The Hero Next Door

by The Hero Next Door (retail) (epub)

  “She can’t come out till she does the dishes!” they heard Franny’s mom yell from somewhere behind her. She sounded angry. They could hear a hint of turmoil coming from the house: voices yelling in another room.

  “Hurry up, Franny!” someone called out, after they’d all been waiting a good five minutes.

  No one liked to have to wait for too long. Waiting usually led to arguments in a crowd of kids this size. Someone in the group had already questioned whether punchball was the right game choice, and when Big Frank suggested ringalario, everyone razzed him mercilessly because it was common knowledge ringalario could only be played at dusk.

  “Franny!” several other voices yelled up to Franny’s empty kitchen window. “Hurry up!”

  Reina was not one of these voices. She knew, or sensed, that Franny had other forces at work in her morning routine that had nothing to do with the kids below, and everything to do with the chaos inside her home. It wasn’t uncommon for Franny to emerge from her building with mismatched sneakers, or a shirt worn inside out. There was always some waiting around for Franny. But today the crowd was ruthless.

  “Come on, let’s just go,” said Kim, an older girl who didn’t usually hang out with them.

  “But she’ll be down in a second,” Reina said.

  “We’ve been waiting forever,” Kim said, clucking her tongue. “Let’s just go, already!”

  An argument was about to start, but luckily Franny came trotting out the front door of the building just in time. She seemed almost breathless.

  “I’m ready!” she said, running past the group.

  The crowd began to head toward the long courtyard, when a voice boomed from Franny’s kitchen window. It was a man’s voice, and it sounded like thunder.

  “Franny, you get back here!” Franny’s father yelled from the window.

  The kids all stopped in their tracks and looked up. They could see Franny’s dad, in his white undershirt, red-nosed, at the window looking down at them.

  “I’m just playing for a little while!” Franny yelled back.

  “I told you you’re not going out and playing with that spic anymore!” he shouted.

  There was silence. A silence like a cloud that consumed all the worldly sounds: no buses, no cars, no birds. Silence.

  Reina was looking up like everyone else, not even realizing what he’d said at first. But then it hit her, quickly, with the strange clarity of a firework in the night, a Roman candle explosion in still black air: he was talking about her. None of these other kids spoke Spanish. She was the only one with the long black ponytail and the warm brown eyes. Her skin was the color of canela, as her mother used to say. Cinnamon. Later when she went to art school, she would learn the word sepia was the best color word to describe her. But for now, canela. Franny’s father had just called her spic in front of all her neighborhood friends. It was an incandescent moment. It was a flash going off, obscuring vision.

  No one looked at Franny, or Reina. The kids looked down at the sidewalk, or at each other. Reina didn’t see Franny’s expression as she ran back inside the building. She herself swallowed hard. It didn’t occur to her to cry. She wasn’t angry. She was embarrassed, though. She was still, like she was at the age of six, a very shy girl. She didn’t like to be the center of attention.

  Reina turned to Karen and Tommy, the kids she felt closest to, who knew her the best. Their eyes were wide, trying to gauge her expression to see how they should react. Reina thought they looked like they were waiting for her to speak, to say something, but she didn’t want to. She found no words. She wanted the moment to be over, forgotten.

  “Let’s just play, already,” said Roy Ponte, punching the Spalding ball into the courtyard.

  The kids, as if released from a game of freeze tag, followed the ball into the courtyard. It bounced off the walls, and Roy caught it and called, “Captain.” Big Frank called, “Captain!” They picked sides. Reina always got picked second or third. She was good at punchball.

  Nothing was said about what had just happened. Reina, focused on the game, blew all thoughts of it away. She punched them away every time it was her turn at bat.

  Franny didn’t come back out to play that day. She didn’t watch the fireworks that night. But she showed up the next day. No one called for her, but she came out and joined the group in the middle of a game of tag. She said hello to Reina as if nothing had happened, and Reina said hello to her. Neither one of them ever acknowledged what had happened. They were best friends, but they were strangers, too. There were boundaries, like in foreign countries, that were never crossed.

  5.

  Reina didn’t tell her mother about the incident until the end of summer. Maybe she was afraid her mother wouldn’t let her play with Franny anymore. Maybe she was afraid her mother’s feelings would get hurt. But finally she told her mother one night as she was going to bed, as her mother sat on the side of the bed stroking her hair. Her mother didn’t react the way she’d thought she would.

  “Poor Franny,” her mother said after a moment. “Imagine, growing up with such an ignorant father. He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know me. Such an ignorant man. Did Franny ever say anything to you afterward?”

  “No.”

  “Not surprising. What could she say, after all?”

  Reina looked at her mother in the darkness.

  “Is that it?” she said, relieved. “I thought you were going to tell me I couldn’t play with her anymore or something.”

  “Why would I punish Franny by depriving her of your friendship?” her mother answered. “She needs you, Reina. She needs you much more than you need her. Years from now, when she looks back, she’ll see the happiest days of her childhood involved being with you, going ice-skating, going to the beach, the pancakes in bed on Saturday mornings. She’ll remember all that.”

  “Will she remember her father calling me a spic?”

  “She’ll never forget that, I’m sure. And neither will you. It will be a little line in the story of your life. But you’ll have much bigger stories to write someday.” Mrs. Madrid bent over and kissed her daughter on the forehead. “Now go to sleep, mi reina bella, mi reina adorada.”

  Reina closed her eyes and turned on her side. She did not want her mother to see that she was crying. Not because of the horrible word uttered by a red-nosed man she would never see again. But because she knew her best friend would never have a mother like hers, or know the tenderness of that one luminous word uttered in the darkness: reina.

  Go Fish

  William Alexander

  Colt, Elora, and Avery had never spoken to each other before they found the catacombs. They were neighbors, but they didn’t know each other’s names. Colt was seven years old, Elora eleven, and Avery thirteen. Those ages were separate nations whose citizens didn’t really speak the same language. But the catacombs gave them common ground and something to talk about.

  Colt found the place first. It was bedtime on an early summer night. He had already had a bath. He had needed that bath. Colt liked dirt. He’d spent the afternoon helping ghosts in his backyard sculpt new and muddy bodies for themselves. But now Colt was clean. He had brushed his teeth and put on pajamas with feet attached. He had done all the things he was supposed to do at bedtime—except stay in bed. He couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t tired. So he snuck down to the basement, which was his favorite place.

  Colt was pale, the sort of pale that sunburned easily and made his skin look like it belonged to a cave creature shut away from sunlight for several hundred thousand generations. But that wasn’t why he loved the basement. He wasn’t really a cave creature. He just had Viking ancestors. Not the warrior kind—Colt’s people had never been any good at fighting. They were good at singing and catching fish. He knew this because some of his Viking ancestors haunted the bathtub and they still san
g songs about catching fish.

  The basement was Colt’s favorite place because sound behaved strangely there. He hummed the songs of his fisherfolk ancestors and tapped out a drumbeat on the basement wall.

  One part of the wall made a different sound from the rest. Colt tapped it again. Then he pushed. Something spring-loaded clicked on the other side. The whole wooden wall panel opened.

  Colt was surprised. But a part of him had always expected to find a secret passage in his own basement. He took a camping lantern and went down into the catacombs.

  * * *

  —

  The ghosts of that place were immediately worried about Colt, a young kid exploring in the dark all by himself. Some of those ghosts still remembered their voices, so they sent whispers through the second tunnel and into Elora’s basement.

  Ana Maria, Elora’s older sister, had set up her bedroom in the basement. But now Ana Maria was away at film school—even in summertime, because she had an internship—so Elora had claimed the entire basement as her own. She was dancing when she heard the whispers. She was usually dancing. No single spot on the ground was ever interesting enough to hold the attention of her feet.

  The whispers told her about the wall panel, the one Ana Maria had covered up with movie posters. Elora took down the posters, pushed against the panel, and then went into the catacombs by the shining light of her phone.

  The tunnel floor was made out of bricks in a zigzagging pattern. More bricks had been stacked to make the walls. Dirt, wooden rafters, living tree roots, and haunting ghosts made up the ceiling.

  Elora found a wide-open room at the end of the tunnel.

  A ghost with a lantern stood in that room.

  Elora peered at him. “Wait. You’re not dead.”

  “Nope,” said Colt.

  “You’re the kid from down the street.”

  “I’m Colt Harper,” said the kid.

  “Elora Giselle Dulce,” said Elora.

  Colt held up the camping lantern to see his neighbor more clearly. Elora was dark. People whose ancestors lived close to the equator were usually dark, for obvious reasons. They didn’t sunburn easily. Elora’s own ancestors came from an island that had sunk beneath the sea. Their ghosts also sang songs about fishing, but none of them haunted her bathtub. Elora’s great-great-grandparents preferred to rest inside ice cube trays. Their music escaped whenever their ice melted in lemonade.

  “Where are we?” Colt asked. “Why is there a secret door and a secret tunnel in my basement?”

  Elora looked around by phone light. “I don’t know. But I can see three tunnels. Plus a door. I wonder where they go.” She tried the door. It was stuck. “Okay. Forget the door. Should we see whose basement the third tunnel connects to?”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t find out.” Colt felt nervous for the first time since he had come down into the catacombs. “Maybe one of the mean kids at school lives at the other end. Maybe it’s somebody we don’t want to share a secret tunnel with.”

  “Maybe,” Elora said. “But I’d rather know than just wonder and worry. If that tunnel does lead to someone else’s house, then that someone could use it to sneak right into our houses whenever they want. And if one of the mean kids can do that, then I’d really like to know about the possibility before it happens.”

  Colt slowly nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”

  The two of them went through the third tunnel together. They found another wooden panel at the very end.

  Elora knocked.

  * * *

  —

  Avery Nook sat on the couch in the finished half of their half-finished basement, hard at work on a graphic novel about ghosts who knitted new bodies for themselves out of branches and belly button lint. Avery liked to knit almost as much as they liked to draw. Avery liked to keep their hands busy by making things.

  The linty ghosts of the comic had adventures inside walls and huge hollow trees, where they fought battles against villainous woodchucks.

  A knock came through the basement wall.

  Avery wondered if the comic that they’d made up might be coming true. Maybe small and linty warriors were sending a summons to adventure. Probably not. But Avery shifted a big pile of boxes out of the way and listened to the wall, just to be sure. Their family had just moved into this house a month ago, so dozens of unpacked boxes were still scattered all over the place.

  Knock knock knock.

  “Hello?” Avery whispered.

  Click. The wall opened. Two younger kids from down the way stood inside.

  Avery felt simultaneously delighted and disappointed that their visitors were not, in fact, tiny warriors made out of knitted twigs and lint.

  The three made introductions.

  “Are you a boy or a girl?” Colt blurted out. “I can’t tell by your name.” He couldn’t tell by looking, either. Avery wore neither girlish nor boyish things. They had darkish skin that wouldn’t sunburn too easily, massive glasses to better magnify their most intimidating stare, and short black hair that stuck out in all directions as though pointing to every continent where Avery’s family had ever lived. Their people moved around a lot, and always had. Avery’s ancestors didn’t haunt this new house yet, though. Sometimes ancestry takes a while to catch up.

  Avery tried to smile. A new neighborhood meant new rounds of tiresome explanations. It was like wearing a cast and having to answer the question How did you hurt your arm? several times daily.

  “Yes and no,” they said. “Both and neither. Don’t call me he or she.”

  “Okay,” said Colt.

  “Come check out the big secret room,” Elora said. “It’s haunted, obviously, but just in the usual sort of way. The ghosts in the ceiling don’t seem to mind company.”

  Avery wrote a hasty note on a blank page of the sketch pad and left it for their parents: OFF EXPLORING! BACK SOON.

  * * *

  —

  Colt and Elora showed Avery the chamber in the center of the catacombs. Haunting ghosts watched them from the dirt and roots above.

  “Where does that door go?” Avery asked.

  “Not sure,” said Elora. “It’s stuck.”

  The three of them pulled together, hard. The door creaked and then banged open. They found a long staircase on the other side. Avery led the way up.

  The room at the top had been built out of polished granite blocks. It had old leaded windows and a big metal door, which was locked up tight. Moonlight shone in through the windows. Elora peered outside.

  “We’re in the town cemetery,” she said. “This room must be a crypt. But it doesn’t have a body in it. Weird. It hides the stairs to our basements instead.”

  Avery realized what the catacombs had to be.

  “Prohibition tunnels!” they said. “Specialists used them in the 1920s when it was really illegal to talk to ghosts.”

  “What?” Colt asked, horrified. “Why would that be illegal?”

  Avery shrugged. “Some people freak out about hauntings.”

  “Hauntings just get worse if you ignore them,” Elora pointed out.

  “Obviously,” Avery said. “So all the appeasement specialists kept working. They just went underground. Literally underground. They made secret tunnels to all the cemeteries. Then the law got changed, because that law was a terrible idea in the first place. Now we have proper specialists who don’t need to sneak around through tunnels.”

  “Some places have proper specialists,” Elora said. “Here we’ve got Mr. Armstrong.”

  “Is he any good?” Avery asked.

  Elora hesitated. “He’s very nice….The ghosts seem to like him.”

  “My mom says ‘Bless his heart’ a lot,” Colt added.

  “Crap,” said Avery, who knew what that meant even though they weren’t from around here.
“Well, at least Mr. Armstrong doesn’t have to hide.”

  Avery and Colt both stood close to Elora to look through the window. The moon made pale granite gravestones seem to glow. Wisp lanterns flickered from the tree branches. A whole flock of sleeping pigeons huddled together on top of a tall statue. The statue held a cavalry sword high as though ordering a courageous charge against villainous enemies.

  Avery wondered who that statue was, but didn’t ask.

  * * *

  —

  Every night, all through the summer, the three neighbors met in the catacombs beneath the cemetery to play card games.

  Go Fish was Colt’s favorite.

  Avery liked Psychic Lemur, which involved slapping and stealing the discard pile every time someone correctly guessed what the next card was going to be. Avery was best at guessing, but Elora had the fastest slap.

  Her favorite game was one that she had invented herself.

  “This is called Sleepsuits,” she said. “It’s a sleepover game.”

  “Are we sleeping here tonight?” Colt asked, suddenly worried.

  “No,” Elora assured him. “We aren’t sleeping here. This is just the sort of game that you might play at a sleepover. In whispers. While hiding in the camping tent that you set up on the floor of your bedroom.”

  “Does it rain in your room?” Colt asked.

  “Not usually,” Elora told him. “But it did once. I found a seashell at the beach and brought it home. The shell remembered tropical storms. It kept sharing that memory with me, which flooded the whole house, so we had to take it back to the beach. We couldn’t just mail it to my cousins, because the post office won’t let you mail tropical storms. Dad was annoyed. Mom liked the excuse for another weekend trip, though. She likes to drive. Even in the rain.”

  “Did it rain inside the car?” Colt asked.

  “No. Just outside. We taped the shell to the roof of the car.”

  “So how do we play Sleepsuits?” Avery disliked the whole concept of sleepover games, but tried not to show it.