Bringing Down the Mouse (17 page)

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:

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.

“Here ya go, now you've got a partner for the Ferris wheel, one I guarantee isn't going to throw up on you.”

Then he walked right past them, his heart pounding in his chest. He exited the tent, letting the crisp October air flow down his throat and into his lungs. It had only been one game, three coins, one prize—but this wasn't
some mock-up in a deserted classroom; this had been real, live, under true carnival conditions. He'd still have to go back in and hit the balloon darts and the rope ladder, but even so, he'd already proven to himself—he could do it.

He was three yards past the flaps of the tent when he caught sight of Finn, standing by a barrel-shaped garbage can, flicking what looked to be pecan shells into the trash. Another yard and he saw Daniel, leaning against a bright blue Porta-potty, pretending to read a Spider-Man comic book. And there, in line for the same Porta-potty, three people deep, Jake, jumping from heel to heel as if he really had to go. Farther back, Magic, his face painted in bright yellow and red, juggling tennis balls to the great amusement of a group of third graders who had gathered just outside the face-painting booth. And a good ten feet behind Magic, Sam, her hands jammed deep into the pockets of her tight jeans as she pretended to kick a soda can against the fence that separated the fairgrounds from the parking lot.

But it took another minute, a few more steps, before Charlie caught sight of Miranda standing in the middle of a crowd of high-school kids dressed as vampires. Like the others, she pretended that she was a complete stranger, just a college girl spending an afternoon at a carnival.

And then, for the briefest of seconds, she broke character, looked right at him—and smiled. Then she turned, her jet-black hair fanning out behind her, and she was gone, lost in the sea of high-school vampires.

Charlie trembled. He shifted his eyes, back toward Finn and the rest, but they had faded away as well, vanishing into the depths of the Halloween Fair. Charlie felt the energy rising inside of him.

He had passed the trial by fire. He was officially one of them now.

And he was on his way to Incredo Land.

EYES CLOSED, IT WAS
all physics and math, written in the language of engineering: steel and fiberglass, titanium and aluminum, iron bolts and copper screws. Eyes closed, it was an equation turned corporeal: spinning fan blades feeding air into twin gas turbines, where the air was compressed, sprayed with jet fuel, then ignited by an electrical spark. Eyes closed, it was theory turned to practice: a two-thousand-degree controlled conflagration, gasses expanding in a confined space, then forcefully funneled through an exhaust cone, creating thrust.
Equal and opposite reactions, Newtonian physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Thrust became momentum, forcing more air spiraling up the curved, retractable flaps of the wings, and momentum became lift.

But eyes open, it was an entirely different story. Charlie was loosely strapped to an uncomfortable vomit-green chair, clutching a plastic bottle of apple juice he had bought in the kiosk adjacent to the gate. Sitting there on the plane, beads of sweat started to form on his forehead as he thought about how he was enclosed in a veritable coffin-shaped, one-hundred-sixty-thousand-pound hunk of oblong metal that was hurtling thirty thousand feet above the ground, at almost six hundred miles per hour.

The logical portion of Charlie's brain was no match for the pure, terrifying magic of modern flight, and his fingers whitened against the plastic bottle of juice as the 727 worked its way through the last canopy of clouds on its way to its predetermined cruising altitude. To make things even worse, the oval, tempered glass to Charlie's right had gone dark a few minutes after takeoff, and now all he could see when he peered into the porthole-shaped window was his own pale reflection staring back at him.

He hadn't always been afraid of flying. When he was younger, he had loved traveling by plane, and even though his parents had taken him on only a few short trips to New York and Washington, and once to Florida, he'd always looked forward to that feeling of
flight: the rush as the engines growled to life, the thrill as the plane galloped down the runway, that indescribable, unique lightness as the plane lifted off the ground and took to the sky.

But now that he was older, his nerves had taken over. Which was ironic, because now that he was smart enough to know the science and the statistics, he knew, logically, that there were few places on earth safer than the cabin of a commercial airplane, and that a plane was literally built to stay in the air. But even so, he couldn't shake the feeling that such a very large, heavy object shouldn't be able to fly.

A matter of perception
. Despite his fear, he couldn't help smiling to himself as he imagined Sam mouthing the words. He fought the urge to crane his neck around to search for her toward the back of the cabin; when they were boarding, he'd caught a glimpse of her putting her black backpack into the overhead compartment five rows behind where he was seated, but he'd been well trained. He hadn't even acknowledged the quick glimpse she'd thrown in his direction. Not that Jeremy, in a state Charlie could only describe as pure euphoria, would have noticed if he'd dived down the aisle and given her a great big hug.

As the plane finally broke free of the seemingly
magnetic grip of the last few clouds and straightened into a thankfully smooth flight line, he shifted away from his reflection and looked at his lanky friend, splayed out in the aisle seat to his left. It was like looking at a giant, redheaded grasshopper made out of maniacally twisted pipe cleaners. Amazingly, only ten minutes into a three-hour flight, Jeremy was fast asleep.