We Could Be Heroes

by Margaret Finnegan

  There was only one problem. She refused to pay! When she sat down next to him at school she started yakking away, spoiling his revenge by not even realizing it was happening.

  “So the good news is your dad did not talk to Mr. Jorgensen,” she said as the other kids in class found their seats. “I thought for sure he would because he had that whole spill-the-beans look going on the entire time he was walking me and Booler back. Luckily, he only spilled the beans to my parents—boy, were they mad. They told me I had to march right over to Mr. Jorgensen’s house with Booler and apologize, but I told them that George Washington never apologized for freeing our country so I didn’t see why I should apologize for freeing Booler.”

  Hank imagined himself a stone wall.

  “Unfortunately, my parents do not seem to appreciate Mr. George Washington, which I think is un-American of them.”

  Hank did not respond. Luckily, Mrs. Vera called the class to attention.

  * * *

  At lunch, Maisie was at it again, starting right where she left off, willfully ignoring how well Hank was icing her out.

  But Hank persevered: When she sat down at their usual lunch table, he plopped down at another. She got up and moved next to him. “They still made me go over and apologize to the old liver spot. But I was tricky. My parents watched from our yard but they could not hear me, so when Mr. Jorgensen opened the door, I was all, ‘I am so sorry, Mr. Jorgensen. I rudely took Booler for a walk without asking permission and that was terribly wrong of me and I will never do it again.’ Pretty smart, huh?” Maisie nudged Hank conspiratorially with her shoulder.

  But he just crossed his arms, squinted, and made his mouth an angry wrinkle.

  Maisie continued. “So now I have to clean the whole garage by myself because apparently I make bad choices and that’s supposed to help me.”

  When he still didn’t answer, she added, sounding less sure of herself, “But I’m thinking maybe I’ll be able to bring you some rocks from our rock cupboard.” She moved to the other side of the table, where Hank had been pointedly looking. She moved her head left and right so that he could not help but see her smile. “Yeah? Some rocks?”

  But Hank would not be soothed, not even by rocks, and he kept his distance even when the bell rang and it was time to head home—when they normally planned a playdate or talked about homework or compared notes about what a piece of work Mrs. Vera was.

  At home, the freeze-out continued. But it was harder because when his parents figured out he wasn’t talking to them, they just went about their usual business as if it didn’t matter at all.

  Finally, he had to put on his jaw-clenching angry face and say, “You gave me a bad day. I didn’t have any doubts that Maisie was my friend until you said something.”

  His parents were in the kitchen cooking dinner. They looked at each other. His mother bent down and hugged him—but he knew how to punish her. He did not hug back at all.

  “We’re sorry,” said Dad, coming to rest a hand on Hank’s shoulder.

  “She fooled us too,” said Mom sadly. “I really thought she was made of better stuff than that.”

  Hank’s heart seemed to give a little squeeze. So it was true then. Their sympathy seemed to prove everything. Maisie had been using him all along.

  He ate his dinner without tasting it and didn’t even feel better when they sat down and watched The Jungle Book.

  Funny enough, though, Maisie still kept acting like nothing had changed between them. The next day, while waiting for Mrs. Vera to come walk them to class, she said, “The thing is, I don’t see how cleaning the stupid garage is supposed to help me make better choices, especially when I already make good choices. So I think my parents are just Cinderella-ing me, which seems like it should be against the law. What do you think?”

  Hank looked at Maisie. He pushed out his jaw and billowed his lower lip, just like he’d seen his mom do, and he glowered at her. He could tell he was doing it really well too, because he could feel his eyebrows trembling. It must have worked because Maisie didn’t try to connect with him again until lunch, when she pushed a brownie across the table toward him. She seemed humble and small, but Hank just pushed the brownie away and went to look for rocks. It should have been fun. It had always been fun before. It had always been enough before. But something had changed. It was like someone had taken all the spice out of his guacamole and left him with just smashed avocados. He missed the spice. He missed Maisie.

  When the school day ended he followed her outside. He ran up to her and said, “Real friends don’t try to use you.”

  Her shoulders slumped forward and she began to rake her hair in front of her face. In a singsongy mumble, she said, “It is maybe a little bit true that when I first met you I was being nice partially so you would take Booler.” She blinked and her curtain of hair fluttered. Her voice stronger, she added, “But then I beat you up by accident and now we play Jungle Book and stuff. And…” She threw her hands in the air and they fell down with a defeated flail. “And I thought you wanted to save Booler too. I thought that’s what you said.”

  “I did want to save Booler too. But my parents said… They said maybe you only cared about Booler, that maybe you weren’t really my friend.”

  She pushed her hair out of her face and looked at Hank, astonished. “We are friends.” Quietly, she added, “You’re my best friend.”

  Hank leaned back. His face softened. “Really?”

  “Of course, you goof.” She gave his arm a gentle slap.

  He smiled. And the black moth of revenge fluttered away.

  She smiled back and, taking a step forward, said, “Now let’s look for rocks—but good ones. Maybe we can find a meteorite. We could give it to a museum and make them name it after us. We could call it the Huang-Hudson meteorite.”

  Hank held his hand up to stop her. “Meteorites are named after the place they’re found.”

  “Then we’re keeping the meteorite for ourselves.”

  “No,” he said as his confidence began to blossom. “It is a fact that friends don’t fool each other, but it is also a fact that they don’t boss each other around. And if we find a meteorite we have to give it to a museum because that is what you do.”

  She looked at him, nodded approvingly. “Okay, Mr. I’m-not-a-doormat. I like it! We’ll give it to the museum.”

  She took another step forward. He stopped her again. “And it is also a fact that friends don’t make you change for them. Friends accept you just the way you are. And friends don’t ask you to give them your toys or your money or your food. And they don’t just play at their house. They also come to your house”—with that one he gave her a pointed look—“and—”

  “And when they fight they make up! I get it! Let’s find that meteorite!”

  They walked toward the playground.

  She pulled her mouth up to one side and said casually, “I’m still a little insulted that you thought I was using you, Hank. I’m not a lemon, you know.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You can’t be best friends with a lemon.”

  At dinner he said the same thing. His parents were talking about the tooth that had that morning popped out of Sam’s gums. They couldn’t get over it. Mom was showing Dad pictures of the tooth on her phone even though both of them could have just looked over at Sam in the high chair and seen the real tooth for themselves.

  Hank blurted, “You can’t be best friends with a lemon.”

  His parents looked blankly at each other, then at Hank.

  Mom put her phone on the table. “Excuse me?”

  “You can’t be friends with a lemon. Maisie isn’t a lemon so she wasn’t using me. You were wrong. And friends have fights and then they make up. So… I think you need to make up with me.”

  Dad scooped some more applesauce onto Hank’s plate. And they made up.

  7.

  Hank was in Paradise. Literally. With him and Maisie having made up, Maisie’s family had invited him to see the L
ewis Overthrust that weekend, a mountain pass where Maisie’s dad had been working with a team of geologists to better understand the places where earthquake faults come to an end. Her parents had explained to Hank how the pass’s bent and contorted bands of light-colored quartzite had—over millions of years of intense compression—pushed themselves on top of younger, darker rocks until the landscape looked like folds of ribbon candy.

  Afterward, they had parked at Two Medicine Lake and hiked up to Paradise Point for a picnic. It was fully spring now. The meadows were carpets of green and the leaves in the trees danced in the light breeze. In the distance they could see Flinsch Peak, which Maisie said looked like a giant gray traffic cone. It sort of bothered Hank because he didn’t think anyone should describe something as impressive as a nine-thousand-foot matterhorn as if it were as ordinary as a traffic cone, but Hank was in too good a mood to make it a big deal. He did know an interesting fact about matterhorns, though, and decided to share that instead.

  “That is actually a matterhorn,” he explained. He had just swallowed a bite of one of the many ham and cheese sandwiches he had brought to share, and he was still holding the sandwich up to his face. “An interesting fact is that a matterhorn is carved out by at least three glaciers. Three!”

  He waited for Maisie to answer, and when she didn’t he turned to her. She was staring right at the steep peak. He repeated, “A matterhorn is carved out by at least three glaciers. It takes millions of years.” She continued to stare. Hank waved his sandwich in front of her face, trying to catch her attention. “Maisie?”

  Mrs. Huang slid closer to her daughter and put her arm around her as Mr. Huang got up. He was thin and tall with short, spiky hair, and when he stood he looked a little like a long green onion. He said, “You really know your stuff, Hank. Hey, why don’t we start heading back down the path and I can tell you about the time I climbed to the top of Mount Thielsen in Oregon?”

  “I’m not so interested in climbing mountains,” said Hank. “I just like facts about mountains. And also rocks.”

  Mr. Huang chuckled. “Well, then you’ll like this. Mount Thielsen is not just a mountain. It’s a dead volcano.”

  Hank waited for his voice to catch up with his percolating brain. He whispered, “This is the best day of my life,” stuffing the remainder of his sandwich into his backpack. He shouldered his pack and started to follow Mr. Huang back down the path, adding, “Do you know that a dead volcano has a volcano skeleton?”

  “I do,” answered Mr. Huang.

  They talked all the way back to the car, and it was only when they got there that Hank realized Maisie and Mrs. Huang were not behind them. “Hey, where’s Maisie?” asked Hank.

  Mr. Huang looked back up the path. “Oh, they’ll probably be here in a minute. Maybe they saw some good rocks!”

  “Yeah. Though I don’t know how I could have missed any,” said Hank.

  When Maisie and her mom did arrive, they all got straight into the car. Maisie seemed pretty quiet. But then, it would have been hard for her to get a word in edgewise since Hank had so many things he wanted to say about what they’d seen, and—best of all—Mr. and Mrs. Huang did too. And so Hank didn’t even mind when he looked over and noticed that Maisie had fallen asleep. He just kept talking, and when he looked at the time and noticed that they had been driving for over an hour, he said, “Do you have to drive this far every day?”

  “Most days,” said Mr. Huang. “But it won’t be forever.”

  “You should camp up here,” said Hank. “I saw campsites near Paradise Point. That would be easier and more fun.”

  “We used to camp a lot.” Mr. Huang’s eyes flashed in the rearview mirror. “Remember when we used to camp, Maisie?”

  Hank looked over. Maisie was awake. Her brows were knit tight. She snorted, “No.”

  “We camp all the time,” said Hank. “You guys can come with us sometime, but you’ll have to bring your own sleeping bags because Sam is going to use the extra one from now on.”

  She snorted again and said, “Not bloody likely.”

  Hank tilted his head, not sure if she was talking about the camping or the sleeping bag.

  “What Maisie is trying to say,” said Mrs. Huang calmly, “is that we don’t camp anymore. And now we don’t need to because we are always so close to the wonders of nature. It’s in our backyard!”

  Mr. Huang turned on the radio and music started playing. “Hey, it’s your favorite song, Maisie!”

  Maisie let out an exaggerated sigh. “Not this version. Only old people like this version.”

  Hank listened. It was not a song he knew—and he didn’t think he liked it. It was a warbling man singing, “Oh, we can beat them forever and ever. Then we can be heroes just for one day.”

  “No way,” said her dad. “Nothing ever beats the original!”

  Maisie sat up straighter. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  Hank was confused. Something had changed. The tension of only a moment ago had seemed to dissolve. But that couldn’t be right because the words Maisie and her dad were saying were actually arguing words. He looked cautiously up at Mrs. Huang, who was doing something on her phone.

  Mrs. Huang said, “Okay, okay, how about this?” and a different version of the song began to play.

  “That’s better,” said Maisie.

  “Oh, no!” cried Mr. Huang.

  Maisie laughed. So Hank laughed too, and he listened. When the song ended, he said, “That is a much better version of the song, Mr. Huang. Maisie is right.”

  Maisie looked over at Hank. Grinning, she said, “Yeah, Dad. You don’t know anything.”

  “Not about music,” said Hank, before diplomatically adding, “but you do know a lot about rocks.”

  They took the turnoff for Meadowlark and soon Hank was delivered to his parents with a sunburned face and a container of oatmeal cookies.

  Hank held the cookies in front of his dad. He said, “Maisie made these for us. I told you she wasn’t a lemon.”

  “You were right,” said Dad, grabbing a cookie from the container and taking a bite. “And we were wrong.”

  Hank rolled his eyes. “You were wrong.”

  Mom came. She took a cookie too. “She’s a tornado, that one, but I think her heart is in the right place.”

  Hank took his own cookie and lorded his wisdom over them again. “Her heart is in the right place. Otherwise I think she would die.” Then, humming the song from the car, he went to his room and slipped a rock he’d found at Paradise Point on his bookshelf.

  * * *

  Hank was still thinking about his day trip with Maisie’s family the next time she came over to play. They had invented a game where they organized Hank’s rocks and minerals by their likelihood of becoming money in the aftermath of a robot uprising. There was a lot to consider: beauty, weight, potential for being used as a robot part.

  They were debating the possible value of a piece of coral-colored quartzite. Maisie was convinced that the plain-looking rock would have absolutely no monetary value, but Hank disagreed.

  “People could throw it at the robots.”

  “Yeah, but people aren’t going to pay for throwing rocks. They’ll be able to find those anywhere.”

  “Yeah, but it would be a really good throwing rock. People would want it. It’s super hard. It’s the exact same stuff as in the Lewis Overthrust. It got so compressed that it turned from quartz to quartzite. That’s a valuable anti-robot weapon. It would really dent them right up.”

  She rolled her shoulders and looked away. “Ugh. I don’t want to talk about the Lewis Overthrust.”

  “Why?” said Hank, who could think of nothing more exciting to talk about than the day of their picnic.

  She deflated a bit. “I just… Let’s get back to organizing.”

  So they did, and it was great, but to be honest even Hank realized that it wasn’t as great as playing at Maisie’s. For one thing, Maisie’s house came with Mai
sie’s parents, who would occasionally toss him an exciting rock fact. For another thing, there was Booler. Booler was Hank’s friend too, after all. And Hank increasingly shared Maisie’s worries about excluding Booler. Booler did get so excited to see them. He would bark and jump as soon as they appeared, and when they reached him he would burrow into them and let out high-pitched little whines as his tail flippity-flopped left and right.

  Plus, Hank saw now that Booler really did need them. For example, the dog had developed a small sore on one of his paws. It did not look too bad to Hank, just a little redness between two of his toe pads, but Booler licked it constantly. Maisie said that her old dog used to do the same thing and that it was not a good sign. She started bringing a jar of Vaseline with her over to Mr. Jorgensen’s, and she and Hank would take turns gently spreading a thin layer of the greasy cream on the sore. The Vaseline would settle Booler down for a while, but only a little while, so then they would have to look at him and say, “No, boy. No licking.” That worked too, until Booler figured things out and started waiting for them to play before he started licking his paw, which meant that, now, one of them had to keep an eye on him the whole time they were visiting him.

  It worked. In less than a week Booler was better, but the whole event raised an important question. What would have happened to Booler’s paw if they had not been there? And if the sweet pup needed so much attention to help him recover from a sore paw, how much more did he need to keep him safe during his seizures?

  “I think Booler really needs to live with me,” Hank told Maisie one day.

  “Duh,” she said, letting her tongue fly outside her mouth. “Of course he should live with you.”

  “Too bad my parents don’t want a dog.”

  Maisie was quiet for a minute. She got a sneaky look on her face. “Or maybe your parents just think they don’t want a dog.”

  And so the lobbying began.

  To the argument that Hank’s mom didn’t believe she could “manage one more thing,” Hank and Maisie explained that Booler would not mean more work for anyone. Booler would mean less work for everyone because Booler would keep away burglars and play with Sam, who had just one day earlier taken his first steps—right in front of Maisie and Hank. Sam, they said to all who would listen, would appreciate a four-legged nanny as fun as Booler. Plus, Hank and Maisie could even train Booler to do things for Hank’s mom, like open cabinets and drawers and bark if Sam were about to walk off a cliff.