Page 55 of The Last Inch Of Ice
“It’s a hybrid,” she says, her voice a little shaky. “A carrot and a beetroot. My mom grows them in our garden and I thought, what if they were one thing?”
Before Nazar can formulate a response—something appropriately encouraging but not condescending—the cowlick boy swoops in like a predator who’s spotted weakness.
“That’s not real,” he declares. “Vegetables can’t be hybrids. You just couldn’t make a normal carrot.”
The girl’s face crumples. Her eyes go shiny with the particular sheen that precedes crying. “I know,” she whispers.
The boy seems to realize he’s gone too far. His triumph deflates. “I mean… I couldn’t make my Transformer either,” he admits glumly, holding up a tangle of gray and silver clay that looks more like a car accident than a robot. “It was supposed to be Optimus Prime but it just turned into… I don’t know. Nonsense.”
Silence falls over their small corner of the room. The girl looks like she’s about to cry. The boy looks like he wishes he hadn’t said anything. Nazar is completely out of his depth.
Then Callahan moves.
“Show me that again,” he says, his voice cutting through the awkward quiet.
He walks over to the girl with the purposeful stride of someone who’s just decided something.
He crouches down—a smooth, athletic movement—and takes the lumpy vegetable from her hands. He turns it over with surprising seriousness, examining it from multiple angles like it’s a piece in an art gallery.
“The carrot-beet hybrid,” he says slowly. “Here’s the thing: it is real. You made it. Therefore, it exists. That’s how creation works.”
He stands up, holding the clay creation aloft like it’s Simba from The Lion King.
His sunglasses are still on, which should make this ridiculous but somehow doesn’t.
“This isn’t just a vegetable,” he announces to the kids, who are now gravitating toward him like he’s got a magnetic field. “This is theKarabeet!The superfood of the future. Sweet like a beet, crunchy like a carrot, and full of vitamins that make you grow tall and strong.”
He pauses dramatically, and Nazar can see him thinking, calculating.
“We need a slogan,” Kai says. “Something catchy. How about…” He strikes a pose like he’s in a commercial. “‘The Karabeet—it’s root-tastic!’”
Several kids giggle. The girl with the pigtails looks up at him with something approaching worship.
Then Kai sings a little jingle—just a few notes, nothing elaborate, but somehow catchy.
“Wait,” one of the kids says. “Sing it again!”
“No, no, you all have to sing it,” Kai insists. “It’s a commercial. Everyone together…”
And somehow, impossibly, he gets half the class to sing his stupid made-up jingle about the Karabeet.
Then he rolls up the sleeves of his sweater—which Nazar knows from earlier isLoro Pianaand cost somewhere in the three-thousand-dollar range—and points at the boy with the failed Transformer.
“You,” he says. “Bring me that ‘nonsense.’”
The boy shuffles forward cautiously. Kai takes the clay tangle and holds it up to the light.
“This is not nonsense,” he declares. “This is Scrapshard. A Decepticon who was blown apart in an epic battle but reformed himself using rage and scrap metal from destroyed Autobots. His superpower is that he can absorb any machine and make it part of his body. If he touches your car? Now he’s got wheels. If he touches a jet? Boom, he can fly.”
The boy’s eyes go wide. “Really?”
“His catchphrase,” Kai continues, lowering his voice into a gravelly villain tone, “is ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me… more me.’”
The boy grins so hard his face looks like it might split.
Kai surveys the room like a general assessing troops. “Okay. Who’s next? Who else has a project that isn’t quite what they wanted?”
And the most scandalous player in the League transforms into a one-man creative agency for failed sixth-grade art projects.
