Bringing Down the Mouse (10 page)

“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.

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.

The dome was an accident of architecture; Charlie's father had told him that the original plans for the second floor of Nagassack Middle School had actually called for a cantilevered, environmentally friendly sunroof that would help heat the building during the cold winter months. But somewhere between blueprints and buttresses, the Nagassack Building Committee decided alumni funds would be better spent on a four-hundred seat theater, which, it turned out, was just as swelteringly
hot in winter and summer, because of its unfortunate location right above the main boilers that fed superheated steam through the school's vascular system. In any case, the sunroof was out, the dome went up, and Nagassack was the only middle school that Charlie knew of that taught science in the round.

The table setup was perfect for a thirty-student class, which was the norm. The far half of the room was reserved for special projects, and for the preserved samples that lined the metal shelves above the microscopes: fish, bugs, frogs, snakes, mostly sealed in plastic containers with cork tops, some stuck right to display boards with brightly tipped pins. Next to the shelves, tucked into the farthest curve of the circular room, was Mabel the skeleton. Mrs. Hennigan, who taught science from fifth to seventh grades, never tired of telling her classes that Mabel was the most expensive specimen in the entire school. At Halloween, she got a jack-o-lantern sidekick, placed right beneath her dangling, bone-white toes. Around Christmas, Mabel was dressed up with a red Santa hat and a cotton-ball beard.

The room itself smelled of hamster wood shavings, though there hadn't been a live hamster in the room for as long as Charlie could remember. A lot of kids attributed the smell to Mrs. Hennigan herself; a heavyset
woman with curly white hair and poorly applied blue eyeliner, she had a penchant for sacklike outfits that seemed to be made of burlap. Everything she wore was beige, down to her hospital-style tights and outdated platform shoes. Her hand always shook when she wrote on the chalkboard at the front of the room, which made her mostly illegible handwriting even more impossible to decipher, and the glare from the fluorescent panels in the dome only amplified the effect.

As usual, Mrs. Hennigan was at that chalkboard, scratching away with a piece of chalk as small as a pencil eraser, while Charlie watched Greta devour her lunch. Every now and then, Hennigan's nails hit the blackboard as she wrote, sending an awful screech reverberating through the wood-shaving-scented air. Most of the kids groaned at the sound, but Charlie remained focused on the turtle.

He'd often found solace watching Greta; seeing her roam around her tank in the slow-motion manner of her species helped him think, and at the moment, he certainly had a lot to think about. A casual observer might wonder how a turtle could aid a twelve-year-old's meditation, but for Charlie, it made perfect sense. One of his most significant childhood memories revolved around a turtle just like Greta.

It had happened just a few days past his eighth birthday. He and Jeremy had been outside playing and had discovered a little creek that ran parallel to Jeremy's backyard. They'd never seen the creek before, because it was past the invisible line that Jeremy's parents had drawn beyond which they hadn't been allowed to play, but that morning they'd decided to push those boundaries and explore. They followed the creek through the dense underbrush, finally coming to a little clearing where the water swelled to what almost could be described as a pond. And in the middle of the pond, they spotted a turtle sitting on a rather large log. Before either of them could even react, they heard laughter from the other side of the pond, followed by a rain of rocks, all aimed at the hapless reptile. A bunch of older kids, maybe age fifteen or sixteen, were hurling stones at the poor creature. Most were poorly aimed, but a few were finding their target, and Charlie could see the red splotches where the rocks were cutting through the turtle's shell, finding the soft meat beneath. Slowly, painfully slowly, the thing was trying to get off the log and into the safety of the pond, but with every second, the rain of stones became heavier, the moment more dire.

Charlie and Jeremy had watched in silence, unable to do anything. Charlie had never felt so helpless. Eventually,
he'd just turned and made his way back along the creek to Jeremy's yard. He liked to imagine that the turtle had made it off the log, injured but alive, and disappeared beneath the surface. But he knew, realistically, that the turtle had probably never gotten off that log.

Greta, safe in her terrarium, made Charlie feel secure in a world that seemed every day less in his control. After a day like this, even a moment with Greta seemed unlikely to put it all in perspective.