The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (4 page)

“They’re both good thinkers,” said Winston. “We’re a good team. You’ll see.”

Mr. Garvey thought about it, shook his head briefly, and threw his arms out wide in a gesture of surrender. “I guess I will. You win, Mr. Breen.”

Winston was hugely relieved. “Thank you,” he said. He almost extended an arm to shake Mr. Garvey’s hand in gratitude but stopped himself from doing that. “It’ll be fine, I promise.”

Mr. Garvey nodded, not wanting to discuss it any further. Winston was happy, but Mr. Garvey clearly was not. The teacher dug through the leather bag he was carrying and brought out a piece of paper and a pen. “Give me your address,” he said. “I’ll pick all three of you up at your house at eight thirty on Friday morning.”

Winston wrote his address and handed it to the math teacher. Mr. Garvey glanced at it, then said, “Okay. I’ll see you in a couple of days. Be ready.” He stalked off down the hall, all in a rush.

No, he definitely didn’t look happy.

“YAAAGH!” cried the knight as the blade of a sword separated his head from his body. The headless knight fell to his knees and turned to dust. Then the dust itself vanished. When things died in this video game, they died
permanently.

“You did it again!” said Jake, frustrated. “How did you do that?”

“When you just stand there gaping, you make it real easy,” said Mal.

“I don’t just stand there!”

“You do, all the time! I can tell when you’re trying to push the buttons for a special move. You take your eyes off the game and look at the controller, and your knight stands there like he’s birdwatching or something.”

Jake stood up, aggravated. “This joystick has more buttons than an airplane cockpit,” he said. “Who can keep track of them all?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Mal. He turned to Winston, who was on the couch waiting for his turn. “Win! You’re up. Your turn to take on the master.” He blew on his knuckles like his hands were registered weapons.

They’d been addicted to
10,000 Swords
for a few weeks now, and even though it was Winston who owned the game, Mal had become the undisputed champion. Winston was passable, but Jake, considering his dexterity on the baseball field, was surprisingly hopeless. He once impaled himself on his own sword before his opponent could get a swing at him. They couldn’t even figure out how Jake had done it. They’d spent half an hour trying to do it again, with no success.

Jake moved to the sofa, and Winston picked up the controller. Mal pushed the start button, and two warriors prepared to duel in a bleak castle dungeon.

As the swords clanged together, Jake said, “So is there anything we have to do to get ready for this contest?”

Winston shook his head, focused on the game. “I can’t think of anything. I wish there was. I hate waiting.”

Mal’s knight jumped around, baiting Winston into making a move. Mal said, “And we’re stuck with Mr. Garvey as our chaperone? Can’t we get anybody else? I mean it—anybody else on earth?”

“I wish,” said Winston. “But Mr. Unger chose him, so that means he’s the guy. There aren’t that many teachers willing to give up their first day of summer vacation.”

“I never thought of it as
their
summer vacation,” said Jake.

“Yeah, me neither,” said Mal. His fighter lunged forward.

The phone rang. “KATIE, GET THE PHONE,” Winston yelled up to his sister, while his fighter ran away from his opponent. The phone rang again. “KATIE!”

“Want me to get it?” said Jake.

“Yeah. Ugh!” Mal’s fighter smacked him a good one.

Jake picked up the receiver. “Hello?” He listened for a moment. “No, he’s in a swordfight right now. Who is this?” He listened for a moment and then said, “Who?”

Winston glanced over and saw confusion on Jake’s face. That was all the opening Mal needed, and a moment later, Winston’s knight was a pile of dust dissolving on the castle floor. “Oh, nuts,” said Winston. “That’s not fair. I got distracted.”

“That’s why you’re dead,” Mal pointed out.

Jake waved the phone and said, “He won’t say who he is.”

Winston stood up. “Huh? What do you mean?” He took the phone. “Hello?”

“Winston Breen?” It was a deep male voice.

“Yeah?” said Winston.

“Did you break the code?” This was said in what Winston guessed was supposed to be an ominous, mysterious tone. It didn’t quite get there. And now that the voice had said more than two words, Winston thought it might be a kid lowering his voice to sound older.

“Who is this?” he said.

His question was ignored. “Did you break the code?” whoever it was asked again, in the slow, deep voice of a summoned demon in a horror movie. Except this voice cracked a little on the final word.

Well, he must be talking about the principal’s code—the one that got them into the puzzle event. What else could he mean? Winston said, “Yes, I did.”

“Then . . . I’ll be seeing you,” said the voice, dropping to a dramatic whisper. There was a click as the mystery caller hung up.

What was
that
? Winston, baffled, slowly hung up and stared at the phone as if another bizarre call might come through at any second.

Mal and Jake were looking at him. “So who was it?” Mal asked.

“He didn’t say.”

His friends glanced at each other. “Well, what did he want?”

“He wanted to know if I cracked the code. And he wanted to tell me that he’d be seeing me.”

They considered that.

“Okay. That’s really creepy,” said Jake. “Do you know who it was?”

“I just told you. He didn’t say his name.”

“Yeah, but you’re Mr. Puzzle Solver, so maybe you figured it out anyway.”

Winston shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Mal flopped back to the floor and picked up the video game joystick. “Eh. Crank call,” he said. “If he’ll be seeing you, I guess we’ll know soon enough. Who wants to play? Jake, you’re up.”

Jake looked disgusted. “Forget it. I’m done.”

“Win?” said Mal.

“Yeah, sure. One more game.” But he couldn’t shake off the strange phone call. Who
was
that?

Frowning and distracted and knowing that Mal was about to wipe the floor with him, he nonetheless sat down and started a new swordfight. Jake threw himself back on the sofa.

Winston shook his head and tried to move the phone call to a holding cell in his brain, to think about later. “Hey, Jake,” said Winston as he took the controller. “If you don’t want to play this anymore, I know something else you can do.”

“What?” said Jake.

“There’s something fun that you can do that contains the letters of SWORD in that order, but has nothing to do with swords.”

Jake nodded, unsurprised. Puzzles popped out of Winston with no notice. “And I have to figure out what that is.”

“Well, I’ll tell you later if you can’t get it.”

 

THE LAST TIME
Winston participated in a large-scale puzzle event, he’d woken up at dawn and spent several hours wandering around his house, urging time to go faster. Time refused. Winston had pulled his hair out in frustration as he watched the minutes crawl, crawl, crawl.

When Winston opened his eyes on Friday morning, he knew immediately that the same thing was going to happen again. The light in his room was wrong—instead of bright summer sun, it was a pale mixture of daylight and darkness. Bracing himself for the worst, he rolled over and looked at his clock. Five forty-five. All year long he’d gotten up at seven o’clock, groaning and wishing for ten more minutes of sleep. Now, on the first day of summer vacation, he was awake and raring to go before full sunrise.

There was nothing to be done about it. He was awake like it was high noon. Winston got up and wandered around the house. There was nobody to talk to—his parents and sister were still asleep. He flipped through the television stations, but the only things on were news shows, infomercials, and cartoons for babies.

On one channel, though, he came across a commercial for Simon’s Potato Chips. He knew it was unlikely to contain any clues for today’s event, but he still had to stop and watch it. The commercial showed a bunch of young people, supposedly at a party, except that everybody was standing around, bored and glum. Suddenly a guy with a wide smile showed up holding a bag of (new!) Simon’s Potato Squares, and the party was transformed: The music began thumping, and guest after guest grabbed handfuls of chips, which were indeed perfectly square. Fueled by this magical new snack food, everyone began dancing and chatting and having fun. “Think square!” said the guy who had brought the chips, his teeth flashing white as he held up the bag for the camera.

Winston turned off the television, amused. Did people really believe this? That a bag of potato chips could turn a boring party into New Year’s Eve? Winston guessed that commercials like this must work at least sometimes, since it seemed like every other ad followed the same script.

The commercial gave him an idea, though. He went back to his room and went online to look up information about Dmitri Simon, the founder of Simon’s Snack Foods and the guy whose voice they had heard on the answering machine.

The company Web site had most of what he wanted to know. A page marked “History” showed a big picture of Dmitri Simon’s pudgy, smiling, bearded face. Simon had started his company after being fired from five jobs in a row. He made the first batches of his now-famous potato chips in a pizzeria’s kitchen. He started off by selling them to delis and other stores out of the back of his car. People loved them, and he soon had more requests for his chips than he could handle. He borrowed money from everyone he knew and opened a small factory. Now he was one of the richest men in the state.

He was also one of the
oddest
men in the state, as Winston learned while searching the Net for more information. Simon had more money than he knew what to do with, and he gave a lot of it away. Rather than merely writing a check, however, Simon enjoyed attaching the money to crazy stunts. He funded a local museum for a full year but insisted on an exhibit of “potato chip art,” whatever that was. He built a playground for a children’s hospital . . . but only after the doctors at various hospitals had competed in some kind of nutty Doctor Olympics, with track-and-field events. The winning team of physicians got the playground. And Dmitri Simon got tons of coverage in the newspapers and on television.

Would any of this help today? Winston didn’t know. But he doubted he and his friends would be handed a bunch of word searches and pencil puzzles. Dmitri Simon enjoyed stunts that were big and goofy. Winston would try to remember not to be surprised by anything: With this guy’s money and wacky ideas, anything was possible.

Winston looked at the clock again and sighed—6:05 A.M. He’d killed twenty minutes. He had another full hour before he even needed to get dressed.

He wandered the house a while more and then finally grabbed a puzzle magazine and stretched out on the sofa. It was going to be a long wait, but at least he had a puzzle to solve in the meanwhile.