Jake took off after him.
Mr. Garvey yelled, “No! Jake! Get back here!” But Jake wasn’t listening. He ran at full speed—he might as well have been shot out of a cannon. Jake was one of the school’s better athletes, a fact Winston sometimes forgot simply because Jake never bragged about it. Well, he was certainly reminding them now. He dodged through the crowd like an afternoon breeze, slipping sideways through tight spots, weaving around baby strollers, until Winston couldn’t see him anymore.
Mr. Garvey grabbed Winston by the shoulders and shouted into his face. “Stay here! Do not move!” He took off after Jake, although at a much slower rate. Mr. Garvey didn’t look like a guy used to running.
The people on the ride were beginning to realize they had a problem. Some of them were shouting “Get me down!” and “Hey! Why aren’t we moving?” The guy operating the ride didn’t seem to know what to do, other than pace back and forth uselessly.
“Is there another key?” Winston shouted to him.
“I don’t know where the key is!” the guy shouted back, irritated.
Winston tried again. “Where’s
another
key?” But the guy didn’t answer, just kept looking at the ground as if the key might burrow out of its hiding place like a woodchuck.
Winston glanced up at Mal, who was clutching the bars of his skybound jail cell like a prisoner in a science-fiction movie. Beside him, Elvie was doing the same thing. At this rate, they were going to be stuck up there for a long time . . . unless somebody jumped in to solve this nasty little problem.
Knowing Mr. Garvey might actually kill him, Winston ran.
Someone
had to have another key to the ride, and Lip Ring didn’t look like he was going to figure that out anytime soon.
He ran past Bethany and Giselle. “Where are you going?” Bethany yelled to him.
Not stopping, Winston yelled back, “The business office! They’ll have another key!”
To Winston’s surprise, Bethany burst into a run and quickly joined him. Winston heard her teacher yelling, but Bethany ignored her. She seemed to think that commands from adults—even shouted, urgent commands—were strictly optional. She was going to get into serious trouble later. Then Winston remembered that he was disobeying a direct order as well. There was going to be more than enough trouble to go around.
He headed for the heart of Adventureland. Bethany was right behind him.
The paths in the park ambled this way and that; you could hardly walk in a straight line for more than twenty feet. Winston and Bethany rounded a corner and almost crashed into a crowd of teenagers. They skirted around them gingerly, avoiding their glares and their shouts of “Hey, kid!”
“Cut through the arcade!” Bethany yelled to him and veered diagonally over to a long, low-roofed building. Winston, panting, his heart kathudding in his chest, strained to catch up. They bounded up the stoop and into the building, running past the Skee-Ball bowlers and little kids playing Whac-a-Mole.
They burst out the other side of the arcade and found themselves at the entrance to the office. The business office was a small, white house that looked like it had been blown here from a nearby neighborhood. When he was a little kid, Winston thought that some lucky family lived in that house, right in the middle of the amusement park. They ran up the three steps of the porch and through the door.
Behind a counter, an overweight woman sat pecking at a typewriter, and a casually dressed man was chatting on the telephone, leaning way back in his swivel chair.
This was not the time for politeness. “I need the key to the Ferris wheel!” Winston shouted, leaning all his weight on the counter so as not to collapse onto the floor. Beside him, Bethany was also trying to get her breath back.
The woman turned to look at him, startled. She wore a little name tag on her wildly colored blouse that identified her as Rhonda Weeks. The man on the phone ignored them—he turned away and put a finger in the ear that wasn’t glued to the phone.
Winston only needed one person’s attention. “The Ferris wheel is stuck,” he told Rhonda Weeks. “The guy lost the key, and there are people stuck on the ride. You have an extra key, right? We need it!”
Rhonda squinted at him. “What do you mean, he lost the key?”
Waving her hands for emphasis, Bethany said, “Someone stole the key, and people are stuck on the ride.”
“Ride operators are supposed to keep the key on them at all times,” Rhonda said crossly.
Winston thought she was focusing on the wrong part of the problem. “Well, he lost it,” he said. “Do you have an extra?”
She considered them for several long moments, and then said, “Yeah, hang on. . . .” She opened up a desk drawer and began rooting through it. Winston put a closed fist to his mouth to prevent himself from yelling at her to hurry up. He had hoped he could retrieve the key and get back to the Ferris wheel before Mr. Garvey even knew he had left. Winston felt the seconds race by while she sorted through a decade’s worth of broken pencils and loose change.
“All right, here we go,” she said at last. Then, to Winston’s horror, she hoisted herself up from her sagging office chair. “Let’s go see,” she said.
Winston’s plan was to run back to the Sun Wheel as quickly as they had run here. He did not get the impression that Rhonda Weeks was planning to run with them. For one thing, she was oblivious to the urgency of the situation. Also, it was clear that Rhonda Weeks had not done any running in a long, long time.
“Uh, okay,” he said. He and Bethany shared a look of dismay.
Rhonda plodded to the office door, the key dangling casually in her hand. A plan materialized in Winston’s brain. He knew it was a bad idea—maybe even a
very
bad idea. But he didn’t see that he had a choice . . . not if he wanted to get back to the Ferris wheel during this century. There was still a chance he could get back without getting in trouble with Mr. Garvey.
Rhonda took her first slow step down the office’s small porch. Winston touched Bethany on the shoulder and whispered to her, “Get ready to run.” He gestured purposefully at the key. She looked at him, at first not understanding, and then getting it all at once.
Not allowing himself to think, Winston jumped off the porch. He snatched the key out of Rhonda Weeks’s fist, and ran.
“Hey!” she yelled, but Winston and Bethany were already twenty feet away. “Get back here!” she screamed. Other people glanced their way, but nobody made a move to stop them. His fevered brain tried to see into the future. Maybe this would all work out. He’d get back to the Ferris wheel, and if by some miracle Mr. Garvey was still chasing Jake and the man in the green jacket, then Winston would give the key to Mr. Lip Ring. They’d get Mal off the ride and out of the park before Rhonda Weeks caught up.
If everything went just right, there was a microscopically thin chance he might get away with this.
That thin chance vanished in the very next moment. Winston glanced behind him as he rounded the first corner and saw something he hadn’t considered when he came up with this wacky idea: The guy who’d been on the telephone was no longer on the telephone. He had burst out of the office and was running straight at them. He looked very fast.
“Oh, no!” he said. Bethany looked over her shoulder and saw the problem. How could they possibly keep ahead of this guy?
“Come on,” Bethany said, and ducked into the arcade again. Winston followed, trying not to panic. They had a head start, but it wouldn’t last long. They had maybe ten seconds to figure something out.
Winston saw a photo booth with a curtain. A hiding spot! He started to jump in, but Bethany grabbed his arm, “No! Come with me!”
She ran down an aisle of arcade games, practically dragging Winston. She stopped abruptly and shoved Winston into the gap between two machines. There was barely enough room for him . . . but then, astonishingly, Bethany squeezed herself into the same gap, forcing Winston even further backward. He was as squashed as Santa coming down a chimney.
“Keep going,” she hissed.
“There’s nowhere to go,” he whispered back.
“Yes, there is. Look.”
Winston looked and saw that Bethany was right. The gap they had squeezed into was narrow but long, and where Winston thought it ended, it instead bent into a little L-shaped corner. Winston rounded this corner, and Bethany followed. They ended up in an even smaller space, packed as tightly as peanut butter inside a jar. But they were undoubtedly out of sight.
“That security guard would have looked in the photo machine first thing,” said Bethany.
They were standing nose to nose or, more accurately, nose to chin: Bethany was about three inches taller than he was. Winston was all too aware how this would look to anybody who discovered them. He fervently hoped they were not discovered.
“How did you know about this place?” he whispered.
“My brother and I played hide-and-seek in here last year,” she said. “He never found me.”
“How long should we stay here?” Winston said. Bethany shrugged and shook her head.
Winston tried to listen beyond this fortress of video games, but he couldn’t hear anything. The guy could be right outside their little cramped space. There was no way to know. But they couldn’t stay here forever. Indeed, they couldn’t stay here very long at all.
“We’ll count to ten, and then we’ll run,” he whispered, and Bethany nodded agreement. Even a slight nod caused their heads to bonk together.
Winston forced himself to count slowly. He could feel his blood pumping in his veins; they needed to get back to the Ferris wheel. He was also a cauldron of emotions—delight, discomfort, amazement—at being so physically close to this girl who, he had to admit, he liked very much.
He reached ten, and they eased out of their hiding place. Bethany looked both ways down the aisle of arcade games.
Shaky with relief, she said, “It’s okay. Let’s go.” They started running again. Winston still expected that guy to land on them at any second. But he was gone.
They ran down the pathway toward the final corner, euphoric at making it back to the Ferris wheel without getting caught. He felt like a spy who had successfully completed a dangerous mission.
That giddy feeling didn’t last long. As they rounded the corner, Winston realized just how big a fool he was. When the security guy lost track of them, he didn’t give up and go back to his office or vanish like a movie extra. He knew where Winston was going . . . and he went there first. The security guy was right there, waiting for them.
Worse yet, he seemed to have rounded up everybody involved with the puzzle contest. He was talking with Mr. Garvey, but all the other teams were gathered around, listening in. There was Rod Denham with his team, and there were Bethany’s teammates. Even the Ferris wheel operator was there, Mr. Lip Ring himself. Winston groaned. The next few minutes were going to be very, very bad.
Mr. Garvey looked stonefaced, so angry he didn’t know how to express it. The Ferris wheel was still not moving, which, in a way, was fine with Winston. He wouldn’t have wanted to go through all this for nothing.
Everybody looked up as Winston and Bethany came into view. The man from the amusement park pointed at them as they approached. He looked like a professional wrestler, right down the furious expression on his face. “Give me that key,” he said.
Winston, head down, handed the security guy the key, which he instantly turned over to Lip Ring.
“You’re supposed to keep this on you at all times,” the security guy said to the kid. “If this ever happens again, you can find another summer job.” Lip Ring nodded his head, too afraid to speak. “Now get those people off the ride,” the security guy said. Lip Ring wordlessly went to follow orders.
The security guy turned back to Winston. “And you,” he said, “get out of my park.”
CHAPTER NINE
WINSTON WAS FROZEN.
He thought, Thank goodness we solved this puzzle. He couldn’t imagine Mr. Garvey’s reaction if they’d been kicked out without the answer they needed.
“You’re still standing here. I said get out,” the security guy said.
Mr. Garvey clutched Winston by the shoulder a little too tightly. To the security guy, he said, “One of my boys is on that ride. We’ll wait to retrieve him, then we’ll be on our way.”
Miss Norris was leading Bethany away by the elbow. The security guard pointed at Bethany and said, “Her too. The lot of you. You’re all out of the park.”
“But we haven’t solved the puzzle yet,” Miss Norris said.
The security guy went goggle-eyed. “You’re not solving the puzzle! You’re leaving the park!”
Winston felt his stomach go sour. This was going as badly as it possibly could. Had he really thought he could run away, steal a key from a park employee, and run back here with no consequences whatsoever? Or that perhaps he would get yelled at briefly and that would be it? Well, now he knew better. He was in a ton of trouble, and what’s more, it was his fault Bethany’s team was getting kicked out of the park. By stealing the key, he’d ruined the contest for them—they wouldn’t be able to solve this puzzle, and would never be able to win.
Should he just blurt out the answer? That would get Bethany’s team back on track even if they got kicked out of the park. Mr. Garvey would be furious, of course—but then again, he already was. What’s the worst that could happen to him? He wasn’t sure if he wanted to find out. The answer to the puzzle—
Icarus Icarus Icarus—
bobbed in his throat, daring to be said.
Mal and Elvie joined them. The cars of the Ferris wheel are essentially metal boxes, and both of them looked like they had been in an oven set for a long, slow roast. Mal’s T-shirt was soaked through with sweat.
“Whoa,” said Mal when he reached them. “What happened to you?”
Winston turned to see what Mal was talking about and gasped. Wrapped in his own miseries, he never noticed that Jake had been beaten up. He had a waffle of a bruise on one cheek, his upper lip was bleeding and swollen, and he had a large black-and-blue mark under one eye. He was holding a white plastic bag, and Winston wondered where that had come from. Had it belonged to the cheater?