The Gollywhopper Games (8 page)

“Think of this as a big treasure hunt with one activity leading to the next. You’ll have five puzzles you must solve. Each puzzle alternates with a stunt you must perform.”

Carol took a seat at the head of the table. “Now, this may sound confusing, but I promise, once you get in there, things’ll run as smoothly as a greased pig through buttered hands.” Carol referred to the piece of paper in front of her.

“Okay,” Carol continued. “Try to follow this. I will lead you to a large warehouse-type area. Inside, you will receive your first puzzle. Each puzzle will have a multiple choice answer—not the same sort of multiple choice you know from school. No. Your choices will be three Golly products. All three will be on a table. The answer to the puzzle is the name of one of those toys or games. Sound easy? It isn’t.

“First, you need to solve the puzzle. Be sure your solution makes sense. Be sure you all agree on that solution. Then, and only then, pick up the Golly toy or game that corresponds to the answer. Open
it and you’ll find an envelope marked
STUNT
.

“Inside will be instructions on how to perform an activity. Follow the instructions exactly. When you complete the stunt, you’ll receive the instructions for the next puzzle. Maybe.”

Huh?

“Huh?” said Rocky out loud.

“If you solved the puzzle wrong, it will make you perform the wrong stunt. How will you know you’ve made a mistake? The puzzle you receive at the end of a wrong stunt will be the very same puzzle you thought you already solved. Then you must go back, figure out the right answer, and perform the right stunt.

“And ouch! That will hurt because you’re in a race for time. The team that finishes this treasure hunt with the best time goes on to the next round.”

“But,” said Rocky, “won’t it take more time to sit around and figure out the puzzles than guess and do the stunts?”

“Oh, Rocky, you dear, misguided child. We’re smarter than that,” said Carol. “Every time you goof, we add a one-minute penalty to your score. So not
only have you taken extra time to do more stunts, you also have to deal with those precious extra seconds.”

“But—”

“Hold on, Rocky. I’ll bet you’re still thinking that a one-minute penalty is a small price to pay for a wrong answer, and it’ll take longer than that to work the puzzle.” Carol shook her head. “According to the rules—and we’ve worked very hard on them—you must make a true and logical attempt to solve each puzzle. You must work on each for at least five minutes before you make a random guess. We’ve even installed a five-minute clock visible wherever you are. If you guess wrong, you need to talk it out at least five more minutes before you guess again.”

“What if we’re smart?” said Bianca. “What if we can figure it out in five seconds? Do we sit around for five minutes anyway?”

“No, no,” said Carol. “Each puzzle has a logical answer. And when you find it, you’ll know it’s right. Our distinguished panel of judges will be able to hear everything you say. If your reasoning is solid and you’ve legitimately come up with the answer in less than five minutes, move forward as fast as you
can. If you try to fool them, they’ll know. And they’ll stop you.

“Don’t try to take any shortcuts. Any infraction of the rules, any failure to follow directions might cost you much more than a minute. It could cost you…your hair.” Carol’s lips crawled to a huge grin. “Just kidding! Your hair’s safe. Mine’s still at risk.”

She paused and studied her paper again. “That’s it. Any questions?”

Gil wondered if she could repeat all that, maybe after she’d taken a tranquilizer.

“Of course you have questions. Those directions made no sense to you. But we have to make sure you’ve heard them. It’s the law. Or not. But it is our law.” She smiled. “It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Really. It’s as easy as Puzzle-Stunt, Puzzle-Stunt and so on, five times. The whole process will start flowing once you get in there.

“Oh, and the other team? You’ll never see them or hear them. You will, however, hear
about
them. They’ll be in a duplicate area, performing the same puzzles and stunts in the exact order. All fair and square. Each time they successfully move to the next
puzzle, we’ll let you know. And we’ll let them know about you.

“If you’re wondering about the people who brought you here, they’re all safely tucked away upstairs in a sort of stadium luxury box that encircles the entire action area. They’ll be able to get up and move around and see and hear everything that happens on both teams. When you get into the room, look up and wave, then forget about them.

“Also forget about the cameras. Dozens of them are camouflaged, but each side will have ten people running around with handheld cameras, capturing everything. We have microphones planted everywhere to pick up every single whisper. At first you may feel self-conscious, but I promise you’ll be so focused on the task at hand, they’ll soon fade into the sunset.”

Carol handed a stapled set of papers to each person. “We do a lot of research at Golly, especially in the Fairview office, where Bill and I work, and we know some people absorb more by listening and some by reading. So everything I’ve explained is on these sheets. For the next fifteen minutes, all cameras and
mikes are off. Take that time to relax and get comfortable with the procedures. Please give one another a chance to read through these. Then you can schmooze all you want. I’ll be right back.” Carol gave a wink and left, the green door closing behind her.

Gil read through the instructions twice, then looked at the clock on the wall. Carol would be back in about seven minutes.

Bianca was twirling her paper around on the table. Lavinia was still studying. Rocky was sitting on the gorilla, folding his sheets into paper footballs, and Thorn had drifted to the far wall, looking bored.

If Gil was going to do anything about the cheating, it would have to be now. He moved toward Thorn. “We haven’t really talked,” Gil said, sticking out his hand. “Gil Goodson.”

Thorn shook it. “Thorn Dewitt-Formey.”

“Is there anything I need to know about you?” asked Gil.

“I don’t believe so.”

“I’m not trying to be rude, but I mean, is there something about your hearing we should know? Something we could help you with?”

“Oh.” Thorn pointed to his ear. “You mean this. Good eyes, Gil.”

“Thanks. It’s just that I knew a girl,” Gil lied, “who was hearing impaired, and it helped if we got her attention first. Should we do anything like that?”

“No. Not necessary. This thing is state of the art. I can hear whispers at thirty feet.”

“Really? Battery powered?” Gil craned his neck like he was trying to see it.

Thorn turned his head to oblige. “Smallest battery you’ll ever see.”

“Really?” Gil amped up the excitement in his voice. “Can you show me?”

By now, Bianca and Rocky had gathered around. Lavinia was staring from the table.

“I don’t know,” Thorn said. “It’s delicate.”

“Please,” said Gil. “I won’t touch it. I only want to see.” Slowly, carefully, Gil pulled his lucky penny from his pocket. Too fast and his sweaty hands would drop it. He only had one chance to get this right. He moved the penny from his right hand to his left and plunged that hand into his pocket, the coin pinched between his fingers.

“Yeah, please,” said Bianca.

Thorn sighed, dug the piece from his ear, and displayed it in the palm of his hand.

“How long have you been hearing impaired?” Gil asked.

“Most of my life.”

“Wow! How do you know what I’m saying right now?” Gil whispered.

“I read lips.”

Gil let the penny slip through the hole in his pocket and slide down his leg. It hit the wooden floor with a tiny
clink
.

Thorn’s eyes shot to the sound.

“Pennies don’t have lips.” Gil pointed to the earpiece. “If you stick it back in your ear, I’ll make sure the whole world knows. I refuse to be disqualified because they stuck me with cheaters.”

Thorn shrugged like he was bored and slipped the earpiece into his shirt pocket.

“And Rocky,” Gil said, “the cheating goes for you, too.”

“Whoa. I don’t have any ear thing.”

“I’m not blind, Rocky,” said Gil. Then he tugged
his ear and touched his nose like Mr. Titus had. “Neither are the people who run this thing. Your choice: Stop the signals or go home.”

“Okay, okay.”

Lavinia took an audible breath as if she had been scared to inhale. She lowered her eyes to the table then peeked up at Gil.
Thanks
, she mouthed just before Bianca threw her arms around his neck.

“My hero!” She laughed. “Ooh. Idea here. Every team needs a leader. I elect Gil.”

Rocky shook his head. “That’d be a kill. Ask him about his family.”

“This isn’t about my family, and it isn’t about anyone being a leader. We just have to work together if we want to win.”

“I want to win,” said Bianca.

Gil looked at the others. “Are we gonna win or what?”

“Yeah, we’ll win,” said Rocky, putting on the game face Gil remembered.

The door swung open. “Sounds like you’re ready,” said Carol. “Let’s play some games.”

T
he five filed behind Carol like first graders following their teacher to recess. If they were a real team, they’d bunch together like every winning team Gil had ever been on. Those teams, though, had practiced for months before their biggest game of the year. Together they learned who was strong and who to avoid in a crunch, who divided the team and who provided the glue.

Watching Rocky swagger in front, Gil was oddly glad he was here. Rocky was the kid you wanted on your team, any team. Kids still talked about that spelling bee in Rocky’s fourth-grade class. Five
remained on one team; just Rocky and one girl remained on the other, and Rocky’s spelling wasn’t that impressive. According to the legend, not only did Rocky question his poor teammate over every letter, but his stare rattled the other team so much, every one of them—including Moe, the Human Dictionary—misspelled the same word:
intimidate
.

Bianca could probably handle Rocky’s intensity, but Lavinia and Thorn? Lavinia may have been used to scholarship competitions, but Gil doubted she’d seen anyone like Rocky, especially when the fear of losing turned him into a wild man. And Thorn? Big question mark. He seemed so bored, but he must have had his reasons to be here. Why else would he have spent so much money to find an instant winner ticket and also to wire himself up?

Carol led them down another hallway with darkened offices, cordoned-off cubicles, but walls that practically vibrated with color. Where the murals stopped, framed pictures began: formal
portraits of men and women, but with mustaches drawn on them, or with clown hats and squirting bowties, rabbit ears, caterpillar eyebrows, cat’s eyes.

The group turned down yet another hall that opened into a junglelike area with flowers and small trees and sunshine that filtered through skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows. They stopped beside a massive pair of green doors in an eight-story brick wall.

Carol turned to them. “Any minute—Correction. Right now, here they are. The other team, with my counterpart, Bill, there in the red shirt.”

Bill stopped his team at matching red doors about five yards away, then he and Carol nodded to each other and ruffled their own heads of hair in a silent challenge.

The other team stared at Gil’s team, and Gil stared right back until, ghostlike, both sets of doors lumbered open on their own. Gil and his team edged through.

“Oh. My. Gosh,” said Bianca.

“Am I hallucinating?” Lavinia asked.

Gil shook his head. “Only if I am.”

Palm trees and monstrous flowers rose for stories. Hot-air balloons and skeletons danced from the ceiling. Huge shoes dangled, giant pandas floated around, and gigantic spears of broccoli sprouted from the ground. Puffs of gold confetti rained in random spots, catching the light and casting a brilliance across a small area. A waterfall rushed and rumbled somewhere to his left. And who knew what was beyond that maze of rainbow-colored walls?

“Green team. Green team.”

Gil closed his mouth and focused on Carol.

“The wow factor here is huge. It still is for me
after hundreds of times. But now I need you to look up to the spectator area. Wave to everyone.” She waited for them to wave. “Now forget they’re there. See Jason, the main camera guy to your left? Wave to Jason and his camera. Wave, wave. Good. Now forget him, too.

“But here’s something to remember.” Carol pointed toward a plain door. “Through there lies a short corridor leading directly to the conference room where we met. We took the long way around and allowed you to make a grand entrance. The conference room can be your second-best friend. Use it as a home base if you find King Kong, the racecar, and all the other random props too distracting. Now come this way.”

They stopped at a long, Plexiglas table with green twinkle lights encased along its edges. In the center, on top of a stack of three boxes, sat a green envelope with a big “#1” on it.

“Ta-da! Your first puzzle. When you hear the chimes, open the envelope and begin. I’ll be lurking in the shadows if you need me. I’m rooting for you, but by the rules, I’m also your impartial referee and
your harshest judge. Do me proud.” Carol put on a set of headphones, spoke a few words into the attached microphone, then gave a thumbs-up to someone in the viewing area.

An unbroken line of faces peered from the perimeter of the room. It reminded Gil of feeding time at the zoo. He caught a glimpse of his mom and dad. Then, farther down, Old Man Golliwop. And Mr. Titus, touching his nose and his chin.

Gil stared at Rocky until Rocky noticed.

Rocky looked up at his dad and ran his own finger across his neck. “Satisfied?” he said to Gil.

Blong! Blong! Blong!

Rocky’s hand shot out fastest. He grabbed the envelope and ripped it open.

Puzzle #1

Seek A Lively Evil Magician, With Its Terrible

Cackling Head

(choose your answer from these three products)

Lavinia spaced out the boxes: The Black Magic Game, The Salem Witch Game, and My First Magic Act.

“I wanna win,” said Rocky. “Someone think of something smart to say.”

Gil and Lavinia were leaning over the table, staring at the clue. “That’s what we’re trying to do,” said Gil. “Anyone care to help?”

“Or else,” Rocky said, lowering his voice, “we can talk real soft, look like we’re intelligent and pretend to solve it.”

“Why don’t we actually solve it?” said Gil.

Bianca and Rocky gathered around. Thorn stood a half step away, looking bored.

Rocky jabbed Gil in the arm. “Look,” he said, pointing at Thorn. “The baby’s sulking. He misses his ear thing.”

“Do not,” Thorn said. He moved closer to the group.

Gil tried to ignore the drama and decipher the puzzle. “Seek a lively evil magician, with its terrible cackling head.” He turned over the puzzle, looking for directions, clues…something.

“Why’d you do that?” said Rocky. “The back’s as blank as your mind.”

“Shut up and let him think,” said Bianca.

Good advice. Gil scanned the warehouse, looking for a grotesque magician with a top hat and magic wand. He saw a tuba, an enormous jar of pickles, but no cackling head. Wait. That wasn’t the way to solve it. The answer had to be within the puzzle. He pointed to the paper. “Does anything look strange here?”

“Why does anything have to look strange?” said Rocky. “Well, except for your—Never mind. The puzzle says we’re looking for a magician. So that could be The Black Magic Game or My First Magic Act. But it’s evil, so that means the first one. But witches can have terrible, cackling heads so it could be The Salem Witch Game.”

“In other words,” said Bianca, “you have no idea.”

Gil shook his head and looked at the clock. They had less than two minutes to figure this out before Rocky would rip open one of those games on his own. Gil felt it.

“Excuse me,” said Lavinia, “but I may have the start of an idea.”

Maybe Gil had one teammate with a brain.

“The sentence is grammatically incorrect,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Gil, “I noticed there’s no period.”

“The sentence also lacks commas.”

“There’s a comma,” said Rocky. “See? ‘Seek a lively evil magician—comma—with its terrible cackling head.’”

“But that comma is misplaced. There should be two. One between ‘lively’ and ‘evil’ and one between ‘terrible’ and ‘cackling.’ Strings of adjectives take commas.”

“Maybe,” said Gil, “we’re supposed to pause where the comma is.”

“Perhaps,” Lavinia said, “but it’s something else, too.”

“And that would be…” said Rocky.

“The word
its
. A magician is a person, a he or a she. Why would they use ‘its’ instead of ‘his’ or ‘her’?”

“You may have something,” said Gil.

“Ooh,” said Bianca. “I might have something else.”

“Fleas?” said Rocky.

Bianca shot him a poisonous look. “So I might not be the smartest here—I almost flunked math—but I wrote this history paper about Janice Dickinson, the first super-model. Don’t you love history? Anyway, I
would have gotten an
A
, but I capitalized all the letters in the title after my teacher reminded me not to capitalize words like
and
and
with
. And the five stinkin’ points she took away brought my paper down to an eighty-nine and—”

“Bianca! You’re a genius,” said Gil. “You, too, Lavinia. Look. There is a reason for ‘its.’ Look at the capitalized letters, just the capitalized letters.”

As Gil read them, the others chimed in. “S-A-LE-M-W-I-T-C-H.”

Before they reached the “C-H,” Rocky had wrestled open the lid of The Salem Witch Game and pulled a card from the green envelope marked
STUNT
#1.

Stunt #1

SEE THE YELLOW STRIPE

ON THE FLOOR?

FOLLOW IT TO THE PIÑATAS.

MORE INSTRUCTIONS

AWAIT YOU THERE.

Rocky raced off. Right as the other four caught up with him, he yanked down an envelope with such force that it shot a wooden pole the size of a large broom handle right toward them. It fell just short and rattled across the floor.

“Rocky!” yelled Bianca. “You could have killed us.”

“What? What’d I do?”

Gil rolled his eyes. “Just read it, Rocky.”

Rocky held up the message and read it aloud.

Stunt #1

Look above you in the air.

See five piñatas hanging there?

Four contain a gooey brew.

One contains a clue for you.

With all ten hands upon this pole,

strike until you make a hole.

If goo comes out, don’t lose all hope—

the next may hold your envelope.

Swaying from near-invisible wires were five piñatas: a black cat, a witch hat, a witch head, a broom, and a cauldron.

“Let’s smash the witch in the middle,” said Rocky. “Where’s the pole?”

“It’s what you almost killed us with,” Bianca said.

“Here,” said Lavinia, who had sneaked away to fetch it.

Rocky grabbed the pole from her hands and reared back to take a swing himself.

“Wait!” Lavinia’s scream seemed to startle even herself. “The rule says all ten hands.”

“Then get some hands over here,” said Rocky.

“I’m at the top,” said Thorn, taking the pole away. “Dewitt-Formeys always land on top. It’s our family code.”

“So tell me,” Rocky said. “Is your family code on the family crest on the family flag on the family mansion? What a dweeb!”

“Cut it out, Rocky,” said Gil. “Grab the pole.”

Rocky latched on underneath Thorn’s hands. Then came Lavinia’s, Gil’s and Bianca’s.

With Rocky’s power controlling the pole, they reared it back and took a swing. It missed the target, but lifted Thorn off the floor, spilling him away from the group.

“Forget your family code,” said Rocky. “We need to organize by height.”

Thorn held on at the bottom. Lavinia grasped just above him, then Gil, Bianca, and Rocky. They swiped at the witch. Again. Again. But their pathetic taps only made her sway more.

Gil let go. “Some of us are going left and some are going right, and we’re not in sync.”

“If we have to do this,” said Thorn, “then we need to work it like a crew team so we all swing the same way at the same time.”

“Crew team?” said Bianca. “What’s a—”

“It’s like five people rowing the same boat,” said Gil. “When Thorn says, ‘stroke,’ we all swing this way.” Gil nodded his head to his right. “Okay, Thorn. Go!”

“Stroke,” said Thorn like the effort to speak would kill him.

They completely missed the witch’s head.

“Stroke,” he said in a voice that could put a sugar-shocked kid to sleep.

They managed to tap it like the first few tries.

“Stroke,” he said with some conviction.

Direct hit.

“Stroke! Stroke!” he yelled.

They were in a rhythm now.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”

“Eew!” A big blob of green goo globbed out and struck Thorn’s shoulder. He let go to wipe it off. “Do you know how expensive this shirt is?”

“Have Daddy buy you another one,” said Rocky.

Another blob globbed onto Bianca’s shoe. She let go. “Gross. It’s like—”

“It’s not phlegm, Bianca. I promise,” said Gil. “You’ll be okay.”

“C’mon,” said Rocky. “We’re attacking the cat.”

Bianca and Thorn took their places on the pole again.

“Stroke!” Thorn commanded.

A wobbly hit.

“Stroke! Stroke!”

Back in rhythm.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”

This time a red blob hit Lavinia on the back, but she held on.

“The hat,” said Rocky.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”

A hole—nothing coming out.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”

The gleam of green paper.

“Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”