Bringing Down the Mouse (14 page)

“Which doesn't mean you stick around if they do start giving you problems,” Finn said.

“Which brings us to the third rule of the Carnival Killers,” Magic finished for him. He took Charlie by the shoulders, spun him around so they were face-to-face, sneering at him, nose crinkled and teeth clenched in full view like a wolf threatening its prey.

“Always be ready to run.”

Magic laughed again, but Charlie couldn't tell if he was kidding or not. Before he could belabor the point, Finn was ushering him out of Magic's grip and toward the second fair game, a counter of darts and a wall of balloons.

CHARLIE WANTED TO CLOSE
his eyes. He wanted to scream. He wanted to do anything but what he was doing—standing there, frozen in place, his arm out in front of him, palm up, watching with terror as the metal dart plunged down through the air, racing toward his skin.

“Wait!” he finally shouted, but it was too late.

The dart reached his palm and the cold steel hit his skin, directly in the center, the soft unguarded flesh, an inch from the base of his fingers, and he opened his mouth to let out a noise—

And then, nothing. The steel point creased his skin but didn't even come close to piercing. In fact, it didn't hurt at all. Other than the coldness of the metal and the pressure from the downward arc of the dart, there
was little to no sensation. The thing was so dull that even though Daniel had jabbed it down at his hand with fairly good speed and accuracy, it hadn't harmed him at all. Which, obviously, was the point.

Charlie turned his attention from the dart to the freckled face peering down at him.

“And they're all like this,” Daniel said, bringing the dart back up to eye level. “They grind them down to make them as dull as possible. But that's not even the worst part.”

He gestured to Jake, the soccer kid, who was a few feet to his left down the counter. Jake picked up one of the other darts and tossed it toward the balloons affixed to the wall. The dart hit one of the balloons dead on, and harmlessly fell to the floor. The balloon continued to wobble after the dart disappeared, a trembling blob of bright yellow. Charlie couldn't help wondering which of the kids had spent the necessary hours blowing up all those things. There had to be thirty, forty balloons attached to the wall.

“The balloons are only about three-quarters full. The latex is loose, nowhere near stretched to capacity. Which means that when a dull dart hits it, ninety-nine out of a hundred times the dart is going to just bounce right off.”

Charlie nodded, still listening to Finn and Magic's coins clinking loudly against the plates. He tossed a glance over his shoulder, back toward where Miranda was still sitting in one of the drafting chairs, scribbling in a notepad. He wondered if she was taking notes about the teaching session for the paper she was going to write about their team.

The more Charlie learned about how even these supposedly “beatable” fair games worked, the better he felt about what he was getting into. With the darts and balloons, the deck seemed stacked heavily against the player. Under-filled balloons? Dulled darts? Like the oiled plates and the low-hanging stuffed animals, it seemed that the fair games were anything but fair. Carnival Killers? If the carnivals were so rigged against poor unaware kids who spent their allowances trying to win prizes—well, didn't the carnivals deserve to get killed? Was it cheating to even the odds of an unfair game?

“So how do you beat the balloons?” Charlie asked, narrowing his eyes.

Daniel smiled, the freckles around his mouth dancing like orange raindrops across a pasty white windowpane.

“I like your attitude.”

He showed Charlie the dart, then did something bizarre. Without a word, he slid the dart down into his pocket. He held the dart there for a few seconds, then brought the dart back up, swung on his heels, and hurled it toward the balloons.

There was a loud pop as one of the balloon burst into a million pieces.

“Wow,” Charlie said.

“Yeah, wow,” Jake responded from a few feet away. He brought a dart out of his pocket and flung it toward the balloons. Again, another loud pop, another balloon bursting emphatically.

“What the heck is in your pockets?”

Daniel reached in and pulled out a small white piece of material that looked like a thick gauze bandage. He held it out toward Charlie.

“Careful, now.”

Charlie raised an eyebrow, reached forward to touch the bandage, and jerked his hand back. The thing was hot. Not searingly so, but enough to make him wince.

“It's a heat wrap,” Daniel said. “You know, the kind you can find at any drugstore. People use them for pulled muscles or aching joints.”

Charlie had seen heat wraps many times before. His father had gone through a racquetball phase when
Charlie was in fifth grade. Before that, it had been pickup basketball with a few of the other professors at MIT. His father had worked through so many heat wraps, ace bandages, and Advil bottles, sometimes his medicine cabinet looked like the Celtics' locker room.

“You use them to heat up the darts,” Charlie said.

Daniel nodded. Charlie instantly understood. Again, it was physics and chemistry mixed together to beat bad odds. His father had explained how the chemical filled heat packs worked, because Charlie had essentially been born naturally curious. Heat packs were actually made up of two separate compartments, one filled with liquid, usually water, the other with chemicals such as calcium or magnesium sulfate. When the pack was opened, the two compartments were combined, causing a chemical reaction that released energy via heat.

“The second law of thermodynamics,” Charlie continued. “Heat always moves toward an equilibrium. The atoms excited by the chemical reaction give off energy, which travels from atom to atom through anything it touches, heating up the cooler materials until everything is an even temperature. In other words, you hold the dart against the heat pack, the metal heats up. And when you throw the dart at the balloon, that heat is transferred to the atomic structure of the latex, breaking those bonds—”

“And popping the balloon,” Jake finished, tossing another dart that hit with another loud pop.

Again, physics and chemistry, the science of ballistics meeting the laws of thermodynamics. But this time, unlike with the coin toss, Daniel and Jake had added something that wasn't really part of the game—the heating pack. Charlie wasn't sure, but it felt like that was a little more like cheating.

Then again, the game was unfair. You couldn't really win the way the game was designed. And what were you really adding? You weren't throwing anything but the dart. You weren't moving closer to the balloons or really breaking any rules that Charlie could name. You were adding heat, which wasn't even something physical or quantifiable.

It was pretty ingenious, actually. The heated darts flipped the odds of the game on their head. Nine out of ten times, you'd probably pop those balloons. They were easy to hit, and with the heat reacting with the latex material, well, there would be a whole lot of popping going on.

Charlie was eager to give it a try himself. He was about to reach for one of the darts when Daniel caught his hand, then pointed over his shoulder.

“There's still one more game to beat,” he said.

Charlie followed the kid's freckled finger. Greg was standing at the base of the rope ladder, arms crossed against his chest, a bored look on his face. Behind him, halfway up the ladder, Sam smiled toward Charlie, then gracefully scrambled up the last few feet along the swaying rope material and hit the bell with an outstretched hand.

THE RINGING IN CHARLIE'S
ears seemed to continue even after the bell had stopped trembling; he used the few seconds it took to get from the balloon-dart counter to the base of the rope ladder to clear his head. He wasn't sure what it was about Sam that seemed to continually catch him off guard, but every time she looked at him, it was kind of like getting splashed with water.

By the time he reached the base of the rope ladder, she had clambered back down from the bell and was standing next to Greg, who still had his arms crossed, a smug look on his face. His shirt was bright green with a designer label, the collar starched so high it nearly touched his ears. Sam, in contrast, was in an oversize
sweatshirt and ripped jeans. Her outfit would have gotten her sent home during regular school hours, but this late, nobody would be roaming the halls other than athletes on their way home from various practices and the odd musical prodigy coming back from one of the practice rooms on the school's lowest floor.

Charlie was surprised to see that she wasn't even breathing hard; she'd gone up and down the rope ladder in a near blur, so fast he hadn't even seen where she'd put her hands and feet. The ladder was still swinging a bit behind her, and the way it rocked back and forth sent chills down Charlie's spine.

Like the other games in the room, he'd tried the rope ladder before a few times in his life, at various fairs and carnivals that his parents had taken him to over the years. The results had always been the same. Charlie knew his limitations: He wasn't a good athlete, he didn't have great balance, and though he could do math and science on a high-school level, the strength of his arms and legs was barely beyond that of a toddler's. He'd always sucked at all things physical. His father had told him that those things only mattered until you were eighteen, and then it all reversed, and all anyone cared about was what you could do with your brain. Charlie had suspected that that was the sort of thing
fathers always told athletically inept sons. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but eighteen years seemed like a heck of a long time to wait for the tables to turn.

Greg's eyes seemed to be telling Charlie the same thing as he looked him over.

“I guess we better get this over with.” He sniffed, waving Charlie toward the still-swinging ladder. “Let's see what you've got.”

Charlie looked from him to Sam, and she gave him a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile. Charlie took a deep breath and stepped past the two of them, then surveyed his competition. The ladder was exactly the same as the few he had tried before: two thick ropes leading about fifteen feet at a steep angle up the wall, bisected by a dozen or so wooden rungs. A foot above where the ladder reached the wall was the bell that Sam had rung so easily.
Simple
, Charlie said to himself,
just take a deep breath and give it a go.

He reached for the second rung, gripping it tightly with his right hand. Then he put his left foot on the first rung, and lifted his weight up onto the ladder—

And that was as far as he got. The ladder lurched right, then left, then flipped upside down. His hands came open and he dropped, his stomach lurching as he plummeted the few feet to the floor. He hit with a
huff of air, then realized, thankfully, that he'd landed on a thick blue gym mat. Nothing bruised but his ego. Greg and Sam peered down at him, laughing. Greg's laugh was cruel and hearty and went on a lot longer than Sam's.

“Pretty much what I expected,” he said. Sam gave Greg a push, then stepped forward and reached out a hand. Charlie took it, letting her help him back to his feet.

“I gotta say, I'm not sure how math or science is going to help me with this one. It just seems really hard to do.”

Sam laughed. Then she pulled Charlie next to her and turned him so he was facing the ladder with her, side by side. He was getting warm beneath his shirt but did his best to ignore the feeling.

“Charlie, tell me what you see.”

Charlie raised his eyebrows, wondering if it was some sort of trick question.

“I see a ladder.”

“And that's exactly why you can't do it. Because this one, well, it's really a matter of perception.”

“What do you mean?”

Greg stuck his head over Charlie's right shoulder.