by Adam Rex
“I wonder what happened to Arthur,” said Emily. As she listened to Merle, she was writing rapid lines across and down the yellow pad of paper. As Scott watched, she filled a page and flipped it over to start on the next. Archimedes was perched on a nearby lamp and appeared to be reading over her shoulder.
“I don’t know,” sighed Merle, and he looked down at his hands. “I don’t know what happened to Arthur. If I … if I killed him … well. He was gonna die anyway without some twenty-first century medical attention. Mordred stabbed him pretty bad.”
“But Nimue really trapped you in a cave?” said Erno.
“Yep,” said Merle, and he actually brightened at this change of subject. “Of course, I knew she was going to, ’cause I’d read the books. With all her powers, I couldn’t have stopped her from doing whatever she really set her mind to, but I could make sure she put me in the exact cave where I wanted to be put.”
“How could you do that?” asked Scott, but he didn’t sit down with the rest. Instead, he circled around them, eyeing the back stairs.
“Nimue wasn’t kiddin’ when she said the Fay like a good story. They think story’s the magic of the universe or some bull. So I checked out a bunch of caves around Avalon on my own and found one that had a good back door. Then when Nimue and me are walking one day, I point out the cave entrance and tell her this tall one about two ancient lovers who got closed up inside. There was no other way out, I tell her, and the cave became their tomb. Then I say—get this—I say, ‘What a chilling apparition I see there!’ So of course she asks, ‘What apparition?’ and I say, ‘Why, I see my own fetch (that is, a specter of my own death) above the door! But what harm could possibly befall me in Avalon when the Lady of the Lake herself is my consort? Ha ha!’ And Nimue laughs, too, but I can see it in her face: she’s just found my tomb. There’s no way she’s gonna trap me in any hole but that one, ’cause otherwise it’d ruin the joke. You know?”
Scott excused himself and left them still talking as he ascended the back stairs. He came up through the concrete floor of an enclosed porch that overlooked the scant and weedy backyard. Mick, Harvey, and Finchbriton were sitting on a vinyl sofa in front of an old television set.
“’Lo, lad,” said Mick. Finchbriton whistled. Harvey ficked his ears in Scott’s direction but otherwise didn’t turn away from the set. “We’ve been havin’ a long talk, the three of us.”
Scott had to take Mick’s word for it. To the casual observer it looked an awful lot like they were watching cartoons. “Everything okay?” he asked.
Mick shrugged. “It’s a lot to take in. An invasion. Saxbriton comin’. One o’ the Great Queens o’ the Fay, of the Seelie Court, doin’ the things she’s done.”
Scott nodded. “So … uh. Do you know what you’re going to do? Where you might go if you … go anywhere?”
“Think we need to stick together on this one,” said Mick. “An’ I still owe yeh.”
Scott shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything any—”
“I think we all of us owe one another somethin’. All the time, like. I think that might be the way t’ live,” Mick said as he turned his attention toward the start of another cartoon. “Honorable.Your da’s lookin’ for yeh, by the way.”
“I know. I’m going to send my mom an email first.”
“Shh,” shushed Harvey. “Thith ith the one where he’th a bullfighter.”
Scott left the room and walked back to the staircase in the center of the house. At the top of the stairs he heard a sound like whoop. After a pause he heard it again.
Merle had shown Scott a laptop he could use. Email had to go in and out through Archimedes for security’s sake, but at least this computer had a keyboard. Scott did not yet feel comfortable dictating personal letters to a superintelligent owl.
The laptop was in a mostly empty room in the corner of the house. So was John Doe.
“Thought I might run into you if I stayed in one place long enough,” said John.
“You have a sword,” said Scott just as John brought the blade of it down and around, slicing through the air. Whoop.
“Haven’t you heard? There’s this rumor going around that I might have to slay a dragon.”
Scott didn’t answer but thought privately that there must be some Knight Bachelor left who wasn’t an actor or a singer or some pampered billionaire.
“You know they found Sir Gordon Maris this morning, dead of a heart attack?” said John. “He was a jockey, years ago. Seventy-nine years old, no threat to anybody. I just saw him. And now he’s dead.”
Whoop.
“Merlin thinks I might be one of the last men knighted before Goodco replaced Her Majesty with two goblins in a queen suit,” John added, and Scott could see his father already starting to buy into the movie make-believe of it all. Already casting himself as the leading man.
Thing is, Scott had believed it, too, for a moment. In the dairy. He tried to remember the way that felt.
“I forgive you,” he said quickly. He’d had no idea he was going to say it until he said it.
John started, and lowered the sword to his side. “Oh … good. Um. For what exactly?”
“For, you know, running out on us. On me and Mom and Polly.” Polly herself appeared in the doorway, and Scott thought, Good. It’s probably better she hear this.
“Wait,” said John. “Run out on you? Scott, I never ran out on you. That isn’t what your mother told you, is it?”
Of course it was. Wasn’t it? It had been so long ago.
“He didn’t run out on us,” said Polly. Of course Polly would know the truth. She and their mother probably talked about it every other day. While eating ice cream and watching movies with lots of kissing. Scott wished he hadn’t brought it up, not like this.
“I went off to Toronto for eight days, to film a movie,” said John. “Treacherous Intentions, did you ever see it? No, of course not; it’s rated R. But I came home to find that your mother had moved out and taken you both with her. We’d been having problems….”
“Mom says it was a lot of little things,” said Polly. “Do you wanna hear them? Thing Number One: she—”
“Ah, you know something?” John interjected as he watched Scott’s face. “We don’t need to talk about this now. There’s time. I bet Scott only came up here in the first place to use the computer. That’s right, isn’t it?”
And just like that, John was Reggie Dwight, hero of stage and screen. “Yeah.” Scott sighed happily. “I have to email Mom.” John smiled at him. He smiled back. And was he actually getting teary now? No, of course not, that would be stupid, Scott thought, blinking his eyes. He coughed and sat down at the computer.
There was still the question of why his dad had never visited. Or why, with all John’s money, Scott didn’t own at least one speedboat. Nobody was off the hook or anything.
“Okay, remember,” said John. “Don’t tell your mum anything about all this.”
“I know.”
“She’s still down there working for Goodco; they need her, so maybe she’ll be safe if they think she doesn’t know anything—”
“I know. I mean—I know. Thanks.”
He had a couple emails from her, one from New Zealand and one from Antarctica. The last read:
Dear Scott,
Hope I hear from you soon. Are you mad I left? You know I wouldn’t ever leave you if I didn’t have to. You’re probably just very busy. Well, so am I! You would not believe Antarctica. It’s like another planet. I’ve seen lots of seals and skua. Remember we looked up skua? No penguins yet.
There’s this phenomenon down here called the Fata Morgana—it’s an optical illusion, like a mirage. It makes the horizon look smeared and distorted in a weird way, but otherwise it’s nothing special. Except there’s this strange spot where the Fata Morgana isn’t behaving like it should. That’s all I can tell you right now, but it’s very exciting. I haven’t even begun to understand these readings we’ve been taking.
/>
Write back soon. Be good to your father. Be even better to your sister—she loves you.
It’ll be January before you know it.
Love,
Mom
It made Scott feel sad and good in equal measures. He was pretty sure John had been reading over his shoulder, and trying to seem like he wasn’t. Scott turned his head slightly, and John set himself in motion.
Whoop.
They were going to have to flee Goodborough. Go into hiding while they made their plans. There had been some talk about a boat. Never before had Scott had so much to say and so little he could write.
Dear Mom,
I can’t wait to see pictures! Why don’t you start a blog where you can post a picture every day? Make sure you’re in it. Every day. Or else Polly will worry.
Sorry I haven’t written before now. You’re right, I’ve been busy. I won’t bore you with the details, which are boring. But I made some new friends. And visited a tree house. And saw a play. And learned about history. And about how commercials are made. They do a lot of it with stunt doubles, it turns out.
I’ll write more soon. I promise.
Love,
Scott
Whoop.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ADAM REX is the author of many books, including the New York Times bestselling picture book FRANKENSTEIN MAKES A SANDWICH, the middlegrade novel THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY, and the teen novel FAT VAMPIRE. He currently lives in Arizona with his wife. You can visit him online at www.adamrex.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors and artists.
OTHER WORKS
For middle grade
THE TRUE MEANING OF SMEKDAY
For teens
FAT VAMPIRE
CREDITS
Cover art © 2012 by Adam Rex
Cover design by Joel Tippie
COPYRIGHT
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
COLD CEREAL
Copyright © 2012 by Adam Rex
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rex, Adam.
Cold cereal / Adam Rex.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A boy who may be part changeling, twins involved in a bizarre secret experiment, and a clurichaun in a red tracksuit try to save the world from an evil cereal company whose ultimate goal is world domination.
ISBN 978-0-06-206002-0 (trade bdg.)
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN 9780062060044
[1. Cereals, Prepared—Fiction. 2. Magic—Fiction. 3. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. 4. Twins—Fiction. 5. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B26615Co 2012 2011019538
[Fic]—dc23 CIP
AC
11 12 13 14 15 CG/BV 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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1 A wealthy family with millions in orthodontic hardware. They owned most of Goodborough, and indeed the town was named for the legendary family patriarch Zachariah Terribull Goode, who had made a name for himself fashioning complicated headgear for the punishment of indecent women. Dentists coveted these devices as well, and soon the Goode Ortho-dontical Emporium was born.
2 Older readers may also remember Clover the Angry Leprechaun, who was discontinued from boxes of Burlap Crisp in 1962.
1 In recent years the Sickle has become more symbolic than the Freemen Founders could ever have imagined: natural cereal grains have been almost entirely replaced in Goodco products by vat-grown imitation grain meals such as Gorn, Weet, Noats, and Gorn-Free, the Gornless Gorn substitute.
2 The most common include the “Eye of the Dragon” (pink, usually surrounded by blue flame), a red octagon (which marks the beginning and end of a journey), a cow with a beehive for a hat (representing Nature’s bounty), an apron (service to a higher purpose), and a large, radiant G (for Goodco).
3 The Initiate will not be permitted to bring snacks before his third month of membership. The snacks must include a nondairy option for those who have trouble with milk.
