The Journal of Curious Letters (The 13th Reality #1) by James Dashner

black words. He reread the first letter from M.G., which seemed to be mostly an introduction to set things up. The most recent message said the first letter would reveal “magic words” he’d need to say on a special day, but he’d get to that later. One thing at a time.
    The first clue obviously told him the date of that special day—the day when he’d have to have solved the ultimate puzzle spelled out by the coming clues. He focused on the paragraph, reading it several times.
Mark your calendar. One week from the day before the day after the yesterday that comes three weeks before six months from six weeks from now minus forty-nine days plus five tomorrows and a next week, it will happen. A day that could very well change the course of your life as you know it.
I must say, I hope to see you there.
     
    As he read through it, he tried to visualize in his mind the stated time periods, adding and subtracting as he went. But by the time he got to the end, the words always jumbled up and fell apart inside his thoughts. He realized he needed to treat it like a math problem, solving it in sections until everything could be added together.
    He pulled out a pencil and drew parentheses around phrases that were easy to identify as a stand-alone period of time. Then he assigned letters to them to help him solve them in the most logical order. All the while, he knew he must be the biggest dork this side of the Pacific Ocean, but he didn’t care. He was just starting to have fun.
    He first attempted to figure out the clue from beginning to end, adding and subtracting time with each new phrase as it came in order. But he kept hitting a snag because of the words “before” and “six weeks from now” in the middle of the paragraph. The phrases seemed to split the timeline into two pieces and he realized he needed to work around them, not from first word to last word.
    After a half hour and lots of erasing and starting over, he copied the phrases and their assigned letters to a different sheet of paper. Then, using the Seattle Seahawks calendar that hung next to his bed (which also had a one page, year-at-a-glance section for this year and the next), he penciled in the dates as he figured them out. When he finished, he leaned back in his chair and took a look:
Beginning Date: Today, November 26.
A. –6 weeks from now = January 7
B. –6 months from A = July 7
C. –the day before the day after the yesterday that comes 3 weeks before B = 3 weeks plus 1 day before B = 22 days before B = June 15
D. –1 week from C = June 22
E. –D minus 49 days = May 4
F. –E plus 5 tomorrows and a next week = E plus 12 days = May 16
     
    He went over his math again to make sure he’d done it right, and was just about to put the calendar away, quite satisfied with himself, when he realized he’d missed the easiest and most important part of the clue. The beginning date.
    You idiot, he thought.
    Whoever M.G. was, he or she would have no way of knowing when people received the cryptic letters, much less when they would test out the first clue to figure out the
all-important date. Tick reread one of the lines from the first letter:
Beginning today (the fifteenth of November), I am sending out a sequence of special messages . . .
     
    November the fifteenth. Even before officially starting the messages, M.G. had provided the mystery’s first hint: the start date needed to solve Clue Number One.
    Tick quickly went through the calendar again, calculating three times what the date should be based on the new starting date, erasing and rewriting. Finally, confident that he’d solved it, his paper showed a different result:
              May 6
     
    At first, he worried that the results were only ten days apart when the beginning dates had been off by eleven, but after looking at the calendar three times, he determined it had to do with June only having thirty days.
    May sixth. The all-important date. Just over five months from now.
    Tick