“Start at noon?” Mal said. “It’s already after twelve thirty.”
Mr. Garvey stared at Mal in disbelief, then said slowly, “Pretend the Ferris wheel is a giant clock and give me the picture at the twelve-o’clock position.”
“Oh.”
Winston said, “That’s a rhinoceros. Then there’s a bunch of faces . . . a boat, or maybe that’s supposed to be a canoe. Then that’s a—”
“A garbage can,” Jake said.
“Yeah,” Winston said. “Then a house.” The wheel was turning now, carrying new passengers. “After that we’ve got a stage or a theater or something. Then a trumpet.”
“That’s not a trumpet,” said Mal. “A trumpet has whaddayacallem. Valves. That’s a bugle.”
“Okay, a bugle,” said Winston. “Then a safe, an ice-cream cone—”
“Hold on,” Mr. Garvey said, writing. “Okay, what else?”
“A bunch of hats. A shoe. And a fence.”
“That last one is a gate,” Jake said.
“Yeah, I think Jake’s right. A gate.”
Mr. Garvey crossed something out and then finished writing. He clicked the pen closed, looked at his boys, and announced, “I have no idea what this is.”
“Me neither,” said Winston.
“Do all these things have something in common?” Mal asked.
“Yeah,” said Jake. “They’re all made up from letters of the alphabet.”
They stared at the wheel, all four of them, wide-eyed and increasingly baffled. Winston tried pairing the images up in some way. The shoe was right next to the hats, and both of those were kinds of clothing. That seemed vaguely promising . . . except why one shoe, and why three hats? Winston guessed that maybe the house and the stage could be paired up, too—they were both kinds of buildings. That didn’t feel right, however. This whole line of thought seemed less than promising. Even if it was right, what then? Winston couldn’t pair up any of the remaining pictures. A gate and a rhinoceros? Faces and a canoe? It was hopeless.
Mal said, “I guess the answer’s going to be a twelve-letter word.”
“What? Why?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. There are twelve objects . . . so maybe we have to take a letter from each one to spell out something?”
“How?” Winston asked.
“Beats me. I’m just throwing out stuff for you to use.”
Winston sighed. This was the frustrating part, waiting for an idea to come from some magical place within the brain. Right now all he could think to do was stare at the Sun Wheel, rotating around.
The girls showed up a few minutes later. Bethany arrived first. She was gazing up at the Ferris wheel, unaware she had come to a stop right next to Winston, who wondered whether or not he should say something. Before he could decide, Bethany turned and saw him. She glanced up to see Mal and Jake as well. Winston might have said something at that point—though heaven knew
what—
but Bethany abruptly turned her back and stalked away. Her friends Elvie and Giselle came up right then, saw Bethany marching away, and ran to catch up.
Last to arrive was their teacher, Miss Norris. She came running up, as frazzled as ever. She was out of breath. “Girls, please,” she called, between pants, “it’s very crowded here, and I don’t want to lose you—”
“We
said
where we were going,” Bethany called back, disappearing from view around the side of the ride. Miss Norris was definitely not in charge of her team—certainly not in the same whip-cracking way that Mr. Garvey was.
Mr. Garvey caught Winston staring and gave him a light shake, as if to literally rattle Bethany and the girls out of his head. Winston, abashed, turned back to the Ferris wheel.
How could they get an answer word out of this bunch of pictures?
“Does this park have a stage?” Mal asked.
“I think it does,” Winston said. “Why?”
“Well, there’s a picture of a stage. Maybe it’s a clue that we should go there.”
“There’s a picture of a rhinoceros, too,” said Jake. “You think this park has one of those?”
A few minutes later, Mr. Garvey said, “A lot of teams here now. At least we’re back in the thick of it.” He kept looking over at Rod Denham’s team to see how they were faring. Lincoln Junior High looked truly stuck, which would have been something to celebrate, except that Winston and his team weren’t doing too well, either. There were several other teams gazing up at the Ferris wheel, mouths slightly agape, unable to make sense of what they were seeing. They all looked like victims of the same wizard’s hypnotism spell.
“Maybe there’s more to the puzzle somewhere,” Mal said.
“Where?” asked their teacher.
“The other side of the wheel, maybe? There could be pictures on both sides.”
Mr. Garvey looked at Mal with some surprise. “You might be right. Go and see.”
“Can I go, too?” Jake asked quickly.
“And me?” Winston said. The three of them looked up at their teacher with pleading eyes. They may as well have said, “We really need to get away from you for a few minutes.”
Mr. Garvey got the message and agreed. The boys tried not to appear too giddy as they left Mr. Garvey behind, but they all felt some relief as they walked away.
“I’m glad I’m only average at math,” Jake said. “I’ll never have him as a teacher.”
“He just wants to beat that rival team,” Mal said. “You should hear some of the things
you
say right before your baseball team plays Maplewood.”
“That’s different,” Jake said.
“If you say so,” Mal replied, shrugging.
Speaking of the rival team, the three of them walked past Rod Denham and the trio from Lincoln Junior High. They stopped talking as Winston and his friends drew close, and watched them pass with expressions of cool hostility, as if Winston was trying to eavesdrop or something.
“Everybody’s so friendly around here,” Mal said so the Lincoln kids could hear. “I am definitely inviting those guys to my birthday party.”
The other side of the Ferris wheel looked no different—each picture had been painted on both sides of its car. So that was a bust; they had learned nothing new. They stopped nonetheless and looked up at the Ferris wheel from this new vantage point.
“Any idea what this is?” Mal asked.
Winston shook his head. “Not a one.”
“Three teams solved it already,” Jake said. “How hard could it be?”
Winston didn’t reply. Every puzzle was hard when you didn’t know the answer. Every puzzle was easy when you knew what to do. “Come on, let’s circle back,” he finally said.
They walked slowly, not saying anything. Winston stared at the pavement, the twelve pictures from the Sun Wheel spinning around in his mind. He felt like he was stumbling his way through a dark room, looking for a light switch that might not even be there. He thought of Brendan Root, who had solved this thing easily enough. “This puzzle was fun, wasn’t it?” he’d said in the parking lot. What had Brendan seen in these twelve pictures that Winston was missing?
He was startled when Jake stopped his progress with a hand to his chest. “Look,” he said. Winston looked up.
Twenty yards ahead was the girl’s team: Bethany and her teammates, all in that same state of hypnosis, staring up at the Ferris wheel.
The three boys looked at each other, having a silent conversation about whether to continue forward or turn around like scared kittens.
“C’mon,” Jake said, deciding for the lot of them.
They were only a few steps closer when Bethany glanced over and saw them. She nudged Giselle, who in turn nudged Elvie. Winston looked at his friends as if to ask, “Should we keep going?” Bethany had an expression on her face like she couldn’t
wait
for the confrontation they were all about to have. But Jake never paused.
“The cheaters are here,” announced Bethany. “Hide your belongings.”
Winston flushed. He didn’t know what to say. He knew the girls would feel tricked, but it felt awful to be accused of outright cheating.
Jake didn’t like it, either. “We didn’t cheat,” he said.
“You left us standing in that hallway,” said Giselle. “We were working together, remember? We were all looking for the puzzle together.” Her pretty face was dark with disappointment.
“Our teacher did that,” Jake replied in a calm voice. Winston was more than happy to let him speak for all of them. “He decided not to tell you when we found the puzzle. He’s very . . . competitive. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have left you waiting there.”
The girls looked at him, weighing the sincerity of this apology. The smallest girl on their team, Elvie, then said, “And what about the bathroom?” She crossed her arms while asking this, like a lawyer who knows she’s about to make a defendant confess.
Winston didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. Neither did Mal or Jake. The boys looked at one another, each hoping somebody else knew what that question meant. Mal finally said, “I admit it. Sometimes I have to go to the bathroom.”
Elvie grimaced. “The bathroom back at the farm,” she said. “That was you, wasn’t it?” She looked at them. “That was a mean trick.”
Winston was starting to experience the detached and dizzy feeling that comes when you have no idea what is going on. “Whatever you’re talking about,” he said, “we had nothing to do with it.”
“We’re not cheaters,” Jake said, a bit more adamantly. “Somebody else is cheating. They gave us a flat tire, and they moved the signs at the planetarium so that we couldn’t find the puzzle. Whatever you’re talking about, the cheater probably did that, too.”
“I believe them,” Bethany said, sounding surprised with herself.
“You do?” Giselle was shocked.
“Yeah. He’s right. Someone moved those signs in the planetarium, but it wasn’t these guys. They got stuck by that, same as us. They should have played fair and told us when they found the puzzle”—Bethany glanced at the boys one by one, as if daring them to argue this point—“but they didn’t move the signs in the first place. Somebody’s cheating, but it’s not them.”
“Who is it, then?” Elvie asked. Nobody could answer.
Winston asked them about this incident in a bathroom, and the girls finally told the story: Someone on the New Easton team, a girl named Krissy Huang, had gone into the ladies’ restroom at Sutherland Farms. When she tried coming back out again, the door wouldn’t open. The doorknob turned, but that was all—the door itself wouldn’t budge an inch. She pounded on the door until Bethany heard the commotion and went to investigate. The bathroom door had been wedged shut with a small triangular block jammed tightly into the door frame. Bethany couldn’t pry it out. After calming Krissy down, Bethany ran to the young man behind the cash register for help. Soon someone came with a crowbar, and Krissy, shaken and upset, was freed.
“Who is this guy?” Jake asked angrily. “And how does he get away with so many nasty tricks?”
Nobody knew the answer to that. But as they talked about it, Winston realized something new: The cheater trapped this girl in the bathroom long after the leading teams had left for Adventureland. The cheater
couldn’t
be on one of the winning teams. But why go through all this trouble, if not to steal victory from everybody else? It made no sense.
“Hey,” Mal said, looking around, “where’s your teacher?”
Giselle said, “Oh. Right over there.” She pointed to the park bench, not that far away, where Miss Norris was sitting.
Mal said, “She’s not standing over you, yelling at you to solve the puzzle faster?” He shook his head with wonder. “Would you like to trade teachers?”
The girls smiled. “No, thanks,” Elvie said.
As if referring to Mr. Garvey was enough to summon him, the math teacher appeared suddenly from the other side of the Ferris wheel’s enclosure. He saw his boys talking with the girls’ team and called from a distance, “Excuse me. If you guys are finished chatting, I’d like to solve this puzzle before nightfall. Can we step back over here, please?”
“Sorry,” Winston said, after a moment of awkwardness. “Uh, we have to go,” he said to Bethany.
“I get that,” she said. “See you later.”
The boys and girls nodded good-bye to each other, and Winston and his friends caught back up with their teacher.
Mal said with a smile, “I think Winston is trying to win a different prize.”
“How did I know you were going to say that?” Winston said. “Well, not
that,
but something close.”
“They’re all kinda cute, aren’t they?” Jake said, looking back at them. He smirked at his friends. “Three boys, three girls. . . . You know what that means?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Garvey. “We’re going to lose. Can we focus, please?”
The puzzle was still here, revolving slowly in the afternoon sky. Winston still didn’t have any idea where to begin.
“Well, you hoped for a harder puzzle,” Jake said to Mr. Garvey as they all continued staring.
“I suppose I did. But I was hoping it would be harder for everybody else, not for us.”
“Maybe we need to go on the ride,” Mal said.
“What good is that going to do?” Mr. Garvey asked. “No. Just stay here.”
Mal said, “What if there’s something in the cars? Or maybe something on the ground that you can only see from the top of the Ferris wheel? We’re not getting anywhere just standing here.”
The math teacher grimaced and massaged his forehead. “All right. Maybe you’re right. I don’t know. But I don’t want all of you going. You’re on your own, Mal, all right? I want Winston and Jake to stay here and work with me on these words.”
Mal nodded and sauntered off to ride the Sun Wheel by himself. Winston thought Mal had a pretty good idea: When you’re stuck on a puzzle, it’s good to try random stuff to see if it sparks any new inspiration. But Winston also had to admit he was doubtful that a ride in the Ferris wheel would lead anywhere.
Mal shouldered his way into the crush of people waiting to go on the ride. It was a small mob—for some reason they refused to form an orderly line.