surfboarding cat.
Thing number one: he was a surfboarding cat.
Thing number two: he was wearing a T-shirt. It said CATS RULE, DOGS DROOL.
Thing number three: he was holding a closed umbrella, like he was worried about getting wet. Which, when you think about it, is kind of not the point of surfing.
Thing number four: no one else on the beach seemed to see him.
He’d grabbed a good wave, and his ride was smooth. But as the cat neared shore, he made the mistake of opening his umbrella. A gust of wind yanked him into the sky. He missed a seagull by seconds.
Even the gull didn’t seem to notice him.
The cat floated over me like a furry balloon. I looked straight up. He looked straight down. He waved.
His coat was black and white, penguin style. He looked like he was heading somewhere fancy in a hairy tuxedo.
He also looked awfully familiar.
“Crenshaw,” I whispered.
I glanced around me. I saw sandcastle builders and Frisbee tossers and crab chasers. But I didn’t see anyone looking at the floating, umbrella-toting surfer cat in the sky.
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to ten. Slowly.
Ten seconds seemed like the right amount of time for me to stop being crazy.
I felt a little dizzy. But that happens sometimes when I’m hungry. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
When I opened my eyes, I sighed with relief. The cat was gone. The sky was endless and empty.
Whap. Inches from my toes, the umbrella landed in the sand like a giant dart.
It was red and yellow plastic, decorated with pictures of tiny smiling mice. On the handle, printed in crayon, were the words THIS BUMBERSHOOT BELONGS TO CRENSHAW.
I closed my eyes again. I counted to ten. I opened my eyes, and the umbrella – or the bumbershoot, or whatever it was – had vanished. Just like the cat.
It was late June, nice and warm, but I shivered.
I felt the way you do the instant before you leap into the deep end of a pool.
You’re on your way to somewhere else. You’re not there yet. But you know there’s no turning back.
Here’s the thing: I am not an imaginary friend kind of guy.
Seriously. This autumn I go into fifth grade. At my age, it’s not good to have a reputation for being crazy.
I like facts. Always have. True stuff. Two-plus-two-equals-four facts. Brussels-sprouts-taste-like-dirty-gym-socks facts.
OK, maybe that second one’s just an opinion. And anyway, I’ve never eaten a dirty gym sock so I could be wrong.
Facts are important to scientists, which is what I want to be when I grow up. Nature facts are my favourite kind. Especially the ones that make people say No way.
Like the fact that a cheetah can run seventy miles per hour.
Or the fact that a headless cockroach can survive for more than two weeks.
Or the fact that when a horned toad gets mad it shoots blood from its eyes.
I want to be an animal scientist. I’m not sure what kind. Right now I really like bats. I also like cheetahs and cats and dogs and snakes and rats and manatees. So those are some options.
I like dinosaurs too, except for them all being dead. For a while, my friend Marisol and I both wanted to be palaeontologists and search for dinosaur fossils. She used to bury chicken bone leftovers in her sandpit for digging practice.
Marisol and I started a dog-walking service this summer. It’s called See Spot Walk. Sometimes when we’re walking dogs, we’ll trade nature facts. Yesterday she told me that a bat can eat 1,200 mosquitoes in an hour.
Facts are so much better than stories. You can’t see a story. You can’t hold it in your hand and measure it.
You can’t hold a manatee in your hand either. But still. Stories are lies, when you get right down to it. And I don’t like being lied to.
I’ve never been much into make-believe stuff. When I was a kid, I didn’t dress up like Batman or talk to stuffed animals or worry about monsters under my bed.
My parents say, when I was in nursery, I marched around telling everybody I was the mayor of Earth. But that was just for a couple of days.
Sure, I had my Crenshaw phase. But lots of kids have an imaginary friend.
Once my parents took me to see the Easter Bunny at the mall. We stood on fake grass next to a giant fake egg in a giant fake basket. When it was my turn to pose with the bunny, I took one look at his paw and yanked it right off.
A man’s hand was inside. It had a gold wedding ring and tufts of blondish hair.
“This man is not a rabbit!” I shouted. A little girl started bawling.
The mall manager made us leave. I did not get the free basket with candy eggs or a photo with the fake rabbit.
That was the first time I realised people don’t always like to hear the truth.
After the Easter Bunny incident, my parents started to worry.
Except for my two days as mayor of Earth, I didn’t seem to have much of an imagination. They thought maybe I was too grown-up. Too serious.
My dad wondered if he should have read me more fairytales.
My mum wondered if she should have let me watch so many nature shows where animals eat each other.
They asked my grandma for advice. They wanted to know if I was acting too adult for my age.
She said not to worry.
No matter how adult I seemed, she told them, I would definitely grow out of it when I became a teenager.
A few hours after my Crenshaw sighting at the beach, he appeared again.
No surfboard this time. No umbrella.
No body, either.
Still. I knew he was there.
It was about six in the evening. My sister, Robin, and I were playing cerealball in the living room of our apartment. Cerealball is a good trick for when you’re hungry and there’s nothing much to eat till morning. We invented it when our stomachs were grumbling to each other. Wow, I would love a piece of pepperoni pizza, my stomach would growl. And then hers would grumble, Yeah, or maybe a Ritz cracker with peanut butter.
Robin loves Ritzes.
Cerealball is easy to play. All you need are a few Cheerios or even a little piece of bread all torn up. M&Ms would be good too, if your mum isn’t around to say no sugar. But unless it’s right after Halloween you probably don’t have any.
In my family those guys go really fast.
First you pick a target to throw at.