Scurvy Goonda Page 5

  “He doesn’t speak much English.”

  “You can teach him!”

  “I’m trying. I think he said he wanted to join the drama club. Either that, or he was saying he wanted some Tater Tots. He’s hard to understand.”

  “Oh, and you should join the drama club. You could be an actor! I can just see you up on a stage, wearing makeup. You’re so handsome. You know, I was quite the actress in my day.”

  “I know. In college you played Elaine in Arsenic and Old Lace.”

  “At Cape Cod Community College I played Elaine in Arsenic and Old Lace. People told me I should go to New York. But if I had, I wouldn’t have had you. Of course, if I hadn’t had you, I wouldn’t still have all this baby weight.”

  Ted always felt sorry for his mother when she started talking about her theatrical sojourn, which she remembered almost as fondly as she did the years of her marriage.

  “Maybe you’ll still go to New York? Eventually?” said Ted.

  Debbie smiled sadly at her son.

  “I hope I’ll still be able to do a lot of things, someday,” said Debbie. “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. That night manager from the supermarket called here today.”

  “Why?”

  “He wouldn’t say. He just told me to tell you to call him at the store tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  Ted walked toward his room, wondering why in the world Jed would be calling him. As he passed Adeline’s room, he saw his sister sitting on the floor scribbling with crayons, furiously switching back and forth between reds and yellows. She hadn’t spoken to Ted since Scurvy went away.

  “Hi, Adeline?” said Ted. But Adeline just raised her eyes and glared at him.

  “Is something wrong?” said Ted.

  For the first time in weeks, Adeline said something to him: “Eric is GONE.”

  “What do you mean he’s gone?”

  “GONE. GONE!”

  “Maybe he’s hiding. Were you playing hide-and-seek or some other game?”

  “I think I would KNOW if I was playing a game with him. He’s just gone,” said Adeline. Her eyes were getting wet.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Last night,” said Adeline, sniffling. “He was all sick and covered in those same green bumps that Scurvy had, so I let him sleep in my bed so that he would feel better. When I woke up, he was gone!”

  “Eric was covered in green bumps?”

  “He caught them from Scurvy.”

  “You didn’t touch any of my patches, did you?”

  “NO I DIDN’T TOUCH ANY OF YOUR STUPID PATCHES. Why would I DO that? Scurvy said that you were going to be able to help Eric, but you didn’t do ANYTHING!”

  Ted thought about this.

  “Adeline, I’ve never even seen Eric,” said Ted.

  “But Scurvy said you would help,” said Adeline.

  Ted wasn’t sure what to do. Even though Adeline was crying, she didn’t want Ted to comfort her, and he wasn’t sure what Scurvy had meant by saying he would help Eric. So he just stood there, dumbly leaning against the doorframe.

  “I want to draw some more now,” said Adeline. “By myself.”

  Ted went to his bedroom and lay down on his bed, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. He didn’t know why he kept them up there. When his father had glued them to the ceiling, he had made sure that every constellation was correct. Ted could still find the North Star in the night sky, and he could point out the fish shape of Piscis Austrinus and talk about how the Greeks thought that the Corona Borealis was the crown of Ariadne.

  The constellation Orion was as far away from Ted’s bed as possible, in the corner of the room, and he had never looked at it all that much. But tonight as he stared at it, zoning out, he noticed something that he had never seen before. The center star in Orion’s belt glowed more brightly than the other stars in the constellation—and all the other stars in the room, for that matter. Not by much, but enough to make Ted get out of bed to take a closer look. He pulled the chair away from his desk and stood on it, so that his head was only a foot or so from the center star.

  It was still a basic glow-in-the-dark cutout, but it was made of thicker plastic, and it was larger than its counterparts. Its tips were more defined, and it seemed likely that it had been purchased separately from the other stars, which were clearly part of the same kit. But why would his dad have gone to all that trouble for just one star?

  Ted reached up and carefully peeled it off the ceiling. He turned it over in his hands, and when he saw what was on the back, a jolt like he had never felt before shot through his body.

  On the star was a single word: HERE!

  XVI

  Ted opened his eyes and saw that it was almost ten-thirty p.m.—he’d fallen asleep right on top of his chemistry textbook. He walked into the kitchen, pulled a yellow phone book out of a drawer, and found the number for the supermarket.

  “Stop to Shop,” said a voice. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m calling for Jed, the night manager, please.”

  Ted waited a few seconds, and then his old boss’s voice clicked on: “You’ve got Jed, and Jed’s got you.”

  “Hey, Jed. This is Ted Merritt. My mom said you called.”

  “You bet I did,” said Jed, more than a touch of anger in his voice.

  “Er,” said Ted, “what did you want to talk about?”

  “What I want to TALK about is the VANDALISM of the meat section. Your former section if I remember correctly.” Ted paused, completely lost.

  “There’s something happening in the meat section?” he said. “OH, COME ON,” sneered Jed. “For the last WEEK somebody has been coming here AT NIGHT and ripping apart the meat section. You and I know that you didn’t leave here on the best of terms, and that was your section, so it seems pretty clear who the prime suspect should be.”

  “Why don’t you ask the current meat guy about what’s going on?”

  “I have. The attacks always happen when he’s away from the section. On break, getting supplies out of the back, that kind of thing.”

  “Why don’t you just check the security cameras to see who is doing it?”

  “We have,” said Jed, suddenly sounding unsure of himself. “One minute everything is normal, and the next, all the packages are sliced open.”

  Sliced.

  “And we’re thinking that maybe you’re doing something weird to the cameras.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Well, so far ‘we’ is me, I guess, but I’m sure if I brought up the issue with the other guys—”

  “Jed, I’ve never been inside the camera room. I stocked meat, that’s it.”

  “You stocked meat, but you’re also crazy, and if you’re acting out some kind of sick revenge thing here, I want it stopped.”

  “What packages are being sliced open?”

  “Meat packages.”

  “But what kind of meat?”

  “Bacon.”

  With that, Ted hung up the phone. Scurvy wasn’t gone. He had simply relocated.

  XVII

  The next day, all over the world, something weird was happening. It was hard to define exactly what was different. Some people thought that the air didn’t feel the same as it had the day before, while others thought that the sunlight looked odd or that the wind seemed to be blowing in the wrong direction.

  In Mongolia, seven-year-old Oochkoo Bat awakened in her drafty room to discover that her best friend, Mandoni—a miniature fire-eating yak—was not sleeping in his normal spot on the closet floor. He was gone. Oochkoo hoped that Mandoni was okay—the yak had been breaking out in green spots for the past week, and though she had tried to hug him and make sure that he was comforted, the yak had still seemed in pain. Not knowing where Mandoni was—or even if her yak was alive—made Oochkoo cry all day.

  In Iceland, five-year-old Halldor Gundmondsson pulled open his window blinds to let in the late-summer sunlight, expecting to see his rhino
ceros friend, Bjarni, stomping around in his yellow raincoat. The rhinoceros considered himself a fisherman, so Halldor checked the shore when he found the rhinoceros missing. All that was left of the rhino was one of his galoshes, stuck in the crevasse of some volcanic rock.

  In the African country of Eritrea, pretty Natsinet Tenolde walked along the dirt streets of her village, searching the tops of houses and the branches of trees for a talking leaf-nosed bat named Gongab. Gongab had been Natsinet’s confidant ever since she had lost her mother to illness, but now Gongab was gone, and Natsinet found herself joining other kids from the community who were looking for their own friends. Some of the children were crying, while others were being carried by parents who knew they wouldn’t be able to see whatever it was they were searching for, and therefore didn’t know quite what to do.

  All across the planet, in every country in the world, every single imaginary friend had vanished. Young children everywhere were refusing to go to school, screaming that they wanted their friends back and describing how their friends had been sick. Adults frantically telephoned one another or met to try to figure out what was happening. Was this a mass psychosis? Was there something bad in the water supply? Reports of hysterical children were coming in from all over the world, and the grown-ups couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around what was happening. How could all these kids be going nuts at the same time?

  Many of the duller children, sitting in front of their televisions playing shoot-’em-up video games, simply turned up the volume to drown out the voices of kids crying for their friends. But for the kids whose brains cranked and crackled properly, this was a monumental personal crisis.

  The worldwide disappearance of imaginary friends was leaving the press, and in particular television newscasters, in a bind. This was clearly a big story, but there wasn’t any footage they could broadcast, aside from kids walking around their neighborhoods shouting for lost giants or robots, with the occasional clip of an elementary school girl babbling into a camera about how her jeweled pony was gone. And viewers didn’t like to see little kids cry. Confused cops stumbled through interviews, promising to look into the disappearances immediately, though when asked what they would be looking for, they couldn’t quite say.

  Ted sat on his couch with a red-eyed Adeline next to him, watching a local reporter interview the mother of a six-year-old boy, who was stomping through some hedges in the background:

  “And what exactly is he looking for?”

  “Well, he has a … friend … named Flappybappy. And when he woke up this morning, Flappybappy was gone.”

  “What kind of friend is Flappybappy?”

  “Flappybappy is … a manatee.”

  “A manatee.”

  “One of those elephant things that swim in rivers in Florida. I think he saw something about them on the Discovery Channel, and he’s had one ever since.”

  “But this manatee walks on land.”

  “That’s right. And he always carries doughnuts.”

  “Were there any indications that … Flappybappy might go missing?”

  “Well, my son said that he had recently broken out in these bumps, but I don’t really know what that means.”

  Ted felt his sister looking at him. “I didn’t have anything to do with this, Adeline,” he said.

  “EVERYBODY in the whole WORLD lost their friends! And they were all SICK with the same green spots that Scurvy got when YOU started using the patches!”

  “I’m sure that there were some that had green bumps before I started using the patches.”

  “There weren’t,” said Adeline. “I can see everybody’s abstract companions! You got Scurvy sick with the bumps, and then Eric caught the disease from Scurvy, and Eric passed it on, and pretty soon all of the ab-coms in the whole world got sick and it is ALL YOUR FAULT.”

  “Have you ever read The Crucible?” said Ted. He knew that Adeline, being seven years old, had not. “It’s a play about witch trials, and in it, one girl starts saying that certain people are witches, and soon enough all of her friends are accusing people of being witches. Hysteria is contagious.”

  “But this is happening ALL OVER THE WORLD.”

  “Radio, Internet, television—kids are just hearing about it and saying they’re missing friends too, to get out of school.”

  “ERIC THE PLANDA IS GONE AND I’M NOT TRYING TO MISS SCHOOL,” said Adeline, hitting the couch with both fists. “IT WAS YOU! YOU GOT THE AB-COMS SICK AND TAKEN AWAY! YOU’RE NOT EVEN MY BROTHER ANYMORE! YOU’RE JUST NORMAL AND MEAN!”

  Adeline grabbed her schoolbooks and stomped away, and Ted got a terrible feeling in his stomach. What was he doing? A month ago, he and Scurvy Goonda were spending every single day together—sleeping in the same bed, even—and now he had somehow become exactly like the people who told him that Scurvy was just the product of something misfiring in his head. But this—hundreds of millions of kids being orphaned by their friends on the same day—this was something real. He was a jerk for refusing to admit it. If this was becoming a normal kid, no thanks.

  Ted grabbed his backpack and darted out the front door. He found Adeline at the end of the street, waiting for her school bus with a couple of other second graders, one of whom looked extremely sad.

  “What?” said Adeline, seeing him coming.

  “You’re right,” said Ted. “I’m acting toward you the way people act toward me. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, Ted. So, now what?”

  “I’ll try and do something about this. If Scurvy thought that I could stop this from happening in some way—I’ll talk to him.”

  “Scurvy is GONE, Ted.”

  “Well, maybe not.”

  The school bus pulled up and the two other seven-year-olds got on. Ted had stood with Adeline many times before to make sure she was safe, and he’d never heard the bus so quiet. She climbed onto the first step and then turned around.

  “You PROMISE you’re going to do something?” she said.

  “I promise to try.”

  “Try doesn’t count.”

  “Okay, Addie,” said Ted. “I promise. Get on the bus, and we’ll talk more about this later.”

  Adeline disappeared up the steps and the bus pulled away, leaving Ted holding his backpack, wishing that he hadn’t just made an impossible promise. There was no way a problem of this magnitude could be his responsibility, no matter what Scurvy might or might not have told Adeline before stomping away in the middle of the night. Somewhere, there had to be a team of scientists examining data from beeping machines and poring over data readouts, pegging the moment that the disappearances had taken place and working on a quick solution to put everything back the way it was supposed to be. It was ridiculous to think that someone like him could resolve this crisis.

  Still, his doctor wouldn’t be pleased with what he was about to do.

  XVIII

  It was almost eleven o’clock, and Ted was glad to have the night alone to himself. It had been an odd day, yet one that was, shockingly, not as awkward as he had anticipated. Many of his classmates must have had younger siblings missing imaginary friends, because the eyes he felt looking at him as he made his way through the hallways weren’t of the usual you’re a freak! variety, but instead were sympathetic, as if his fellow students might finally be considering that his pirate was, or had been, real.

  Ted approached Stop to Shop from the road behind the supermarket. He knew that the rear door was always open, and he didn’t want to alert Jed to his presence. He pulled the door open just enough so that he could slide inside without risking a squeaking hinge, and bounded behind a water fountain. From there, shuffling close to the ground, he made his way behind the deli display case. It wasn’t the best hiding spot because all the food that was usually inside the case had been removed for the night, but it offered an excellent view of his old stomping ground, the meat aisle.

  The new meat attendant was a guy Ted had never seen before. He had thin yellow hair and bone-white skin
, and he was in the middle of singing to himself. Ted didn’t recognize the lyrics to the ditty, which might have been in a foreign language. Before he had been fired, he had heard a rumor that the store might be bringing in a few Czech employees, and this could be one of them.

  The possible Czech was drinking steadily from a liter bottle of blue Gatorade. It wouldn’t be long before he needed to use the restroom. As expected, once the bottle was empty, the Czech walked toward the break area, leaving the meat aisle unattended.

  Something was going to happen.

  And then … ever so slowly … the gray swinging doors that led to the back of the store were pushed open from the inside. A dirty hand emerged and landed with a slap on the tile floor. Then came another hand, and then the rest of a dirty, hairy, ragged body.

  “Scurvy,” whispered Ted.

  Except this Scurvy was gaunt and sick and covered in green bumps. He crawled to the base of the meat section, where he paused and slowly removed his sword from its scabbard. With great effort, he swooshed the blade through a row of premium bacon. Plastic packaging erupted into the air, and slabs of raw meat spilled all over the floor.

  “Ha-HAR!” said Scurvy, who again attacked the row of bacon. The packaged cold cuts and honey-baked hams now looked like they had been through a war. Ted winced, knowing how irritating it was going to be for the new meat guy to clean up the mess.

  “Rarr!” said Scurvy.

  Scurvy swung his sword again and again, blade always cutting cleanly through the meats, making small squishing sounds.

  “THAT’S fer abandoning me!” said Scurvy, sending more pig wedges cascading to the floor.

  “And THAT’S fer gettin’ everybody else sick with yer stupid patches!” said Scurvy, and more juices burst in every direction. “Patient ZERO, ya are! Tha great infector!”

  Ted was impressed with how accurate Scurvy’s assaults were, considering the pirate’s weakened condition—in all the years that they had been together, Ted had never seen Scurvy simply go nuts with his sword.