Heroes & Villains

by Jon Scieszka

  I am only partially settled atop the goose when the Knave charges into the cage, covered in muck and reeking to high heaven. If he’d been thinking more clearly, he could’ve easily trapped me by simply slamming the door closed and latching it from the outside. But it’s probably hard to think clearly when you’re covered in manure, so instead he charges toward me like a poopy, mindless missile.

  The goose stands quickly and rears back again, sending me tumbling over its tail into the straw. Mr. Sixpence snaps and growls at the Knave from up above, where he has somehow managed to stay fixed among the goose’s downy feathers.

  With a cry, the Knave comes at me, fist raised and ready. But before he can slam his knuckles into my nose, I open my magic bag and say . . . nothing. Nothing backward. Nothing forward. I simply let the Knave’s momentum carry him fist-first—SHHWWWWIP!—into the bag, where he promptly disappears. Snip, snap, snout, his tale told out.

  The goose appears to know what it’s doing and where it wants to go. I cling to the reins, and to Mr. Sixpence, as we travel aloft, flying so high we practically brush cobwebs from the sky. The moon is up, and I swear a cloud that’s shaped exactly like a jumping cow passes over it. I blink my eyes. This place is beginning to mess with my mind.

  When we land in Mother’s garden, the old woman rushes outside to greet us.

  “Well, buckle my shoe! You’re back sooner than I expected,” she says as I climb down from the goose, holding Mr. Sixpence and trying to brush straw from the goose cage out of my hair.

  Mother reaches out and scratches Mr. Sixpence under the chin. “I see you’ve found even more than what you came here looking for, young Wendell.” The pup doesn’t bark. Instead, he turns his face toward mine and licks my chin. I’m not entirely sure what Mother means about finding more than I came looking for. It’s not like I came to this world on purpose.

  “And the Knave?” Mother lifts her eyebrows, waiting.

  “He won’t be bothering anyone anymore,” I say, and I hand her the burlap bag, which is now Knave-sized in its totally empty proportions. “You can figure out what to do with him now.”

  “I can indeed.” Mother chuckles as she takes the bag and begins to fold it. “Now, I believe it’s half past time to send you home, young man. But first you must kneel so that I may bestow on you one final gift, something you can carry with you. Something that will remind you of what you are capable of achieving.”

  My heart begins to play pat-a-cake with my rib cage and I think, This is it! This is the moment I get my true weapon, at last. My Sword of Whatsit. My Hammer of Whosit!

  Whiffling my lips madly from side to side, I kneel in the old lady’s radishes, trying to look dignified.

  I hold out my hands and close my eyes. I feel cold metal touch my palms. The cold metal of . . .

  A shiny new pie pan.

  And somehow it feels exactly right.

  I spill from Allie’s locker and land on the floor of the seventh-grade hallway, clutching my pie pan and holding Mr. Sixpence safely in my arms. Won’t Mrs. Finkleman be glad to have her pup back!

  Time must work differently in Mother’s world. Here, it’s no longer nighttime; it’s the middle of passing period, and Mr. Sixpence and I narrowly avoid getting trampled by my classmates. Mr. Sixpence starts yapping as soon as the daze of traveling through a crazy, sucking black-hole vacuum-vortex thingy wears off. But the hallway is so noisy—tennis shoes squeaking; locker doors slamming; kids talking, laughing, yelling—no one appears to notice the funny bark of a small dog.

  Suddenly, one voice rises to the top.

  Allie Chen is shouting. Her voice rings with authority, even if she is only twelve years old, like me.

  “You give that to me right now, Cameron! That 3DS belongs to Wendell. It’s even got his name on it. You can’t go around taking other people’s stuff!”

  I jolt upright and look around for Allie. She’s standing a short way off, surrounded by Cameron Jamison and his friends. She jumps again and again as she tries to grab my 3DS, which Cameron is holding high above his head. Her canvas tote bag sits forgotten on the floor nearby. It has a pig on it, which makes me smile.

  “Back off, Chen!” Cameron laughs as Allie makes another valiant leap for my handheld game system. “Haven’t you heard of ‘finders keepers’? It’s not my fault I just happened to find this in Wendell’s hands. If he wanted it so badly, he shouldn’t have let me take it from him.”

  Cameron’s little speech gives me an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. Didn’t the Knave say something similar less than forty minutes ago, back in the world I’d just come from?

  For a moment, I silently will Allie to cease and desist. No one has ever stood up for me the way she’s doing, but I don’t want her to risk life and limb or have other kids laugh at her for going up against Cameron on my behalf. Our fellow seventh graders have become spectators in the hallway, watching Allie fight for what’s right, all by herself. Even Jay Gupta is here, acting like he doesn’t care one way or another that Cameron stole my 3DS. Acting like he doesn’t care one way or another that Allie might be about to get stuffed inside someone else’s locker before the next bell rings.

  I straighten up. I hold my arms still and ready at my sides, but I can’t help bouncing on my toes a little. I no longer have the burlap bag or the shepherd’s crook, but I do have my shiny new pie pan. And some shiny new confidence.

  I went up against the Knave. The Knave. If I could stand up to that guy, I’m pretty sure I can stand up to a punk like Cameron Jamison. Especially since, this time, I won’t be alone.

  “You heard what Allie said, Cameron,” I call out, making heads turn up and down the hallway. “You can’t go around taking other people’s stuff!” I put down Mr. Sixpence and stride over to stand next to Allie. She glances my way, then does a double take. Her gaze jumps quickly from the bump on my forehead to the straw in my hair before settling at last on the pie pan in my hand. Her eyes widen in surprise, then in dawning comprehension. I can see from her expression that she knows exactly where I’ve been.

  Giving me a crooked smile, Allie reaches down, dips one hand into her tote bag, and pulls out a shiny metal pie pan, just like mine.

  She nods at me. I nod back. Champion greeting champion. Together, we stand up to Cameron Jamison as a pair of true Grandville Middle School Warriors. Ready to help out when help is needed.

  Ready to be heroes.

  THE HERO OF THE STORY

  BY LEMONY SNICKET

  Years and years ago, when I was about your age, I found myself alone in a park in winter without a coat on a terrible afternoon. My story doesn’t begin there, of course. I wasn’t born in the park. But this story takes place during a time when I was frightened of a baby, and it ends the next morning, shortly after sunrise, when I stopped being frightened, and it begins on a particular park bench.

  Before this story begins, I was frightened of many other things, and I was thinking about those things when the woman approached me. I was frightened that I had nowhere to live. I was frightened that I had nothing to eat. And I was frightened that it was very cold outside and that I had no coat. As I said, it was a terrible afternoon, and I had been having a number of terrible afternoons, and nights and mornings, too, all in a row, like the cars of a train, and me sitting there wishing each car passing in front of me was the caboose. I had been utterly unsupervised for a number of months, for reasons that have nothing to do with this story, a situation that was often frightening. To make myself feel better, I had gotten into the habit of thinking about myself as a hero, like a young man in a fairy tale, alone on a journey to seek my fortune. So far everything had proven more difficult than it was in those stories. I had not found a princess who never laughed, or a talking goose who could turn grain into gold, or an enchanted briefcase, or anything else that would allow me, the hero, to find my fortune and live happily in some faraway realm. I was in a large city stuffed with gray brick buildings, and no one had need of a thirteen-year-old boy
all alone. A shopkeeper had offered me a job sweeping the sidewalk, but then said I hadn’t done it well enough and took her broom back. A cook had hired me to scrub pots, but the soap was slippery, and I dropped a pot on his foot, and he threw me out of the yam-and-noodle restaurant without letting me take my coat off its hook, so I didn’t even have the few coins in my coat pocket, which I needed in order to stay one more night in an old and dirty room down by the docks. I tried to think how else a thirteen-year-old boy could earn those coins, but all I could think of was babysitting, and I didn’t know anyone with a baby. Truthfully, I didn’t think I’d be much of a babysitter, anyway. I wasn’t particularly fond of most babies, and I was so cold and miserable, it was clear I wasn’t very good at taking care of myself, never mind an infant.

  It surprised me, then, that the woman with the baby had the idea to approach me, as I sat there on the bench, shuffling my feet a little, shivering and coatless and wondering if I was going to freeze to death. The wind tossed some leaves around my ankles and made a rustling noise I could hear even over the crying of a baby.

  The crying was coming from a baby carriage, one of those kinds with a large cloth dome over the baby, and four wheels to move it around. The woman was in a warm bundly coat, and both the coat and the carriage had cloudy stains, as if perhaps something had spilled all over them.

  “Excuse me,” the woman was saying to me. “I’ve just spilled tea all over, as you can see. Would you watch my baby while I run back to the tea shop and get some paper napkins or a towel? I’ll only be a minute.”

  She was already handing me the baby, which frightened me a little. It was a tiny baby, not very old at all, and it was one of those babies that looks angry, with a mad mouth, little angry tufts of hair, and fierce eyes looking right at me, dead silent, like we were already arguing. It looked like it was in a purple velvet sack, though it was probably a little robe, glittery and fancy, like what a wizard might wear in a story when he arrives to help the hero. There was even a little hat to match, tucked down on the angry baby’s head so that just a few tufts, which I’ve mentioned, stuck out toward me. I didn’t want it. I wasn’t frightened of the baby like I’d be frightened of a vampire or an avalanche. I was frightened of it like a dark barn, with its creaky door hanging open, or a high staircase, built a long time ago and due to collapse someday soon, perhaps the moment you reach the highest step.

  “I’ll run and get those napkins for you,” I said quickly. I could see the tea shop, which was little more than a shack with a kettle in it, clear across the park, with a few people standing around with steaming clay cups. Maybe if I fetched napkins, I would be considered a hero and given hot tea.

  “No, no,” the woman insisted, and shoved the baby toward me again so I had to take it. I had to. She began running almost immediately across the park. The baby was warm in my hands, the only warm thing near me, but it was so strangely dressed and angry-looking that I didn’t want to hold it any closer. The robe was so thick and soft I couldn’t feel the baby’s arms anywhere in there, and the idea of an armless baby frightened me so much that I stopped holding the baby and sort of propped it up next to me on the bench. It was a nice bench, wooden but not splintery, and with the baby dressed so fancy it looked a bit like a throne.

  “Sit there, Your Highness,” I said to the baby, just as a girl went by on a bicycle. She gave me a bit of an odd look but kept pedaling. “Your mother will be right back, Your Highness.”

  The baby did not relax on the bench. If anything, it looked more cross, and it occurred to me that the woman was not necessarily the baby’s mother. Plenty of people hold babies who are not the baby’s mother. I was proof of this.

  “If she is your mother,” I added quickly, and to pass the time, and because I was cold, and lonely, I imagined the baby’s response.

  Of course she’s my mother, you fool.

  The baby’s voice, as I imagined it, was gurgly but clear and sounded neither like a little boy nor a little girl. It just sounded like a baby. “‘Fool’?” I repeated. “Why are you calling me names?”

  Because I am obviously a fancy and important baby, the hero of the story, and you are just a boy on a park bench.

  “Even if that’s true,” I said, “it’s not very nice. After all, I volunteered to take care of you.”

  You didn’t volunteer, the baby didn’t say. You were practically forced. And you’re not really taking care of me. I’m just propped up on a bench next to you.

  “Well, if I needed to take care of you, I’m sure I could,” I said.

  What makes you so sure? And where is my mother, by the way?

  This was a good question that I’d imagined the baby asking me. I looked across the park, and neither she nor her baby carriage were anywhere to be seen. The tea shop was still there, with steam from the kettle prowling through the air, but the last customers were leaving, and none of them were the baby’s mother. They were all men, for instance. I looked all around, from my seat at the bench, and there was no woman, no baby carriage—no one at all.

  I stood up, frightened. My heart, beating, was a little frightened, too. I turned all the way around, twice, looking foolish but feeling close to panic. The woman was nowhere I could see. The baby was still there, though, and it still looked angry.

  You can’t just leave me on this bench.

  “I know,” I said, and picked up the baby. It was still warm, and I held it close as I walked to the tea shop, wondering what I should be doing at this point in the story and whether I was the hero or the baby was.

  Inside the shack, the teaman was rinsing out a stack of clay cups.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Have you seen a woman with a baby carriage?”

  “No one’s around,” the teaman said a little crossly. “I’m closing up.”

  “A woman spilled tea,” I said, “and I’ve been holding her baby so she could get paper napkins or a towel.”

  “That’s nice of you,” the teaman said, and put the cups on a rack to dry. The woman, I thought suddenly, had been holding a baby, but not a cup. What had happened to it, after she’d spilled her tea?

  “She never came back,” I said.

  “Sorry to hear it,” the man said.

  “We need to find her,” I said. “This is her baby.”

  By now the man was closing the door of the shack and locking it so he could go home. He was not very interested in my story. “You seem a little young to be babysitting,” he said.

  “I’m not young,” I said, “and I’m not a babysitter. I need help finding this woman.”

  The teaman shrugged into his coat. “If you want to call the police,” he said, “go right ahead. I’m not stopping you.”

  “You’re not helping me, either,” I pointed out. I had to raise my voice because he was already walking away, putting his key into his pocket. “This is your opportunity to be a hero!” I called after him, but by then, he was gone and once more I could not think what to do. There was no one in the park to help me and no way of fetching the police. I could walk to a police station, but I would have to either take the baby with me, so it would be gone if the woman returned, or leave it there, where who-knows-what could happen. Either way these did not seem like things a hero would do. They seemed like the actions of a villain.

  So instead, I sat back down, on another bench, for at least an hour, with the baby on my lap like a bag of groceries that was beginning to fuss. I suppose I could not blame it. The baby had been quiet the whole time it was under my care. Enough is enough, I imagined the baby saying, although it was just making little noises, like it was planning on crying soon. I made a short list of things a baby might need, but of course I had none of them. I had no food or a bottle of milk. I had no blankets or toys. I had no mother or father. Something else occurred to me, and I remembered something I’d read recently, that in some places in the world, babies wore leaves instead of diapers. I did not think that picking up some of the rustling leaves and sticking them on the baby wa
s something a hero would do, but thinking about reading gave me the idea to go to the library. I knew right where it was. On other terrible days, I had spent many hours there. Reading at the tables with me were other people without coins or coats who were grateful for the warmth and the shelter, at least until the library closed. It was a good place to go when you didn’t know where to go. The library opened promptly each morning at sunrise, but I could not remember if this was one of the days the library stayed open late. I hoped it was. I walked quickly out of the park, carrying the baby as normally as I could, so as not to attract attention, scanning the sidewalks and the pedestrians. Everyone hurried by, but none of them was the woman and her baby carriage.

  The library was open, but the librarian behind the desk was the wrong one. Practically every library has one terrific librarian who will help you, and the other one. It was the other one at the desk, so I didn’t even bother telling her this story or asking her for advice. I just walked to my favorite part of the shelves, grabbing a book as I went by, and found one of my usual seats by the window. The library windows had thick metal rods between the panes of glass, and I imagined that to the pedestrians outside, it must have looked a little like the baby and me were behind bars. We must have looked like we were in jail together.

  I didn’t really read to the baby. I read to myself. But I murmured the words out loud as I read them, and the baby stopped fussing, maybe because it was warm, or my voice was soothing, or even because it somehow understood the story and liked it.

  The book was a book of stories, one that the helpful librarian had suggested to me a few days ago. She always had good books to suggest to me, even though she had no children herself. She eventually had one, but that’s another story. These stories were from all over the world. The one I was reading was from a part of the world where people your age, living in small villages, had to go on a journey and perform an impressive task, after which they would be welcomed back into the village as a hero. In this story the hero was a girl who had decided to slay a giant crab that lived in a cave a few kilometers outside the village. The crab regularly menaced the village—“menaced,” I explained to the baby, was a word that here means “attacked people and destroyed things”—and the entire town was desperate. Surely whoever slew the crab would be considered one of the greatest heroes the village had ever produced.