by Ben Mezrich
At that, Charlie had almost told Jeremy everything. He felt so bad about lying to the Whiz Kids, about keeping something so important from them, and especially keeping it from his best friend—that was harder than anything he had learned from Finn and the rest. Particularly the fact that if Charlie made it through to the end of his training, Jeremy was going to be coming along with him to the Cheeriest Spot in the Universe. But Miranda’s icy eyes and perfectly chiseled lips were in his head. He could only sigh and mumble an apology.
“It’s nothing like that. I’m just tired. Maybe overextended with homework and the science projects I’m working on with my dad.”
It was another little lie, one he’d been using to explain the afternoons he couldn’t spend with Jeremy at the park or wandering the creek behind his house. But it was obvious Jeremy wasn’t really buying it anymore.
“Yeah, I know about tired, remember? There’s a six-month-old sharing my bedroom and my dad works a night shift three days a week to pay for these stupid boots. But that doesn’t mean I disappear at lunch every day and treat everyone I know like trash. If you’ve found new friends to hang out with, you should just be honest. We’d all understand.”
Charlie had almost broken at that, but then the bus had mercifully pulled up to the sidewalk, and Jeremy had kicked the carton of milk hard enough to send it bouncing off one of the bus’s big rubber wheels. They’d ridden to their shared stop in silence, and Jeremy had let the matter drop. Another week, Charlie’d told himself, and it would all be over, they’d be on their way to Incredo Land, and Jeremy would forgive him. And when Charlie got to the wheel, when Charlie beat the wheel, he promised himself he would tell Jeremy and the rest everything, no matter what Miranda wanted. She’d have her paper, the rest of the group would get their lifetime tickets to the amusement park, and Charlie would have his Whiz Kids back, with a couple of those lifetime tickets to share for the rest of their lives.
Of course, Charlie thought as the lightning thundered even louder overhead, causing the crowd to gasp in near unison, getting to the wheel and beating the wheel were two very different things. Now that he’d had four weeks of practice and that he’d seen what the Carnival Killers could do, he was pretty sure that getting to the wheel was something they, as a group, could achieve. But beating the wheel was going to be up to him.
His eyes shifted from the jagged, brilliantly white bolt of lightning to the giant aluminum spheres, then down to the enormous cylinders at the center of the stage. When he closed his eyes for a brief second, he could picture the immense rubber fan belt spinning within one of those cylinders, carrying the current up to the aluminum in a blur of mechanical speed. The science behind the magic, that’s exactly what Miranda was expecting from him.
Would he be able to give it to her? He was just a skinny kid who was good at numbers. He didn’t have a magic wand or a wizard’s hat. He didn’t have access to any magic spells.
But what he did have was even more powerful than magic. He had math. Or specifically, a mathematical formula. With just four pieces of information, he could calculate how long it took a ball to roll down a bowl.
Four pieces of information. The diameter of the bowl. The time the ball was dropped into the bowl. The time the ball finished its first rotation. And the time the ball finished its second rotation. With those four pieces of information, those four numbers, he could calculate when the ball was going to stop. Or, metaphorically, where a satellite was going to land.
Or even more metaphorically, where a spinning wheel was going to stop spinning. Because really, Charlie now understood, a spinning wheel was no different from a marble in a salad bowl or a satellite going around the earth. The arrow at the top, clicking its way from section to section, was akin to the marble or the satellite. The wheel was the bowl, or the earth.
So all he really needed to beat the wheel was to know the diameter of the wheel, the time at the moment the wheel started spinning, and then, as it went around, the time as it finished its first revolution, and then, infinitely slower, its second revolution. At the moment, he wasn’t sure how he was going to find out the exact diameter of the wheel at Incredo Land, or how he was going to record the time that the wheel started spinning and the two other important marker points, but those were just details. The important point was, Charlie could, theoretically, beat the wheel.
Charlie shifted his gaze from the Van de Graaff generator back to the magnificent lightning in the air. From theory to practice, from an idea on a piece of paper to terrifying bolts of pure white energy flying through a pitch-black auditorium. From theory to practice was really just a matter of mechanics, of muscle and sweat and strategy. A process, boxes to be checked off a list, emotionless obstacles to overcome.
The thought brought him back to the previous day, his last afternoon of practice, because in one more week, he was either on his way to Florida or back to being a normal sixth grader. He’d just finished climbing the ladder for a seventh time in a row, and even his palm hurt from slapping that darn bell at the top of the ropes again and again. He’d half walked, half crawled to the pod of beanbag chairs someone had piled in a corner of the art room, right beneath one of the blacked-out windows. Because it had been late, nearly nine p.m., all the other kids had gone home one by one, and Charlie had suddenly realized, as he lowered himself into the bulbous beanie cushion, that the only other person in the room was Miranda, seated at one of the drafting desks.
Charlie had realized that in four long weeks together, this was the first time he’d been alone with her. At the moment, most of her face was obscured by her jet-black hair as she leaned forward over the desk, but as he settled into the beanbag, she had suddenly looked up, showing him a sliver of white enamel between the ruby lines of her lips.
“Charlie,” she’d said, her voice piercing the air. “I think you’re ready.”
Charlie hadn’t been able to disguise the pride that had washed over him. It wasn’t just the feeling of belonging that had come with being part of the Carnival Killers; it was Miranda’s approval, the fact that Charlie had earned her respect.
He knew, deep down, that his parents probably wouldn’t have liked Miranda—in her perfectly tailored pencil skirt and cherry-red pumps; her manicured nails and perfectly styled hair; her flowing white blouse, knotted at the throat; and her shiny, sparkly watch—she was nearly an adult, and yet there she was, spending her evening helping a group of kids learn how to beat carnival games. And even though, over the four weeks, she’d let Finn and the rest do most of the guiding, she’d always been there, a presence you couldn’t avoid.
She was doing it for a paper, and the tools they were using were physics, chemistry, and math, but still, it was a scheme practiced in secret, which they were going to use to win a prize. Charlie’s parents wouldn’t have understood.
“Sunday afternoon,” Miranda had continued. “Finn will make the arrangements. If everything goes as planned, we’ll know you’re ready for Incredo Land.”
It was strange to think that Ms. Sloan would not have made the arrangements herself, but the inner workings of a finely tuned machine were palpable—each member had their designated role, and it was clear that Finn was the head.
Now, two days later, standing in the darkness, watching streaks of lightning tear through the air, Charlie tasted sparks on his tongue, and an involuntary shiver ran down his spine. But though the oxygen around him was supercharged by the voltage spewing through the auditorium, the electricity in his veins didn’t come from a Van de Graaff generator.
Sunday—tomorrow afternoon—Charlie was going to have to prove himself.
A trial by fire.
13
IT WAS TEN MINUTES past two in the afternoon, the sky was a deep and blustery gunmetal gray, and Charlie had just come to the undeniable conclusion that there was no cool way to walk through a crowd while eating an ice-cream cone. It didn’t help that Crystal had ordered him the Triple-Decker Halloween Scoop: almost half a foot high of vanill
a and chocolate swirl, covered in orange and black sprinkles. Or that she, Jeremy, and Kentaro were all wielding similar cones. Charlie doubted that even Finn could have pulled off a suave stroll through the Sherwood fairgrounds behind a phalanx of brightly colored sprinkles.
Crystal had lunged toward the ice-cream booth the minute they’d ditched Jeremy’s dad in the parking lot. Crystal was paying because she’d gotten twice her regular allowance the day before to make up for the fact that her mother had inadvertently vacuumed up part of her lava-rock collection, which her cat had knocked off her desk and onto her bedroom carpet. Charlie would have seemed really out of character telling her he didn’t want free ice cream, even though it was hard to play it cool with a face full of sprinkles. It was precisely the same reasoning that had forced him to arrive at the scene of Miranda’s test with three quarters of the Whiz Kids in tow. When Jeremy had called to tell him his dad had offered to take the crew to the fair on the last Sunday before Halloween, Charlie couldn’t have refused.
“Marion shouldn’t have been so concerned about his face,” Jeremy remarked as they continued away from the ice-cream stand and out into the bustle of the fairground. “He’d have fit in perfectly with all the goblins and ghouls out and about this fine afternoon.”
Charlie faked a laugh. It was eight days before Halloween, which meant that the Sherwood Fair was in full swing, right in its sweet spot. The parking lot had been completely full, and it had taken Jeremy’s dad a good twenty minutes before he’d found a muddy pocket on the tire-ploughed field to stash his UPS van. He was lodged so tightly between two sparkling SUVs, Charlie had nearly had to climb out the window to get free. And Jeremy was right: Nearly half of the people cluttering the main glade of the Halloween Fair were in costume. Goblins, ghouls, witches, ghosts, the more popular television and movie characters, presidents past, present, and maybe future, and of course, vampires—so many flipping vampires, you needed a wooden stake and a clove of garlic just to navigate down the dirt path that ran through the center of the fair. The only costume that even came close to rivaling the vampire in popularity was the similarly ubiquitous zombie. Marion could have fit right in, especially with the zombies. The next time a deliveryman brushed him with a bouquet of roses in the elevator at his dentist’s office, and his face exploded in firecracker hives like the sky above the Charles River on the Fourth of July, he could hide in plain sight at the Sherwood Halloween Fair.
Instead, Marion had stayed home, and the rest of the Whiz Kids were moving aimlessly through the park, trying to avoid the vampires, zombies, and especially the older kids who might think it was funny to see orange and black sprinkles spread out across a sixth grader’s cheeks.
Lately Charlie was the quietest of the bunch. Inside, his nerves were so twisted into knots, he was using every ounce of energy to appear calm and normal; a large part of him wanted to turn and head right for the exit. He hadn’t expected to be so tense. After all, he’d been practicing for this moment for what felt like an eternity. The muscles in his arms twitched as his fingers opened and closed over imaginary coins, and both pockets of his jeans felt thick with the still-cool heating pads that were hidden inside. He’d bought the pads at the local Walmart that very morning, telling his dad that he’d pulled a calf muscle chasing Kentaro up a flight of stairs at school.
“I think we should visit the face-painting booth first,” Crystal said as they got deeper into the park. “And then the Ferris wheel. But this time I’m not sitting with Kentaro. It took me a week to get the vomit out of my shoes last year.”
“I told you,” Kentaro shot back, jabbing at her with his ice-cream cone, “that had nothing to do with the Ferris wheel. I had stayed up the whole night before working on a violin recital—”
“You can be such a stereotype, man,” Jeremy said. “Just own it. When I vomit, I do it loud and proud. Crystal, I’d love to sit with you on the Ferris wheel.”
“Not on your life,” Crystal spat. She grabbed at Charlie’s hand. “Charlie, sadly you’re what’s called making the best of a bad situation. Okay?”
Charlie felt a pang inside, a burst of warmth at her sudden touch; a part of him truly wanted nothing more than to ride the Ferris wheel with Crystal. But he wasn’t there for fun, and he knew he had no choice. He was trying to come up with a witty answer when his eyes settled on a familiar swath of color: the peak of a midway tent, squatting about twenty yards away down the crowded path. Another few steps, and he could make out the huge sign, the scrawl of Old English:
Midway Games
He took a deep breath, and without looking, stretched out his arm and dropped his half-eaten ice-cream cone into an overflowing garbage can.
“Maybe a little later,” he murmured as his mind suddenly clicked into gear. “But first I’d like to try my hand at a few games in there.”
And with that, he was moving forward at double speed. He could hear his friends calling after him, but he kept going. It was as though he had blinders on like a horse pulling a cart; he knew exactly what he was supposed to do. As he went, he reached into his back pocket and yanked out a rolled-up baseball cap, then pulled it on his head so that the lid hung down low over his eyes. He knew he didn’t have much time before the Whiz Kids caught up to him, but they were barely registering now that he could hear the clink of coins against plates, the clang of darts hitting the floor.
He reached the entrance to the tent, took another deep breath, and moved quickly inside. As he went, he kept repeating to himself what Finn had told him, for what had to be the hundredth time, at their last practice: You do it fast, easy, cool. That’s how Charlie had to play the games, and that’s who Charlie had to be. Mastering the techniques had been easy compared to mastering his own nervous system. Fast, easy, cool.
And then he was moving right up to the coin-toss counter, his eyes taking in every inch in front of him, making note of every aspect of his surroundings. The three high-school girls to his left, laughing as one of them missed every plate on the floor with ridiculously errant tosses. The bored, smug-looking carnival worker, unshaven, in shoddy, torn jeans and a Sherwood Fair branded sweatshirt, absentmindedly poking at one of the stuffed animals hanging above the plates as he watched the girls. And there, at the very end of the counter, standing there with his arms crossed nonchalantly against his chest, pretending to count pennies out of the change section of a Velcro wallet, Greg. For a brief second Charlie asked himself why in the world it had to be Greg, his least favorite of the Carnival Killers, but then it was past the time for thought. He had reached the counter and it was time to play.
He caught the attention of the carny and slapped a pink ticket onto the counter. The carnie sighed, turning away from the high-school girls long enough to take Charlie’s ticket and exchange it for three of the oversize gold coins.
Charlie faked a smile, taking the coins into his hand. A dollar spent from his weekly allowance, but that didn’t matter either, because Charlie was no longer Charlie. He was no longer a nerdy sixth grader at Nagassack Middle School with practical parents and an affinity for numbers.
“Wow, this is so cool, I bet I’m gonna hit every plate!” He coughed, in full Chucky the Easily Amused mode, as happy and smiling as a giant clam, shaking the coins in front of him like they were dice. The carny glanced at him, the smug smile digging deeper into his face. He’d seen idiots like Chucky a million times before. So many times that he didn’t even notice as Charlie quickly and smoothly flicked one of the coins really close to his lips, touching one side thickly with his tongue. He was completely unaware of Charlie, who swiftly lowered his hand, then flicked his wrist in a perfect upward motion, releasing the coin at exactly the right moment. He didn’t even notice that the coin arced almost straight up, barely missing the bottom of the lowest stuffed animal by an inch. He didn’t notice anything, in fact, until the coin landed with a loud clack on one of the center plates.
“Hey.” Charlie gasped. “Look at that! I hit a plate.”
; The carny glanced down and realized that, indeed, Charlie’s coin was sitting on a center plate.
“Yeah, great, kid. That means you get one of the small animals,” he started, but Charlie was already throwing the second and third coins in rapid succession. They both arced up and landed with equivalent clacks. All three on the same plate, bunched next to each other like the three holes of a bowling ball.
The carny opened his mouth, then closed it. Inside, Charlie was on fire. He could feel Greg watching him with approval, but he didn’t acknowledge the other member of his team. Instead, he grinned and pointed to a huge stuffed giraffe hanging from the ceiling.
“I guess I get one of the big ones now, don’t I? I’ll take the giraffe. My sisters aren’t going to believe this! I never win anything!”
The carny didn’t say a word as he struggled to unhitch the giraffe from the ceiling. It was obvious he wasn’t used to getting the big animals down, because it took him a full minute to get the thing loose. Then he handed it over the counter to Charlie. Charlie couldn’t help but notice the admiring stares of the high-school girls as he tucked the stuffed animal under one arm and turned away from the counter.
Still grinning ear to ear, he started for the exit. Then he noticed Jeremy, Crystal, and Kentaro coming through the opening, still eating their ice-cream cones. They saw Charlie and the giraffe, and all three registered surprise. They’d all played enough carnival games over their lives to know how hard it was to win one of the big prizes. Even stranger, Charlie was wearing a baseball cap and grinning like a toddler.
Charlie quickly crossed to them, and before even Jeremy could get a word out, he handed the giraffe to Crystal.