“Then I’ll have to sneak out. This is important.” Nick let out an overlong “Ohhh …” as he turned back to me. “Now I get the whole Robin Hood angle. You have to sneak out to stop the Merry Men.” He picked up his jeans and put them into one of the drawers. “You’re creative, I’ll give you that. And you have a really impressive knack for getting guys to take revenge for you. First Bo 73/356
vandalized city hall, and now the Robin Hood dude is messing with the police. But as your little Frisbee there says, you think criminals are cool.” Nick shoved his T-shirts into another drawer. “I bet the city council totally wishes they hadn’t ticked you off now.” I didn’t appreciate his sarcasm, but what could I say? He didn’t believe me about the magical stuff, and the only proof I had was a pathetic-o-meter. “You won’t tell on me when I sneak out, will you?” I asked.
He grunted. “I’m not going to mess with you. You might set your battalion of evil boyfriends on me.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked out of his room.
It wasn’t hard to sneak out. I went to my room and turned on my music loud enough so it seemed like I was in there, but not loud enough that my dad or Sandra would knock on the door and demand I turn it down. I didn’t know what to take with me, so I slung a small purse over my shoulder and put my cell phone, wallet, and the pathetic-o-meter inside. Since it was magic, I vaguely hoped it would be able to do something to help me, like contact my fairy godmother if my pathetic reading went high enough. At any rate, I didn’t want my dad to find it in my room. He would not be cheered by its pronouncement that I think criminals are cool.
Dad had bought a sheet of plywood and leaned it against my window. It moved easily enough, and I slipped outside into the warm September night. I went around to the side door of the garage. I couldn’t take one of the cars. I had grown up in New York with its sub-way systems, so I didn’t know how to drive very well. This left a bike as my only means of transportation. Bike riding isn’t the fastest way to track people, and it was probably a hopeless venture from the start, but I had to at least try to find Robin Hood and his men. I had brought 74/356
them here, and if I didn’t explain things to them, they would keep robbing people, and someone would get hurt.
I set out through the neighborhood, peering at people’s lawns as I rode by. Would Robin Hood try to find a place like Sherwood Forest?
We didn’t have any forests around, but a lot of trees grew in yards.
Maybe the men had climbed some and were hiding there. I looked up at every tree I passed but I didn’t see them. Maybe they had found a deserted building. I headed toward the center of town, riding through street after street, searching for any sort of clue.
Everything seemed normal.
Navigating around downtown was hard. Cars zipped past me impatiently, driving by so closely that I kept jerking away from them.
After a while, I headed into another neighborhood. There was nothing unusual there either, except for me, riding aimlessly around in the dark. I was getting tired. I stopped my bike to rest and took the pathetic-o-meter out of my purse. “Look,” I told it, “I need to find Robin Hood before he runs somebody through with a sword or the police shoot him. Can you help me?”
As I watched, the lettering changed on the dial. I held my breath, thrilled for the magical help, until I read the new sentence: Talks to inanimate objects.
I was now 83 percent pathetic.
“Great,” I said. “Just great.” I shoved the pathetic-o-meter back into my purse. “See if I ever speak to you again.” I didn’t check to see if yelling at inanimate objects had made the pathetic-o-meter go up. I might as well head home. I didn’t have the stamina to keep pedaling for much longer.
I rode back to town sullenly, mumbling Chrissy’s name every once in a while. I wasn’t sure how her job interview as a muse had gone, but she certainly wasn’t inspiring anything but stomach ulcers for me.
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As I passed a Walgreens I saw them. I was so used to looking up in the trees that I scanned the roof without thinking about it. One of the Merry Men lay up there, bow drawn back, ready to shoot anyone who threatened him. My gaze dropped to the parking lot. There, crouched among the parked cars and moving in, was Robin Hood and the rest of his men. He should have looked ridiculous—a guy in a tunic squatting behind a parked car—but somehow with his muscular frame and handsome features, the tunic thing worked.
I rode my bike slowly up to them. “Robin!” I whispered.
He turned and saw me. “Not now, wench, we’re about to liberate some wealth from the gentry.”
I climbed off of my bike and wheeled it over to him. “My name is Tansy, and you can’t hold up this store.” He raised an unimpressed eyebrow in my direction. “I read your Robin Hood book, but I refuse to believe it.”
“Yeah, well, I’m having my doubts about it too.”
“It says I die because a nun poisons me. A nun.” I had forgotten about that, but he glared at me as though I had written it into the book myself. “So avoid nuns from now on. They’re easy enough to spot—long black dresses and wimples. Very few of them sneak up on people.”
He went back to staking out the parking lot. “Women,” he said with disgust. I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to me or nuns.
I lowered my voice. “We need to talk. You see, you don’t need to rob anyone here. We have agencies that take care of the poor, and if you keep holding places up, someone will get hurt.” He didn’t look at me. He waved at some of the men, and they ran forward, still crouching and darting between cars. “Never worry, no harm shall come to me. I am more than a match for the menfolk here.
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My arms will remain unbound and will hold you in their embrace soon enough, just as you wished.”
Several of the men chuckled knowingly at that.
My cheeks burned from embarrassment, but I kept my voice even.
“I’m not worried about you—I don’t want you to injure anybody else.
You’re attacking people who don’t carry weapons.”
“Such foolishness is astounding,” he said. “But a fool and his money are soon parted. Our swords only speed the process.” The first two of Robin Hood’s men had reached the Walgreens’
front entrance. They pressed themselves against either side of the door, looking inside.
“Robin, this isn’t stealing from the rich and giving to the poor; this is just stealing.”
Robin Hood glanced at the building behind us, a Laundromat. On the top of it, a Merry Man lay on his stomach, a bow in his hands. “Ah, but you’re wrong. Everyone here is rich, and my men and I are poor.
It’s fitting we should relieve your village folk of some of their goods.” He motioned to the men nearest him, and then he and the men left their hiding places and sprinted toward the store doors.
They timed their surge wrong, piling up at the entrance, and had to wait for the automatic door to open all the way before they rushed inside.
I leaned my bike against a car and strode after them. When I walked into the store, Robin Hood already had his sword drawn and held it only inches away from a startled store clerk. He was a thin teenage boy who’d gone completely pale. The Merry Men walked along the aisles, dumping things into their sacks. A small group of shoppers were lined up, hands in the air, by the photo counter.
Maybe some stories have more sway than fact. Maybe they carve themselves into our minds and slant the way we see things. Because 77/356
even then, I saw Robin Hood as a hero, as someone who cared about right and wrong. I marched over and tried one more time to make him understand. “You’ve got to stop. This is wrong.” Robin Hood didn’t take his eyes off the clerk. The muscles in his arm flexed. “Hold your tongue, wench. I asked not for your blessing.” He moved his sword tip close to the clerk. “Your jewelry, my good man, hand it over forthwith.”