, then laughter.
“We really like to beat carnival games,” Magic said, rising from his chair. He strolled past Miranda and pointed to each game in turn. “Balloon darts, plate coins, and rope ladder. The three pillars of the carnival, and all of them completely beatable.”
“What do you mean, beatable?” Charlie asked.
Miranda smiled.
“What do you think it means, Charlie?”
“I think maybe you guys figured out a way to cheat.”
“Cheating is a strong word,” Miranda responded. “If a game is set up unfairly, would you consider evening the odds cheating? We don’t intervene with the design of these games, and we don’t break any printed rules. So, is using your brain to beat a game cheating?”
Charlie didn’t know how to answer that. Of course, using your brain wasn’t cheating, but there were plenty of things that were unfair. That didn’t give you license to break the rules. Then again, if there really was a way to beat these carnival games that wasn’t explicitly against the rules, well, would that really be so wrong? He’d watched Finn land three coins on those plates, and it definitely hadn’t looked like cheating to him. And Magic popping those balloons, it hadn’t seemed like he’d done anything against the rules.
“Maybe not,” Charlie finally said. “But what do these games have to do with Incredo Land and the spinning wheel?”
Miranda strolled over to the low counter facing the balloon-dart game. She lifted one of the darts off the counter, inspecting the metal point as she turned it over in her hand. Her bright red, manicured nails seemed much sharper than the end of the dart.
“These games are the gateway to the wheel. They’ve set up a Midway Center right on Solar Avenue at Incredo Land, full of every kind of fair game you can imagine. By playing these games, you win tickets, and the kid who wins the most tickets in a single day gets a shot at the wheel. They count the tickets by weight right at the park’s closing time, and the winner gets to spin the wheel the very next morning. The rules don’t say anything about a group of friends pooling tickets; whoever shows up with the most tickets at the end of that promotion day gets to spin.”
“And that’s going to be one of you?” Charlie asked.
“No,” Finn said, still in his seat, putting his feet up on the drafting table in front of him. “That’s going to be you.”
“Me?”
Charlie still hadn’t moved from right in front of the door. He didn’t know whether to turn around and just get the heck out of there, or move deeper into the room to check out the three games up close. He was certainly intrigued. He felt like he was being asked to join some secret club. He’d joined clubs before: a chess club, a math club, an astronomy club, but never anything like this. Still, it didn’t seem real to him. The idea that he was special enough to be asked to join—not just to join, but to star in this bizarre endeavor—it simply seemed like an elaborate, practical joke.
“Are we going to beat the claw game too? You know, the one with the claw on a crane, where you try to pick up toys or stuffed animals. I think there’s one at Chuck E. Cheese’s with Star Wars action figures in it. I’d love a Chewbacca to go with the R2D2 I won at my last birthday party.”
The blond girl from the front row, Sam, shot him a look that would wither a rosebush.
“I know you’re trying to make a joke, but the claw game, it’s a sucker’s bet.”
She flipped an errant strand of her long hair out of her eyes.
“A sucker’s bet?” Charlie asked, his voice sounding a bit choked as he tried not to avoid her eyes. That shy feeling he got around most girls felt amplified a hundred times, but he wasn’t going to shrink away in front of all these people.
“A sucker’s bet. Which means that if you take that bet, you’re a sucker before the game gets started. See, the claw games are rigged. Picking up a stuffed animal takes a certain amount of pressure applied over a certain amount of surface area. Picking up a golf ball with your fingers, for
instance, is actually the application of pressure using the muscles in your hand, via the friction created by the pads of your fingers, translated to the surface of the ball.”
Charlie loved the easy way she spoke about complicated science. He found himself instantly enrapt, his shyness overwhelmed by her obvious intelligence.
“This pressure,” she continued, “or force, is known scientifically as PSI, pounds per square inch. It takes a certain amount of PSI for a claw to lift a stuffed animal—and the PSI applied by those claws isn’t fixed. It changes based on whether the owner of the machine wants you to win or lose. Turns out, in the state of Massachusetts, there’s an archaic law that says coin-operated vending games must pay out once every twelve tries. So the claw machines are set to only exert enough PSI to grab a stuffed animal in one out of twelve attempts. No matter how good you think you are, no matter how hard you try, you can only win one in twelve times.”
Charlie leaned back against the door. He was duly impressed. Not just by the science of what she had said, but by the way she had said it. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes sparkling. She was passionate about this, the science behind a game. It wasn’t just some stupid claw machine at Chuck E. Cheese’s; it was something she could mentally take apart and understand.
“A sucker’s bet,” Charlie finally said.
“Now you’re getting the feel for this,” Finn commented, picking at his shoelaces. “Claw games, basketballs thrown at hoops that are too small or wrongly shaped, baseballs thrown at milk bottles—”
“The milk bottles are rigged?”
“That’s right.” Sam nodded. “The milk bottles look like they’re all the same weight, but it turns out one of the bottles is usually way heavier than the rest. When that bottle is put on the top of the pyramid, it’s really easy to knock them all down with a single throw. That’s what the carnival workers do to ‘prove’ to the players that the game is fair. Then, when they restack the bottles, they put the heavy one on the bottom as one of the lower bottles in the pyramid. Suddenly, it becomes almost impossible to knock them all down in one throw. Again, it’s about force versus friction, kinetic energy versus inertia—”
“The bottom line is,” Miranda interrupted, putting the dart back on the counter facing the wall of balloons, “we don’t play games we can’t win. We only play games that are beatable. And when we find beatable games—”
“We beat the heck out of them,” Magic chimed in, grinning.
Charlie felt the door against his back. His head was spinning. The words Sam had used, force, friction, kinetic energy, inertia, of course he knew what they all meant, not just from his science classes, but from his own reading and research. His friends—his Whiz Kids—used words like that all the time. But Charlie had thought they were the only kids who ever talked like that. Sam, Finn, Magic, the rest, these weren’t losers; these were cool sixth and seventh graders who had chosen to hang out with one another, had chosen to talk about math and physics in an abandoned classroom.
“With physics and math,” Charlie said, “you beat carnival games.”
“And that’s where you come in,” Miranda said, bringing the attention back to her. The fact that she was older, a college student, a teacher’s aide, gave her a natural authority. There was definitely a divide between her and the rest of the group; there was no question, she was the boss, she was running the show.
“Because I’m good at math,” Charlie said, trying to finish her thought.
“No,” Greg joked, “because you’re so handsome.”
Miranda shushed him with a look, then turned back to Charlie.
“Not just because you’re good at math, but because you understand something important. You know that math isn’t just something you learn in a classroom. You know that math is something you can use in real life. Knowing math, and how to think mathematically, scientifically, doesn’t just make you smart—”
“It makes you win.” Finn said, pushing his boots off the desk and rising to his feet.
“Charlie,” Miranda said as she stepped away from the dart counter, reached out for the curtain, and yanked it closed with a swirl of purple velvet. “Here’s our offer. We’ll cover the cost of your trip to Incredo Land. We’ll teach you our secrets, and make you part of our little team. And when we win, we’ll split the lifetime Incredo Land tickets. We’ve already agreed, each of the group will get one, and you’ll get the remaining two. They’re pretty much priceless. And the little cash prize will go to my teacher’s aide program at Northeastern.”
Charlie swallowed, running through it in his head. Two lifetime tickets to Incredo Land—he couldn’t even begin to imagine what they would be worth. But still, what would he be getting himself into? What Sam had said, the way she’d said it, he was fascinated by how brilliant it seemed. Just the idea of spending time with her and the rest of this group, talking about science, beating games using math, was truly compelling. But something about it also seemed a little frightening. And maybe even wrong.
“And what do you get?” he finally managed, using every ounce of courage to get the words out. “I mean, no offense, but you can’t be doing this for Incredo Land tickets.”
Miranda laughed.
“Amusement park tickets, at my age? I must be like a hundred, right? No offense taken. I’m actually writing my thesis about this. The math involved, but also how you guys work as a group.”
Charlie nodded. Having two parents in academia meant he knew what a thesis was, and how kooky some of the subjects that PhD and masters students chose to write about could be. His mother had written her own PhD thesis on hummingbird flight. It wasn’t that bizarre to think that Miranda would be writing a paper on a group of middle-school kids banding together to beat carnival games. And if a few hundred bucks, or whatever the cash prize might be, ended up going to her university teacher’s aide program, that would probably benefit her as well. Her motives were understandable.
Still, it wasn’t an easy decision for Charlie. He’d never been involved in anything remotely like this. And if it wasn’t cheating, well, then why did Finn and Magic use fake names at the Sherwood Fair? Charlie knew he didn’t have the full picture yet.
“I guess I need to think about it,” he said.
Finn opened the door behind him and gestured with a hand.
“That’s as much as we can ask. I’ll walk you back to the last few minutes of your recess.”
Before Charlie got through the doorway, Miranda crossed the room, fast and quiet as a cat, and leaned in close.
“One more thing. We do ask that you keep this discussion just between us. This is an invitation that isn’t open to everyone, and the fewer people who know about us, the better it is for everyone. I’m sure you understand.”
Charlie nodded. Up close, her perfume was strong, something floral and sweet, but beneath it was the slightest tinge of sweat. When she turned away and headed back into the room, her long hair flicked at him, silken strands gently kissing the skin of his cheeks.
Finn closed the door behind him, and then they were alone in the long corridor. Finn smiled.
“Quite a lady, isn’t she? She put this whole thing together about a month ago, recruited us one by one. Pretty sure she used school transcripts to decide who to approach. I think she’s made some pretty good choices, don’t you?”
Charlie nodded, but he didn’t know enough about the group to judge any of them. Daniel and Jake hadn’t said a word the entire time. Sam was obviously smart, and Greg, though he seemed kind of an jerk, seemed to know his stuff. Finn and Magic were strange, but also confident enough to do just about anything.
And that left Charlie. Well, Charlie knew he was smart and good with numbers. If Miranda had really read his school transcripts, she knew he had always been at the top of his class, especially in the maths and sciences.
But deep down, Charlie knew it wasn’t as simple as that. Even if she had recruited the rest via their school records, he knew with him, it was different
. In fact, now that he’d seen what they were up to, he had a feeling he knew exactly why she had chosen him.
Charlie started down the hallway, Finn right next to him.
“It does seem like she knows precisely what she’s doing,” Charlie said, nodding.
Finn had been right all along. There was no such thing as coincidence.
7
THE DINOSAUR WAS HUNGRY.
Charlie could see it in her glazed, intense, prehistoric eyes; she was ravenous, down to her core, and every genetic instinct imprinted in her soul by those still-evolving random twists of DNA within her cells was telling her that it was time to feed. The ultimate prerogative, the definition of imperative, her body had been built for this moment. Her long prehensile neck jutted forward, muscles rippling beneath her thick, almost rubbery skin. Her sharp, bony, beaklike mouth opened wide, as if on hinges, revealing a sliver of bright red tongue. Her entire body lurched forward on legs as thick as mini tree trunks, her rapier-sharp claws curling forward against the gravel floor of her terrarium—and then it happened. Her beak slammed shut with a crunch that echoed against the terrarium’s thin glass walls.
Charlie leaned close, watching her jaw work as she pulverized the head of lettuce. Of course, the creature in the terrarium wasn’t actually a dinosaur, it was a twelve-year-old painted turtle named Greta. Charlie hadn’t traveled a hundred million years back in time, he’d just gone across to the main building, to the second floor science lab, room 231.
Over the past few years, Charlie had spent a lot of time watching Greta wander around her terrarium. Since third grade, he had been visiting room 231 on a pretty consistent basis; all his science-related classes had met in the brightly lit second-floor “lab,” and he felt comfortable and at home beneath the recessed fluorescent panels that covered the domed ceiling.