of the dryer exhausts, the alley feels twenty degrees warmer than the street, even though the sun hasn’t risen high enough to peek down here yet. It’s all fog, trash, and grafitti. There are detergent boxes spilling out of trash bags next to the back door of the laundromat, and a bunch of grocery cartons from the store with chip and beef jerky logos on them.
“Can you see him?” Kyler whispers.
“No.” I creep along, weaving between the dumpsters. Kyler follows.
“We really shouldn’t be doing this,” he whispers, and he’s right. Mom will kill me if she finds out. Big time screen ban. No TV, minimum. But this is a Celt we’re talking about.
Behind the dumpsters, people have laid sheets of cardboard to sleep on. There are blankets too, dirty coats and plastic bags piled high against the grimy black walls. Torn strips of paper and cardboard stick to the ground in dirty brown wads, reminding me of the collages Kyler’s little brother makes. They always end up brown. There are puddles of dark water in every dip in the bricks, and the alley smells of pee.
Kyler overtakes me, hurrying to look behind the final cluster of garbage cans, about three quarters of the way down. My heart slams a few extra beats when he sticks his head up.
“Found him?” I call.
Kyler shakes his head. “He’s gone!”
I catch up with him. He’s right. The Celt is nowhere to be seen.
“It’s all my fault,” Kyler groans. “That was insane. Never saw anyone so scary in my life. But he was just like you said, Mikey. A Celt! Awesome!”
“Awesome,” I agree. “But where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
We high five in the dark stink of the alley because even though we’ve lost him this time, we have a real live Celtic warrior in our town. A shiver runs down my back. It’s only when we walk a few extra feet and we’re out on the other side of the alley that we start to laugh.
“You should have seen your face,” I say. The smell of fresh hot doughnuts drifts across the street. My mouth waters, and I feel good again right away. I push Kyler, and he pushes me back.
“Did you see Ryan’s face? He looked like he’d seen a ghost,” Kyler says.
“He saw our Celt. A real time-traveled Celt! That’s better than a ghost.”
Then Kyler throws himself against the door of a store and blubs, “No, just go!” It’s a pretty bad imitation of Ryan, but I know what he means, and we double over laughing. When I look up trying to catch my breath, I catch sight of the clock in the doughnut shop.
“We are so late!” I adjust my backpack.
“Oh no, just go!” Kyler flings his arms in the air and fake sobs again. He wants us to keep laughing, but we’ve got to hurry. I start back down the alley, but it feels too creepy, so we end up running down the street we’re already on. At the intersection, we join up with the red route we planned this morning.
“He just appeared…” Kyler shouts as he runs beside me, “in all that fog and steam, and then disappeared again. Like magic.”
“Not science?” I ask, thinking how much Kyler loves his physics.
“Maybe science and magic are the same thing…if you’re a Celt.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that, but now that Kyler says it I can’t help wondering if it’s true. This is the greatest thing ever. First day, and we found him. No. Even more spooky, he found us. “He remembered me. He protected us from Ryan.” I’m gasping for breath now as we get near school. “How did he even know where we were?”
“Maybe he’s following us?”
“You think?”
“You said it yourself, Mikey, you’re his only friend. Maybe he needs help? We’ve got to be open to all possibilities,” Kyler says. “We have to be governed by the evidence.” Kyler can run and say “governed by the evidence,” without panting. That’s a brown belt for you.
The school bell goes off. The last three tetherball guys slide into their classrooms. We’re still way over on the other side of the blacktop, officially late, but I don’t care.
“We’ve found a Celtic warrior!” I yell to Kyler.
“This is the best day ever!” Kyler shouts back.
“Epic!” And it doesn’t even occur to me to worry about leaving Ryan behind.
Miss O’Brien’s already finishing roll call when we hit the classroom. I manage to get my backpack in my cubby and sit down before she calls me. That’s one good thing about having a last name near the end of the alphabet. Kyler’s name has already been called out. She waits until she’s called everyone else before she goes back to him. She gives us a look. I’m sure she’s going to send us to the office. Then I notice Sawyer Bradstone isn’t here yet. Thank you, Sawyer. He’s always late. He doesn’t come in for another ten minutes, which makes us look like angels.
Miss O’Brien isn’t mad when Sawyer arrives, but she makes him go to the office because she’s already emailed her class numbers.
“What was it today, Sawyer?” she asks when he gets back. He’s got a huge smile on his face, and we all know we’re in for a story.
“Justine pooped right when Mom was buckling her in. It squirted down her leg and all over the car seat. Massive pool of yellow poop.”
“Ewwwww!” The whole class groans. A few kids hold their noses and pretend to gag. Babies are gross like that, especially Sawyer’s new twin sisters.
“Thank you, class,” Miss O’Brien says. “Your mom did well to get you here at all, Sawyer. Twins are hard work.”
I think Miss O’Brien knows when Sawyer’s going to gross us out, and she lets him speak anyway. It brightens our day. Miss O’Brien likes us laughing, as long as we’re not too wild.
It’s only after we get started on Language Arts, which I dread, that I wonder about Ryan. He’s not here yet. I pass Kyler a note. “Where’s Ryan?” I write.
Kyler replies with “Oooooh, nooooo, just goooooo!” in jiggly writing that would be squeaky if it could speak.
The rest of the lesson Kyler keeps his head down over his work. He fills in his worksheet in double-quick time, which means he has time to do the harder worksheet for “fun.” The annoying thing is, he does seem to find it fun. It takes me nearly the whole class to do the first one, so I only have a few minutes to think about how amazing it was to find the Celt…or for him to find us, as Kyler suggested. That gets me thinking. Kyler said something about science and magic…magic and science. The idea plays around in my head. I remember some of the sidebars in my military history book about how the Celts didn’t believe in death, which is what made them so scary on the battlefield, and I don’t have to crunch anything. My neurons are
