Bringing Down the Mouse (13 page)

One minute he was standing in front of the purple curtain, Finn next to him, Miranda reaching for the heavy velvet, and the next thing he knew, strong hands grabbed him by the waist and he was suddenly up in the air, the world spinning around him. He was vaguely aware of the curtain being pulled back and the sound of laughter mixed with applause, and then he was upside down, his head inches from the hardwood floor. He looked up toward his feet and saw Magic grinning down at him, thick hands around his ankles.

“First rule of the Carnival Killers,” Magic said, “always be aware of your surroundings.”

Magic lowered him gently to the floor, then helped him back to his feet. Finn was in front of him, Sam and Greg right behind Finn, and the redheaded fellow sixth grader, Daniel, standing next to Jake Tucson, the soccer jock, right beneath an oversize banner that read, in big block letters:
WELCOME TO THE TEAM
.

The whole scene was kitschy and stupid and fairly ridiculous, and it filled Charlie with a warmth he couldn't begin to describe. No matter how much comfort he got from his Whiz Kids, as an admittedly geeky kid he'd always had trouble shaking the feeling of being a little different, a little lonely. Being welcomed into a group of kids like these gave him a palpable rush. It certainly took the sting away from the fact that he'd had to lie to his parents for the second time in a week to get them to drop him back at school after dinner—seven p.m., the latest he'd ever been to the Nagassack campus. They hadn't even balked when he'd told them he'd been elected the head of a new math club that would be meeting three days a week in Headmaster Walker's—or Warden Walker's, as most of the kids called him—office to prepare for a statewide quiz competition after Christmas break. A pretty elaborate lie, but even though Charlie was new at deceiving his parents, he'd come to the conclusion that an elaborate lie was probably more
believable than something simple and straightforward. After all, a simple and straightforward road was easy to see down, while one filled with twists and turns was much more obscure.

“The Carnival Killers?” he finally managed, when the heat went out of his cheeks. “Is that what we're calling ourselves?”

“That's not set in stone,” Finn grumbled. “Personally, I kind of hate it. I wanted to go with something a little subtler. Like the Magnificent Seven. Or why not the Numbers Gang, in honor of our newest member?”

“But the Carnival Killers has such a nice ring to it,” Magic responded, giving Charlie a friendly little shove forward. “And that's who we are, that's what we're going to do. We're going to kill the biggest carnival on earth.”

The group parted as Magic guided Charlie out of the front, semicircular section of the art room, past where the curtain had hung. Charlie could see that the three mock fair games were exactly as they had been when he'd first seen them, the coin toss to his right, the dart-balloon game to his left, and the rope ladder directly ahead, attached to the back wall. He also noticed that the windows were still blacked out with construction paper, even though it was obviously dark outside this late into September.

“Hyperbole aside,” Miranda said, “I think it's a good fit. But we'll have plenty of time to argue about the name over the next five weeks. In the meantime, we need to get our newest member up to speed.”

Five weeks
. Charlie felt a burst of adrenaline at the mention of the deadline, because he knew what she was referring to: the trip to Incredo Land, something he couldn't have even imagined two days ago, something he still couldn't really envision because it seemed so unreal. But the other kids in the room obviously felt differently, because they immediately broke into action, moving to the various games set out across the orange-lit room. Greg and Sam went right to the rope ladder, quietly discussing some aspect of the game as they went. Daniel and Jake stepped over to the balloon-dart setup, immediately arguing about who was going to play first; Jake seemed to make the argument moot by getting to the darts first. But before he made a toss, Charlie felt Magic's hand on his shoulder again, and he found himself right up in front of the coin-toss counter, staring out at the sea of shiny white plates that covered much of the floor ahead of him.

Finn pointed to the three oversize gold coins that were neatly stacked up on the counter and gave Charlie a nod. Charlie glanced over his shoulder, but Miranda
had crossed back into the front half of the room, taking a seat in one of the institutional-style plastic drafting chairs. Maybe it was an act, maybe she was watching everything out of the corners of those exotic, frighteningly intense eyes. Maybe the team was such a well-oiled machine, she could hang back and let them bring Charlie into the fold without her. It was too soon for Charlie to judge the dynamics of the group yet. Either way, it was obvious what he was expected to do:
Dive in, headfirst.

He picked up the first coin, shrugged, and tossed it at the plates. Clink, clatter, clunk—just as it had happened at the Sherwood Fair, the coin ricocheted off a couple of plates and landed with a thunk on the floor.

Finn folded his arms against his chest and cocked his head to the side.

“Charlie, what is the object of this game?”

Charlie looked at him, then at the plates, then back at Finn. It seemed like a pretty stupid question.

“To get a coin onto a plate.”

“Wrong!” Magic shouted, startling Charlie. Magic grinned again, but Finn shushed him with a hand.

“The object of this game is to get a coin to
stay
on a plate,” Finn corrected. “It sounds like a minor difference, but that difference is everything. It's real easy to get the coin onto a plate.”

He reached forward, picked up one of the coins, and flung it at random toward the closest plate. Much like Charlie's coin, the little gold piece clicked and clacked through the field of plates at random, ending up on the floor with a clunk. Then he turned back toward Charlie.

“But to get a coin to stay on a plate? That's something else entirely.”

He picked up the last coin, then centered himself in front of the counter. His back was to Charlie, so for a brief second Charlie couldn't see what he was doing, but then with a flick of his wrist, Finn sent the coin in a high arc, up toward the ceiling, where the gaggle of stuffed animals hung, just like they had at the Sherwood Fair. The coin barely missed the lowest hanging animal—a Zebra with googly eyes—at the top of its arc, then dove straight down, hitting a plate in the direct center of the field. This time, the coin didn't ricochet or hop from plate to plate. The coin hit the plate and stopped dead, planted firmly against the porcelain.

“How did you do that?” Charlie asked.

“Magic,” whispered Magic with a laugh.

Finn turned back to Charlie. His face was completely serious.

“Science looks a lot like magic when it's applied correctly.”

Winking, Finn suddenly pulled himself up onto the counter where the three coins had previous been stacked, then flung one jeaned leg over the top. Reaching down, he grabbed one of the plates off its base and held it up to show Charlie its smooth, shiny front surface.

“The plates that they use in carnivals are usually polished porcelain or ceramic. Exceedingly smooth and shiny and slippery; in fact, sometimes the carnies even oil them up to make them even more so. Anything that hits them with any sort of horizontal force is going to slide or roll right off.”

“And when you toss a coin forward,” Magic butted in, “you're giving it a lot of horizontal force. The harder the toss, the more forward force. Which means in this game, the stronger you are, the worse you actually do.”

Charlie nodded, taking it all in. Horizontal force, what Finn and Magic were talking about, in physics terms was forward velocity. The speed of an object moving forward multiplied by its weight. The coins didn't have much weight, but even so, any reasonable amount of forward velocity was going to add up to enough force to make it hard for one of them to avoid sliding off the slippery surface of an oiled plate!

Which is why Finn had obviously avoided as much forward velocity as he could.

“So you arc the coin up, toward the ceiling. The more of an arc you give it, the less horizontal force, and the more force on the vertical, or up and down, axis.”

“Give the kid a gold star,” Magic said. “Or maybe a gold coin. But see, there's a problem with your solution, isn't there?”

Magic pointed toward the ceiling with a thick finger, and Charlie looked up, immediately seeing the jungle of stuffed animals.

“That's why they hang the stuffed animals right above the game,” Charlie murmured, a little awed at realizing something he'd never thought about before. “They're trying to limit your vertical throw.”

“Right,” Finn said, still straddling the counter. “You can't get really good height at most carnivals because the doggone stuffed animals are hanging right there, like some chaotic zoological piñata. But with a little practice, you can still arc it up to some degree, giving yourself a little edge. And you need to make sure the coin isn't spinning in the air. When a coin spins, it's adding in all these new forces to the calculation, which you don't want. And when it spins, you can't be sure how it's going to hit the plate. If it contacts that smooth surface with its edge, it's going to roll right off. But if it lands flat, well, you've got a chance.”

“But not much of one.” Magic sighed. “You've still got a bit of forward velocity to deal with, and you've got that incredibly slippery surface.”

Charlie was amazed at how much was going on behind the scenes of something as simple as a carnival coin-toss game. Oiled plates? Stuffed animals hung in a way that was designed to lessen your chances of winning? It certainly didn't seem fair.

“So how do you get the coin to stay on the plate?”

Finn smiled.

“We add a little chemistry.”

Then he did something that took Charlie completely by surprise. He reached down behind the counter and retrieved one of the gold coins, then held it up in front of his face, stuck out his tongue, and licked it.

“Ninety-eight percent water, about two percent enzymes that break down starches. A little mucus, a few other elements depending on your diet and your genetic makeup. Saliva, Charlie. It's a pretty nifty chemical, lots of cool properties that most people don't know about, and even more important, you've always got some with you.”

He turned, gave the coin a flick with his wrist. It went up, up, up, just avoided the bottom of the googly-eyed zebra, then dropped down, sticking to the same
plate that he'd landed the last coin on:
clunk
.
A perfect winner.

“You put spit on the coin,” Charlie murmured. Magic squeezed his shoulder.

“Works even better if you eat something heavy in dairy right before you play. Ice cream, maybe some yogurt, it increases the thickness of the mucus.”

“On a microscopic level,” Finn said as if he were giving a book report, “the enzymes in your saliva have all these protein-size attractor points that grip the tiny imperfections in the plate, the grooves you could only see with a microscope—”

“Friction,” Charlie said. “You create friction by licking the coin. Just enough that if the coin hits the plate flat on—”

“It's going to stick.” Finn grinned.

Charlie whistled low. “That's pretty cool.”

Finn pulled his leg back over the counter and put his boots back to the floor. He stretched, then straightened the sleeves of his ever-present leather jacket.

“Yeah, it's cool. But even when you know what you're doing, it's not as easy as it looks. It takes practice. Lots of practice. A couple of hours a day, a few times a week, and maybe you'll be as good as me.”

Physics and chemistry. Not strength, not even accuracy,
really, though you'd need to practice the motion until you had the skill, until you could get the arc right and keep the coin from spinning in the air. But physics and chemistry, that's really what it was. That's how you beat the game. Charlie felt like he was on fire, eager to get started, eager to teach himself how to throw the coins as well as Finn, maybe even better than Finn. He started forward toward the counter, but Finn stopped him with a hand.

“Being good enough to do this nine out of ten times isn't enough. Because it's all in the way you do it. That look on your face right now, the way you're going for the coins—Charlie, that's going to end this for you before you even start.”

“What do you mean?”

“You've got to disguise your movements. You've watched me beat this game here and at Sherwood. You ever see me licking any coins? No, because I do it fast, easy, cool—in a way that nobody can see me doing it. You've got to learn to play it cool. You've got to hit the game, land the coins, then get out without the carny ever realizing what you've done. And if you're going to keep hitting the same game over and over, you've got to play different roles so he doesn't recognize you each time. We're not talking major disguises here, we're just talking wearing a hat, maybe a different jacket—”

“Fake names,” Charlie said, eyes widening. “Fake personalities.”

Magic leaned toward him dramatically.

“Second rule of the Carnival Killers. Always be in character.”

“Is all that really necessary?” Charlie asked. “I mean, are they really watching over these games so carefully?”

Finn shrugged.

“It's better to be thorough than to get caught, right?”

Charlie swallowed. His throat felt a little tight.

“What happens if you get caught?”

Magic playfully punched his shoulder, laughing away Charlie's sudden tension.

“Spitting on a coin? Tossing the coin the correct way to win the game? There's nothing illegal about that. You're just using your brain to beat them. They won't like it, but they can't get you in trouble for it.”