Sneak Peek: 'Cabin Pressure'

It reminded me of the summer after sophomore year of college, when I was living at home and working as a waiter at a Pizzeria Uno. My good friend Chris was painting houses. Both were the kind of jobs that had only one benefit: as soon as we were done for the day, they ceased to exist in our minds. When I clocked out, I was done; no going home and worrying about the big pepperoni presentation I had coming up the next day.

This was the summer that Burger King announced ''Burger Buddies,'' which were three tiny burgers served lined up in a rectangular paper coffin, and the sales pitch was that you could eat each one in only three bites. (It was a short-lived campaign, as Burger King had overestimated the target audience of People Who Are Sick of All That Biting.) The commercials were incessant, so one night, after work, Chris picked me up and we bought two orders of Burger Buddies to test its sales promise. We drove to the parking lot of a community swimming pool near his house, where we opened our cartons and each selected a mini-burger. After my third bite, I saw that I still had a sliver left. Chris had the same. We tried different angles on the second and the third, but both times found that the arc of the human jawline meant that, geometrically, three bites would always leave a small shred of Buddy in your fingers. We sat in the car, feet up on the dashboard, idly finishing off our fries and pondering what this all meant. Was Burger King a big liar? If we explained this smoking gun to McDonalds, would it end the rivalry for good? We talked for an hour about this turn of events, the car filled with an odor of greasy meat and chlorine wafting in from the nearby pool: if someone had squirted suntan lotion into the window it would have made the perfect summer hybrid odor. For years after, I remembered that as the last moment that my mind was entirely uncluttered with worry. It was summer, I was with one of my best friends, and the most important thing we had on our minds at that moment was fact-checking a Burger King commercial.

The cookie discussion was similarly relaxing. I sat back and listened to the various theses and rebuttals fly back and forth, the boys fervently dunking chunks of cookie into their glasses to further their points. I leaned toward Rattler, who had his hand in his milk glass up to his palm. ''Hey, be careful there! I like warm milk, too, but you can't directly dunk a cookie into it.''

He looked at me. ''Why not?''

My aim was to play off the old urban legend about how Mikey from the Life Cereal commercial had died mixing Pop Rocks and Coke. ''It's an explosive combination. You could blow us all up.''

Big B snorted at me. He loved to be the first to snort.

''You don't believe me? You know who it happened to, don't you?'' I was ready to deliver the punch line: some young, just-forgotten child star had dunked a chocolate-chip cookie into warm milk, and died in the explosion. But I hadn't thought it through yet, and I had no name. No problem, one would come to me, I wrote about pop culture for a living. Who was the 2003 equivalent to Mikey? I needed a famous kid who would have been big about three years before, the way the Life cereal kid had just vanished when his death became a nationwide rumor. As the kids stared at me, I rifled through my mental pop-culture rolodex. Olsen Twins? No, they were still too famous. The girl from the show Blossom? No, before their time. Were there any popular commercials with kids? Dammit, ever since I got TiVo I hadn't watched a commercial.

The longer I paused, the more quickly my joke was becoming moot. My mind finally lit on the only movie kid's face I could think of: Dakota Fanning. In the next couple of years she would go on to become a ubiquitous child star in huge movies like War of the Worlds, but at the time she had only been noticed in I Am Sam. I couldn't even remember her name at the time, but I hated to leave my joke unfinished. ''The girl from I Am Sam,'' I said, still trying to sell it. ''She went dunking and KABLOOEY! Killed her instantly.''

There was a moment of silence.

''Who?'' said Patrioticus.

''Wait, what?'' said Action.

''What's I Am Sam?'' asked Rattler. ''Is that like Green Eggs and Ham?''

Reg just laughed at me. ''The girl from I Am Sam?''

''Yeah, her. You know, like the Mikey thing?'' I looked back at Reg for support. He just kept laughing. Didn't they have urban legends in Australia?

The Fog said quietly, ''Who's Mikey?'' His hand fluttered nervously over his mouth when he spoke.

''The kid who mixed Pop Rocks and Coke!'' I said impatiently.

They looked at me as if I had just quoted an old Burns and Allen routine.

''What's Pop Rocks?'' asked the Fog, his hand dropping to his lap in confusion.

I was three layers out of touch. I might still be able to convince myself that thirty-four wasn't a one-step-closer-to-death sentence, but it was becoming harder to rationalize that I was still just another kid.

Copyright 2007 Josh Wolk. First published by Hyperion Books.

Visit the author's website, joshwolk.com, for more about Cabin Pressure.