Bringing Down the Mouse by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online Page B

hallways in school. And the further away from that afternoon Charlie got, the more okay he was with the idea that it was just some strange moment in his life, insignificant and soon forgotten. After two weeks, the thrill of that moment had begun to fade. The more Charlie thought about what he’d seen, the more reluctant he was to delve much deeper into the matter.
    It’s just math, chemistry, and a little physics.
    In Charlie’s mind, there were a few too many problems with what Finn had implied with that cryptic statement. To use math to beat carnival games suggested the games had a predictive nature about them—that the games themselves had a set, mathematically precise way they were supposed to be played, and that youcould somehow figure out mathematical or physical formulas that gave you an edge. Throwing a coin at a plate seemed to be a game of skill and luck, not math. And popping balloons with a dart? Wasn’t that just about how good your aim was and how strong your biceps?
    Either Finn and Magic were just messing with him, or they were involved with something much more complex than Charlie could imagine. And of course, there was one other possibility—that somehow Finn and Magic had figured out a way to cheat. Charlie wasn’t a saint, but he tried to be a good kid most of the time, keeping the lying to his parents to a minimum. Telling his dad he was going to meet Jeremy at the Halloween Fair was about as bad as he got. But cheating a carnival game—that seemed plain wrong. He’d never cheated on a test—not that he’d ever felt the need to—and he’d never taken anything that wasn’t his. So if Finn and Magic were involved in some scheme to cheat at carnival games, well, that just seemed like something he didn’t want to know more about.
    Whatever the case, Charlie had finally decided to put all his ruminations aside, and he’d gone back the business of being a regular sixth grader. Hanging out with Jeremy and the rest of his friends during his free time, avoiding Dylan and his gang in the halls andon the playground, studying for his classes, doing his homework, having regular dinners with his parents when they weren’t off writing papers or playing with their test tubes, beakers, and pipettes in their respective labs.
    â€œFinally, here we go,” Jeremy interrupted Charlie’s thoughts, gesturing with a spindly arm. “We seem to be moving. If we can just get our muscles thawed enough to make it to the front of the line, we might survive another day at this prison camp.”
    Charlie rubbed his hands together to get life back into his fingers, then followed as Jeremy and the rest of the line lurched forward toward the trays. A few more minutes went by in grim silence, broken only by the sound of a few dozen boot soles scraping against the near-frozen sidewalk, and then they were working their way through the double doors, both gripping lime-green plastic trays and tarnished silverware. Charlie had found a fork with three tines intact—a coup!—but the only spoon he’d managed to track down had been flattened into something resembling a miniature shovel. No matter, Charlie was inside, his skin prickling as the heat brought life back into his zombified outer cells.
    They made quick work of the food dispensary. Choosing matching cartons of whole milk from theindustrial-size coolers just inside the doorway, lining up again to slide their trays down the aluminum shelving tracks that allowed the lunch ladies—flabby-armed doughy women with hairnets and white-and-pink short-sleeve buttoned coats that made them look like dental assistants—to dollop out huge spoonfuls of vaguely identifiable slop into the different hexagonal compartments dug into the trays. As usual, one of the compartments got a heavy glob of beans and rice; next to that, some sort of meat, drenched in sauce that seemed to glow beneath the fluorescent ceiling