“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.
“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.
“Yeh don’ happen to have somethin’ to eat, do yeh, lad?” the little man asked. “I’d be in your debt. ’Tis always a blessing to have one o’ the Good Folk in your debt.”
Scott glanced around the restroom. Men and boys were coming and going, but none were paying any attention to what he considered to be a fairly unusual tiny-man-hanging-on-a-toilet-door situation. That’s New Yorkers for you, he supposed.
“Except when it’s not a blessing, yeh know,” the thief continued. “Speakin’ fair, the blessings o’ the Good Folk can be worse than the curses.”
“You could have just asked in the first place,” Scott muttered. “You didn’t have to try and steal my bag.”
“Asking is begging. Pitiful. Want to punch myself in the eye for even tryin’ it. Stealin’ is good, honest work,” said the thief, puffing out his chest.
“Well, not honest, strictly speaking,” he admitted, after a moment. “Or actually good.”
They were interrupted by Denton Peters, who barged through the men’s room door, shouting Scott’s name like it was a swear word.
“I’m right here,” said Scott.
“Ms. Egami wants to know what’s taking so long,” said Denton. “You got the squirts? Should I tell her you have a bad case of the squirts?”
“No! I’m just … this guy was trying to steal my backpack.”
“Yeah? And you’re scared he’s gonna come back?”
Scott gaped at Denton.
“Need yeh to let me go now, son,” the thief said to Scott.
“Are you telling me you can’t see the … little … guy hanging here?” Scott asked Denton.
Denton frowned in the little man’s general direction, and then Scott thought he saw a flash of recognition on the boy’s face. He’d seen something. Denton Peters squinted, titled his head, crossed his eyes like he was trying to cope with an optical illusion.
“I can … sorta see,” he whispered.
“Just sorta?”
“He’s like a mirage.”
What Denton Peters saw next was a sort of prismatic blur, and then Scott jerked back his arm, yelping with pain. Scott pushed past him and scowled into the distance.
Denton followed his gaze to the men’s room door.
“Uh … what just happened?”
Scott unhooked his backpack. “Your mirage bit my hand.”
Oh Huck! seemed like kind of a lousy musical, but Scott supposed he might have been in the wrong mood.
His migraine vanished shortly after leaving the bus terminal, but on the way to the theater Denton staunchly denied having seen anything unusual in the men’s room apart from the new kid hiding from imaginary elves. Denton had by this time already forgotten Scott’s name, however, and most of the other kids didn’t know who he was talking about, and Scott had hidden behind Carla Owens until it all blew over.
Scott was quiet as they returned to the bus terminal through the toy store dazzle of Times Square.
“I just don’t think they should have made the raft a separate character,” said Emily.
“Riff-Raft?” said Erno. “But she’s the narrator. She told you what was going on.”
“Mark Twain didn’t need a talking raft in the book. Or a rapping scarecrow.”
“Scott, tell my sister that everything doesn’t have to be exactly like the precious book.”
Scott started. “What?”
“You’re still upset,” Emily told him. “About Denton teasing you.”
“No. No, I’m fine.”
“Forget about it,” said Erno. “Everyone else has.”
The thing is, they probably had. Scott was nothing if not forgettable.
Back at the Port Authority there was some sort of situation. Two flashing police cruisers were up on the sidewalk in front of the entrance, grille to grille. A crowd had formed, and three uniformed officers attempted to push back these people with outstretched arms and patently false claims that there was nothing to see. Another officer, on horseback, paced the street. And in the center of it all, two more policemen squared off against each other like big dogs.
“Let’s not do this here, man,” one of these officers was saying in soothing tones. “We can talk about it at the station.”
The other man took a step back, took a step forward, his boyish face tangled with fear and anger. “We’ll go back to the station when you admit I’ve apprehended a suspect!” he said, pointing to the backseat of one of the cop cars. “This is not cool, guys! I know I’m the rookie and all, but—”
“Not in front of the juveniles,” said the first officer, glancing at Scott’s class.
“We’re not juveniles,” Erno muttered.
“It just means kids,” said Emily. “Nothing bad.”
An electronic red news crawl on an adjoining building declared the DOW DOWN and REGGIE DWIGHT PUNCHES QUEEN and then POLICE DISRUPTION AT PORT AUTHORITY BUS TERMINAL. It flashed like a marquee for the weird bit of drama playing out in front of them.
Scott craned his neck to look at the rookie’s car. There was someone in the backseat, but the suspect was very small. Smaller than a toddler. He wondered….
If Scott Doe had a talent, it was his ability to walk about unnoticed. When not actually calling attention to himself in bus station bathrooms or by defending his indefensible given name, he was one of those kids who could practically disappear in a crowded room. Inconspicuous. Unremarkable. It had always been that way.
So now when Scott shuffled away from his class and approached the police car, Ms. Egami did not notice. Even Erno and Emily didn’t notice, transfixed as they were by the police and the strobing lights. Scott stepped up to the cruiser on the street side, away from the cops, and looked in the rear window.
It was the little man again. He was slumped in the backseat, his round fists ringed by silver handcuffs like tiny planets. He could have just slipped them free if he wanted to. Apparently he didn’t want to.
“Look, Pete …,” the cop was telling the rookie. “We need to get you some help. There is no one in back of your squad car. There is nothing but a pair of empty cuffs.”
“Fight!” Denton Peters suggested from the sideline, and Ms. Egami tried to shush him. “Shoot something!”
The window was open a crack. The little man sniffed and looked up at Scott.
“Oh. ’S you. Come to gloat?”
“I can see you,” Scott said quietly into the gap, “and that policeman can see you, but nobody else can.”
“You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes, yeh are. Quick now an’ offer your services to those coppers! They could use a brilliant mind like yours.”
“Why can I see you? Am I crazy?” Scott asked, worried suddenly that his headaches were the sign of something else, something festering in his brain.
The little man studied him for a second. “Set me free, and I’ll explain everythin’.”
Scott looked again at the handcuffs, so large against the man’s wrists that they looked like a practical joke. “Why can’t you—”
“It’s complicated.”
“Were you stealing again? Is that what happened?”
“What else am I to do? Work for a livin’? Make shoes?”
Scott breathed, and tested the door. He expected a police car to be locked, but it wasn’t.
“Hey,” one of the police officers said just then. “Hey, your door is open.”
Scott ducked down, and the little man scootched to the edge of the car seat, rattling his handcuffs.
Scott pulled them off, easy as anything. And that’s when the little man leaped up onto his shoulder, ran down the length of his back, and was away.
“Hey!” said Scott. “Come back!”
The small red tracksuit slipped into the street, dodging traffic. Then the clop of hooves, and the mounted policewoman was towering over Scott, her horse snorting thick, furious clouds.
The officer was shouting. Scott cowered. It might have gone badly for him had the horse not chosen just then to turn into a unicorn, and throw its rider, and turn back into a horse again.
The policewoman landed on the pavement, hard. Scott ducked and dashed back to meet his class as the other officers rushed to her aid.
“There you are,” said Erno when Scott turned up beside him, panting. “Did you see that horse rear back like that?”
Scott goggled—at the flashing squad cars, the Keystone cops, the plain brown horse mincing about. Just a horse.
“I’m having kind of a weird day,” said Scott.
