Ms. Pennypickle's Remarkable Road Race

Chapter 1

When it comes to speed puzzling, my dad and I are almost unbeatable.

Because we’re a super tight team. We don’t need anybody else on our squad, either. He’s Jack. I’m Jackson. Yep. Even our names are tight.

The object of speed puzzling is—­you guessed it—­speed! Whoever finishes the assigned jigsaw puzzle first wins.

“You ready, Jackson?” asks Dad. He’s holding our pickle-­green drawstring bag. Inside is the same puzzle everybody else will discover in their bags.

“Ready.”

Suddenly, there’s wild applause.

The Spanish team just showed up. They call themselves Los Anónimos—­The Anonymous Ones. A pair of dark-­haired, stubble-­faced, twenty-­something dudes in hoodies and Ray-­Bans. They never say much, and they look supercool doing it. They also have their own YouTube channel.

At the World Competition in London, the Spaniards put together a one-­thousand-­piece puzzle in less than forty-­five minutes. It took the runners-­up an hour and a half. If you watch a video of Los Anónimos piecing together a puzzle, you’ll swear it was shot using time-­lapse photography. They move at 6x speed.

“Their puzzle is made out of cardboard, just like ours,” says Dad when he catches me side-eyeing our new competition. “They need to put it together one piece at a time, just like we do.”

My dad is usually much better at coming up with snappy stuff to say.

He even owns his own advertising agency. His biggest client is Ms. Penelope Pennypickle, “America’s premier puzzle maker.” Jigsaw puzzles are her biggest seller. That’s why Dad and I signed up for this pairs competition at Chicagoland’s “Pennypickle Speed Puzzling Competition.”

Ms. Pennypickle herself is not attending the competition. Dad says she’s something of a recluse. That means she stays home a lot.

Technically, Dad and I can’t win because if you listen to the blah-­blah legal stuff in any commercial for a contest, right after “no purchase necessary” and “void where prohibited” you’ll probably hear something like “employees of Pennypickle Puzzles and its advertising agencies or their family members” are not eligible to win diddly.

So, we play for pride. We play for bragging rights. We play because, like I said, we’re a team.

There must be two hundred people in this hotel ballroom. A few kids like me. Mostly young adults and older folks. One hundred two-­person teams. We’re all waiting for the lady with the microphone to bop her timer and tell us to start.

Dad rubs his scruffy red beard.

I nervously finger-­twirl my shaggy red hair. That’s right. We’re both gingers. Two peas in a pod. If, you know, peas were orangish instead of green.

We stare at the drawstring bag on the table in front of us.

“On your marks,” says our host through her microphone. “Get set.”

I limber up my fingers.

“Go!”

Dad undoes the drawstring and pulls out a shrink-­wrapped box.

I see the top.

Our finished picture will be a cluster of rainbow-­spotted dalmatians standing in the snow. There’s more than 101 of them splattered across three hundred pieces.

Dad is poking at the plastic wrapping, trying to find a seam.

Meanwhile, Los Anónimos have already dumped all their pieces out of the plastic bag that was tucked inside the box that Dad is still struggling to open.

“Got it!” he announces when the film is finally torn free.

He’s about to lift the lid when Emily, his senior vice president in charge of client services, races over, nervously clutching a green envelope.