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The first thing that hits us is the smell.

It's a combination of old newsprint, cooking grease, and some sort of old-guy smell—maybe body odor mixed with liquor and cigarettes.

But that's nothing compared with the look of the place. Empty bottles are everywhere. There are bags of food on the stained couch. And I don't even want to think about what those stains are from. As a matter of fact, there are stains of all sorts of interesting colors on the floor as well. On the part of the floor that's visible, anyway. Most of the floor is covered by cartons of old magazines or grimy broken appliances from about twenty years ago that Great-Uncle Ted didn't bother to wash.

It's kind of like a Museum of Gross.

Anything too big to pile is stacked against the wall, and the boxes are all balanced precariously one on top of another. There is barely room to walk.

Mom quickly weaves her way into the mess. She heads for the nearest window and with a grunt pulls it open, letting in the first fresh air in what is probably weeks. Although it's hot and muggy, the feel of the outside is a relief.

Over her shoulder, my mom calls out, “I warned you, Ted. I
said
my uncle didn't like to throw things out.”

“Yeah, I know, Mom…but I didn't think—”

Having thrown open two more windows, Mom turns on a large fan. As the breeze ripples the pages of the newspapers and magazines piled up on the chairs nearby, she puts her hands on her hips. She turns to Isabel.

“I'm sorry, Isabel. I guess this is a little shocking.”

Isabel shrugs. “I don't know. I'm from New York City. I've smelled worse. In the subway, in used bookstores…I'm more worried about
that.
”

My mom follows Isabel's eyes to the old refrigerator wheezing in the corner.

“It's fine,” Mom laughs. “I emptied it the night my uncle was taken to the hospital. I had a feeling he wasn't going to come back.” As Mom says this, I see her face crumple, and she turns away.

“Well, you kids have fun. I have to get to work. I've left big bags for all the trash in the kitchen. If you fill those, we can get more. I think Isabel's dad is picking her up in a couple of hours?”

Isabel nods absentmindedly as she continues to take in the mounds of stuff.

“Okay, guys, I'll swing back on my lunch hour to get you two boys. I don't want you spending too much time in this heat! Good luck!”

Then my mom hops over an old toaster oven and winds between a box crammed with old videocassettes and an unopened carton of ramen noodles covered in a layer of dust and heads for the front door.

We watch her go.

All three of us stand motionless, no one quite knowing what to do first.

In the silence we hear my mom's car start, pull out, and drive away.

Then Isabel speaks. For the first time, with no grown-ups around.

“Um…if it's all the same to you…”

I know where this is going.

“Would it be okay if I wait for my dad outside? I brought a book, and—”

“Sure, of course,” I say. I don't blame her. She didn't agree to clean this dump, Caleb and I did.

Relieved, Isabel actually smiles and hightails it outside. She pulls an old chair near the door, and we see her lean it up against the wall. She carefully wipes the seat and arranges herself on it.

Meanwhile, Caleb and I get to work, picking stuff up and seeing if Great-Uncle Ted left any German Lugers or samurai swords, you know, just lying around.

A bright voice calls from outside. “So, your mother's Japanese—”

I know she's just trying to make conversation, but for some reason, this bugs me.

“Actually, she's
American,
” I hear myself say, adding, “Why do people always assume that Asians are from somewhere else?”

Isabel lets out a puff of breath and clears her throat.

“Hey, man, that's a little harsh….I'm sure she didn't mean—” Caleb begins.

“Obviously she's American,” Isabel sniffs. “If you'd let me finish, I was saying Japanese American.”

I try a lame attempt at damage control.

“I didn't mean to jump down your throat, but it's something that—”

“Believe me, I have plenty of Asian friends back in New York. That's something I don't need to be lectured on.”

Before I can get into it with Miss Private School, Caleb jumps in. “So what's the plan here? Just poke through everything until we find something valuable?”

From the doorway, a blond head speaks. “What makes you think you're going to find anything valuable?” Isabel asks. “Looks like he was just an old pack rat.”

Before I can stop him, Caleb answers, “Ted's great-uncle left the contents of the apartment to him. He said there was some sort of treasure buried here.”

Aha! Now the blond head appears at the door. “Wow! Nobody told me that. You think it's true?” She comes in and stands next to me, surveying the debris.

I don't want to get her hopes up. “My mom doesn't know anything about it. And she's the only relative who was close to him. Who knows what the old guy thought was a treasure.”

Caleb stretches, making his already scrawny body look even skinnier, if possible. “Man, this place is packed. Where do we start?”

I look around the room and instinctively take inventory. My right hand twitches like I'm clicking a mouse.

“First things first. Let's collect whatever looks like trash and put all the newspapers and magazines together,” I suggest. “And then maybe see if any of the appliances still work.”

“Right,” Isabel answers. She kicks a box at her feet and picks it up. She heads to the nearest garbage bag.

“Whoa! Wait a minute!” Caleb yells, pushing through the garbage at his feet and peering into the box Isabel is holding.

“You were going to throw that away? You're kidding, right?”

Isabel looks down and then back at Caleb like he's lost it. “Ummm…is there any reason why not? It's just some old video stuff. Most likely broken. Who would want it?”

Caleb reaches gently into the box and holds something up. It's a small, rectangular gray box with a button in the shape of a cross on the left side and two red buttons on the right. A wire connects it to a larger gray box in the carton, surrounded by large plastic slabs with colorful names on them.

“Ted, look at this!”

“Wow,” I whisper. “Never seen one of those in person.”

“So is someone going to let me in on this, or is one of you about to call that thing ‘my preciousss' and fight to the death over it?” Isabel asks with a smirk.

I give her major points for the LOTR reference but take something off her score for the smirk.

“Wow. There's something you actually know nothing about?” I say.

“Just tell me what it is already, okay?”

I can tell she's about to walk out the door again, which would be fine, but I also know I'm being a jerk.

“Sorry. It's an old Nintendo gaming system. It's like a classic. I never in a million years thought Great-Uncle Ted would be into this.”

“Well, it has to be his,” Caleb says, turning the remote over. “He wrote his name on it and everything.”

There, plain as anything, is “Wakabayashi” written in black marker.

“You think this was his buried treasure?” Caleb says softly, going over the various games in the box.

“Maybe…,” I say. “He did mention something in the will about how I liked puzzles. And video games are kind of puzzles. Maybe this is all he meant.”

“I don't think so.”

We both look up at Isabel. She has a thoughtful expression on her face.

“You said it was
buried
treasure. This was right out in the open.”

“Well, Caleb was kind of dramatizing when he said that. He actually said I've been given all the treasure this room contains, but I'd have to search for it.”

“Still, we didn't have to search for it too hard. I say he was referring to something else.”

“Yeah, well, you certainly would know what my great-uncle was thinking, you two being so close and all,” I snap.

“Whatever. I was just trying to— Forget it.”

I watch as the immaculate jeans of Isabel Archer walk back out the door into the California sunshine. I'm probably being a jerk again, but I'm not in the mood to be bossed around.

From the other side of the room, Caleb calls out: “Do you think there are any old comic books? He must have
some
old comic books, right?”

The other thing about Caleb, besides his ability to draw really well, is his dream.

His dream is to one day own a copy of Amazing Adventure #1.

What makes this particular comic book more important, than say, Detective Comics #2, #3, #4, etc.? Or any other comic book, for that matter?

It so happens that this is the comic book that features the origin story for a group of special crime fighters, the Alloys! (not that I'm so excited about this—the exclamation part is part of their name).

I should back up a second and explain what an alloy is. The only reason I know is because of something that happened to me when I was eight years old. I was the only kid in my class whose parents were of different races, and for some reason this rubbed one kid in particular, Morrie Friedman, the wrong way.

Morrie Friedman's father owned the Miracle Delicatessen in La Purisma (“If your sandwich tastes great…it's a Miracle!”). That day we had been discussing Passover, and the teacher asked the kids in the class who were Jewish to raise their hands, so I did.

Well, during recess, Morrie Friedman started in on me, telling me that no way should I have raised my hand since I wasn't Jewish because my mother wasn't Jewish, that I was only
half
Jewish, so I wasn't as good as he was.

I was pretty upset about all this, and told my mom, who just stroked my hair and said she was sorry. That didn't make me feel much better, but that night my dad came into my room and sat on my bed and told me about alloys.

He told me that the pure metals, like iron and nickel and zinc, aren't all that strong—they break easily, and aren't useful in their pure state. It wasn't until men began combining metals, creating bronze, that civilization moved forward. Think of the skyscrapers and bridges that never would have been built without alloys like steel. He went on to tell me that it was a scientific fact that these combined metals, or alloys, are stronger, more useful, and far more valuable than any pure metal on its own.

I'm pretty sure my genius sister would have known exactly what was going on, but I'm not Lila, so I had to ask him what that had to do with me. That's when he said that I was like an alloy, the combination of two ancient and proud cultures brought together to create something that can be stronger, better, and more useful than anyone else.

I asked him if this included Morrie Friedman, and he said, laughing, “Especially Morrie Friedman, whose father wouldn't know a good bagel if it fell on him.”

I never knew if my father read this somewhere (like a book called
Things to Say to Your Half-Jewish, Half-Asian Son When Some Jerk Makes Him Feel Like Dirt
) or if he made it up himself, but I've never heard him talk this way before or since.

Of course, the comic-book Alloys! had nothing to do with being Jewish (at least, I don't think so). It was about these three scientists trying to combine certain elements together to make an unbreakable, all-powerful alloy. There's some kind of accident involving radiation (I know; there's
always
some kind of accident involving radiation in these comics—it was the 1960s, what do you want?), and each scientist is transformed into a being made of pure metal. There's Mr. Mercury, who is super fast; the Tin Man, who is super flexible; and Iron Girl, who is super strong.

Whenever I tell anyone about this, they always say, “Wouldn't it have been funny if Iron Girl got together with Iron Man and had little Iron babies?” Guess what? I thought of that first. I already told it to Caleb, who said, “That wouldn't happen, Ted. Iron Girl is actually made of iron, but Iron Man is just a rich guy in a metal suit. He's not actually made of iron.”