Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (9 page)

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
.

“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.

“I mean,” Erno continued, “what if Mr. Wilson stopped saying
robot
, or …
esophagus
? It could be years before we—”

“Stop TALKING about it!” Emily shouted, spitting just a little involuntarily.

She’d been too loud. Even
her
tiny voice had carried, and kids in the bus turned to look. A single incident of fighting had given Emily a reputation, and now everyone waited for her to lunge across the seat and start chewing on someone.

“What’s going on, Erno?” she continued, quieter. “The
games have been working just fine for ten years, and now you’re breaking rules just because Scott thinks they’re weird?”

“It’s not that big a deal, Emily—”

“Oh no? No? Do you think Dad will agree? What do you think will happen when he finds out you’ve been getting help?”

“What difference does it make, anyway?” Erno steamed. “You always solve every puzzle first. No wonder you like them so much.”

Emily’s frown dissolved, and now she just looked hurt. Scott resisted the urge to tell them both to shut up and let him die in peace.

Finally they reached Manhattan, and then the Port Authority Bus Terminal, and then a spot outside some Port Authority restrooms where Ms. Egami asked if anyone had to go and Scott raised his hand so energetically he heard his back crack.

He rushed into a narrow stall and was punched in the nose by the smell. The toilet showed signs of having been visited by either a very large man or a very small horse, but Scott didn’t feel he had the time to be picky. He spun out enough toilet paper to vandalize a house and carefully cleaned the seat.

Dizzy, he nearly dropped his backpack to the floor,
then got a closer look at the floor. Instead he looped it over a hook on the stall door and then a great vinegar wave crashed over him and his knees gave and he gripped the seat and sputtered his breakfast into the bowl.

A minute later he flushed and turned.

Afterward, he’d realize he didn’t think about it at all—when he saw the hand appear over the top of the door and reach for his bag, Scott lunged forward and seized it at the wrist. The tiny wrist, attached to the tiny hand on an arm like a doll’s. A real ugly doll made from dried fruit and old footballs.

The hand squirmed. Scott looked down beneath the stall door for the thief’s feet. There were no feet. Scott considered his options, and so did the thief.

“Well now, son,” said the thief in a voice that was both high and coarse, like a kazoo. There was something a little foreign about it too.
Australian, maybe, or Irish?
“It seems you’ve got me. So wha’ d’yeh suppose you’ll do with me?”

Still holding the tiny wrist, Scott unlatched the door and opened it just enough to poke his head around. It was a tiny man, this man who was trying to take Scott’s bag. He couldn’t have been more than two feet tall, with a miniature red tracksuit and his arm hooked over the top of the stall door. His tiny old-man face was pug nosed and underbitten like some overbred kind of dog, and it seemed puckered with sadness. Not to mention oddly familiar. If it wasn’t for this familiarity, and for the feel of the man’s arm in his hand, Scott would have mistaken him for another aura.