Cold Cereal (The Cold Cereal Saga) (35 page)

Scott reached over and turned it off.

REGGIE

Hello! I’m Reggie Dwight, and I’m visiting the good folks at Goodco to see how they make new Peanut Butter Clobbers™!

Ow
.

Um, there are peanut buttery bumpers! And melt-in-yourmouth strawberry milk bubbles in every box of Peanut Butter Clobbers™.

REGGIE

OW!
Is that going to happen every time I say “Peanut Butter Clobbers™”?

I think that one was a man. (cough) Okay. This … um … cereal not only combines the great taste of peanut butter and strawberry milk, but it’s also chock-full of IntelliJuice™, the magic juice that makes you smarter! I wish I’d had some before agreeing to do this commercial.

Hey! So, uh … try new Pea … try this cereal here.

And wash it down with new Strawberry ThinkDrink™! It’s the punch with punch!

VOICE-OVER ANNOUNCER

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

The van and the Citroën skidded to a stop in the vast but empty Goodco factory parking lot. It was still a holiday weekend, Scott supposed. He realized in a detached and foggy sort of way that he didn’t have any idea what day of the week it was. He took off at a run toward the entrance, with its Freemen icons and spiky mascots.

“Wait, what’re we doin’?” shouted Mick. “Just blowin’ through the front door?”

“There’s no time for tricks!” Scott shouted.

“I’ll wait in the car,” said Harvey.

Mick narrowed his eyes. “Finchbriton, why don’t yeh stay an’ keep our Harvey company? See that he don’t get lost.”

Scott paused at the entrance, and he was relieved to see the others fall in behind him. They all crashed through the double doors together and into the lobby, ran past
the TV screen and down the hall to the factory floor to find … a commercial shoot.

“Hey,” said Scott’s dad. He wore a pink shirt and white pants and a pleased smile on his handsome face. “You came after all. And you brought … friends!”

Assuming that his dad could see Mick, Scott could hardly imagine what he thought of this crowd of gatecrashers. Add a couple of puppets, and they would have looked like a children’s television program.

“I’m afraid you’re a trifle late, though,” his dad added. “We just wrapped. Got it in only three takes!”

“You nailed it, Reggie!” said a seated man in a baseball cap.

“Oh, please. It was good planning. I just read the lines and hit my marks.”

There were people all around the huge room, and they all chuckled good-naturedly. Five of them were dressed like the Queen of England. The rest stood beside a big camera on wheels, or next to any number of spotlights on tripods, or by the factory machinery, holding a long pole with a microphone on the end of it.

“Um,” mumbled Scott. “Guys, this is my dad, John. Or Reggie. Should they call you Reggie?”

“As long as they don’t call me sir,” John joked. “Sir is my father’s name.” More laughter.
Adults laugh a lot
, thought Scott,
even when nothing’s funny
.

He drew close to John. “Where’s Polly?” he asked.

“Oh, around. She wanted to explore. Do you want to see the commercial?”

John was grinning a lot. Too much? Was he trying to tell them all was not well?

Scott’s gang gathered around the camera. Mick whispered, “Maybe I should go find your sis. Get outta here while the gettin’s still good.”

“Um, I don’t know,” Scott whispered back. “Let’s not all get separated yet.” Maybe they were holding Polly captive, he thought. Maybe the crew all had guns and threatened to kill her if John didn’t play along.

“This is hilarious,” Erno announced as he watched the camera’s small display. “The internet’s gonna love it.”

“There’s a lot of punching in it,” Emily whispered to Scott. “Might explain the sounds we heard in the van.”

Scott, for his part, was barely listening. He wasn’t watching the camera screen. He was staring at John Doe, waiting for a sign, some secret message encoded in the dots and dashes of his eyes. But his dad was no longer looking at him. He appeared to be looking everywhere but: at the camera, at Erno and Emily, at Merle, at the commercial crew who no doubt had equipment to put away and lives to get on with but who nonetheless lingered, watching. And then John did something wrong. Afterward Scott couldn’t have told you just what that something was: a
twitch, a tilt of the head? But while Scott would never have admitted this to Erno or Polly or even to himself, he had made a great study of John Doe. John Doe was his life’s work. He’d watched, with fake nonchalance, every movie, every music video, every online interview. From a thousand photographs he knew the cleft in John’s chin, the cut of his teeth, the exact former site of the neck mole that John had had removed in the fall of the previous year. He knew the back of his hand like the back of his hand. And this man was not his father.