Free The Gollywhopper Games by Jody Feldman Page B

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, Iwould 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