• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“You’re not solving the puzzle!” Mr. Garvey said. “You’re laughing with your friends and picking at the grass!”

“I’m thinking,” Jake yelled back, though he tossed aside the blades of grass in his hands. “We’re all thinking. I had an idea. It just didn’t work. What do you want from me?”

The math teacher was now pacing. He was angry beyond reason, his frustration boiling over after a long and hectic day. “This is what I meant, Winston. We could have had this last answer! We might have won by now! We might have beaten everybody!”

“If what?” Winston said, and then realized the answer as the question left his mouth.

Mr. Garvey seemed to realize he was on the verge of going too far—indeed, may have already crossed that line. He didn’t answer Winston’s question but sat down on the bench, shaking his head.

Mal repeated, “If what?” He looked at Winston.

“Nothing,” Winston said, looking away.

Jake smelled blood. “No. What is he talking about?”

Winston looked at his friend. He hated this, but what was he supposed to do? Winston said reluctantly, “Mr. Garvey didn’t want you or Mal to be on the team. He wanted to replace you with kids from his math class.”

They all looked at Mr. Garvey, who absorbed their stares and finally tossed his arms in the air. “I wanted the best possible team,” he said. “Is that so wrong? I wanted kids that I knew would take this seriously.”

“We’re taking this seriously,” Mal said.

“Not seriously enough,” Mr. Garvey said.

Winston felt his stomach twist and untwist. He said in a small voice, “Mal and Jake have both solved puzzles today. They got the prison puzzle before I did.” Mr. Garvey said nothing. “They’re both good at puzzles,” Winston persisted.

“Fine,” said Mr. Garvey. He looked stiffly down at Mal and Jake. “I apologize for implying otherwise.”

Jake said to Winston, “How did you talk him into keeping us?”

Winston was a little embarrassed. He twisted a fistful of grass for a moment and then admitted, “I said I wouldn’t do it without you guys.”

Mal and Jake gaped at each other with real surprise. Then Jake fell backward, laughing at the sky.

“Aren’t you the bestest buddy!” Mal said.

“Quit it,” Winston said. It was one thing to stand up for your friends. It was another thing to be caught doing it. He didn’t want to feel like the hero of a bad television show.

They were all quiet for a minute or two. Mr. Garvey seemed to understand that he had forfeited the right to yell at them . . . at least for a while. Mal and Jake didn’t want to rag on Winston any further. And Winston was rolling the five words around in his mind, looking for the sixth.

It looked like every park bench had been taken over by a team. Winston could still see kids running around, talking to the people in the brightly colored shirts. Did those kids know what they were doing yet? Had they figured out the secret behind this puzzle, or were they just collecting riddles at random and waiting for a brilliant idea to strike?

Directly across the town green, Winston saw Bethany and her friends sitting together. If none of them were out chasing down riddles, that meant they had the answer to this puzzle and were looking for the sixth and final word, just like them.

Winston watched his math teacher’s head swivel back and forth, watching Brendan Root’s team on the one hand and the Lincoln team on the other. Someone was going to get that final word soon. Winston shared Mr. Garvey’s sense of helplessness, that it probably wasn’t going to be them. None of them had any ideas.

“Maybe the answer is QUAINT,” Mr. Garvey suddenly said.

“What?” Jake said.

“Quaint,” he repeated.

Mal squinted and said, “I thought you didn’t want to try random words.”

Mr. Garvey flushed and stood up from the bench. “Look at the answers,” he said. “They begin with the letters Q, T, I, A, and U. If you add the letter N and scramble them all up, you get the word QUAINT. Who has the computer?”

Jake said, “I do.”

“Give it to me.”

Jake stood up. “That’s not the answer. It doesn’t make any sense.”

Mr. Garvey