Scurvy Goonda (6 page)

“You were a senior last year,” said Ted. “I thought you graduated.”

“What did you say?” said Duke, stepping forward.

“You were a senior. You should have graduated.”

“Plenty of guys do a FIFTH YEAR, you moron. SPORTS!

Colleges want older players, and I’m gonna get NOTICED. If it wasn’t for me, nobody would CARE about the cross-country team in this town.”

Ted thought about this. “Wait, what?” he said. “You’re running cross-country instead of playing football?”

“I got kicked off the football team,” said Duke.

“For what?”

“NEVER MIND FOR WHAT. I’m gonna EAT your pirate this year.” Duke smacked Ted on the forehead and walked back to his table, where Carolina Waltz was sitting, little splotches of Tater Tot ketchup surrounding her mouth.

However, for the first time ever, she wasn’t laughing.

She was just looking at Ted.

Ted searched around for an empty table where he could finish his lunch, but he couldn’t find one, so he stood in the middle of the cafeteria floor and tried to balance his tray with one hand and eat with the other. Taking a sip of his milk, he wished he had someone to eat lunch with. He just wanted a place to start.

A week into the school year, Ted found somebody—a foreign-exchange student named Kettil, who was from Sweden, and whose name actually meant “kettle.” It was an appropriate label. Kettil had a stocky midsection and stubby arms and usually looked like he was overheating.

The first time he saw Kettil, Ted felt bad for the Swede, who was standing in the hallway watching the hordes of students rush past. Kettil repeatedly glanced down at a piece of paper in his hand and then back up, until Ted finally walked over to figure out what was going on.

“I’m Ted.”

“Kettil.”

“Do you need help with something?”

Kettil pointed at the sheet of paper, showing his class schedule.

“You’re in Algebra II?”

“Yes please you’re welcome.”

“Come on. We’re in the same class. I’ll show you where to go.”

“Yes please you’re welcome.”

“Kettil” and “yes please you’re welcome” were pretty much all that Kettil seemed to be able to say in English. This baffled Ted, because wasn’t Scandinavia known for its multilingual
education system? He had assumed that a high school-age kid would speak at least a little English.

On the third day of their friendship, Kettil sat across from Ted, pointing at different objects in the lunchroom and giving their Swedish translations.

“Bord,”
said Kettil.

“Okay, then. A
bord
is a table,” said Ted.

“Bricka,”
said Kettil.

“A
bricka
is a tray.”

“Vägg,”
said Kettil.

“The wall is a
vägg
. Got it,” said Ted.

It wasn’t quite the conversation about girls and movies and those kinds of things that Ted was hoping for with a new friend, but it was something.

During the second week of classes, when Ted walked through the door after school, Debbie called him over for a hug. Ever since he had gotten rid of Scurvy Goonda, he had become just her normal kid enjoying a normal existence at a normal New England high school.

“How was your day, Ted?” said Debbie.

“It was fine, Mom.”

“Making friends?”

“Yep. I’m hanging out with a Swede.”

“Well, how about bringing your Swede over one of these days? It would be
wonderful
to meet him. Tell him how I love ABBA.”

“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!

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.

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 rhinoceros 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.”