by Ben Mezrich
“Just do your best to stick close to Cauldwell.” Charlie shrugged.
“Thanks, you’re a big help,” Jeremy shot back glumly. Maybe he was angry that Charlie didn’t seem more sympathetic, or that Charlie hadn’t offered to trade with someone himself. Charlie felt truly bad about how he was acting toward his friend, but what else could he do? Charlie tried to think of something else to say, but Jeremy had already moved away, finding a place in his line behind an eighth-grade girl with a long blond ponytail and Hello Kitty purse, and a seventh grader in cargo shorts and a Nagassack athletic T-shirt.
Nothing to be done about it, Charlie thought to himself. He had to be strong. If Jeremy was back to being angry with him, that was something he’d deal with when this was all over. He did his best to wipe his mind of Jeremy as he strolled into his own line, taking up position right behind Finn and Magic, who were helping Miranda dole out the admission tickets to her group of seven. Then they were headed to the nearest turnstile. Miranda stood to one side as they each moved through, one at a time.
When it was Charlie’s turn, she reached forward with a manicured hand and pushed the cool metal bar of the turnstile for him. Her face had become intense, her features narrowing into something truly feral. Leaning close, her breath was like a hiss against his ear.
“Pace yourself. Just picture yourself back in the art room. Concentrate on what we’re here to do. Everything else is a distraction.”
And then she was back to her amiable self, waving Charlie through as she gave Warden Walker, at the head of his own group a few yards away, a cheery smile over the bank of turnstiles.
A moment later, Charlie was moving through the tunnel in lockstep with a veritable mob of Nagassack kids and babbling, bubbling tourists, inching his way into the park by way of Solar Avenue, or as Loopy called it on the cartoon, a little taste of Earth at the gateway to the stars.
• • •
Ten feet of shuffling his way through a crowded tunnel beneath the docking station, and then a sudden, instantaneous hundred-year dive forward in time; Solar Avenue was jarring to Charlie’s senses. A blast into the future, everything was brightly lit and made out of shiny chrome, steel, and bulbous glass. The sidewalks moved, like at the airport, though most people were walking anyway, in a rush to see as much of the shiny avenue as quickly as possible
The first thing Charlie noticed was the smell. The very air was sweet: a potent blend of cotton candy, chocolate cake, ice cream, even popcorn. Finn might have cynically pointed out that the scented atmosphere wasn’t an accident; every morning before the visitors arrived, the sugar-tinged air was pumped out of vents above a futuristic-looking candy store. But Charlie didn’t care how the air was flavored; for this one brief moment, he wanted to experience the place the way it was designed.
Stepping deeper into the circular courtyard that served as the base of Solar Avenue, he tried to take everything in at once. The electronic music that seemed to throb right out of the moving sidewalk below his feet; the wonderfully futuristic-looking storefronts on either side, beginning with the Space Explorer’s Outpost, a general store peddling everything from Loopy the Space Mouse umbrellas to state-of-the-art recording equipment; the Lunar Theater, with its half-moon-shaped windows and neon marquee, showing the first Loopy cartoon that started it all, “Loopy Goes to Mars”; the Space Cake Bakery; the extraterrestrial architecture of the Alien Trading Post, from the twisting arch of its gilded laser tower to the saucer-shaped mock spacecraft visible in the open docking port.
It was all perfect, designed to evoke wonder in the adults and to create an attitude of awe in the children. To Charlie, strolling behind Finn and Magic, Miranda a few steps ahead, everything seemed fresh and magical. It was everything he could have imagined: astronaut ice cream, hot dogs shaped like rocket ships, park employees dressed in shiny futuristic garb.
From the giant, welcoming, green-skinned Martian that stood guard in front of a meteorite store to his left, to the supercooled ice sculpture of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing outside the rocket-ship hot dog restaurant to his right, all of it represented a look into the future. And Charlie was so swept up in the experience, he didn’t realize that Finn, Magic, and the rest had stopped walking until he stumbled right into Greg, nearly knocking them both over. Greg shot him a glare, while Magic laughed and wagged a finger.
“You still haven’t mastered the First Rule of the Carnival Killers, have you Charlie? Keep an eye on your surroundings.”
Charlie started to mumble an apology to Greg, when he realized why they had all stopped so abruptly. Ten feet to their right, in an alley next to a brightly lit moon-boot store was the entrance to a striped circus tent.
From Charlie’s vantage point it was difficult to tell how big the interior of the tent might be, but from the sounds emanating from inside, it was obviously vast. Bells, whistles, laughter, and the unmistakable sound of carnival barkers, hawking various games of skill and luck. Charlie’s eyes instinctively shifted to the sign above the tent. It was neon and blinking:
Midway on Solar Avenue
Charlie had no doubt what he’d find inside. Miranda gave the team a wink, then sauntered a few feet away, reaching for her cell phone. One by one, the rest of the team moved toward the entrance. In a moment, only Charlie was still standing where they’d started, gathering up the energy to follow them inside. He was just about ready, when a voice from behind took him by surprise.
“Oh, that kind of sucks. Carnival games? You could have stayed home to play carnival games.”
Charlie turned and saw Jeremy sauntering toward him. Jeremy’s group was about fifteen feet away, still heading down Solar Avenue toward the park proper.
“You sure you don’t want to sneak along with me?” Jeremy continued. “I think Allison Clark would switch groups; she doesn’t particularly want Dylan yanking at her ponytail all morning, anyway.”
Charlie didn’t know what to say to that, so he just shook his head. Jeremy got a hurt look on his face, and stopped a few feet from Charlie. Then he shrugged.
“Yeah, okay. Whatever, man.”
And then he turned on his heels and was moving back toward his group, his long legs pumping to catch up. Charlie almost ran after him—but again, forced himself to be strong. He turned away, toward the entrance to the midway games. The rest of the Carnival Killers were gone. He tossed one last glance at Miranda and was surprised to see she was no longer on her phone. Instead, she was chatting with a young man wearing what looked to be a clerk’s uniform: a tan collared shirt with a name tag on the lapel, and matching tan pants. The guy was obviously a park employee of some sort. He had a scruffy, scraggly halo of spiky brown hair, and an easily visible, mean-looking scar above his lip. He was grinning as Miranda spoke to him, and when she leaned close to say something particularly important, he nodded vigorously, obviously excited, the greasy locks of his hair flipping about.
Charlie wondered who the guy could be. Probably nothing to do with the Carnival Killers, but still, the sight of the two of them made him strangely uneasy.
But before Charlie could run with that thought, Miranda was peering his way. She caught his eyes with her own, and with a determined flick of her head, reminded him where he was supposed to be.
Charlie nodded, took a deep breath, then headed through the entrance to the circus tent.
17
“WHO THE HECK IS this kid?”
“He’s on fire.”
“It’s like he doesn’t even look at the plates.”
Charlie’s eyes were near slits beneath the wide brim of a Florida Marlins baseball hat as he leaned against the counter, one elbow crooked to support his weight while his other hand casually scooped a gold coin off the burnished wood. It was true, he barely even looked at the plates; his face was completely impassive, his breathing regular and soft, and he let the muscles of his wrist do the rest. It was strange—in real life, the thought that at least a dozen kids were gathered behind him, pointing and gawking an
d analyzing his every move, would have filled him with anxiety. Especially since about half of them were girls, varying in age from ten all the way up to seventeen. But at the moment, he felt nothing. He was cool, he was calm, he was totally in control.
Clank. The coin hit the plate as if it was magnetic, sticking so solidly that he half expected the carny to scoop it up and look at the underside for glue. Instead, the guy, who was in his mid-twenties, dressed in a shiny silver vest, matching suspenders, and a cone-shaped hat that was supposed to look vaguely spacey, just grinned at him and cupped a hand around his lips.
“Another winner! Give the Frisco Kid another ticket!”
Charlie wasn’t sure when the guy had started calling him that. He knew the reason; one of the characters he had invented was a lonely boy from San Francisco, left to his own devices while his family took an older sister on rides he was too scared to ride. But the past eight hours had blended together into one big, frenetic mishmash. That’s how it was, when you were living at ten thousand RPMs.
When he closed his eyes, all he got were glimpses. Slices of the day caught like images in front of a flashbulb.
• • •
Nine a.m.
Just thirty minutes from the moment he’d followed the rest of his team through the entrance to the tent, and it was like he’d been there all his life. Even to Charlie, it was amazing how fast his training had kicked in; to the uninitiated, that first step inside that tent would have been like leaping off a cliff into a world of absolute chaos. The whole place was like a carnival on steroids, larger than life.
Except, when Charlie let it all sink in and allowed the logical, mathematical portion of his brain to digest what he was seeing, it was all a brilliant and beautiful facade, much like the rest of Solar Avenue. The place was more crowded and architecturally more vast than Sherwood, but at its heart, it was the same set of midway games. Once his senses acclimated to the science-fiction setting, it took Charlie only a few minutes to find the three games he could beat. Then it was just a matter of navigating through the thick crowd of kids, changing his face as he went, pulling the baseball cap out of his back pocket and rehearsing the characters he was going to cycle through as he moved from game to game: the lonely kid from San Francisco; the spoiled dentist’s son from Arizona, who was so bored by all the rides that he’d come to the midway games to blow through his ridiculous allowance; the sickly child who’d spent the day before vomiting his way from the Space Drop to the Haunted Moon, and was now relegated to the midway tent by his two brothers, who were sick of getting kicked off rides because of his weak stomach.
He didn’t even pause as he reached his first target, the coins and plates, the game he felt most comfortable with, the one he had learned first and fastest. Working his way between a clutter of kids pitching coins haplessly in every direction, he slapped two dollars onto the counter, smiling eagerly at the carny as the man replaced his bills with golden coins.
Without even seeming to pause for breath, Charlie hit six plates in succession. Clang, clang, clang, clang, clang. The carnie stared at him for a beat, then reached up and rang an electronic bell.
“Winner, winner, winner, winner, winner, winner!”
And just like that, everyone at the counter was looking at Charlie, who was laughing like an idiot and going on about how his friends in San Francisco were never going to believe what had just happened, how his siblings were going to be so jealous that they’d spent the day on stupid rides. When the carny tore off a set of six white tickets with pictures of Loopy the Mouse stitched across the center of each, Charlie raised his eyebrows as if surprised.
“No stuffed animals? What, do we change these in for prizes?”
As the carnie explained the contest, Charlie pretended to listen and shrug. Meanwhile, he was taking in the reaction of the other kids around him. Some of them were well aware of the promotion, were even playing in groups to try to win a shot at the wheel themselves. Many others were just playing for the fun of it. Either way, it didn’t matter. Charlie had tested the waters, and he knew now that it was just a matter of continuing what he’d started.
He palmed the tickets, thanked the carny, and strolled away from the counter. Jake Tucson passed him as he crossed beneath the blinking orange and black lights. Neither acknowledged the other. Just two kids at a carnival, strangers passing beneath the folds a circus tent. Jake took up Charlie’s old position at the coin-toss counter, and Charlie worked his way to the spot at the balloon-dart game where Jake had just won a half dozen tickets of his own.
• • •
Eleven a.m.
The balloon-dart area had gone positively rowdy—shouts, cheers, arms pumping up and down. Charlie could barely stay on his feet as he was good-naturedly jostled back and forth by hands as big as mitts. It had happened suddenly: A busload of bigger kids had surged around him just as he was settling in to his third hour of straight play. In fact, his hand had just emerged from his pocket with its folded-up twist of heating pad inside, a warmed dart poised to fly, when he was surrounded and nearly lofted right up over the counter. Charlie didn’t need to listen hard to overhear who they were; he could have just read their matching sweatshirts. A junior high football team from Miami on a class trip similar to Charlie’s own. The two ringleaders of the group, a heavyset African-American kid in a bulky gray sweatshirt and Adidas sweatpants, and a loudmouthed blond kid in jeans, matching sweatshirt, and high-top sneakers, had taken an immediate liking to Charlie because of his hat. And beginning right after his next three throws—the balloons popping like fireworks—they started cheering like maniacs with every throw.
The football kids were providing Charlie with natural misdirection, almost as perfect as flaming sticks tossed toward the sky. By the fifth balloon he’d popped, Charlie was grinning beneath the brim of his baseball cap; the carny wasn’t even really looking at him as he tore off more prize tickets and slapped them on the counter next to more darts.
By the twelfth balloon, Charlie was enjoying himself so much, he didn’t even notice that Greg was now standing about three feet to his right, also in the jumble of junior-high football kids. And Daniel, his red head stuffed beneath a wool cap that was part of a Brooklyn-hipster persona that Magic had dubbed “more dip than hip,” was a few feet to his left, also half swallowed up by a crowd of gray sweatshirts. Like Charlie, they’d recognized the natural cover of the crowd. Nobody was going to notice them in the loud mob of junior-high kids. Charlie didn’t even see his teammates until all three of them happened to throw darts at the exact same moment. The three balloons exploded at once, right next to each other in the center of the board.
Bang. Bang. Bang!
The football players erupted in shouts. The two big ringleaders grabbed Charlie under his arms and lifted him right off the ground, shouting at the carny in unison.
“Winner, winner, winner!”
Charlie, feet dangling as he smiled helplessly, looked back and forth around the counter, and for the briefest of seconds his eyes met Greg’s, then Daniel’s. All three stifled grins.
“Do it again!” yelled the football player in the high-tops.
Charlie laughed. He certainly wasn’t going to disappoint his fans.
• • •
Three p.m.
Back at the coin table.
Charlie was chewing on a granola bar that Jake had shoved in his pocket on their last pass across the tent, as he pushed through a set of what looked to be triplets grouped around the closest corner of the game counter. The three brothers were all chubby and red-faced, obviously frustrated with the way their day was going. Charlie could easily see why: They were throwing coins almost in unison, and every time, the result was the same. The coins skipped and scattered their way from plate to plate, disappearing to the floor—and yet again and again, the triplets kept hurling away, putting their thick biceps into it as they wound up like they were pitching for the Red Sox. Charlie waited until they were finished, their faces getting even
more radishy as they finally ran through their last few dollar bills, and then leaned over the counter himself, flashing six singles to the carny. It was a different man than before—Charlie had counted at least two shifts gone by since the morning hours. Counting the shifts was another piece of Charlie’s training; each change in shift meant a new carny, a new set of eyes that hadn’t just watched you win way more than you were supposed to, which meant you could do it all over again without much worry of getting noticed. This time, the carny was as thin as a pipe cleaner, with a high beak of a nose and eyes like beads. He had an exasperated look on his face, and Charlie immediately saw why.
Directly across the gaming pit, beyond the sea of clinking plates, at the counter right across from Charlie, he saw a group of high-school girls gathered around Finn. Finn actually had his back to the game, leaning so nonchalantly he was almost sitting right up on the counter. He was chatting to the girls, obviously charming them with his eyes, his manner of speaking, the smug way his lips turned up at the corners; as Charlie watched, one of the girls even reached out and touched Finn’s jacket.
Then she laughed, and he held a gold coin to her lips. Without even turning toward the plates, he flicked his wrist back over his shoulder, sending the coin into a perfect arc. It hit a plate and stuck, and all the girls burst out in applause. The carny just stared at Finn’s back, then shrugged and reached for another winning ticket from the roll attached near his electric bell. Finn didn’t even turn as the man put the ticket on a pile that already looked to be thirty tickets thick.
What a jackass, Charlie thought, and then he grinned. It was time for the Frisco Kid to get in on some of that action.
He kissed one of his own gold coins as if for good luck, and gave it a perfect toss toward the waiting plates.
