"No mortal shall pass into the kitchen without first giving me the secret code!"

"Shut up, Corey," I said groggily the next morning. It was about six-thirty, and I was trying to get into the kitchen to eat something. Corey was standing in the doorway with his arms across it, not wanting me to go through him. He was way too awake.

"I am the gatekeeper, and I say no mortal shall pass! Give me the code, human scum, or die!"

"I'll give you a code," I muttered angrily, trying to push past him but too tired to really make it. "Turn around and I'll shove it up you—"

"Cole!" came my mother's disapproving voice. Easy for her to disapprove; she was already in the kitchen.

"Well tell him to get out of my way!" I snarled.

Rather than say anything else, mom came over to Corey and gave him this look that I'm sure said something like, "Corey, my favorite child ever, your brother is being grumpy. Let's be kind to the poor beast and not play with his little mind." Whatever. I didn't care. Corey moved, anyway, and I got in.

When I sat down at the table, my mother said, "What's wrong this morning? You seem to be in a bad mood."

"Yeah, well when Corey's being a turd, I get like that."

She sighed. Like she always does when I'm crabby. Like she wants to say, "Get over it!" But she never does actually say that. She's a good mom, even if she does like Corey better. She made us breakfast every morning. I bet Adam's mom never did. And actually, just sitting there at the table, I could smell the syrup hot in the microwave. What would it be—waffles? Pancakes? French toast? Yum. The morning was looking brighter already.

Corey plopped his obnoxious little self right across the table from me. His big, fifth-grade eyes stared at me, and I tried to pretend like I didn't notice. He looked just like my parents with his dark hair and irises like drops of chocolate. For being a fifth grader, he sure was pretty popular. Every night he was getting phone calls, and not just from guys. It made me kind of sick, but he was a pretty perfect-looking boy. You have to be able to admit that sort of thing about your siblings sometimes. Corey was going to be a really good-looking guy when he got older. Not like me—oddball Cole. White-blonde hair and black hole eyes. I was probably just going to get more freakish with each passing year. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd been phoned by someone other than Adam. Plus, Corey played miniature football, which was a big sport in Goldenrock. You started playing the minute you were born, if you wanted to fit in. Not me, though. I played nothing, unless you count calculator games, which I played sometimes during math, the most boring subject of all.

I totally didn't want to go to school that morning. I was so tired that I could hardly remember what had taken place during the night. Adam . . . tree . . . box. Everything was in pieces. And I had my math final in school. I completely didn't care about it. All the final would do was once again show my teacher how stupid and hopeless I was with the subject. I think I was dyslexic with numbers, kind of like some people are with letters. It didn't help any that I figured I was never going to get the stuff so I never bothered trying.

"Mom, Cole did something bad last night," Corey was suddenly saying in this sneaky way.

I looked up at him; he was still staring at me, except now he had this big stupid grin on his face, like he was about to get me in trouble and was going to love doing it. "I didn't do anything," I said quietly, giving him this sort of evil eye, like, If you even say a word you'll regret it for the rest of your life.

But Corey wasn't afraid of me, that was for sure. He had enough friends to not worry about losing the esteem of his brother. "Yeah, mom. He did something. He just doesn't want to admit it."

My mom wasn't really listening. She was busy pouring pancake batter onto a pan, where it hissed and bubbled in the heat.

"He sneaked out."

I kicked Corey under the table.

"Ow!" he whined, overreacting on purpose.

"Cole, don't kick your brother."

My mom had eyes all over her head and sometimes in her hands.

"He sneaked out!" Corey insisted, talking so loud it grabbed mom's attention like he wanted it to.

"What are you talking about?" asked mom, giving me this raised-eyebrow sort of look as she put a hand on her hip.

"No I didn't," I tried. "I didn't go anywhere. I didn't do anything! I was in bed the whole time! Seriously, I didn't go anywhere, because . . . I'm grounded, right? So why would I sneak out of the house? That would just be stupid." I nodded at my own words, trying even to convince myself of them.

"I don't mean out of the house, you moron," Corey sputtered. "I mean out of your room. And don't deny it—you did! Otherwise, how did Scuzz get out of the house? He was scratching at the door this morning, and I let him in last night before everyone went to bed. So don't lie, Cole. You hate Scuzz. You sneaked from your room and kicked him out of the house!"

Oh my gosh, I thought, just like a moron would. I couldn't believe I'd actually thought Corey knew about my leaving the house. "Who cares about the stupid cat!" I said. And seriously, no one did care about the ugly thing except for Corey.

Corey started to complain. Mom just sighed with some sort of smile and went back to our pancakes, which were close to being done.

School. Math final. Me sitting in my desk sweating like a pig in a blanket. Miserable, miserable heat. How did they even expect us to do well on finals in such hot rooms? I mean, seriously. Humanity wasn't technologically delinquent. Air conditioning shouldn't have been a problem for anyone in the twenty-first century. But that was Goldenrock for you—somehow always twenty years behind the rest of the world. We didn't have air conditioning, but by God, the football players had brand new uniforms.

Wherever a drop of my sweat fell on the test sheet, that was the answer I bubbled in for each math problem. Or close enough, anyway. And I was way too tired. I kept almost-falling asleep at my desk. You know the feeling when you're warm and your eyelids are so heavy it's like there are little weights attached to them? Yeah. That's how I felt. The only reason I managed to keep awake was because the guy sitting behind me couldn't stop kicking my desk. Normally, that would've really bugged me. But that day, I was glad he was there; otherwise, I would've fallen asleep and looked like a real jerk.

Nothing interesting happened during the morning. It was a half-day, with my social studies final after math, and then after that we were allowed to go home. They released us into the wilderness of Goldenrock. One more half-day, I told myself. One more half-day. I could make it. School was like being in a hot car. A locked hot car. I couldn't imagine being one of the kids stuck in summer school. Pure torture, that's what they went through. I was glad I'd never been dumb enough to get tossed there.

Anyway, I saw Adam after math. Just in the hall at his locker. He gave me one of those pass-and-don't-wave-because-you'll-make-me-look-stupid sort of glances, but I waved anyway. Sometimes I did it just to irritate him. He's lucky—I could've also yelled out something like, "Hey bro! What's kickin'?" But you have to remember, I had my non-existent image to think about in addition to his. We always walked home together, but I had to go to my locker first and lug out my book bag. Tomorrow I had a gym final (Ha! Who ever worried about a gym final? Like gym was a real class or something.) and a German final. Blech. German. It was such a chunky language. I was only talking it because I had to, and all I really knew how to say was, "Heil Hitler!" which wasn't exactly something you went around saying, if you know what I mean.

Suddenly there was this laughing behind me. The only words I heard were "albino" and "freak," and that pretty much convinced me that I was being talked about. Now, I wasn't albino—that I know. I didn't have white hair. And I didn't have red eyes or anything. I don't even know if human albinos have red eyes. But the way it made me feel, I wished I did have them. Maybe I could've shot fireballs out of them, then, like they can in video games. People rarely made fun of me, you know, so when they did, it caught my attention. Usually, I wasn't worth the trouble of snickering about behind people's backs. But I guess I was this time, and when I turned around, I saw the one person who was always behind the rare occasions my name popped rudely into conversations.

Dylan Doyle.

Yeah, that's right. Dylan Doyle. The world's biggest wannabe. Biggest wannabe popular kid (next to Adam). Wannabe athlete. Wannabe feared. Small, leafy-haired, and freckly, he was the kind of kid who told dirty jokes and talked back to the teachers because he thought it would make him look tough. He was always in some sort of trouble. I couldn't remember a time I'd walked through the halls during classes and not seen him standing out there, kicked out of a classroom, waiting for a teacher to come chew him out. I hadn't had any classes with him the past year (some miraculous gift from above), but we'd been stuck in a room with each other all of our sixth grade year, and he still hadn't forgiven me for it.

As for me, I was still working on the forgetting part. Forgiving wasn't something I really spent much time thinking about. Forget, forget, forget. That was more important to me. Because a lot of times, if you forget things, they tend to go away.

Not Dylan Doyle. As hard as I tried to forget him, he always did something jerky to bring himself back into the small, dull picture of my life. Every time I thought about him I wished somebody would just grab a big eraser and rub him clean off the paper of the planet. No such luck that day, though. He was being stupid, and I was too hot to do more than just stare after his ugly self, watching him as he strutted off with his mangy mongrel friends, shooting some sarcastic, probably inappropriate comment at a girl dressed in a whole lot of neon. What a complete jerk.

The funny thing about Dylan was that I knew something about him that could make others crack more than a smile. Get this: he still played with dolls. And I don't mean Transformers and action figures. No way. He played with girl dolls. Curly hair, big dopey blinking eyes, the works. No joke.

Ok, so I hadn't actually seen him with them. But I'd walked by his backyard more than once (it was on my way to Adam's house—I always passed it on tiptoe), and I'd seen all of the dolls behind his fence, lying around on the grass, propping up the bushes, set up for tea parties. And he didn't have any sisters. The ratty-haired things were always there, too, just waiting around for him to come make them talk and walk and play dress-up. It was the weirdest thing ever. And there was no way he'd want the rest of the school to know about them. He lived on the edge of town, so most people hadn't a purpose for walking by his place. Of course, I wasn't the sort of person to go squealing that Dylan Doyle, the almighty leprechaun, played dollies in his backyard. It just wasn't in my nature.

"Hey, come on," commented Adam, coming up behind me and giving me a small scare. He'd seen me staring after Dylan. "What's up with you? Doyle talking shit again?"

I shrugged. The way Adam had been acting all defensive lately made me not want to tell him anything. "No. Just thinking."

"Well stop! School's over, man. Let's bust out of here."

He was in his cool mode. Once we made it about half a mile from the building, he'd start acting normal again.

"We're heading back, right?" he said real quietly, and I knew he meant the tree. I was surprised to hear him talk about it at all in school surroundings. He'd feed himself to bears before letting anyone in school know he was checking out a tree house. It must've been the heat getting to him.

"I'm grounded, remember?"

"So what!"

"So I'm not going. Last night was ok, but Corey will know this time. So will my mom."

Adam sighed real loud and rolled his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "That's the problem with your mom. She's always home."

I didn't want to argue. My day was rotting after what I'd heard come from Dylan's mouth. It had made something burn deep down inside, like a sore opening up. "Sorry," I said.

He couldn't stay mad at me. He wasn't that upset, really. "Listen." We started walking. "I'm going to knock the lock off. I'll bring whatever's inside to your house. I'm not grounded from coming in, am I?"

"I don't know," I said a bit moody, annoyed that he was going to go back without me. "But that's a big box. There's no way you can bring it over."

"Well, some of it. Whatever it is. Or I'll tell you what it is. How's that?"

"Sure. Whatever."

So that's what Adam did. He brought some of the stuff over. And I'll bet no one would've guessed what it was. I mean, it was the last thing I would've expected. I probably would have been more willing to believe a dead body had been curled up inside that trunk. It might have been more interesting, anyhow. Because what Adam brought over when he burst inside my room was nothing short of disappointing. At least, not until he read part of the stack of papers out loud. Then, I was curious. Real curious. And when he told me what he thought it meant, I was even more confused.

Let me just tell you what the first paper in the pile read. It was something like this:

"Thunder caused the cloud-clotted sky to vibrate in terror the night he was chosen. It was an hour of utter darkness, for midnight was upon the land and every light in the town was off due to the storm-induced blackout. Winds traveled sixty miles per hour over the fields of corn and grass, across the rackety rooftops. Heavy shutters had been bolted across the windows. Many more anxious people had taken to their storm shelters. Here, they were used to tornadoes and winds. Here, the people were prepared.

"So it was unusual when a man came running into the middle of the candle-lit police station with horrifying news: His three-year-old boy had gone missing.

"The town searched. All through the night. They cried out the missing boy's name—called it to the winds that gulped it right back up. It never reached his ears, and at length, the town had to take shelter once again. Only the man and a handful of police officers kept up the search, never giving up hope that the boy would be found.

"And found he was, but it wasn't until the following morning. He was discovered lying face-down in a cornfield, covered in mud and damp corn husks. The stalks had been flattened in perfect rings around him, as if some strange magic had been in the gales that had knocked them down. His little-boy's hair had turned white-blond. His clothes were torn and dirtied. He was lucky to be alive, they told his mother and father, because, as the town doctors soon discovered, he'd been entirely struck by lightning. No doubt about it—this three-year-old was a walking miracle."

When Adam finished reading, I didn't quite get it. Not just the story, but the fact that he'd just read it to me. There was something impressive about it, but what it was, I couldn't grasp just then. "Adam," I said quietly, chewing on my pencil eraser. "What else was in that trunk?"

"Nothing. Not a thing. Just piles of papers. This was the one right on top. Numbered page one. But get this, Cole . . . you'll never believe what the title of this thing is. It's like some invisible person did this. Someone from beyond."

"What are you talking about?"

Adam turned the paper he'd just read toward me. I read the title as he said it aloud, and the weirdness finally registered in my brain. "It's called, 'The Legend of Lightning Cole.'"