Cold Cereal Read online

  “You look familiar,” Scott told Emily. After he’d registered at Goode Junior High, the school administrators had sent a welcome packet that included the last issue of the school paper. He recalled a photograph of kids with eggs—eggs in old footballs, eggs with parachutes and little plastic hang gliders—and among these a pallid little girl holding a geodesic globe of balsa sticks like it was a live pigeon. It was topped with a blur of whizzing propellers, and if you looked closely you could see the white egg at its center. “You were in the newspaper,” he added, “holding this thing.”

  “I called it the Ovothopter,” she told him. “It was for Egg Drop Day.” And when Scott stared back blankly, she explained that the eggs were all dropped from a local news helicopter over the baseball field. If your egg didn’t break, you won a prize. Emily’s didn’t.

  Scott smiled. “What was your prize?”

  “They didn’t give me one.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  Emily shrugged. “Technically my egg didn’t drop, so I was disqualified.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Scott’s first day of school happened to coincide with the arrival of a yellow scroll tied up with pink ribbon earlier that morning. It was just sitting there on the dining room table at Erno and Emily’s house, the first thing they saw when they came downstairs.

  Erno was a lean and rumpled kid—his clothes, which looked fine on their hangers, always looked on Erno as if he’d found them in the road on the way to school. He had bronze skin and chocolate-brown curls. Emily had milky-white skin and pinkish eyes. Standing side by side, they looked like a box of Neapolitan ice cream.

  Erno and Emily were twins, somehow.

  Erno frowned at the pink ribbon. “Maybe it’s just a birthday present,” he said. Emily lifted the yellow roll from the table and tugged at its bow.

  “Our birthday isn’t until the end of the month,” she said as the ribbon fell away and the pages unfurled in her hands.

  Two flimsy, canary-yellow papers—one for each of them, probably. Both had the same verse printed in dull black:

  WHERE DOTH THE CLAW OF ARCHIMEDES REST?

  IN YELLOW PAGES START THY QUEST.

  BY VETERANS DAY YOU SHOULD HAVE GUESSED

  THE KEY TO THIS, THY CURRENT TEST.

  “Oh boy,” said Erno.

  Emily looked up from her page, tilted her head. It was like you could see her thinking. In point of fact, the lightbulb in the wall sconce above her actually flickered on just then. Bad wiring.

  “That’s clever,” Emily whispered, smiling. Like she already knew the answer.

  “Like you already know the answer,” Erno scoffed. He told himself she must be bluffing, despite all historical evidence to the contrary. She looked over at him with an apologetic half smile.

  “I don’t know the answer. Not … not really.”

  There was an awkward silence, and Emily plucked absentmindedly at a wire of her facebow. Hers was magnificent headgear, if you were into that sort of thing. Orthodontia had sort of been invented in Goodborough, and the intricate curves and veiny filigree of Emily’s hardware suggested that the practice had flowered here into a kind of art form. Dentists routinely stopped her in the street, often in tears, and demanded to know who had done such beautiful work. Some doctor at Goodco, she’d tell them. She didn’t know the woman’s name.

  Erno watched Emily shrug and slip out of the room with her yellow page. He could hear her trying to sneak up the creaky stairs with it before Mr. Wilson came down for breakfast.

  They didn’t used to be so secretive about the tests. Or games—Mr. Wilson usually called them games, when he called them anything at all. They used to talk about them a lot. They used to loudly announce that they had to go potty, too, but you get older and some things become more private. The games were one of those things—you worked on them in private; you solved them in private; if you had the right answer, you expected some acknowledgment from Mr. Wilson to come privately, possibly when he wasn’t even around.

  Erno couldn’t remember the last time they’d played one of the games out in the open. Not during the Great Vocabulary Mix-up, and that had been five years ago. Not during the Prime Number Treasure Hunt. Nor the Geography Costume Contest. Nor Anagrammania.

  It felt a little like shame. But why? Why did people feel shame over things that everyone did? thought Erno, and he counted the games among these things because he assumed other families played them too. He had no idea how alone he and Emily were.

  Erno poured himself a bowl of Puftees and sat down with the curled yellow paper, the floor groaning under the weight of his chair. He wondered if he should Google the whole verse—their foster father didn’t usually write in old-timey language like this. Then the man himself walked through the dining room and into the kitchen, and Erno stuffed the poem into his lap.

  “Puftees,” Mr. Wilson acknowledged in passing. “How are they?”

  “Fine,” said Erno. “The same. Why, did you change them?”

  Mr. Wilson called from the kitchen. “There’s slightly more xanthan gum in the puff meal this quarter. Only in northeastern markets. You can’t tell?”

  “No. Should I … should I be able to tell?”

  “Not consciously, no.”

  Emily came back downstairs, poured herself a bowl of Puftees, and joined Erno at the table. “I’ll be a little late coming home from school, Dad,” she told Mr. Wilson. “I have an errand to run.”

  Mr. Wilson grunted.

  “Field trip today,” Erno reminded her. That morning the sixth-grade classes were visiting the Goodco factory—just as they had in the fifth grade, just as they had in the fourth and third.

  “I remember,” said Emily. “I’m containing my excitement now so I can really go crazy when we get there.”

  “Heh. Well, I just noticed you forgot to wear your Goodco Team sweatshirt.”

  Emily smiled. “And my big foam finger.”

  “I told Denton and Louis that I’d sit with them on the bus.”

  Emily’s smile faded.

  “They asked,” added Erno, “so…”

  Disappointing Emily was another thing that everyone did. They sat in silence for a moment as Mr. Wilson clattered about the kitchen. Then Emily pushed back her chair.

  “I just have to brush my teeth and take my eardrops,” she said, “and then I’m ready to go.” She was leaving without clearing her bowl. Erno supposed the least he could do was clear it for her.

  “You didn’t finish your cereal,” he called.

  “I don’t think I like Puftees anymore,” she answered. “Who can stand all that xanthan gum?”

  The Goodco Cereal Factory was housed in a humorless brick of a building attached to three generations of grain elevators. You could tell they’d tried to jazz up the main entrance in the 1980s with mascots and marshmallow shapes and a pink dragon, but now that every surface of these was bristling with metal spikes to discourage pigeons, the whole thing came off as kind of unfriendly. The children filed inside under the flaking arched neck of the Goodco dragon. And it was here that Erno noticed that his class was joined by a boy he’d never seen before. A new boy. He supposed the kid must have been around all morning.

  A field trip on his first day, thought Erno. That must be kind of confusing.

  The kids and their teachers crowded into a tiled lobby and were met by a young blond woman with preternaturally white teeth. She beckoned them to come stand before a large television screen that was cycling through a slide show of breakfast tables and cartoon mascots.

  “Hi, sixth graders! I’m Stephanie, and I get to be your tour guide today! Are you kids ready for a little bit of magic?”

  Erno and Emily shared a wry smile. They already knew that the “magic” included a lot of not talking and keeping your hands to yourself and watching men in shower caps attend to slow, slow conveyor belts. Breakfast Technicians droning on about cocoa stock and ricemeal density. Listening to people tell you for two days afterward
that your hair smells like corn. But it was worth it just to get the free admission coupon to Cereal Town that they handed you on the way out. Cereal Town was in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and was staffed almost entirely by polite, sixteen-year-old Amish kids. It was like living inside a commercial—floating down a river of milk on an oat bran inner tube or screaming through the loops of the Cereal Killer Koaster—and it was also just about the only fun outing Mr. Wilson ever took them on.

  The slide show faded, and a photo of the factory filled the screen. “The Goode and Harmliss Toasted Cereal Company,” said Stephanie, “was founded in 1858 by Nathan Goode and Jack Harmliss in their hometown of Goodborough, New Jersey.” Sepia-toned pictures of Goode and Harmliss drifted across the television. One was round faced and mustachioed and had hair that looked wet. The other was lean with bushy sideburns and hair that looked wet. Erno could never remember who was who. “Once just a small factory nestled between the Delaware River and Camden Tributary, today Goodco cereals are manufactured in fifteen countries and sold worldwide. But it’s still headquartered here in Goodborough, in the Centennial Building atop a man-made island in the center of Lake Meer.”

  Clover the Leprechaun appeared on the screen behind Stephanie, and she said, “Now, who recognizes this little scamp?”

  Sixty-five dutiful hands went up, though the question was at best a formality: Goodco had reams of market research to tell them that Clover was more recognizable to the average American than Gandhi, Elvis, and all the current Supreme Court justices put together. Stephanie told them this, in fact, and Erno imagined all the Supreme Court justices put together into some kind of giant superjustice. His attention was wandering.

  “But do you know that in the early days of television, Clover wasn’t a cartoon at all? He was played by a real little man on live TV!”

  The screen changed to a black-and-white clip from The Spencer Tracy Comedy Hour. The show didn’t break for a commercial; the camera just panned to another part of the stage where a group of pretty white children sat in a horseshoe around a tiny old man on a big plaster clover. He was dressed in a jacket and waistcoat with comically large buttons, a tricorn hat, short pants, and big-buckled black shoes. He looked as miserable as a dog in a Halloween costume.

  Each child had a spoon and a white cereal bowl with the label BRAND X written on its side.

  BLOND BOY

  Breakfast! The worst

  meal of the day!

  BLOND GIRL

  Why can’t we have a

  cereal that’s fun to

  eat?

  SECOND BLOND BOY

  And will help me to

  grow up big and strong

  like President

  Eisenhower?

  BRUNETTE GIRL

  A leprechaun!

  BLOND BOY

  Let’s steal his gold!

  LEPRECHAUN

  … Why ask for gold.

  How about a golden

  sweet cereal.

  BLOND GIRL

  Breakfast magic!

  BLOND BOY

  Burlap Crisp makes morning

  fun! Let’s eat!

  LEPRECHAUN

  I don’t care what you do.

  ANNOUNCER

  Burlap Crisp! A

  good cereal from the good

  folks at Goodco! There’s

  a Little Bit of Magic

  in Every Box!

  The screen resumed its slide show.

  “Clover didn’t seem like he wanted to be there,” muttered Allie.

  “That was his character,” said Stephanie. “Back then he was called Clover the Angry Leprechaun.”

  “How did they make the bowls change?” asked Dubois.

  “Camera tricks!”

  “But you said it was live.”

  “Oh my goodness!” said Stephanie. “What a treat—children, look behind you!”

  Erno didn’t have a good gauge of Stephanie’s enthusiasm yet, so when he turned, he half expected to see the Snox Rabbit or an actual coconut vampire and not a pair of middle-aged men in short sleeves and ties holding briefcases.

  “Wow,” Denton muttered. “That is something.”

  It sort of was something, though—one of these men was Mr. Wilson. Erno didn’t know the other one.

  Emily virtually sparkled beside him. “Dad!” she said. She waved her hand, then put it away again when the other sixth graders began to snicker.

  Mr. Wilson had the uncomfortable half smile of someone who was being forced to sit quietly while people sang “Happy Birthday” at him. He nodded and grunted some acknowledgment.

  “Children,” said Stephanie, “about twice a day two representatives come to take samples from each of the product lines so they can compare them to small batches of ‘perfect cereal’ back at headquarters! We never know quite when they’re going to show up. Gentlemen, don’t let us keep you from your very important duty!”

  Mr. Wilson and the other man proceeded through the lobby and through a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Stephanie ushered the sixth grade into a public hall and gestured to a long window that ran the length of the left wall. “Let’s just watch these men do what they do.”

  Mr. Wilson and the other man stood in a white room atop a grating while a Hydra of nozzles blasted them from every direction with compressed air. Mr. Wilson’s combover flapped festively and settled over the wrong ear. Kids snickered again and stole glances at the twins. After their decontamination the men stepped forward to select pink matte rubber suits off the wall. They pulled these on, complete with gloves and a hood with something like a diver’s mask in front. They still had their briefcases. They looked like marshmallow men going to work.

  Stephanie and the kids watched from behind a barricade as the marshmallow men stepped out onto the production floor and collected cereal samples in their briefcases. The conveyor belt operators in their shower caps and white smocks stood at crisp attention as the marshmallow men moved about. Erno could no longer tell which figure was Mr. Wilson until they both reentered the white room, removed their suits, handcuffed the briefcases to each other’s wrists, and left.

  Erno heard the new boy whisper “That was your dad?” to Emily.

  “Yes. Erno’s too.”

  Erno looked at the new boy, and the new boy smiled back. Then he lost him as the tour began moving again.

  They were back at school in time for lunch. Some days Mr. Wilson gave them money to buy their lunch, and other days, like today, he made them lunches himself. Erno had some money he’d earned by house-sitting for neighbors, and he hoped the school cafeteria was serving something he liked. Mr. Wilson made really terrible lunches.

  It so happened that they were serving pizza, or more accurately a kind of impersonation of it, as though the whole concept of pizza had been rather poorly explained to the cafeteria workers by people who’d only read about it in books and didn’t really like children much. Erno’s brown bag, on the other hand, contained a baloney salad sandwich, thick with mayonnaise and pickle. Bad pizza beats good baloney salad, he decided. After buying lunch he tossed his bag in a waste bin.

  It wasn’t easy to decide where to sit. Erno had joined Emily for lunch the day before, but he’d disappointed her on the field trip bus. And now he could see her there, at the big table in the corner, all alone with her baloney salad and orthodontic headgear. For years she’d had a friend named Jill, and things had been simpler: he would sit with Emily when Jill was absent, and occasionally when Jill wasn’t absent, so it wouldn’t be so obvious. But Jill’s family had moved to Michigan.

  “You sitting with Frankensister today?” Denton called loudly to Erno, so Erno sat down next to him if only so the boy would have no further reason to shout.

  “Frankensister love Erno,” moaned Louis. He did it at least once a day.

  Because one day Roger had remarked that Emily was pale like a vampire, and Louis had pointed out that her metal headgear made her more like a robot, and then it wa
s generally agreed without any help from Erno that the halfway point between a vampire and a robot was a Frankenstein. Which was why today and every other day Erno had to listen to the three boys make Frankenstein noises and wave their arms around.

  “Doesn’t even sound like her,” Erno muttered.

  “Lighten up,” said Denton. “Hey, did you guys see the new episode of Agent SuperCar last night? With all the explosions?”

  Roger and Louis had, and they immediately started talking loudly about it, quoting their favorite parts. Erno stayed quiet, thinking it best not to remind them once again that the Utz kids did not own a television.

  “And remember when Agent SuperCar said ‘Regular or unleaded?’” Denton shouted. “And then he sprayed the polar bears with gasoline and they all exploded?”

  “That was so great.”

  “Explosions are the best.”

  Erno ate his pizza and watched Emily across the cafeteria. Back when Jill had been around, Erno and his friends had had an unspoken arrangement: he let them make fun of Jill, and in return they didn’t make fun of Emily—not to her face, at any rate, nor his. But now these so-called friends had begun to circle Emily like hyenas. Erno realized with a start that he didn’t know what the deal was anymore.

  And as he watched Emily she turned—very suddenly, in fact, considering she didn’t have full use of her neck—and looked directly at Erno. She looked at him looking at her. After a moment her attention returned to a small slip of pink paper in her small, pink hands. She studied it as though it was a diabolical puzzle, which it probably was.

  “Oh,” Erno said softly. “Oh no.”

  Denton stopped speaking midsentence and faced him. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I’ll … be right back.”

  “Whatever. Free country.”

  Erno stood miserably and shuffled back to the garbage can in which he’d tossed his lunch bag and sighed. The can squatted there in the corner, short and fat and topped with a quivering mound of trash and half-eaten food. Breathing deeply (through his mouth), he rolled up his sleeve and plunged his arm into the mess, pushing wrappers and pizza crusts aside. He dug, ignoring banana peels and peanut butter and the insults his behavior was beginning to draw from the rest of the cafeteria crowd.