“Mm-hmm,” he said. As if this happening were one of many things like this he had to balance today. As if it had happened before. “Mm-hmm. Do you know where the ticket is?”
I told him as we walked into library that I was pretty sure I knew where it was in the house and that in any event I could find it. To show him how much I meant business I rushed through a recap of how I had hidden my motives behind the “can I keep the sugar cereal” story, which I thought would at least amuse him, but even this abridged version he seemed to find uninteresting, and by now he was sitting at the one library computer terminal that had internet, which I knew meant I was about to lose his attention for good. “If you can get it by Thursday,” he said, eyes fixed on the computer monitor, “we have a half day then for teacher meetings. We’ll be out at eleven-thirty. Battle Creek, Michigan, is an hour and a half away. That’s where Kellogg’s headquarters is.” He tilted the screen toward me and revealed a picture of an immense, futuristic, fortress of a building—the last wholesome fantasy of a middle-school boy. “Tell your parents you have a soccer game after school and my parents are giving you a ride home after dinner. Tell them that we’re having pizza.” I didn’t play soccer or eat pizza, but I accepted this story unedited, and so did my mother when I got home from school that afternoon.
There was then, in our house, an unused staircase behind the kitchen that my mother had long ago decided was too steep to be safe. Instead, it had been repurposed as a mostly empty diagonal closet where my parents kept things like tax returns and unwrapped presents. It was closed off by an unlocked door on both sides, and while I had glanced quickly inside a handful of times over the years whenever one of the doors had somehow slightly opened, I had never actually personally opened the door, for fear of accidentally ruining my own birthday or the still-ambiguous-by-mutual-agreement myth of Santa Claus.
Separately, I had, two years earlier, toward the beginning of third grade, realized in an epiphany over an inspiringly decadent breakfast-for-dinner that midnight was not actually the middle of the night: if the night was something that started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as I knew it to be, then the middle of the night was actually 1:30 a.m. My parents happily confirmed this for me. Although my bedtimes had shifted in the years since, I still believed with stubborn auto-loyalty that 1:30 remained the official unofficial middle of the night.
That night, I stared at my clock until it hit 1:29. Then I took a full minute to step out of bed, wearing both socks and slippers, determined to take no chances, and shuffled out of my room on the heels of my feet, rather than tiptoe, which I had noted long ago was actually more squeaky than “tip-heel,” my own invention as far as I knew.
I stepped out and opened the door that I had walked by thousands of times, and then for the first time I took one step after another down the staircase, until I was alone amid the clutter and mystery, unarmed except for a small emergency flashlight that cast a small square light into the cold diagonal corridor, where everything was more or less the color of manila.
On top of a video game I had asked for a long time ago was a dust-free white envelope. I picked it up. It wasn’t even licked shut. Inside was the winning strip of cardboard from the Corn Flakes box. I put it in my pajama-pants pocket and returned the envelope to where it was. I slipped back up the stairs, tip-heel the whole way, closed the staircase door, put the cardboard code under my pillow, and waited for 7:30, never closing my eyes except to blink, constantly checking for the code with my hands to make sure it hadn’t somehow evaporated.
The dictionary that had been used for the now-even-more-irrelevant contest rematch was still on my dresser. Out of an instinct I didn’t have the word to describe yet—irony? panache?—I put the winning code in the middle of that dictionary, put the dictionary in my backpack, and took it to school.
At lunch, I found Tom Salzberg in the cafeteria and showed him the scrap of cardboard.
Tom stared at the numerical code and the YOU ARE A WINNER message right below it for a long time. He had been convinced the whole thing was real when he had only my word to go on; now, staring at the actual evidence, he seemed somehow less sure.
“50-50,” he finally said.
“No,” I said. I hadn’t expected to pay him anything. “80-20,” I said.
He squinted in consideration for a second, then made a face identical to the Robert De Niro face that had failed to win him placement in the class talent show, and shook my hand.
“I’ll buy the bus tickets with my mom’s credit card, and then I’m going to call us a taxi to take us to the Greyhound station.”
I had never been in a taxi before but didn’t feel like letting him know that.
“Shotgun,” I said.