The Stolen School Calendar 📅

The Longest Week Ever

It was a Sunday. It was also a school day. That was the problem.

Nineteen days ago, the big school calendar vanished from the office wall. Not the little ones on desks, the BIG one, the official one, the one with the sticker that said THIS IS THE ONLY CALENDAR THAT COUNTS. Without it, nobody could prove which days were weekends.

"If it isn't on the calendar," said Principal Bellweather, "then it isn't a day off. Rules are rules." And so school ran on Saturday. Then Sunday. Then Saturday again. The bell rang every morning at 7:58, and the kids of Ms. Pain-Quinn's class dragged themselves in with the faces of very tired raccoons.

"I have forgotten what my bed looks like," said Larry, who was eating cereal out of his hoodie pocket.

"I saw a Saturday once," whispered Selena. "It was beautiful."

Calvin had started counting the days on his arm in marker. He was up to his elbow. Geo had built a small calendar out of erasers, but Principal Bellweather said eraser calendars \"lacked authority.\"

Lucy slammed her hands on the desk. "That's it. Somebody STOLE that calendar, and I bet they left clues. We are going to find them, decode them, and get our weekends back."

Ms. Pain-Quinn looked up from her coffee, which was her fourth. "You have my full support," she said, "and this box of codes I found taped under the office fish tank." She slid a shoebox across the desk. Inside were seven folded notes. Every one of them was written in a different secret code.

Larry pulled a spoon out of his other pocket. "Detectives," he said, "let's decode."

The first note was smudged with something orange. Cheese dust. "Whoever wrote this," said Geo, sniffing it like a professional, "eats cheese puffs at a very high level."

Selena recognized the code right away. "Caesar shift. Every letter got pushed 3 spaces forward. We push them 3 back."

"These aren't letters," said Larry. "These are little boxes and dots. Somebody drew a tiny pigpen on my tray."

"It IS pigpen," said Lucy. "The shape of each symbol tells you which box the letter lives in. Dots mean the second set of letters."

Calvin wiped ketchup off the corner. "There's a word here. And it smells like gym socks."

Note #3 was just ones and zeros. "The printer did this," said Geo. "The printer is 40 years old and only speaks robot."

"It's binary," said Selena. "Computers write letters as ones and zeros. Each group of 8 is one letter. We match the groups to the key."

Larry stared at it. "Only three letters. The thief was in a hurry. Or the printer ran out of ones."

The fourth clue was a voice memo on the office answering machine. It was just beeps. Short beeps and long beeps, over and over, with someone breathing heavily in the background like they'd just run up the stairs.

"Morse code," said Lucy. "Dots and dashes. Selena, you take the dots. Calvin, dashes. Larry..."

"I'll take the breathing," said Larry.

Geo found the fifth note in the gym, taped to a red dodgeball. The dodgeball had a face drawn on it. The face looked smug.

"Backwards alphabet," said Selena, squinting. "A becomes Z, B becomes Y. You flip the whole alphabet."

Calvin threw the dodgeball. It bounced off the wall and hit Larry. Larry said it was fine. Larry was lying.

The sixth note was folded inside the 1994 Spelling Bee trophy, which nobody had touched in thirty years except to dust it, and nobody dusted it.

"Rail fence," said Lucy. "The letters were written in a zigzag on two rails, then read off row by row. To decode it, split the message in half. The first half is the top rail, the second half is the bottom rail. Then zigzag: top, bottom, top, bottom."

Larry blinked. "Say that again but slower."

Lucy said it again but slower. It's in the key below.

The last clue arrived as a text message that was only numbers. "Old phone code!" said Geo. "On an old flip phone, every number key has letters. Press 2 once for A, twice for B, three times for C."

"How do you know that?" asked Selena.

"My grandma texts exclusively in this," said Geo. "It takes her four minutes to say hi."

Calvin cracked his knuckles. "This is the thief's NAME. I can feel it."