Kellogg’s

It wasn’t like this boy to throw a tantrum in the cereal aisle of the supermarket, and it wasn’t like his mother to give in to one, but here they were, for some reason, both making an exception.

“Okay,” she said, and threw the box deep into the far corner of the main part of the shopping cart. “Okay. Don’t let your father see it.”

The family never bought sugar cereals and never bought name-brand cereals, so this split-second sight of his mother’s wrist flicking an official name-brand sugar cereal into the cart was something he had to keep replaying in his head for the next several minutes until he was literally dizzy on the image of the impossible. The sensation of seeing and reseeing that wrist snap was something he couldn’t make sense of, something that would be best described by words he didn’t know yet: surreal, pornographic.

The boy kept an even pace with the white-dirt-frosted black wheels so he could stare uninterrupted at the creature that he and his mother had captured. Yes: There in the cart, after all these years, was Tony the Tiger, caged at last. And Tony the Tiger promised even more fun ahead: In a bright blast of words spilling from his sportive expression, Tony the Tiger explained that the box on which he was emblazoned contained not just name-brand sugar cereal—as if that weren’t enough—but also a miniature treasure chest, and—as if that weren’t enough—inside the treasure chest was a secret code, and—as if that weren’t enough!—the code could possibly lead to a cash prize of one hundred thousand dollars.

(When the boy looked closer, as the box rode across the checkout belt toward the outside world, on the way to the arguably more humane captivity of a kitchen cabinet, he noticed that Tony and the text were technically separate, with no speech bubble connecting them: Tony the Tiger wasn’t saying that; he was just next to those words. Somehow, this felt like it gave the promise a touch less credibility, even though, when the boy thought about it years later, it would occur to him that this should probably have given it more. It didn’t matter, though: Everything, even this late-breaking potential scandal, rang with the drama of a new name-brand world he knew he never wanted to leave.)

Usually, when the boy got home from grocery shopping, he helped his mother unpack the bags in the kitchen, mainly by reveling in how rich their family seemed to be for this one moment each week and wondering which item he would honor by opening it first. But this time, the boy ran right to his room with the cereal box so that he could keep his word to hide it from his father, who found both the boy and the box only minutes later, drawn by the sobs to his bedroom, where the boy was discovered crying over a torn-apart box of Frosted Flakes.

“I thought we didn’t buy this kind of cereal,” said the boy’s father, crouching down to look directly at Tony the Tiger, eyeing him as one would an enemy and an equal.

“If you have the right secret code in the box in the treasure chest,” explained the boy, swallowing mucus, “you win a hundred thousand dollars. We’d be rich.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” said the boy’s father.

The boy’s father stood up and pulled a hardcover dictionary from the shelf above the boy’s bed, the frayed sweater he always wore on non-teaching days riding up as he reached.

“If you can guess the word I’m thinking of on this page, I will give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

The boy stopped crying and guessed.

He guessed wrong.

This time the boy was too confused by this whole whatever-it-was to cry.

“What would you have done if I got it right?”

“I have no idea,” said his father, with a smile-like expression