They argued about that for a while. It was an old argument between them. Gabe would rather be quiet and precise than boisterous, loud, and sloppy. He preferred throwing stars to cannon fire. But Frankie liked to be loud.

Gabe strapped the twins into their double stroller once they were both laughing and happy. Each seat had a five-point harness, as though the stroller were secretly a space capsule.

“Time to go home,” he said. He didn’t want to go. The afternoon had suddenly become the very end of Gabe and Frankie’s shared summer. But it was still time.

“I guess so,” said Frankie.

“You’ll have fun in California,” said Gabe, trying to put the best spin on it—even though he was still disappointed and grumpy about the whole thing. That rocket-pipe had been a dumb idea all around, but Gabe had gone along, taken the blame for it afterward, and now faced a friendless summer. He shouldn’t have let Frankie light that fuse.

“Sure,” said Frankie without enthusiasm. “I’ll have fun.”

They argued about Batman and Zorro while they walked home. Lately they had taken to watching old Batman cartoons and older Zorro cartoons online at Frankie’s house. Both cartoon heroes were rich gentlemen who wore masks, hid in caves, and named themselves after stealthy animals—but otherwise they were completely different.

“So which one would win in a fight?” Frankie wanted to know.

“They wouldn’t ever get into a fight,” said Gabe. He said it quietly, as a known and simple fact.

“But what if they did?” Frankie asked, his voice very much louder.

“They wouldn’t fight,” Gabe repeated. “It wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen.”

“What if they fought by mistake?” Frankie pressed him. “Maybe one of them was framed, or hypnotized, or possessed by evil alien ghosts, or something like that?”

“Zorro would still find a way to avoid it,” said Gabe. “Batman would come at him all brooding and serious, and Zorro would just say something charming, or else make him laugh, and then the fight would be over before it even started because you can’t crack up laughing and still be Batman. Zorro would make a game out of it.”

“If Batman got possessed by aliens, then the aliens wouldn’t care about Zorro’s sense of humor,” Frankie pointed out. “None of Zorro’s jokes would make sense to aliens.”

“You can’t say for sure what would make sense to aliens,” said Gabe. “And Zorro would parry anything Batman threw at him. He’d duck and weave and snap batarangs out of the air with his whip. Also, batarang is a dumb word. How could anyone who carries a belt full of batarangs take themselves so seriously?”

Frankie’s voice got even louder. “I can’t hear you over the sound of how wrong you are. It’s deafening. Your wrongness.”