The Potato Chip Puzzles: The Puzzling World of Winston Breen (2 page)

“Winston!” Mrs. Livetta all but screamed in his ear.

Winston jerked like a freshly caught fish, nearly falling out of his chair. The other kids in the study hall laughed. Mrs. Livetta was standing in front of him, hands on hips.

“Wh-what? Yes?” Winston tried to regain his wits. He knew what had happened. Sometimes he became so absorbed in a puzzle that the world around him simply faded away. Mrs. Livetta must have called him once or twice from the comfort of her chair and then, when Winston didn’t answer, said his name louder, and then louder still, and then she finally came over and yelled at him. The next step might have been to hit him with a textbook.

The kids laughed again, but Mrs. Livetta wasn’t laughing. “You are wanted down at the principal’s office. Didn’t you hear the announcement?” She pointed at the loudspeaker on the wall.

Winston reddened. It was worse than he thought. The loudspeaker, which was indeed loud, had barked his name, and he hadn’t heard it at all. Wow. That had to be some kind of record.

Wait a minute—the principal’s office wanted to see him?

“Why does the principal want to see me?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Livetta said. “It’s a loudspeaker—you can’t have a conversation with it. Ask when you get down there. Now go!”

 

Was he in trouble? He couldn’t see how. Was something wrong at home? His mind reached in every direction at once as he walked through the empty hallways down to the main office. As he rounded the corner to the school’s large central lobby, the intercom system crackled and chirped. The school secretary said once again, in the voice of an old lady robot: “Winston Breen, please report to the principal’s office. Winston Breen, to the principal’s office.” Boy, whatever the reason was, they sure wanted to see him. He bit his lower lip and tried to prepare himself.

When he reached the main office, Mrs. Lembo was still returning to her desk from the PA system. “Ah, there you are,” she said.

“Yes, sorry,” said Winston.

“Well, go right in. Mr. Unger’s expecting you.”

The principal’s office was down a short hallway, ending in a door you never wanted to open. Winston had never had a reason to knock on this door, and that was fine with him. He was still trying to figure out some way he might be in trouble. He took a deep breath and knocked softly. “Come in,” said a brusque voice. Winston creaked the door open.

Mr. Unger was not behind his desk. He was up and pacing. “Ah, Winston. Good. Thought maybe you were absent today. Or cutting class!”

Winston recognized that as a joke but had no idea how to respond. “Yes, no, um, I was—”

But Mr. Unger wasn’t looking for any explanations. “You’re still the puzzle person, right?”

“Sure. . . .” Winston had shuffled entirely into the room now. He watched the principal pace back and forth, glancing occasionally at a piece of paper in his hand. When Mr. Unger walked the halls in his gray suit and shiny shoes, he was a severe, frowning authority. Now he didn’t look stern at all. In fact, he looked rather like—Winston could hardly believe it—an excited little kid.

“All right. All right. Good,” he said. “I want you to look at this. Here.” Mr. Unger thrust the paper into Winston’s hands.

It was quite fancy—stiff and crackly, and the color of rich cream. On it were a bunch of letters and numbers, written in ink:

This was not at all what he had expected from a visit to the principal’s office. “What is this?” asked Winston.

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

“It looks like a code of some kind. Where did it come from?”

Unger shook his head. “Don’t know. It was in my mailbox this morning, but there was no return address.”

“Was there a postmark?”

Mr. Unger stopped pacing. “The postmark! I didn’t think of that. I knew you were the right person to call on this.” He sat down in his chair, leaned over, and dug through his garbage pail, looking for the right envelope. “Aha, here we go,” he said. The envelope was fancy, too. Mr. Unger brushed it off and looked at it, frowning.

“What does it say?” said Winston.

Mr. Unger didn’t respond. He just handed the envelope over.

Winston looked at the front. There was no postmark. There was no stamp. “Oh,” he said. He decided to sit in one of the two chairs in front of the principal’s desk.

“Someone must have come in and slipped it into my mailbox,” said Mr. Unger.

“I guess that means it’s from someone nearby,” said Winston.

Unger nodded his head. “I guess so. I guess so. I’ll ask if any of the secretaries saw anything. But the main office is busy all morning. Anybody could have come in and put something in my mailbox. Can you figure out what it is?”

“I don’t know,” said Winston. “It could mean anything. Maybe it has something to do with a map.”

“A map,” the principal repeated, not understanding.

“You know how maps have letters across the top and numbers down the side? So you can find locations on them?”

“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Unger, sitting back in his chair. “Coordinates. So we need a map . . . a map of what? The town?”

“I don’t know,” Winston said again. “Maybe.”

“I can have Mrs. Lembo bring one in.”

Winston shook his head. “The problem is, which map? The map in the phone book, the map in the road atlas? They’re all different.”

“Hmm,” said Mr. Unger, frowning.

Winston added, “And do we need a map of the town or the state or the country? We could be staring at maps the rest of our life.”

“All right,” said the principal. “Then what do you suggest? Maybe it’s not a code. Maybe it’s something else.”

“What?”

“Another kind of puzzle, maybe. A connect the dots.”

Winston blinked. “What?”

The principal leaned forward. “Can you connect these letters and numbers in some way? Draw lines between them? Start at A1 then go to A2 . . . ?”

Winston thought about it. It didn’t sound right, but it was more than he’d come up with. But then he noticed something. “There
is
no A1,” he said. “Or A2. The first pair alphabetically is”—he scanned the paper—“A4. And then there’s no A5.”

“Hmm,” said Mr. Unger.

Winston said, “I still think it’s a code.” He stood up and started pacing, just as the principal had been when he arrived. “Each letter and number pair is going to stand for a letter. Or a bunch of letters. Or . . .” He drifted off, staring at the paper. A wisp of an idea had breezed through his mind, fluttering just out of reach. “There’s no A5,” he said again.

Mr. Unger said, “Do you think that’s important?”

“Maybe,” said Winston, rubbing his forehead. The first pair was C3. If that represented some other letter, what letter could it be? Maybe it was three letters past C . . . which meant F.

Winston’s eyes widened.

Mr. Unger saw that. “You have an idea, don’t you? Did you just solve it?”

“I think so,” Winston said, and told him his idea.

The principal took the paper back. “So then J plus five is the letter O . . . S plus two is the letter U . . . and Q plus one is R.”

“That spells FOUR,” Winston said, getting more and more excited.

They went through the whole code, counting out the alphabet again and again like students in a very strange nursery school. When they were done, they sat back and looked at what they had written:

Winston was elated, but the principal was frowning at the answer. “Seven numbers,” said Mr. Unger. “That’s not a very satisfying solution. What does it mean?”

Winston said, “Maybe it’s a phone number.”

Mr. Unger rubbed the top of his balding head. “What
is
this? If somebody wanted me to call them, why not just give me the number? Or, heck, why not call
me
? What’s with all this spy movie stuff ?”

“I don’t know,” said Winston. “Let’s call it and see.”

A look of bewilderment on his face, Mr. Unger reached over and hit the speaker button on his sleek black telephone. A dial tone filled the room. The principal booped in the seven digits. There was a long, tense pause as the phone rang several times, and then a gentle click, followed by a booming megaphone of a voice. Mr. Unger hastily lowered the volume a couple of notches.

“You did it!” said the voice. “You, my friends, have broken the code! And now I would like to warmly invite you to a very special contest. I am Dmitri Simon, the president of Simon’s Snack Foods. And I am going to give fifty thousand dollars to one lucky school.” Mr. Unger’s jaw dropped open. “You’ve solved the first puzzle, but there will be many more puzzles to solve. On this Friday, May 18, at ten A.M., send three students and one teacher to Simon’s Snack Foods, 1 Livingston Avenue, in Maplewood. At the tone, please tell me the name of your school, so that I know who to expect. And congratulations on making it this far. I will see you soon!”

There was a sudden beep, and the principal leaned in and said quickly, “Walter Fredericks Junior High, Glenville. Bernard Unger, principal.”

Mr. Unger turned off the phone. His eyes were wide open and dazzled. “Fifty thousand dollars. Did he say fifty thousand dollars? If we solve a puzzle contest?” He gripped his armrests as if he thought his chair might suddenly fly. “Can this be real?” he said.

“You can call the company and find out,” Winston said.

The principal nodded. “I will. I definitely will.”

A slow smile crept to Winston’s face. “If it
is
real, I volunteer to be one of those students,” he said.

“What? Of course you do. You
better
,” said Mr. Unger. “Get two more kids. Whoever you want. Fifty thousand dollars!” The principal stood up, his eyes full of wonder. He looked like he had just seen a magician do the most amazing trick ever. “I’ll find a teacher to go with you,” he said. “It’s the day after school ends, and technically, everyone will be on vacation. But I know a few of them won’t mind. Yes. Let me think. . . .” He gazed thoughtfully up at the ceiling. After a moment, he began pacing again.

Winston got the feeling his meeting with the principal was over. Mr. Unger now looked positively giddy, like a man who has just arrived at his own surprise birthday party. “We can’t lose, can we? We just can’t lose!”

“I don’t know,” said Winston. “I don’t want to
promise
anything—”

“Oh, I know, I know,” said the principal. “But I can feel it. Go! Get your team together! We don’t have much time! Just a couple of days! We’re going to win!”

Winston nodded enthusiastically and backed out of the office. He didn’t tell the principal that he didn’t need to get his team together—he knew exactly who his teammates were going to be. All he had to do now was tell them. Winston took off running down the hallway.

 

THE NEXT PERIOD WAS
social studies, the one class he shared with Mal and Jake, his two best friends. The bell rang, and the hallway filled with kids. Winston ran as fast as he could through the crowd, weaving between groups of kids like someone in urgent need of a bathroom. That wasn’t the problem, but it sure felt like
something
might explode, if he didn’t tell his friends the exciting news.

When he reached the classroom, Mal and Jake were already sitting there, laughing about something. Winston started talking even before he reached them. He barely knew which wonderful thing to share first, and he wound up saying something like, “There’s a puzzle thing, and we can be the team! And all the money’s for the school!”

His friends gawked at him like he was insane.

“Was that English?” said Mal.

“I heard the word
puzzle
,” said Jake.

“There’s a surprise,” said Mal.

Winston took a breath, sat down at his desk, and tried again. This time he managed to tell the story in something resembling a logical order, though he had to speed up the ending a little as their teacher, Mr. Nelson, breezed in, shutting the door behind him.

Tossing his briefcase onto his chair, Mr. Nelson said, “All right, all right, the school year may be coming to an end, but this is still my time, and we have work to do.” There was a murmur of disapproval from Winston’s classmates but no real surprise. Mr. Nelson wasn’t one of those teachers who played games with the kids during the final week of school. He intended to teach them right up to the last bell on the last day. Indeed, if the bell system in the school ever broke down, Mr. Nelson would likely keep lecturing until the end of the world.

Winston tried to squeak in the conclusion to his story. He whispered, “And I can choose whoever I want for the team. You guys in?”

Mr. Nelson pegged him with a chilly stare. “Winston Breen, who should be speaking?”

Winston sat a little more attentively. “Not me,” he said.