I looked up at Dad, thinking I might apologize, but was rendered speechless. The stress lines of his forehead had shallowed and the worry lines of his cheeks were all but gone. His smile seemed to open parts of him that had long been locked, just as I knew the steel shutters and locked doors would open for good once we returned home. He patted me on the face, the odd gesture of one unaccustomed to tenderness, and so I patted his cheek in return. The last scabs of the schmoof were gone.

“Nice mowing,” I managed.

He took off his glasses to wipe his face. He noticed the dangling Band-Aid and threw the whole thing onto the turf.

“I’ve had lots of practice.”

With our arms around each other’s shoulders, we hobbled across the field toward Blinky, whose tentacles were smoothing each blood-snarled whorl of black fur. Tub was already there, sprawled across the hide of his dead friend, his face buried in her masses of hair, one hand dangling over the goal-post antlers.

Blinky’s voice was hoarse with emotion.

“An entire volume of my history shall be devoted to this warrior. No, no—such rudimentary canonization would be insufficient. Her memorial shall be a comprehensive history all of her own. Yes, a biographical work of dedicatory power so encyclopedic in its recountings of heroism that even the dimmest of illiterates will believe they might reach out and stroke luck from her boulder. My measly life has but another several hundred years left before it ends. Yet I cannot imagine a better way to run out my golden years.”

Jack put his hand on the nearest tentacle.

“We need to get her underground,” Jack said. “Before the sun—”

“No.”

The refusal was muffled because it came from a mouth lost in folds of fur. Tub raised his head to reveal a face ruddy with tears. He shook his head with such determination that his bouffant rocked like a bush in high wind. He stood, his ninja-wear smeared with Gumm-Gumm slime, his lime-green fanny pack empty of Papadopoulos’s savage inventions, yet with a confidence that looked good on a kid who just a week before was giving up daily fivers. He spoke softly into Blinky’s ear—or his best guess of where one might be located.

“An idea most unusual,” Blinky whispered, “but a requiem unforgettable. Plump midget, you have humbled me with your elegiacal instincts. When they think back upon this day, which they will, and often, it will be your contribution that will be remembered first, and fittingly so. It is poetry, and you, my corpulent comrade, are a poet.”