Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (2 page)

“Me? Lucky how?”

“You’re going on a field trip,” Polly reminded him. “On your first day of school. The girl down the street with the cool bike told me that
my
class is doing the president’s Physical Fitness Test.”

Scott understood. Privately he thought the president should mind his own business about how many chin-ups everyone could do, but his mom was always getting after him to set a better example for his sister.

“It’ll help you make a good first impression,” he told her, borrowing a phrase they’d been hearing from Mom a
lot this past week. “Because you’re so good at sports.”

“Well …,” said Polly. “Well, you’ll probably impress everybody in dork class with your dorkness.”

“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, “
Sor
ry are you going out with Daniel tonight? Are we having videos and scrambled eggs and—”

“I don’t need a sitter,” said Scott.

The look on Mom’s face brought them both up short. “I … won’t be seeing Mr. Trumbull anymore,” she said. “But we can still have video night. Yeah?”

So he was Mr. Trumbull again, thought Scott, and he knew his sister thought it too. He wasn’t to be called Daniel now. Soon Scott would forget the man’s name, just like what’s-his-face. A pall fell over the kitchen, an unscheduled Moment of Silence.

Polly broke the silence, but then she usually did. “Is it because we moved? It’s only ten miles.”

“No, no. Things had been building toward this for a while. Leaving Philadelphia was just the … last straw, you know?”

For a while it seemed impossible to say anything but the wrong thing. Leaving Philadelphia and their old school behind had been sort of a last straw for Scott, too. But it was a curious requirement of Mom’s new job at Goodco that she live in the company’s town of Goodborough, New Jersey, alongside all its other employees.

He raced his last few cereal puffs around in the milk with his spoon. “It’s not ‘dork class,” he said finally. “It’s called Project: Potential.”

“Yeah. That’s much better.”

Scott glanced at the clock. “I have to go,” he said, rising from the dinette.

“It’s kind of early still,” said Mom. “This school starts later than your last one.”

“I know. But I wanted to get there before the other kids to … meet my teacher and stuff.”

Polly dork-coughed into her hand.

“That’s a good idea,” Mom said, smiling. “See you tonight.”

Three schools in three years
, thought Scott as he pedaled through the crisp November air.
They should give me a punch card. Five schools and I get a free soda
.

He steered toward the local park, down the storm drain shortcut he’d discovered yesterday, dodging broken glass and a man with a rabbit head, up the embankment
toward the gap in the fence and was that a man with a rabbit head? Scott braked hard, grinding a black snaking skid behind him. The rabbit-man stopped, too, and looked back. His tweed pants and white dress shirt were creased and dirty. His necktie was askew. His rabbit head was a rabbit head.

Around the rabbit-man the air looked vivid and alive.

“Hey! Kid! Thtop! Thtay there!” He picked his way back through the garbage and glass on big rabbit feet and rushed toward Scott, who tensed and tried to stand up on his pedals to get away; but there was no time. In an instant he had a five-foot-tall rabbit-man all up in his face.

“You’ve got to
help me
!” said the rabbit-man in a throaty warble. “Hide me!”

“Um—”

“They’re coming! I don’t want to go back! I don’t
want
to go back!”

Scott dismounted and let his bike clatter to the ground. He stepped backward, stumbled, and fell against the grassy hillock behind him, and the rabbit-man pressed close.

“Okay, calm down,” he said. “Everybody calm down. Nothing to be afraid of. What I need…”

“Y-yes?”

“… ith for you to take me to your houth…”

“What?”

“… and
hide
me … in your
bayth
ment.”

Scott was leaning back as far as he could without falling over, his chin against his chest, breathless. When he finally inhaled, he smelled sweater and cookies.

“You’re not real,” he said softly, closing his eyes. “You’re imaginary. You are a … neurological event.” And sure enough, when Scott opened his eyes, the rabbit-man was gone.

No, there he was. A little ways off now, running toward the drainpipe again on his swift, imaginary legs.

“THTUPID KID!” shouted the rabbit-man, and he disappeared into the pipe.

The things he passed shimmered and changed. The air itself seemed to flinch and shiver at his touch. Dead leaves uncurled and flushed with new life; broken glass appeared, for a moment, to be bright jewels; a stray cat was a unicat.

Scott blinked and looked again, but it was only a cat, of course. What had appeared fleetingly to be an animal with a single spiraling horn in the center of its forehead was merely a smoky gray housecat, thin and twitchy and watching Scott with blue-green eyes. Then it suddenly and theatrically began to clean itself in that way cats do when they want you to know what a big deal you aren’t. Scott whistled to get its attention, but the cat turned its back to him and licked its paw with such ferocious indifference
that he soon gave up and pushed his bike into the park.

“Not today,” he whispered as he walked. “Come on. Please.”

A large white van was creeping through the soccer field, right over the grass, and the man in the passenger seat studied Scott through tinted goggles. Rose-colored glasses, actually. Scott kept his eyes on the horizon and breathed great mouthfuls of calm air.

Thirty minutes wasted, and now he fidgeted in his orange plastic chair. He hated the first day at a new school. Around him other kids were chattering, excited about the field trip maybe, staring at Scott like he was a brightly colored fish, describing their weekends. But Scott only watched the empty chair at the front of the room and nervously traced his fingertip through the grooves of a swear word carved into his desktop. Some former student had left it there, maybe years before, but it pretty well summed up his feelings. The word could have been a jittery neon sign buzzing inside his chest as he waited for the new teacher to arrive.

And now he was getting a headache, of course. Of
course
. Perfect.

Specifically, he got migraine headaches, which was a useful thing to know—the word didn’t mean much to most of the other kids, but from their parents it drew
gasps and unexpected charity. Once at parent-teacher night the mother of a fifth grader had become so flustered by the word that she’d given Scott five dollars.

He’d get a pain behind his eye, another at the base of his skull and down his neck. And then there were the hallucinations, the seeing-things-that-weren’t-there.

“We call them auras,” a doctor had told him and Mom. “A lot of people get them before getting a migraine. Not all, but a lot. I understand they can be scary, but they’ll be a signal that it’s time to take one of these pills I’m going to prescribe for you.”

In the present, in class, Scott fished a small pill case out of his pocket and removed a white triangular pill. He took it without water and felt it draw a bitter chalk line down his throat.

“What happens to other people when they get these auras?” Mom had asked. Scott understood that what she’d really wanted to know was if anyone else claimed to see a mermaid in the community pool, like Scott had the week before.

Some people saw strange lights, the doctor had told them, or distorted shapes. Zigzagging lines. Some even smelled odd smells or heard things. It was different for everyone.

In the end Mom had left it alone.

The pills usually worked. Scott prayed they would work against the nauseating tendrils that were just now beginning to twist themselves through the back of his neck.

And now the door opened and there she was, a petite woman with a mess of papers in her hands and a pencil sticking out of the bun in her black hair. By the end of the day there would be three pencils in that bun and Scott would think she was pretty, but for now he only frowned and thought,
Where were you? I got here a half hour ago to tell you about my name, so where were you?

“Sorry I’m late,” Ms. Egami said to the class. She dropped her papers, which scattered in that special way papers do when one is running late. She gathered them as the briefly quiet students began to stir as if someone were gradually raising the temperatures of their desk chairs. “Quiet down,” she said, and produced the class list to call roll.

This is it
, thought Scott.

“Brett Adamson?” said Ms. Egami.

“Here.”

It’s not as if I’m at the end of the alphabet
, Scott thought, chewing his lip.
I get called almost right away, when everyone’s still paying attention
.

“Jamie Cassanova?”

“Here.”

Probably next
.

“David Christiana?”

Okay, next then
.

“Here.”

“Sco—Scottish Doe?”

Kids all around him were snickering, looking his way, whispering comments to each other behind their hands.

“Here,” said Scott.

“Is that right?” asked Ms. Egami. “‘Scottish’?”

More snickering. Giggling, even.

“I prefer Scott,” he said. Not that it mattered. They’d been told that his real name was Scottish, and it would take them the whole rest of the year to forget it.

“Wow,” said Ms. Egami. “Scottish Doe. Scottish P. Doe.”

Scott flinched. There were middle initials on the roll?

Now she’s going to ask
—

“What does the
P
stand for?”

Laughter was batted back and forth like a squeaky balloon as the kids shared their private thoughts about what the
P
did or should stand for.

“That’s enough,” Ms. Egami said to the class, but she was obviously new to teaching and hadn’t yet learned how to scold and make it stick. It was only a second before the balloon was in play again. This had to end.

“PAUL,” Scott said, a little too loud. “The
P
stands for Paul.”

The
P
might as well have stood for “pin” or “porcupine” the way it took the air right out of the balloon. The class was silent. There was nothing funny about the name Paul and never would be.

“Oh,” said Ms. Egami, and she sounded almost disappointed. “Paul. For a second I thought it might be … something else.”

“No.”

“Oh, well. Right. Allie Fabares?”

“Here.”

The roll call went on, and Scottish Doe, whose middle name was not Paul, exhaled slowly and sat back in his seat.

Three sixth-grade classes crammed into one big yellow bus for the field trip to the Goodco Cereal Factory, so when Scott stepped up and through the doorway, he found that most of the seats were occupied by kids who already had all the friends they needed or would ever need. Except for a seat right up front, on which sat one very small and delicately pale eggshell of a girl. And exactly no one else.

Scott glanced around the rest of the bus. He caught a few students looking his way and mouthing “Scottish” to
their neighbors, as well as some shorter, sharper words that seemed just now like the clacks of locks or the clicks of closing doors. He could walk down the aisle of this bus like the stranger-come-to-town in a cowboy movie and watch all the locals hide behind shutters and rain barrels. Or he could just sit down next to the girl nobody liked and take his cooties like a man. He sat down next to the girl.

She flinched. Quickly made and then broke eye contact. In that moment Scott could see that her eyes (which, years later, her driver’s license would claim were brown) were really very nearly pink. Her hair was as thin and blond as corn silk. She was not short or skinny so much as small, tiny boned. Her head was wired with orthodontic headgear, such that she looked to Scott a little like a lab mouse caught in a trap. Which she was, in a way, but we’ll get to that.