Cold Cereal Read online

  “Merle Lynn, C.P.A.,” he told her.

  “Here,” she said, and offered the bag.

  He sat down beside her. “Where did you get all this?”

  “It was my prize for winning the game. I saved some for you. There’s a lot of chocolate, and those peanut butter things you like. And a lot of gummi. You know how much I hate gummi.”

  Erno sat down beside her and reached into the bag. He took a peanut butter roll, and Emily ate a toffee.

  “Don’t people do their taxes in the spring?” he asked.

  “Dad was having the last seven years refiled. To see if he could get more money back. He cashed in a bunch of investments, too.”

  Erno nodded politely. Money stuff was beyond him. “How long ago did you solve it?”

  “The day I got suspended.”

  “Well. On Monday your suspension will be over, but Carla will still be ugly.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that,” said Emily, and she looked him in the eyes. “I’m ugly too.”

  Erno started to say “No you aren’t,” but Emily cut him short.

  “I’ve just been thinking about it, is all. Carla hurts people, but I think that’s all she has. That’s her thing. Making fun of her just makes her worse.”

  Erno’s face was hot. “Well, you made fun of her. You called her stupid.”

  “I know. I shouldn’t have.”

  Erno knew she was right, but he was a little sore from being lectured to by his sister. “For someone who understands people so well, you sure don’t know how to deal with them.”

  “I know,” said Emily. “I think that’s my thing.”

  She released a long sigh.

  “I’m so SICK OF SCHOOL!” she added, loud enough to send a flock of sparrows in the front yard out of their tree. “I wish we could just QUIT!” In that same moment, a lightbulb in the front room burned out, almost as if Emily had startled it.

  “You know,” she said quieter, a guilty look in her eyes, “sometimes I think we could. Quit. We already know more than the teachers do, anyway.”

  “Maybe you do. I don’t.” But Erno agreed that theirs was maybe not the most rigorous school. So much busywork, so many movies and field trips. “Do you remember that February when we celebrated Slacks History Month?” he asked. “I think that just started as a typo.”

  Emily looked at him imploringly. He could tell she wanted permission to say something. He could even roughly guess what it was.

  “I… I’m not trying to brag, or anything,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” said Erno halfheartedly.

  “It’s just … well, you know how much I read at home.”

  “Sure.”

  Emily glanced around, making sure the school’s spies weren’t listening in.

  “Well, I haven’t actually learned anything at school since the second grade. Not one thing.”

  Erno assumed she was exaggerating. But then he recalled Egg Drop Day, and Emily’s Ovothopter rising pluckily into the western sky as two hundred other eggs rained down like a biblical plague. Emily didn’t exaggerate; Emily was an exaggeration.

  “Everything they teach us is already in my brain,” she said, a look of haunted wonder on her face. Then she ate another candy. Erno stared at the candy.

  “That new boy, Scott—I think he thinks the games are kinda … weird. Kinda mean.”

  Emily swallowed hard so she could speak. “Mean?”

  “Yeah. The idea of Mr. Wilson making us compete against each other.”

  “What did you say?”

  Erno opened a little bag of gummi shapes. “I didn’t say anything really.”

  They were quiet for a while, eating candy. Erno broke the silence.

  “Where on Earth do you think Mr. Wilson found gummis shaped like the Greek alphabet?”

  “I think he made them himself,” Emily answered. “He does things like that, because he loves us so much.”

  They were quiet again. Then Emily rose, leaving Erno with the bag.

  “I think a lot of kids aren’t fortunate enough to have a dad who invents games for them,” she said as she marched up the stairs.

  By Veterans Day the Ovothopter was videoed as far west as Denver. Both Emily and the National Weather Service agreed that the egg would probably come down somewhere in the Rockies, and that it wasn’t worth the effort to go see if it had broken or not.

  CHILD ONE

  G-g-gosh, what a spooky old forest.

  CHILD TWO

  Look, a castle! Maybe we can stay the night.

  {The castle portcullis rises}

  ALL THREE CHILDREN

  It’s Kookie! The coconut vampire!

  KOOKIE

  I’m loco for coco!

  CHILD THREE

  And tomorrow morning we’ll enjoy the delicious taste of KoKoLumps!

  Part of this nutritious breakfast!

  CHILD ONE

  Don’t let him get our KoKoLumps!

  CHILD TWO

  Look! The sun’s coming up!

  ROOSTER

  Coco-doodle-doo!

  {Kookie crumbles to ash.}

  KOOKIE

  Ai ai ai! Curse you kids!

  CHILD THREE

  Crazy Kookie—vampires don’t eat breakfast!

  CHILD THREE

  KoKoLumps—another good cereal from the good folks at Goodco! There’s a Little Bit of Magic in Every Box!

  CHAPTER 7

  “Lucky,” said Polly at breakfast. It was a Tuesday, the last school day before Thanksgiving break. And for Scott it was barely a school day at all.

  “Maybe in a few years you’ll have Ms. Egami for homeroom,” he answered. “Maybe she’ll take your class to New York.”

  “Ms. Egami,” Polly sang. “Oh Ms. Egami, I love you. If only I were older, and not such a dork.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Hey,” said their mother as she entered the kitchen. “Don’t tell your sister to shut up.”

  “But she called me a dork—”

  “Maybe if you listened to her more she wouldn’t have to get your attention that way. And don’t call your brother a dork.”

  Polly said, “Sorry are you going to go out with Coach Steve again? He asked me to ask you after soccer practice, but he told me not to tell you he asked.”

  Mom gave a wincey little head bob. “I don’t know. He’s a very nice man.”

  “And good at soccer.”

  “That’s not as important to me as it is to you, honey. Honestly, there’s no point thinking about it now—we’ll see when I’m back from Antarctica.”

  Goodco was sending Mom on a scientific expedition. To Antarctica. Something to do with optical anomalies and strange waveforms—Scott didn’t really catch most of it, nor understand what, if anything, it had to do with breakfast cereal.

  “They should make a kids’ book about us,” said Polly. “They should call it Too Many Daddies.”

  Scott smiled weakly and stared into his oatmeal. Why did everybody always want to talk about everything?

  “Coach Steve isn’t your daddy,” said Mom.

  “It could be a lift-the-flap book. Daddy number one is on the television. Daddy number two is in the station wagon, driving away. Daddy number three is honking from the curb so he doesn’t have to ring the doorbell and talk to us.”

  “Oh, come on—do you mean Tim? I only went out with him twice.”

  “I’m going to go,” said Scott, rising so quickly that the table shook. “Sorry,” he added, and patted his napkin against a trickle of milk that had hiccupped over the side of his bowl.

  “It’s earlier than usual,” said Mom.

  “Yeah, but the field trip, remember? It’s today. We’re supposed to be on the bus and ready to go by—”

  “Right, right.”

  “And I’ll need a ride because we won’t be back until four thirty—”

  “I know,” said Mom. “I’m on it. See you then.”

  There had been a lot
of daddies. There was Daddy number one, Scott and Polly’s real father, but he’d left when Scott was five. They hadn’t seen him in years—not in person, at any rate. Afterward Mom remarried, divorced, and dated other men, some seriously, some not. Scott knew that other members of the family talked about her. There’d been talk as far back as her first wedding.

  A lot was made of the fact that she’d caught her own bridal bouquet. Picture her with her back to the bridesmaids and other single women, covering her eyes anyway, throwing the bouquet high—maybe too high—over her shoulder. Then the half-funny, half-serious shuffling of ladies’ feet, the just-kidding-but-not-really contact of elbows against ribs as each woman vied to catch the bundle and therefore maybe—who knows?—be the next to marry. But as Mom turned to watch the flowers fall, a gust of wind howled through the courtyard like the ghost of weddings future and buffeted the bouquet back into her open hands.

  Mom had laughed then; everyone laughed. Mom waved the roses for the crowd and laughed, but she didn’t throw them again. She kept the bouquet.

  Had she known? Had she known in her gut that she was marrying a man who would get famous and leave them? It made for a better story if she had, and Scott believed—without knowing he believed it—that a good story was truer than truth. And so he’d never asked.

  His father, John, hadn’t always been so famous. He was something called a triple threat—that meant he could sing and dance and act—and before Scott was born he had been trying to get someone in New York to pay him to do any combination of the three. Scott’s mom, Samantha, was working to support them both while John pursued his dream. They’d agreed he had five years with his dream before he had to get a real job and give her a chance to go back to grad school. He could feel the five years coming down on him like a slow curtain.

  Then Samantha got pregnant and started hinting that the plan needed a good looking at. If she finished her degree in physics, she could make real money. Not big money, maybe, but steady money. And so far John had only won a few small parts in commercials.

  It had been after one of these arguments that John retreated to the fire escape of their Brooklyn apartment.

  “That you, John?” came a voice from the landing above. John tilted back to look.

  “Hey, Diego.”

  “Another fight with your lady, eh?”

  “The same fight, actually. She’s given me a new deadline. Lord, I need a good part! A great character.” John exhaled, leaning back against the railing. “If I could play just one great character, I swear I’d name my firstborn after him. I’d tattoo his name on my chest.”

  “What roles are you up for?”

  “A kind of small but really juicy part in an off-Broadway play about the war; the lead in an all-singing, all-dancing version of the Scottish Play; and a meerkat.”

  “Scottish play?” Diego had said as John’s cell phone rang.

  What John had actually auditioned for was the leading role in the Shakespearean tragedy Macbeth. It’s the story of a Scottish general, and of his power-hungry wife, Lady Macbeth, and of their murderous plot to seize the throne. But actors are superstitious people. They’ll tell you it’s bad luck, for example, to rehearse on a Sunday. It’s bad luck to have real flowers onstage, or a mirror. It’s bad luck to say good luck. And they never say “Macbeth.” In conversation they usually refer to it as the “Scottish Play.”

  John was especially superstitious.

  “You’re kidding …,” he said into his cell phone. “If this is a joke, I swear I’ll … no, of course … so when do … okay, thank you, Steven! Thank you!” John finished, and closed his phone.

  “What was that all about?”

  “I should … I should tell Sam first,” John said with his eyes on the bedroom window. “Oh, well, she’s still mad at me—that was my agent! I got a leading role!”

  “Qué bueno!” said Diego, grinning down the stairwell. “Which one?”

  Scottish Play Doe was born at 4:13 a.m. on September 6. The ink was barely dry on his father’s new tattoo.

  Their whole lives, Polly and Scott had been under a general gag order not to tell anyone that their father was an actor and recording star. Polly was always a little itchy with this secret, and she’d been known to slip up on occasion—as she had at their previous school when she’d promised the other girls that her famous dad would get them all their own Nickelodeon series if they’d only make Polly captain of the soccer team. But a lot of the other players hadn’t believed her, and the captainship had gone to a girl whose mom brought cupcakes. It had been a rough campaign.

  Scott, for his part, had never had any trouble keeping his promise. He could tell; but then there’d be a lot of fake friends, birthday parties every weekend, people calling him on the phone … who wanted all that attention?

  Speaking of attention, Scott almost collided just now with a strip of police tape. Until today he’d been avoiding the shortcut through the park where he’d seen the imaginary rabbit-man, so now he was surprised to find the end of the storm drain surrounded by yellow bands and marked with orange cones. He had to dismount his bike to duck under the tape, and that was when he saw the unicat again.

  He glared at it. It glared at him. He glanced away and looked back, blinked a few times, gave the animal every opportunity to resume being an ordinary housecat; but it remained stubbornly fanciful. Scott sighed and walked his bike out of the pipe while the cat circled around, keeping its distance.

  “Give me a break,” he called back to it. “A unicat? That’s not even a thing.” Scott read a lot of fantasy books, and if his brain was going to hallucinate mythical creatures, he felt strongly that they should at least be something he’d heard of.

  And now he was going to get a migraine, of course. He fished out his pill case and found it empty. The pills were expensive, so he never carried more than one or two in there. He hadn’t refilled it after the last time.

  A headache and a two-hour bus ride. Outstanding.

  Scott was the first to arrive. The migraine was coming on slowly, but it was coming. He hung around the bus until the driver noticed him and called down through the doors.

  “You one of the New York kids?”

  Scott said yes.

  “This is your bus, then.”

  Scott sat down near the back and checked his permission slip for the third time that morning.

  “What you going to New York for?” the driver shouted back.

  “What?” said Scott. He’d heard the man fine but often said “What” reflexively when people asked unexpected questions. It gave him a moment to think.

  “I said, Why New York?”

  “We’re going to see a play. On Broadway.”

  “Is it Makin’ It? I saw that once.”

  “No. It’s called Oh Huck! It’s a musical Huckleberry Finn. We just finished reading the book, so…”

  “Uh-huh. I saw the original cast of Makin’ It, with Reggie Dwight and Ashlee Starr. My sister knows someone, got us tickets.”

  “That’s great.”

  Kids began filling out the bus. Erno and Emily squeezed into the seat next to him.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  “This is gonna be so cool,” said Erno. “Going to New York, I mean. Not the musical.”

  Emily gazed at Scott with a knowing look. Emily was all about knowing looks. “You’re getting a migraine,” she said.

  Scott nodded, very faintly.

  “You are?” said Erno. “Now? That sucks.”

  “A bus ride isn’t going to help you any,” said Emily.

  Ms. Egami charged up the steps.

  “Who’s ready to go to New York?!”

  Emily was right, as always. The bus ride made it so much worse. The drunken lurch of it sent the nausea slithering round and round his head and all through his insides. Under another set of circumstances he might have actually wanted to throw up—vomiting sometimes made the pain and the sick feeling go
away—but to throw up on the school bus? In front of his whole class? He’d have to change his name and move to another city. Again.

  Erno distracted him with talk of fantasy baseball and pretended not to see the way Emily stroked Scott’s hand so gently, so sweetly, it made Scott want to cry. He could almost have kissed her, if not for the very real danger that his vomit and her orthodontic headgear posed for them both.

  “Tell me,” said Scott, “how the new game is going.” Emily dropped his hand.

  A few days ago Erno had realized Mr. Wilson wasn’t using the letter E.

  It was the word flapjack that had tipped him off. You couldn’t help noticing a word like that, jostling past like a clown car. When Mr. Wilson had said, he’d realized something was going on. Mr. Wilson always said pancake.

  “Do you want an additional flapjack? Or bacon?

  If not, I’m going to want to wash your dish. Okay? Okay.

  Hurry up, now, you don’t want a tardy at school.”

  “I don’t understand what he’s doing now,” Erno told Scott. “You know he started by not using E’s for a while. Then it was R’s. Then he was using every letter again, but he wouldn’t say the word no. Turns out a person can only say nope or negatory so many times before it gets obvious.”

  “Right.” Scott sighed.

  “Then it was the word and, and then the letter M, then L, and E again. But now I have no idea. He’s definitely using every letter.”

  Emily sulked. Scott rubbed his neck.

  “Maybe he’s not using a number,” he suggested.

  “I thought about that, but how would you know? How would you know if someone was avoiding a number?”

  “You could just ask Mr. Wilson to count to ten or something,” said Scott. He was already sorry he’d brought it up.

  “Yeah,” admitted Erno, “except that we’re supposed to be more sneaky than that, when we’re working on the puzzles. We’re not supposed to be so blunt.”

  “We’re not supposed to talk about them, either,” Emily growled.

  A wad of paper sailed backward over rows of heads and seats to hit Emily in the shoulder. The three kids did their best to ignore it.