The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (6 page)

“Uh,” Winston said again. He wanted to say, “No one
forgets
finding buried treasure,” but was too startled to find the words. Who was this kid?

Whoever he was, he kept talking. “I wish I could find buried treasure. But this will be just as good, don’t you think? What do you suppose the puzzles will be like? Maybe they’ll be really hard! I hope not. I don’t like getting stuck on a puzzle. But I want them to be a little hard, because I don’t want them to be too easy. You know? I hope they’re just right.”

Mal finally cut in, waving his hands to get the boy’s attention. “Hey!” he said.

The boy, startled, turned away from Winston, as if he hadn’t been aware of anyone else sitting there. The boy’s big eyes blinked.

Mal, not unkindly, said, “Who are you?”

“Oh. Me? I’m Brendan. Brendan Root. I go to West Meadow. That’s my team over there.” He pointed to two kids, who were playing rock-paper-scissors, and their teacher, who was reading the sports section of the newspaper. “I’m not really friends with them, but they asked me because they know I like puzzles. Not as much as
you,
” Brendan said suddenly, as if afraid he had offended Winston. “But I like them. What do you think the puzzles will be like today? Hard, right?”

“Maybe,” said Winston. He was glad to have gotten a word into this conversation. Maybe in time he could work his way up to longer sentences.

“I hope they’re not too hard,” Brendan said again. “Want to see a puzzle I made up?”

“Sure,” said Winston.

“I made this up myself. Are you ready?”

“Yes!” Winston had been in Brendan Root’s company for perhaps sixty seconds and was already fully exasperated.

“Okay, here it is.” He took a crumpled-up piece of paper out of his pocket. “I wrote this down to show people. What do these words have in common?”

 

After they had solved it, Brendan said, “Did you like it? Isn’t that good?”

“Pretty good,” Winston agreed.

“I bet you make up twenty of those a day,” said Brendan.

“More like seventeen,” Winston said, trying for a joke.

And the joke was apparently achieved, because Brendan threw his head back and laughed. “Seventeen!” he said. He laughed again for several moments and then said, “I’m glad you’re here. I’m looking forward to beating you at this.”

Winston blinked. He could almost hear Mal and Jake, on either side of him, also blinking. But Brendan Root just continued smiling.

“You think you’re going to beat Winston?” said Mal.

Brendan shrugged. “Sure. I mean, I’m going to try. Right? You don’t mind, do you, Winston?”

Winston shook his head. “No. No. Try your best.”

“Nobody here likes puzzles more than you and me,” said Brendan. “So one of our teams is going to win. I think it might be mine.” He was beaming with pride, as if he had won already. He caught himself and tried on a serious expression. “But if you win, that’s okay, too.”

“Thanks,” Winston said dryly. He was wondering how they were supposed to get rid of this kid when Brendan was called away by his teacher. He waved to them all, smiling gleefully, and walked back to his group. The three boys watched him go with a mixture of amusement and awe.

“Am I like that?” Winston said in a low voice.

“No,” said Jake.

“Not even close,” said Mal.

“You let other people talk sometimes,” said Jake.

“Sometimes,” Mal agreed. “It’s been known to happen.” They watched Brendan’s teacher gather his students into a team meeting.

Jake said, “He’s going to be tough, don’t you think?”

Winston nodded. Brendan was a little weird. But weird did not mean dumb. Often the opposite, in fact.

There were enough people in the conference room now that the noise level had risen to a steady, murmuring hum. Winston kept glancing over to the door on the stage, which would surely open at any moment. He had an alarming thought: What if the contest had already started—if the puzzle was right here in front of them and Dmitri Simon was waiting for somebody clever enough to notice it? Winston looked around for anything that might qualify as a clue and saw nothing. There were a number of whiteboards on the wall, but these were erased and gleaming. No. Nothing tricky was going on . . . yet. He was just going to have to sit back and wait for the event to begin. He drummed his fingers on the table and tried to be patient. He wished he had brought a puzzle book with him.

“Hey, look at that,” Jake said, with some concern.

Winston glanced over to where he was pointing and was amazed to see Mr. Garvey, redfaced, waving a finger at that other teacher, Rod Denham. Mr. Garvey seemed to be lecturing him. Mr. Denham wore a tight, humorless smile, and after a moment pointed at Winston and his friends, as if suggesting that Mr. Garvey go back where he came from. They traded a few more words, glaring at each other, then Mr. Garvey turned around and stormed away.

As he returned to his team, Mr. Garvey’s teeth were gritted and a vein pulsed on the side of his head—he looked ready to kill a small animal. He squeezed the back of one of the chairs, as if he might pull it up and throw it against the wall, and never mind the fact that the chairs were bolted to the floor. The three boys gazed up at him, amazed and a little afraid.

“What was that about?” Mal asked.

“I shouldn’t have gone over there,” Mr. Garvey said.

“Did he say something to you?” Jake said. “What did he say?”

Mr. Garvey waved a hand like he wanted to forget the whole thing. He attempted a little chuckle. It wasn’t very believable. The boys kept looking at him, and finally Mr. Garvey had to say, “Let it go, boys. Just let it go.” He sat down, folded his hands, and tried to regain his calm.

 

Letting it go wasn’t easy, but Mr. Garvey wasn’t talking, so it wasn’t like they had a choice. The traffic through the entrance petered out, but there was still no sign of Dmitri Simon. Winston counted ten teams. Was that all? He would have thought there’d be double or triple that number. He felt a vague disappointment—he liked the idea of hundreds of puzzle lovers all congregating together. Of course, the fewer teams competing, the better their chances.

He cast his eyes over the small crowd, sizing up the competition. It was impossible to predict who the tough opponents would be . . . but that didn’t stop Winston from trying. Rod Denham’s team from Lincoln Junior High was clearly going to be trouble, although exactly what
sort
of trouble Winston could not guess.

What about the other teams?

Brendan Root might be a serious opponent, but were his two teammates just as good? Before, the two of them had been playing rock-paper-scissors. Now they were thumb wrestling. Maybe they didn’t plan on taking this seriously?

Over on the right was a team that was
definitely
taking it seriously: They were dressed in identical blue T-shirts that said BROOKVILLE BRAINS, with matching baseball caps. Did they use those shirts for other events? If they had made up these outfits in the few days since the contest was announced, that indicated a level of organization that was almost scary to consider.

Looking around, Winston counted twice as many guys as girls. Only one team was all female. The girl in the middle had her arms crossed as if this delay was a personal insult. The girl to her left was looking around with a faraway smile on her face. The third girl looked too little to be here. They didn’t have matching uniforms, but their identical stillness among so much bustle and noise made them seem very serious indeed. Their teacher, a woman with a sculpted frizz of red hair, nervously jangled several bracelets on her left wrist.

Winston decided the girls would be tough. He wondered where they were from.

He didn’t have time to consider the rest of the teams, because at that moment the onstage door opened and Dmitri Simon bounded into the room, followed by two other men and one woman. The crowd exploded into delighted applause. Simon was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and by no means looked like a multimillionaire. He looked like he might run a comic book store, perhaps playing Dungeons and Dragons or Magic: The Gathering with the kids when business was slow. Simon was overweight—indeed, he was downright fat—and his black beard was scragglier than in the picture on the potato chip bags. He was also fantastically happy.

“Hello!” he said. He all but skipped to the podium, his arms wide as if he planned on giving everybody in the room a hug.

“Whoa,” said Jake.

Mal laughed and said, “That’s exactly what I imagined a guy who makes potato chips for a living would look like!” Mr. Garvey glared at him and told him to shush.

Simon leaned on the podium with his considerable body weight and beamed out at his audience as the applause tapered off. “Do you kids like puzzles?” Simon shouted, which brought the cheering back to a full boil.

Simon laughed. “Me, too. All right, let me see. . . . Here’s one I like. . . . What’s the longest word you can think of that spells another word backward? Anybody have any guesses?”

 

They spent some time on that, and then Simon said, “Ahh, you kids are in for a treat today. A grand adventure! Congratulations to all of you for cracking the code and making it here today, and thank you to all the great teachers who are accompanying you.” Simon clapped his hands, so everybody else did, too.

The large man looked around at all of them, smiling, in no apparent rush to get the event started. “Just ten teams,” he said. “You know, I sent out forty of those secret messages to schools all around the area. I thought maybe half those schools would crack the code and send a team. Shows what I know! I was off by a bunch.” He laughed, as if his miscalculation was the best joke of the day. “All right,” he said when his laughter had subsided. “Let’s take care of the paperwork part of the festivities, shall we? And then we can get the show on the road.”

Simon pulled a folded piece of paper from his back pocket and smoothed it out on the podium.

“Let’s see if everybody made it,” he said. “Who’s from Brookville Junior High?”

Those were the Brookville Brains. Upon hearing their name, their teacher jumped from his chair and whooped as if they had already won a prize. He tried urging his three students into showing some enthusiasm but got nowhere—all three of them were embarrassed rocks.

Simon laughed and said, “All right, there’s some spirit! Cross Street School? Where are you?”

These were three boys Winston had noticed earlier and dismissed as goofballs—they had spent their waiting time not chatting or strategizing but wrestling and roughhousing until their teacher had to bark at them to sit down and keep quiet. Even now, the three boys all cupped their hands to their mouths and yelled “Here!” at the top of their lungs, then collapsed into snickering. Their teacher got redfaced again and smacked the nearest one on the back of the head. Who had sent
this
group after a fifty-thousand-dollar prize?

Simon read from his list again. “Demilla Academy?”

Ah, that was probably a private school. That explained the outfits—the two girls were each wearing a starched white blouse and a stiff blue skirt, and the boy a fancy white shirt and tie. They looked like they were on their way to cater a wedding. Their teacher, who stood up and acknowledged their presence with a grave nod, was wearing a three-piece suit.

“Where’s the funeral?” Mal whispered.

“Shhh,” Jake said, but he couldn’t help laughing.

Simon consulted his list again. “Greater Oaks Junior High?”

That was the all-girl team. “We’re here,” said their frizzy-haired teacher. She started to stand, but thought better of it. Then she realized that other teachers had stood, so maybe she should, too. She stood back up. “We’re here,” she said again, and sat back down. She was a bundle of nervous energy. Her three students glanced at each other, and Winston could see them rolling their eyes.

Despite the fact that every other team had simply said “here” when called upon, the woman accompanying the next team insisted on introducing herself and all three team members. “I’m Mary Noone, the vice principal of Kennedy Junior High, and these are the school’s three very smart representatives, John Curran, Nicole Drossakis, and Martin Oberlander.”

The boy identified as John Curran said loudly, “And we’re going to kick your butts!” He sat back, smiling.

There was an explosion of derisive laughter in response to this as John’s teacher—or vice principal—leaned over to him, her face darkened with anger. Her reprimands did nothing to wipe the broad, confident smile from his face.

Dmitri Simon tapped the microphone in order to get everyone focused again. When the cacophony had died down, he said, “So there’s some competition for you all, I guess. Let’s see . . . where’s Lincoln Junior High?”

That was Rod Denham’s team. He stood up, adjusted his sportcoat, and announced heartily that the “six-time champions of the local math competition league” were all present. Winston glanced at Mr. Garvey, who was wearing a sour expression.

The Marin School was next. That was another private school, although they were not dressed in the same formal wear as the Demilla students. “Good luck, everyone,” said their teacher, a young man who might have been confused for a high school student. “We’re looking forward to having fun puzzling with you all.”

The next team was from New Easton, which was impressively far away. Their teacher introduced his students as “Mr. Hoffman, Miss Huang, and Mr. Hurley. And I’m Mr. Henry Horn. So I guess we’re Team H.” There was some good-natured laughter.

After that was Winston’s own school, Walter Fredericks Junior High. Mr. Garvey stood and said, “We’re here and ready to win,” and sat back down. Winston tried to look as determined as his teacher, but he doubted he was very intimidating.