The Nominal Hero, chapter 4: Something Fishy
“I don’t think that’s why,” Mr. Keller said mildly. “They probably don’t want parents to worry about childcare if they don’t have to. Not everyone’s as lucky as your old dad.” He did bookkeeping for various clients from his home office, as well as the accounts for the store, which Mrs. Keller had left early to open, as she usually did on Tuesdays.
“Can our old dad drive us to school?” Ruth asked with a wheedling smile. “So we don’t get frostbite?”
“Or eaten by polar bears?” Caden put in.
“I think you’ll survive,” their dad said. “I’ll lend you my muffler if that floppy thing you wear isn’t warm enough.”
“It’s called an infinity scarf and it’s very cozy!” Ruth swallowed her toast and glared. “Just because I’m the only person around here who cares about style--”
“Ruth, I said I liked your spiky hair,” Mr. Keller said tiredly. “I know you weren’t comfortable showing it to your mother, but if you’d like me to have a talk with her--”
“Aagh! No!” Ruth got up, shoved her phone into her pocket and stalked out of the kitchen. Caden and their dad looked at each other uncomfortably.
“I like waffles with jelly and waffles with no jelly,” Paz announced.
Caden took advantage of the change of subject to escape the table. It wasn’t that he didn’t like talking to his dad, but with the weight of the Noun glasses in his pocket he felt awkward. It was hard, keeping secrets. Not that it was secret, exactly, he thought as he brushed his teeth. It was private, which wasn’t the same thing. He wasn’t going to lie about it, and if his dad did find out, it probably wouldn’t be so bad. It was just--well--
It was just that once any grown-up knew, the whole thing would be taken away pretty soon after. Caden was absolutely sure about that. Adults wouldn’t trust a kid with that kind of power. Caden wasn’t even allowed to use the stove unsupervised, or mess with the temperature dial inside the fridge, or open anything in the medicine cabinet except the band-aid tin, or have a pet snake. Glasses that summoned mysterious entities were probably right out.
Maybe the adults would let him use them under supervision, especially if the glasses only worked for him. They were the right size to fit his face, which his dad’s reading glasses, for example, weren’t (another thing Caden was forbidden to mess with). But someone would want to tell him what to do, and make him use the Nouns to solve grown-up problems.
And that would probably be good and useful and all, he admitted. There were lots of grown-up problems. The newspaper was like thirty pages long every day and only one of the pages was comics, so there was obviously no shortage of things for grown-ups to be worried about. Caden knew there were wars elsewhere in the world, and car crashes, and bank robbers probably, like on Batman but real, and birds getting tangled up in plastic garbage, and all kinds of bad things. Maybe there were Nouns that could solve them all. Maybe, he thought, suddenly alarmed, he was a bad person for not handing over the glasses to somebody wise enough to fix everything.
Only he didn’t know anybody wise, not for sure. Not like the wise old mentors in books, the wizards and oracles and kung-fu masters who guided the hero on his quest (and usually died before the big battle, so maybe even they weren’t all that clever). His mom and dad were smart, but they didn’t always agree on stuff, so how could he know which of them would make the right decisions? And his teachers were okay, and they knew a lot, but--
He thought of Mrs. Appit and flushed, remembering yesterday’s scene. She probably wouldn’t even believe him. She’d say he was a liar. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her anything at all.
And the thing was, when you got right down to it, the glasses hadn’t come to Mrs. Appit or the government or Caden’s mom. They’d come to him, Caden Keller, age eight. And Bookshelf, at least, seemed to think that was fine, and the Noun was sort of like a grown-up. So maybe it was okay. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be.
(“Some of you are half in our world already,” Bookshelf had said, and what did that mean? Maybe they were sort of like a mysterious mentor too.)
Caden glanced at the bathroom clock and realized with a start that he’d been standing in front of the mirror holding his toothbrush for almost ten minutes, and he was going to be accused of dawdling any time now. He hurried through the rest of his morning jobs and made it to the front door while Paz was still getting her feet into the right boots.
It was stinging cold, and Caden’s nose and scarf and eyelashes were rimmed with ice by the time he got inside. Nobody was in the yard; as usual when it was this cold, the teachers were letting everyone in before the bell. Caden pushed through the clusters of kids to where his friends Hunter and Masami were sitting on the floor by the coathooks. “Hey.”
“Hey, Caden, guess what.” Masami was holding his partly-open backpack in front of him, and he had such a furtive expression that it was surprising one of the teachers hadn’t already swooped down to see what he was hiding.
“It’s not a turtle,” Hunter added. “I already guessed turtle.”
“What’ve you got?” Caden squatted next to them.
“Guess,” Masami insisted.
“Um--poison darts?” Masami’s dad was a professor at the university, and his office, Masami had proudly told them once, contained a real blowgun and a person’s actual skull.
“Nope!”
“Fireworks?”
“No!”
“Shoes?”
“Why would I have shoes? Why would I have shoes in my backpack, Caden?”
“I’m done guessing, show me.” Caden grabbed for the backpack. Masami snatched it away, hopping to his feet, and Hunter snagged his ankle and tripped him neatly so he fell against the coats. The three boys scuffled for the moment, and they ended up with Caden holding the backpack above his head and Hunter sitting on Masami’s chest.
“Okay, let’s see,” Hunter said. Caden reached into the backpack and pulled out a glass jar.
“It’s water,” he said, disappointed.
“It’s lake water,” Masami clarified. “From Lake Huron. Like we were learning about yesterday in Geography. It’s a souvenir.” He sounded proud of himself. “We went there on vacation in summer. I’m going to collect water from all over the world. I’m going to have the greatest ever water collection. It’ll be worth all kinds of money.”
“I’m going to drink it,” Caden announced. He wasn’t actually; it was cloudy and looked like it had mold or something growing in it. Masami howled anyway.
“Give it back! Hunter, let me up!” He punched Hunter in the ribs and scrambled to his feet. Caden backed away hastily, putting the jar and the backpack down.
“Here, I don’t want your dumb water,” he said.
“It’s probably polluted anyway,” commented Hunter.
“Is not,” Masami said automatically.
“Is so. Weren’t you listening to Mrs. Appit yesterday? The Great Lakes are all full of oil and plastic and, and old tires and things.”
“There was this one episode of Tanker Man where he had to find this wrecked car that had gone into a river,” Caden offered, “and he kept finding all these other cars instead--”
“Well, she also said the lake was full of zebras,” Masami said mulishly, “and that’s stupid.”
“Zebra mussels,” Hunter corrected. “They’re like a--like a poisonous clam that, um--they eat fish.” He didn’t sound quite sure.
Caden was a little dubious about this. “Are they really big clams? Cause fish get pretty big. My uncle Ted caught this one fish--”
“Maybe they just eat baby fish,” Masami suggested. “You know, sitting there all innocent until one swims by and then snap! And then crush it into a pearl.”
“Wait, don’t pearls come from oysters?” Caden asked.
“Oysters are basically clams,” Masami said loftily. “I’ve seen them. They look like snot.” Hunter snickered. “And what they do is, they make pearls by chomping up stuff and crushing it, you know, like diamonds are made by crushing--uh--stuff.”
“I don’t think that’s right,” Hunter said.
“How would you know?”
“Cause I listen in class, and anyway it doesn’t matter about pearls, I was talking about pollution and how it’s killing all the fish and things.”
“We could fix it,” Caden said impulsively. The other two looked at him as though they thought he was about to make a joke. “No, we could. We could save all the fish.” The idea seemed to catch fire in him. “Honestly, we could do it. I have these, uh--okay, I can’t show you here.”
He glanced up at the clock on the wall. He could read analog clocks, with some difficulty. Fifteen minutes to the bell. “The cafeteria,” he suggested. It would be mostly empty right now, with the breakfast program just ending, but there would be enough students still finishing up that nobody would pay any attention to the three of them wandering in.
As expected, there were still a few kids at most of the tables, and a loud hum of chatter filled the room. Caden led his friends over to the side of the big room. Against the wall were a dozen or so tall metal rolling racks for people to put their used trays on. They were mostly full now, the shelves filled with trays covered in wadded napkins and paper plates and empty milk cartons. There was a space between the racks and the wall, wide enough for the boys to squeeze into, and once back there they were hidden from view.
They sat on the floor, and Caden pulled the Noun glasses (the Noggles, Bookshelf had called them) out of his pocket. The other two looked unimpressed. “Are they a souvenir from somewhere?” Masami asked. “My water’s better.”
“No! Look, they’re--” Caden lowered his voice. “I think they’re magic.”
It was different from telling his dad. Heroes in books always had their friends to help them. He and Hunter and Masami had been friends since before he could remember, because their parents were friends with Caden’s mom. They were exactly the kind of companions a person ought to have on an adventure. Much better than Ruth and Paz.
Right now, though, they looked unconvinced.
“I’ll show you,” Caden said. He put the glasses on, a little theatrically, and grinned at his friends, and said: “Fish.”
There was a pop, and a flicker, and a gurgling noise.
The Noun was blocky like the previous two, but also somehow shimmery, like they were surrounded by water. Jammed into the narrow space, their chest was level with Caden’s face, so that he saw their shirt first, black and covered with designs. He tipped his head back to see their head, which was, as he’d expected, a fish. The fish was bright yellow and rippled as though in a current, with silver glasses over the eyes, looking odd with no nose to perch on. Bubbles rose and popped around the Noun, disappearing above their head.
A head, Caden realized with alarm, that was at an adult height, poking up well above the tray racks.
“Duck!” he hissed.
There was a second pop.
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