Brave Warrior

by Ann Hood

  “Yes,” he muttered.

  “What is she wearing?”

  “She’s a March sister, from—”

  “Little Women!” Lily said. “That’s clever.”

  “It is?”

  “Well, clever but kind of hard to figure out,” Lily said. “I mean, she just looks like an old-fashioned person.”

  “Right,” Felix said.

  “There’s a DJ in the music room,” Lily said hopefully.

  “Right,” Felix said again.

  He mustered all the courage he had, then he wiped his hand on his pants to be sure it was good and dry, and then he actually took Lily Goldberg’s hand, with its chewed fingernails and small, star-shaped scar at the base of her thumb, in his. To his surprise and utter delight, Lily gave his hand a little squeeze.

  Hand in hand, Felix led Lily to the music room.

  “What are you supposed to be?” Jim Duncan asked Maisie. “Like, an old lady or something?”

  Maisie glared at him. He was wearing basketball shorts, a Duke basketball jersey, and sneakers.

  “What are you?” she said. “A basketball player?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “March Madness.”

  Maisie shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “March Madness is what they call the NCAA basketball play-offs,” Jim explained.

  She didn’t answer him. She was hot in her long dress and high, buttoned shoes. And she couldn’t find Felix to complain to.

  “Now you,” Jim was saying.

  “Jo March,” Maisie said.

  He looked at her, baffled.

  “Forget it,” she grumbled.

  “No, really, who is he?”

  “Do I look like I’m a he?” Maisie said, and walked away.

  “Joe’s a girl?” Jim Duncan called after her.

  She wove her way through the crowd, looking for Felix. Almost every boy was dressed as a basketball player and almost every girl was a flower of some kind. Felix had been right. Her costume was all wrong. She should have been a daffodil, an iris, a daisy. When she passed the buffet table, she popped a miniature egg roll into her mouth, then kept walking, following the music that came from another room.

  There, a DJ was talking kids through something called the chicken dance. First, they had to flap their arms like wings. Then they moved their hands like two beaks opening and closing. Then more arm flapping before they shook their rear ends like chickens shaking their feathers.

  Smack in the middle of the room she spotted Felix chicken-dancing with Lily Goldberg and looking like he was having more fun than he’d ever had before. His face was actually lit up with happiness, and his eyes sparkled as he and Lily shook their butts, grinning at each other.

  Felix did not see her standing there looking lonely and miserable. Or if he did, he was pretending he didn’t. Maisie went back to the buffet table and ate enough hamburger sliders to add up to one real-size hamburger. Then she didn’t know what to do next. The chicken-dance music kept playing, and the sounds of everyone laughing and clucking floated with it through the air. No one else was even in the Gold Room. They were all chicken-dancing.

  Maybe his mother was right, Felix thought. Maybe there was something that happened to people in spring. It had happened to Great-Uncle Thorne, and his mother, and his father. And now it was happening to Felix. He had chicken-danced, hokey-pokeyed, hully-gullyed, macarena-ed, and done the Electric Slide, all with Lily Goldberg. She did not leave his side, not once. When Felix smiled at her, she smiled back. In between dances, when Felix took her hand, she held on. He had even forgotten about Maisie in her ridiculous costume. All around him, girls were flowers, dressed in pale leotards and tights—yellow and pink and purple—with felt or fabric petals framing their faces. They looked lovely, these girls. Not at all like Maisie, whose costume smelled a little like mothballs and didn’t really make sense.

  Yes, Felix forgot that Maisie had come to the party, until the DJ took a break, and Felix and Lily walked hand in hand back to the Gold Room for some more lemonade and miniature snacks.

  “Your sister crashed my party,” Bitsy Beal said from beneath her daisy crown.

  Felix glanced around the room, but Maisie was nowhere in sight.

  “Avery said she smelled like an old man’s winter coat, and she ate about a million sliders,” Bitsy said.

  She didn’t really expect an answer; Felix saw that. But he gave her one anyway.

  “I told her she wasn’t invited,” he lied. “But she came anyway.” He felt weird inside. Weird for lying to appease Bitsy. Weird for betraying Maisie. Un-twinning was harder than he thought it would be.

  Bitsy shook her head sympathetically. “Poor Felix,” she said. “Saddled with a loser.”

  “She’s not a loser,” Felix said. “She’s just—”

  But he couldn’t finish. A lump lodged in his throat, and he could hardly swallow, it felt so big. He got another glass of lemonade, hoping that would help it go away. It didn’t.

  Avery Mason joined them, tossing her beautiful hair.

  “Your sister just ran out of here and down Bellevue Avenue,” she told Felix. “Barefoot,” she added.

  Felix had vowed he was not going to let Maisie ruin his night. But why in the world was she barefoot? Running down Bellevue Avenue? He knew he should go after her. Maybe she had heard Bitsy talking about her. Maybe she knew she wasn’t invited after all.

  The DJ was back, and he put on “The Twist.”

  Everyone squealed and ran out of the Gold Room, back to the music room, already starting to dance. This time, Lily took his hand. Felix thought about Maisie, practically home by now. Where were her shoes? She had been so amused by them, carefully buttoning each button with that special hook.

  “Come on,” Lily said, tugging his hand.

  Felix pushed away all thoughts about Maisie.

  “Time to twist,” he said.

  They twisted. They spelled out the letters to “YMCA” with their arms. They dropped to the floor for “Shout” and then jumped up high when the song grew loud. They did the limbo, and finally, Felix held Lily by the waist and they danced an awkward, shuffling waltz. And the entire time, that lump stayed in his throat, and no matter how hard he tried not to, Felix thought of Maisie, barefoot, running down Bellevue Avenue alone in the dark.

  CHAPTER 5

  Buffalo

  As soon as Felix got home, he ran through the Foyer, up the Grand Staircase, and down the hall straight to Maisie’s room. Elm Medona felt the way it always did at night: too quiet and too creepy. He was relieved to see Maisie’s door open and a light on inside.

  “Maisie?” Felix said from the doorway. “Maisie, I’m sorry. I’m a terrible brother. I’m an awful person.” The words came out in one long, breathless rush.

  But Maisie’s bed, with mahogany posts elaborately carved into the shapes of different animals—giraffe, zebra, elephant, and jaguar—and the canopy that stretched across the top made of handmade saffron-colored silk, was empty.

  Felix stepped into the room and looked around, as if Maisie might pop out of the armoire or come out from under the bed. The mural of a jungle scene that covered the walls glowed in the lamplight.

  “Maisie?” he said again, even though it was clear she wasn’t there.

  She was probably sulking somewhere, Felix thought. Or crying. His stomach twisted with guilt. After he’d heard about Maisie running out of the party, he hadn’t really had very much fun. Sure, he’d liked dancing with Lily Goldberg, but the whole time he couldn’t stop thinking about his sister.

  Felix left Maisie’s room and went downstairs to the Library. Empty. He checked the Billiard Room and the Dining Room and then the Kitchen. But Maisie was nowhere to be found. Slowly, Felix made his way up the back stairs from the Kitchen. A terrible thought had lodged in his mind and despite him trying to push it away, it grew bigger and bigger: What if Maisie never made it home?

  “Maisie?” Felix called into the big, empty house. His throat h
ad gone dry, and his voice came out like a croak.

  Should he call his mother? Or the police?

  But then a new idea came to Felix. He ran up the Grand Staircase, as fast as he could, and down the hall until he reached the place where, when he pressed it, the wall opened to reveal a secret staircase. His heart pounded as he ran up that staircase. If Maisie wasn’t there, he didn’t know what he would do.

  Felix threw open the door to The Treasure Chest.

  And there, to his great relief, was Maisie.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t invited to the party?” Maisie asked Felix.

  To his surprise, she didn’t sound angry. Instead, her voice came out flat and emotionless.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I didn’t want you to feel bad.”

  She nodded. She was sitting on the floor with objects all around her: a tortoise shell and an animal skull; a test tube and a small, jeweled crown; a crystal, a wooden block, a long red-tailed hawk feather.

  “You figured I wouldn’t feel humiliated putting on a costume and going to a party where no one even talked to me,” she said.

  “Jim Duncan talked to you,” Felix said helplessly.

  Maisie nodded again. “You figured,” she continued in that strange, flat voice, “that I wouldn’t hear everybody making fun of me.”

  “I…” Felix began, but he stopped, because what could he say?

  Maisie picked up the feather. “It really doesn’t work alone,” she said. “I’ve been up here trying.”

  “You know it doesn’t,” Felix said, sitting on the floor beside her. The animal skull was whitewashed and creepy.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Felix said, but it sounded weak, not genuine.

  Maisie was still dressed in her old-fashioned outfit, but Felix saw that she had different shoes on now. Not the high, buttoned ones she’d worn to the party, but her lime-green sneakers with the mismatched laces. Those laces were ironic, he decided. Why had he been such a jerk to her about them?

  “Phinneas must have been some kind of weirdo,” Maisie said. “I mean, making an anagram from something in a French novel about time travel. Like he was practically telling the whole world.”

  “Maybe Great-Uncle Thorne has something to say about it,” Felix offered, hoping Maisie might agree and leave The Treasure Chest with him to find Thorne and ask him. Hoping her voice would go back to normal.

  “He’s having a late supper with Penelope Merriweather,” Maisie said. “And Mom is out with her boyfriend. And you’ve been with Lily Goldberg. It’s just been me and all of Phinneas’s collection. Because I guess I got my weird genes from him.”

  “You’re not—”

  “Oh, please,” Maisie said.

  Usually when Maisie got angry with him, she ignored him. She cried. This was different, like she was beyond angry. Felix tried to think of how to make it up to her.

  But before he came up with an idea, Maisie looked straight at him, her eyes steely. She held out the red-tailed hawk feather she was holding.

  “You owe me,” she said.

  She was right. He owed her big-time. Felix reached out and held the soft tip of the feather, and immediately he and Maisie were lifted from the floor, tumbling through time.

  When Maisie landed, she opened her eyes and saw that she was staring up at an enormous, hairy, smelly animal. It stared back at her. It had big brown eyes with a long fringe of eyelashes around them. Although it was dark out, the full moon and a sky full of twinkling stars lit the night.

  Maisie blinked.

  She blinked again.

  “Buffalo,” she said softly.

  As soon as she said it, she realized that she wasn’t exactly seeing one buffalo. She was smack in the middle of hundreds of them. All around her, as far as she could see. Buffalo.

  Slowly, Maisie got to her feet, trying to decide if buffalo were the type of animal that might charge a person, like bulls or moose. The air smelled like the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo, except worse. As hard as she tried to think, Maisie realized that she knew absolutely nothing about the temperament of buffalo.

  She looked around for Felix, but he was nowhere in sight. Or at least, nowhere that she could see past the herd of shaggy beasts that surrounded her. Maisie carefully made her way through the animals, squeezing in between them. The heat from their bodies, and her fear that at any moment they might decide to do something other than just stand there, made her sweat. One thing she knew for sure: A herd of buffalo sure did stink.

  When Felix landed, he hit something hard and hairy, then fell from its great height, hard onto the grass. He looked down the full height of the thing, which was not at all happy about having a twelve-year-old boy drop out of nowhere onto its back. He had seen enough movies to know he was looking at a buffalo. An angry buffalo. The animal snorted and pawed the ground with its hooves. It dipped its head and snorted some more.

  Felix rolled out of the way, right into another buffalo. In fact, there were buffalo as far as he could see. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

  “Sorry,” he said to the snorting one in front of him.

  His voice sounded small in the vast night.

  The buffalo pawed at the grass again, its hooves so close that Felix could see the bits of grass and dirt stuck in them. If this buffalo charged, the whole herd might follow suit, he thought. But if Felix ran, would it follow him and start a stampede? Did buffalo stampede? Or was that just horses?

  Felix got to his knees, carefully backing away from the buffalo and trying to avoid any of the other ones. They were standing pretty much shoulder to shoulder, which made it hard to maneuver. Felix couldn’t believe that just a couple of hours ago he’d been happily dancing the chicken dance with Lily Goldberg. Now here he was in the middle of a herd of buffalo, in the middle of who knows where, scared that he was about to get gored or crushed. He struggled to his feet. The buffalo nearest him shifted, trapping him between it and another one. Felix held his breath until the buffalo shifted again, and then he managed to get free. Luckily, he’d lost sight of the angry one, but now he was lost in a sea of buffalo, trying his best to get out of the herd.

  Once again a buffalo shifted, this time trapping Felix between its haunches and the haunches of another one. Their tails swished lazily. They didn’t seem like they were about to move again.

  Felix placed his hands on the animal’s hairy back and tried to push it away. But when it turned its large head toward him—unhappily, Felix thought—Felix stopped. Instead, he wiggled his body until, inch by inch, he worked his way out and smacked into something very un-buffalo-like.

  He screamed and turned, afraid of what he might see next.

  And there was Maisie, turning to look at him over her shoulder.

  “Buffalo,” she whispered.

  “No kidding,” Felix said.

  “We just have to make it over there,” she said, pointing her chin.

  “Oh,” he said, “is that all?” There were about a zillion buffalo between them and over there.

  “Slow and steady,” she said.

  Felix took her hand and did what she suggested. Together they made their slow, steady way through the herd.

  “They’re kind of cute,” Maisie said from the grass where they sat beyond the buffalo.

  “If they’re not going to kill you, sure,” Felix said.

  He scanned the horizon. It appeared they really were in the middle of nowhere. Felix saw nothing but buffalo and grass stretching seemingly forever.

  Maisie lay down, putting her head on her arms.

  “In the morning we’ll be able to figure out where we are,” she said.

  “I hope so,” Felix said.

  He touched the feather in his yellow tuxedo jacket pocket. One thing he knew for certain: There had not been this many buffalo in a long time. They were practically extinct. Another thing he knew—they had roamed the western states. Felix sighed and tried to stop thinking about it. Ma
isie was right. Once morning came, they would be able to figure out where to go and what to do. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of absolute silence until he finally fell asleep.

  Maisie wasn’t sure what woke her up, the sound of horses pounding toward them or the strange shrieking. Whichever it was, Maisie and Felix startled awake at the same time, jumping to their feet. For a second, they saw nothing but the buffalo, which looked even bigger in the early morning light.

  Then, across the prairie came dozens of Native Americans on horses, bows and arrows lifted. They were shirtless, with rawhide quivers of arrows slung over their bare shoulders. Their hair was long and black and flew in the breeze. Felix saw that they wore feathers in it. He once again reached into his pocket and touched the red-tailed hawk feather from The Treasure Chest. Maisie had been right. Things were clear now. One of these Native Americans needed this feather. But how would they ever figure out which one?

  He didn’t have time to consider any longer. The buffalo, which had seemed temporarily frozen, suddenly began to run, their big brown bodies kicking up clouds of dust.

  One of the men gave a long, loud call, and almost in unison, arrows flew. One. Two. Three.

  Another call.

  And it was over.

  The dust seemed to float in the air for a moment before it settled, revealing the dead bodies of buffalo as far as Maisie and Felix could see.

  Maisie swallowed hard, her hand reaching out to find her brother’s. The stink of blood and musk made her want to throw up. She gulped again, holding on tight to Felix’s hand.

  Across the plains, a sea of Native Americans descended on the dead buffalo. As Felix watched them, he realized where he and Maisie had landed. They were in the American West. And white settlers were the enemy.

  “Maisie,” he whispered hoarsely. “We’ve got to get out of here before they see us.”

  At first, she looked puzzled, but slowly she understood what Felix meant.

  Her eyes scanned the endless stretch of land around them. There was no place to run without being seen.