Antecedent:

It often happens this way. Both man and woman are sitting at home, watching television or eating dinner or getting ready for bed or wishing they were younger, thinner, or more attractive, and they’re both thinking that it, the big thing, will happen in just a few days. Then wife turns to husband and says quite forcefully that it’s time right now so grab the bag and let’s go! To the hospital, to the delivery room, to the first page of the next chapter of our lives!

In this particular instance, the product of Mr. Fred Humphrey and Mrs. Lainey Plowden-Humphrey’s labors was one Samuel Humphrey. And thus, on this night approximately thirty years ago, Samuel Humphrey quite literally dropped into the world just moments before Lainey’s placenta, born the son of a shlump and the son of the wife of a shlump.

After Samuel’s birth, and the subsequent washing away of his various birth fluids and his innocence, he learned all about life through the distorted lens that his parents forced in front of his eyes. Fred and Lainey aren’t to be thought evil or negligent for this upbringing; parents always pass on their world perspectives to their children, whether they try to or not. The children embrace these views or they don’t, but either way (like it or not), they take on some evolution of the views of their parents as their own. A boy whose father hates blacks will reach an age when he determines that there’s no good reason to hate blacks, so he’ll decide that his father is a racist or a bigot or a fool, or some combination of those redundancies. He’ll swear up and down for the rest of his life, even in his heart of hearts, that he’s not the racist his otherwise-okay dad was — but he’ll always register the tiniest trifling of surprise when he hears a news item telling him about a car-jacking, and then sees the robber’s sullen face on the televised news that night... as peachy as his own.

And so it was with Samuel. He grew up with two doting though somewhat dopey parents, who spoiled their only child provided whatever he wanted didn’t cost more than a few dollars. He was an average kid with average parents, living an average life. With relatively few details changed, Samuel and his average existence could be swapped with any of thousands upon thousands of other average kids around the world. Nothing spectacular set him apart. You couldn’t even say he was fascinating in his averageness, remarkable in precisely how unremarkable he was. You couldn’t say it, because it wouldn’t be true. Samuel’s unceasing averageness in all walks of his life was supremely... average.

Not that this was a bad thing -- not by any stretch. Samuel’s personality — a mutated sort of averaged personality, melded from the best and worst features of Fred and Lainey Humphrey, much like his physical features — provided him with an average number of average friends, and he was as happy as any average kid. He was -- contentedly though unknowingly -- on course to live an average life, marry an average wife, and let the whole damn process continue unhindered, into the oblivion of arithmetic means.

But one day, everything changed.

Coming soon: Chapter One: Samuel Humphrey
posted by Lex Friedman 1:07 PM

Chapter 1

 
Samuel Humphrey was deep in the chasm of sixth grade when he changed his life without trying very hard. He was teetering on the epitome of an epiphany, though he could spell neither and define only one.

Sixth grade is nothing to write home about. Especially because, if you’re going to sixth grade in a public school, chances are you live at home. Even so, sixth grade isn’t so impressive: For most average kids, it’s a holding pen. Sixth grade forms a rift; it’s a mere separator, a void-like time block in between where you learned all the truly important basics of life (reading, writing, and math) and where you will learn all the truly terrifying complexities of life (kissing, fondling, and kissing for longer).

Samuel was average height and average build for a sixth grader, with mousy red hair dutifully parted by his father every morning. He packed a bag lunch because his mother thought it saved money, and his bookbag was worn from its heavy-duty use since fourth grade. Next year, Samuel figured, his parents would finally buy him a new bookbag. Seventh graders couldn’t carry around ratty sacks like this one, even Samuel knew that. Surely Mom and Pop Humphrey would understand.

Samuel’s teacher was Mrs. Sherwood, a thin, almost-gangly woman with too much makeup and not enough hair. The thin wisps she did have were gray, and pulled into a tight, see-through bun. Samuel hated it when Mrs. Sherwood bent over her desk to look for something or grade papers, because he couldn’t stop staring at her too-visible scalp. He knew its blotches and moles by heart, and it absolutely grossed him out — but he couldn’t stop staring. Like someone with a sore tooth or a high schooler who needs to renew the same reference book three weeks running because the term paper still isn’t finished, Samuel couldn’t stop checking it out.

Mrs. Sherwood was a fair and gentle teacher, provided you were a girl or a weasly kiss-up. This particular Thursday morning, Samuel felt like neither. Not that it mattered. He didn’t give two butt-cheeks whether Mrs. Sherwood liked him or not. He could get B’s, he would get B’s, and that was good enough for him. B’s would be a breeze. He could do it with ease. A’s would be too much effort, Samuel thought. Too much effort for a heartless demon like Mrs. Sherwood, anyway, one who only liked girls and the nerdy kids who always stayed after class and asked for extra credit assignments, the kind of kids who...

“Do I have to ask you again, Mr. Humphrey?”

That jolted the hell out of Samuel. First, it irked him — he was not Mr. Humphrey — he wasn’t even done with puberty yet. Samuel hated his last name anyway, and there was no reason for his stupid teacher to use it.

“Fraid so, Mrs. Sherwood. I must have stopped paying attention there for a second,” he offered. Samuel mentally patted himself on the back for concealing his hatred for this stupid b-word so well.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, Mr. Humphrey,” she said. A few kids in the class — scratch that... a few buttmunching suck-ups in the class — giggled. “I had asked you if you had found a partner for your science project.”

He hadn’t. He hadn’t, and he hadn’t been paying attention to the whole boring process of other (average) kids choosing (equally average) partners that had been going on for the past five minutes, so he had no idea who was already taken. Samuel wasn’t about to name someone who had already partnered up and let those bratty brown-nosers have a chance to laugh again. But he couldn’t just pick one of the losers! Would Ben Meyer have partnered up already? If she had been going down the row, the only person so far who might have picked Ben was Steven Karney, and weren’t they in a fight over who broke Ben’s Lego helicopter? Samuel hesitated. Should he risk it?

Suddenly, a voice. Notably, a third voice. Not Mrs. Sherwood’s voice, and surely not Samuel’s own, but a new voice to this exchange. “Um... Sam’s supposed to be partners with me, Mrs. Sherwood.” Notably, a sweet, caring, friendly voice. Notably, a girl’s voice.

And most notably of all, Marisa Henson’s voice. Marisa Henson had the unknown (to her) distinction of being Samuel Humphrey’s first official crush. He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about kissing girls, or even girls in general, but he knew that her smile made him smile and that he liked to watch her from the corner of his eye whenever she ran around in Gym. Marisa had long blonde hair that was sometimes just down and sometimes in a ponytail, and she wore a lot of pink and red. During tests, she would usually tap her right foot nervously on her left foot, over and over and over again. Samuel had noticed it, and he occasionally got distracted from whatever quiz they were taking that day, captivated and mesmerized by that tap, tap, tapping foot.

Samuel didn’t think that Marisa Henson was average.

And she had called him Sam. He liked that. Even better, she had saved his butt. He knew that he hadn’t been partners with Marisa until just now, but her little white lie was quite forgivable when you considered that, for whatever reason, she had chosen to help him out... And now they were going to work on their science project together!

Holy crap. They were going to work on their science project together. That meant houses, each other’s houses, meeting parents and having cookies and juice, working together for hours on end. This was huge.

“Very well,” said Mrs. Sherwood. “Try to keep your head in the classroom for the remainder of the day, Samuel.”

Even the mind-gnawing croaks of Mrs. Toadface couldn’t faze him now. He turned back to the girl sitting diagonally behind him to the left. Thanks, he thought, as he looked her in the blue eyes, marvelling again at why this pretty girl with the contagious smile had decided to help him, Sam nee Samuel Humphrey... and then he suddenly hiccupped. Marisa smiled back at him and quickly snapped her head to the front of the room again.

Sam wasn’t even sure if she had noticed he’d hiccupped.

He hoped she hadn’t noticed he’d hiccupped. God, how embarassing. He’d kept his mouth closed around the hiccup, didn’t he? It was just a second ago and now he couldn’t remmeber. Did she see it? Did Marisa Henson see him hiccup?

He was going to have to tell himself that she hadn’t seen a thing. He couldn’t go on living if she had seen him hiccup.

Sam picked up his yellow #2 pencil and stuck the eraser in his mouth and began to chew it softly. Within seconds, he successfully tuned out Mrs. Sherwood again, granting him the peace and serenity he needed to fully ponder out this hiccup conundrum.

posted by Lex Friedman 11:20 PM

Recess rolled around at 12:45, as it did every school day at Randall P. Fennington Elementary and Middle School. (The school was named after Mr. Fennington in recognition of his many years of fine service to the community, in the sense of his having many excess millions of dollars that he was willing to donate as long as his name was displayed prominently enough.) At one end of the caged-in playground, a kickball game was getting underway - the same kickball which was organized every single recess by the athletic kids and the cool kids who could usually kick doubles or maybe even triples, and powerhouses like Brian O'Neil and Jeff O'Neal (no relation) could sometimes even kick homers over the gated perimeter of their painted macadam playground, forcing a member of the fielding team to seek sheepish permission from the teacher on recess duty to reclaim the ball.

Samuel - who now and forever would be Sam to his friends, because if that's what Marisa Henson called him, then that's what he wanted to be called - had never kicked a ball over the gate, and he never would. He usually didn't play with them anyway, although he could. Of the nine times he had actually participated in the game in the hundreds of times he'd seen it played (since 4th grade, when the new recess playground had officially opened), three of those times he had needed to enlist the assistance of the recess teacher to remind the boys (and it was only boys) playing that anyone who wanted to participate could.

Most days, Samuel - rather, Sam - spent in the little round gazebo that completed an invisible triangle of the Cool Kids Kickball Diamond in one corner and the bright orange and blue slide and jungle gym combo with a side order of woodchips in the other. This third corner of the gated playground was where Sam liked to hang out with his buddies Ryan Groom, Jimmy Sanders, and Ben Meyer of broken Lego helicopter fame. Sometimes, they'd play catch, sometimes they'd play tag, sometimes they'd just talk about whatever was on their minds. The four boys were often together, usually paired off into permutated couplings of the group at each other's houses over the weekend, but a solid foursome at school.

Today, they were looking at a small Styrofoam airplane that Ryan had brought from home, testing it out and seeing how well it could fly. They talked while they tested, though Sam made no mention of his exploding love for Marisa - that wasn't something he was prepared to discuss with anyone. Especially not Marisa herself, who was with a giggle of other girls jumping rope maybe thirty yards away. Sam knew - was highly aware of, in fact - that Marisa and her friends happened to be facing the gazebo where he stood with Ryan and Jimmy. He didn't think much of it; chances were they wanted to keep the sun out of their eyes, or maybe they just had ended up facing that direction. He knew for sure that they weren't just staring at him on purpose.

But they were certainly looking near him. And so every time it was his turn to try the airplane, to see how far and straight and long he could make it fly, he would pray that the plane's flight path was impressive.

If Marisa was watching him, or rather, if Sam was lucky enough to be falling within her field of vision, she might as well see some of his abilities. And making Ryan Groom's Styrofoam airplane fly successfully was one of them.

And so it was all the more potentially awful, horrifically awful, when Vance Hogan pointed his rotten self towards the gazebo.

"Look who's comin over here, guys," said Jimmy.

"Oh, man! Not this asshole," Ryan replied. Swearing is pretty cool for sixth graders, once you can figure out how to do it, and Ryan Groom knew his shit.

The three friends picked up the Styrofoam airplane from its latest landing spot (on the bench in the gazebo, Sam's skillful toss, though in truth landing on the bench wasn't his true intent - which, of course, he categorically denied). They formed a wall of solidarity and prepared for Vance.

Vance Hogan was a bit short for a sixth grader, but what he lacked in tall he made up in mean. His hair was usually messy and he wore only black jeans. He had a wide, flat nose and a fresh scar on his cheek from a recent bicycle accident.

Vance didn't think he had to wear a helmet.

Vance was mean for the sake of being mean. But his meanness had a history, a starting point.

Back in first grade, some child prodigy had coined a catchy rhyme:

Vancee-Vance,
Vancee-Vance,
He made poopie
In his underpants.

In first grade - actually, in any stage of life past babyhood - it is rarely a thing of honor or magnificence to have made poopie in your underpants. The song had no rooting in truth (save for the truth that "Vancee-Vance" and "underpants" displayed successful end rhyme), but it stuck nonetheless... like poopie to underpants.

The rhyme made Vancee-Vance an instant pariah, which wasn't good enough. In first grade, children show both remarkable purity and shocking evil - and the children in Vance's class weren't content to let him be merely an unliked outsider when they were letting that evil shine through. They sang the song to him constantly, though usually quietly, so when Vancee-Vance would get angry and yell back, "Nah-uh, you made poopie in your underpants, poop-head," he'd usually be the one to get in trouble.

Over time, the song had run its course, with a brief sequel about peepee and another about - in what was essentially just a specification from the song's first incarnation - diarrhea. Vancey-Vance Hogan was effectively and swifty ostracized by his young classmates, thanks (or no thanks) to an unfortunate rhyme and a budding songwriter. Vance sat squarely on the lowest of all rungs on the social ladder at Randall P. Fennington Elementary and Middle School because of that rhyme, and it made him mad.

When you're a loser, especially when you're a friendless loser, especially when you're a shorter-than-average friendless loser in elementary school, your psychological arsenal of how to deal with your problems is fairly limited.

And if you're Vance Hogan - which, presumably, just about none of you are - you dealt with your problems by becoming a bully.

Bullies are losers with intimidation power. They are downcast outcasts who want to put you in a cast. The best and brightest of the bully crowd never pick on the same kid for too long a stretch of time; the longer you spend with any one kid, the more likely that kid is to become a whiny tattle-tale. No loser-turned-bully's intimidation powers hold water in the principal's office.

It had been several months since Vance Hogan had bothered anyone in the Sam, Ryan, Jimmy, and Ben quartet. Having apparently bullied his way through the rest of the sixth grade, he was back for someone from their now mildly fearful (though stoic on the surface) foursome.

"What's up, Samuel?" He pronounced each syllable of the name carefully, exaggeratingly: Sam-yoo-ul.

"It's Sam," Sam replied.

"Is that so?" Vance asked. "And here, I thought it was 'Pussy.'"

Vance Hogan knew how to swear, too. And when he did it, it sounded a lot meaner.

Sighing, hoping his three buddies didn't actually think he was a pussy, not that Sam thought it was so bad to be a cat, he stuck his hands in the pockets of his (blue) jeans and said, "What do you want, Vance?" He noted that Vance had effectively positioned himself between Ms. Dory, the teacher on duty, and the gazebo. Not that it mattered anyway - she was facing away, watching the kickball game. She probably has the hots for Brian O'Neil, Sam thought to himself suddenly, then shook his head, wondering where that had come from. Vance spoke again, banishing thoughts of the math teacher from Sam's mind.

"Well, Pussy, I want your shitting lunch money."

Jimmy Sanders laughed. Three days later, at a sleepover at Jimmy's house where the boys painstakingly recreated every moment of this conversation, Jimmy would explain his sudden guffaw outburst. He thought Vance's use of "shitting" sounded funny, and he had gotten an instantaneous, goofy mental image of a big ol' green dollar bill straining on a toilet seat, crapping out a few nickles. Jimmy looked down and sucked in his lip, trying to keep the laugh in, but everyone heard it. Ryan, Ben, Sam.

And Vance.

"Somethin funny, asswipe?"

"N-no," Jimmy said. "I was just... coughing."

"Damn right you were."

At this point in the exchange, Sam noticed that Marisa and her friends were watching, all of them holding their jumpropes and observing the conversation with interest. They were too far away to hear, and that was good. Sam didn't need Marisa thinking he was some kind of baby cat.

Vance had a sweaty paw, palm-up, extended towards him. Sam thought about spitting into it, but then decided he liked his jugular vein too much to pursue that avenue. He murmered something to Vance.

"What was that? I didn't hear you, Pussy."

He really liked saying "Pussy" like that, again and again. Ryan's older brother Danny would say that Vance was "getting off" on saying it (and probably find additional, late-adolescent humor in the notion of a sixth grader getting off on "pussy").

"I said that I packed my lunch."

Vance laughed. Loudly. Sam knew that Marisa heard.

"You packed your lunch, Pussy-boy? Mommy packed you a widdle lunch with a widdle bitty note inside?"

Sam Humphrey did not need Vance to point out how uncool it was for your Mommy to pack your widdle lunch.

"Yeah, I packed," Sam said. "So I don't have any money."

A calm, rational bully might have focused his attentions on one of the other three boys flanking Sam. But since Vance was no such oxy-moronical bully, he didn't. (Vance was, in fact, more of a moron who would be in need of many bottles of Oxy just a year down the road.) "Fine," Vance said. "Meet me behind the building after school. We'll settle this like men."

"Fine," Sam said. "Whatever."

Vance pointed a thick finger at Sam and poked him above the right breast. Hard.

"Be there," he said, and walked away.

Sam hoped Marisa saw Vance walking away, hoped that she figured Sam had been tough and intimidating and that's why Vance was backing off. Sam took a step back towards the gazebo, sat down on the bench, and looked up at his three expectant friends.

"What's a pussy?"
posted by Lex Friedman 8:10 PM

Sunday, September 08, 2002

 
As the final bell rang and students throughout Randall P. Fennington Elementary and Middle School headed for the bright red exit doors, Sam didn't know that he was fewer than twelve minutes away from changing his own life forever. All he knew was that he was scared. So scared, in an ironic twist, that he was actually worried that when he stood face to face with Vance behind the school building, he might make poopie in his underpants.

Still, he had said "Whatever" to Vance hours before at recess, and Sam wanted to be a man of his word. In sixth grade boy logic, simply skipping out on the scheduled fight was just not an option. With Jimmy, Ben, and Ryan in tow, Sam headed toward the well-kept lawn behind the school building.

News of the impending fight had apparently stirred up the students; a mess of kids had already gathered in a dense pack, and they parted to let Sam through. He turned to his three buddies.

"If I start to run, you'll run with me, right?"

They nodded their agreement.

"And you can each have one of The Mags if I die." The Mags were Sam's three issues of Playboy that he had discovered in a neighbor's trash bin several months before. He and his pals liked to look at the pictures and read the articles to each other during sleepovers.

Turning back to the crowd, Sam surveyed the scene. Mostly kids he didn't know, a bunch of younger kids, and then a half-dozen acquaintences of his. A distance away from the pack, but still within lugey-distance, stood Marisa and her best friend Melissa Reeves. Melissa and Marisa were acting as if they were conducting an extremely important and private conversation, but they weren't really kidding anybody. They wanted to watch.

"Allright, asshole, let's go." Vance had arrived.

"You're the asshole, asshole," Sam said back.

It was the first time in twelve years that Sam had sworn. He wondered for a second if Marisa thought that swearing was a cool thing to do or whether she thought it was rude and offensive. He reflected on that question for an exceedingly short time, because he was quickly interuppted by getting killed.

Actually, he hadn't been killed, but for an instant he wasn't sure. Vance had struck him, sucker punched him, in the gut. It was enough to knock him on his can, gasping for air and dignity. As he pushed himself back up to a standing position, he momentairly felt a guiding hand on his back.

Ryan. He was a good friend.

Sam took a few deep breaths. The murmer of the kids watching had grown steadily louder, though there was no "Fight! Fight!" chant; no one wanted to attract the attention of displinary figures.

Vance bent his knees into a crouch, fists raised, just like he'd seen on ESPN. Sam mirrored the move. They were six feet apart. Seconds separated them from Sam's change of life.

Vance spoke. "Allright, Samuel." (Again, all three syllables emphasized: Sam-yoo-ul.) Vance smacked his right fist into his left hand. Loudly. "Now I'm gonna rearrange your stupid face."

Sam didn't break eye contact, and he let just one beat pass. The standard pause between utterances in normal conversation.

"In that case," he said, "can the rest of me go home awhile?"

Behind him, Ryan laughed. A quick, one-burst, through-the-nose laugh. And then controlled himself. But that one laugh was all it took to get Jimmy Sanders to laugh. Jimmy let out two laughs, and his were through the mouth.

Boom.

Jimmy's double-laugh opened Ryan's mouth for a short reprise of his first laugh, and that kicked off a chorus of giggles, chuckles, snorts, and out and out laughs from several other boys and girls in the audience for this Main Event.

A simple joke, a one-liner, one that Sam hadn't even consciously thought up. He'd just opened his mouth and out it popped. In all honesty, it wasn't even that funny. But it was an out-of-the-blue zinger in an unexpected situation, like a fart at a funeral, and that had set off a chain reaction of laughter.

Sam couldn't be certain, but he thought that just maybe he had even heard Marisa Henson laugh. He was too busy staring directly into Vance's eyes to make sure that the sweet, innocent, beautiful laugh mixed in with all the others was coming from her, but if he hadn't been otherwise occupied, he definitely would have verified. As it was, he was too busy wondering what the hell was he thinking and what was going to happen to him now.

And all the while the laughter continued.

Vance contorted his face. Sucked in his cheeks, almost as if he wanted to swallow them. For a moment, Sam thought he was about to get spit on.

He needn't have worried.

Vance let out a brief, closed-mouth laugh that jacked his head back for a second, then turned and walked away.

An appreciatve crowd cheered. Ryan patted him on the back, "Awesome! You were awesome, Samuel!"

He was too caught up in the moment to say "It's Sam now" to his friend. The kids who didn't know him passed on quick congrats as they walked away towards. "Good job, Samuel." "Way to go, Samuel." "That was cool, dude."

"Sam, I didn't know you were funny."

Only that last praiser wasn't someone who didn't know him. If she didn't know him, she wouldn't have called him by the right name, his new name, the name that she, in fact, had given him.

He smiled at her and turned back to his buddies who began to lead him home.

Coming soon: CHAPTER 2: Frank Conner
posted by Lex Friedman 8:24 PM

 

"I think she likes you."

"No way, dude!"

"Yeah. Yes way. I think she likes you. I think she wants to make babies with you!"

"Shut up, Marc!" Frank knew Jenny was hot, and plus they were in the video program together here at Camp Harmony, and that made her pretty cool. For Frank, Camp Harmony was the funnest, neatest, phatest sleepaway camp he could hope for. But the kind of guys who made girls want to have babies weren't in Frank's bunk. The older kids, the ones who were 16 and looked 30 or maybe 300, they did those weird things with girls, like kissing with mouths open. Yuck. Frank had practiced such gross activities - he wasn't quite sure why he even wanted to - on his pillow, but only after lights out when he was pretty sure no one could see him. The one time Marc had caught him, Frank had tried to pretend like he was asleep, eating the pillow in a dream he later claimed was about cotton candy. But whatever all that kissing and making babies stuff was about, Frank knew he wasn't interested. And even if he was, Jenny wasn't. Not with him, anyway. They were just friends, that was all.

Frank and Marc and Jenny were twelve.

It was cool to have friends who were girls. Jenny was one of them for Frank. They were making a movie, along with a few other kids in their camp class, that was a parody of Mayhem, a pretty popular movie at the beginning of the summer. Frank hadn't seen it - it was rated R - but he had told the video counselor he had. He fibbed, of course, because Jenny knew everything about Mayhem. Jenny had seen it. Jenny was that cool.

Marc sat down on Frank's bed, atop the sleeping bag. They were sharing homemade cookies Marc's mom had sent up. Chocolate chip. "Why do you want me to shut up, Frankfurter? Are you and Jenny keeping your wedding a secret till the big day?"

Frankfurter was Frank's unwelcome nickname, courtesy of their bunk counselor. His name, or so he claimed, was Taz. As proof, Taz had shown all his campers the blue tattoo of the Tazmanian Devil on his back.

Taking another cookie for himself (his fifth), Frank sat down on Marc's bed, directly across from his own. "Whatever, Marc. Jenny and me're friends. We're not planning on erupting."

Frank meant "eloping." He didn't know he had used the wrong word. Marc, as twelve-year-olds are prone to doing, ignored the word since he didn't understand it. "Let me ask you a question," he said. "Is Jenny your friend?"

"What? Yeah. C'mon, you know that."

"Right. Is she a girl?"

"Yes! Figures a moron like you wouldn't know, Marc-head."

Taz hadn't been able to come up with a good nickname for Marc. The other campers - Bob(cat), Johnny (Rocket), Dom(my Pajamy), Mike (Tyson), and Frankfurter - had been easy. But Marc had proven too much for Taz's internal name pun mechanism, so he had become "Marc-head."

"Well, Furter, if she's a girl and she's your friend, then guess what? She's your girlfriend!"

By this time, Bobcat and Mike Tyson had returned to the bunk, too. It was rest hour - 5pm, the hour before dinner - when all campers and counselors were due back in their bunks.

"Who's your girlfriend?" asked Bobcat, grabbing a cookie from Marc's package.

"No one," said Frank, glaring at Marc. "I don't have a girlfriend!"

Taz, all 6-foot-1, four earrings, and enormous tattoo of him, suddenly entered the bunk. "You have a girlfriend, Frankfurter? Why didn't I know this?"

With that, he tackled Frank on Marc's bed, and pinned him down, somehow grabbing a cookie for himself in between. Taz shoved the cookie in his pierced mouth and spoke to Frank through clenched teeth.

"Who is she, Frank?" he asked, crumbs falling on Frank's face.

The boys were all laughing, Frank included. Taz got along well the twelve-year-old boy crowd - he found that they were the only ones who could really understand him.

"She's no one, Taz!" Frank squealed, swinging his head and body ineffectively under the counselor's weight, trying to avoid the falling crumbs.

Taz's mouth swished around for a few seconds, chomping the cookie into a pulp. Mouth full, he said, "Irrf you dorn't teh me, Ir'm gonna spih ih all ow on you!"

"What did you say?" Frank asked.

"He says if you don't tell him who she is, he's gonna spit cookie out all over your face, Frankurter," Bobcat said. Bobcat was pudgy, and he knew it, and man oh man he wanted a cookie. Heck, he'd even eat those crumbs falling out of Taz's mouth. But his mom had said if he came back home 15 pounds lighter, he could have a new computer set up all to himself in his room, for his use only. He didn't take a cookie from Frank's package. Yet.

"I'm telling you the truth!" Frank yelled, still trying to break free of Taz's hold. "Jenny is not my girlfriend!"

Dommy Pajamy had just returned to the bunk for Rest Hour and took in the scene from the doorway before tossing his lacrosse stick over to his bed.

"Hey," he said, "I didn't know Jenny was your girlfriend."
posted by Lex Friedman 5:34 PM

 

Franklin Henry Conner began life under similar circumstances to Samuel Humphrey. He was born to average parents with average incomes, less shlumpy than Mom and Pop Humphrey but not the social giants of their average-sized town. Frank, however, was not average.

Not at all.

And not just because he got above-average grades and was just a little more mature than the average kid his age.

No, Frank was far from average, but for reasons he wouldn't begin to know about or understand for some time.

Frank's mother had wanted a girl. Dorothy (Keller) Conner knew all there was to know about girls, and for her first go at parenting, she wanted all the benefits she could get. She didn't know the first thing about boys, except that they liked to burp on purpose sometimes. Men she felt she understood, but they were still a challenge. Boys, though... That was a topic she knew nothing about. Growing up with three sisters and a dead father will do that to you.

Still, she loved her firstborn, and he was named after her late dad, Franklin Keller. Frank's dad - Dorothy's husband - was Gerald, and he was a cameraman for the local news, WBRN 5. "News To Live By" was the motto for Focus News 5. They gave Gerald a decent paycheck and he got to meet the mayor, so it worked out okay.

Gerald shot home videos constantly, with a picture far less shaky than most films in that non-Oscar category. In cinematography, Gerald was somewhat above average himself. He could talk about panning, swipes, and jump cuts without sounding like a complete ass; this was because he went beyond merely knowing what he was talking about: He cared about it, too.

Frank picked up on his father's filming interests and would borrow Gerald's camera to make movies of his own. Usually they starred whichever action figures were popular at the time, heroes who were dwarfed by the blades of grass they ran through. Gerald thought Frank's work showed promise, and when he and Dorothy had saved up enough to send Frank to a performance camp last summer, Frank had been thrilled with the idea. He loved Camp Harmony enough the first summer that he wanted to go back again this year, and thanks to Gerald's surprise raise and Dorothy's recent luck with substitute teaching, the Conners could afford to satisfy his wish.

Gerald loved knowing that Frank was off having a wonderful time at Camp Harmony, meeting more boys his age, from different walks of life. Richer boys, poorer boys. Boys with different interests. Even black boys. Gerald's father, like many white men of his generation, had been a racist, and Gerald had decided he wouldn't pass such misvalues onto his son. He was no racist.

Yep, Frankie was meeting all sorts of boys up at Camp Harmony. Girls, too, chances were. And learning more about filming, and all the other stuff they had up there, theater acting, singing, magic, circus acts and whatnot. The whole notion of a performance camp was a bit foreign to Gerald, but Frank had a blast there, and that was good enough for him.

Frank's camp stays were harder on Dorothy. Things had gone so well, so easily (it seemed that way in her memory, anyhow) when she and Gerald had decided to have children. Gerald had enjoyed the extra lovemaking. She had enjoyed Gerald's enjoyment of the extra lovemaking. And just six weeks after they started trying, Dorothy had been late. Just one day at first, and then just one week, and that's when they decided to buy the home pregnancy kit. And Frank wasn't a girl when he was born three quarters of a year later, but he was a baby. A beautiful, living, breathing baby. And he was Dorothy's. Literally her flesh and blood.

Her two follow-up miscarraiges had been flesh and blood, too. Too much blood the second time, and Gerald had almost been a widower. That devastating experience had shut off any interest Gerald had for bringing new lives into the world, but Dorothy had still wanted to... redeem herself. It was awful and irrational, but she really, truly, deep in her soul felt responsible for the babies that had begun the journey of that miracle of life, only to get sidetracked - in her own womb - to the hell of death. Dorothy wanted God and the world to know that her body was a giver of life, not a babykilling tease. She wanted to have one more baby, because she knew she could. She knew it.

And so every time her baby, her living baby, even went to a friend's house, she was losing him for a short time. The house was quieter, part of that loving spark missing. Even if Dorothy was away from the home while Frankie was at a friend's house, she could still feel that emptiness, knew it was lurking alone inside her home.

Camp was much, much worse. Camp Harmony struck a raw, dissonant chord in Dorothy's heart. Frank sent letters occasionally, but those were sheets of paper, not her boy. And they were few and far between. She had her pictures and his letters - which she reread constantly - and she also had knowledge, knowledge deep down inside buried under layers of worry, guilt, fear, and longing, knowledge that Frank was surely having a fine time at camp, and it was probably very good for him.

But that knowledge was too damn deep to be of any consolation right now. She was sitting at the kitchen table on her big yellow stool, an untouched bowl of grapes and a sheet of white lined paper in front of her. The paper was blank right now save for the date, but would soon be covered with her meticulous, black cursive strokes: Dorothy had the perfect handwriting of a grade school teacher, or at least of a substitute grade school teacher - which, of course, she was.

A single tear dripped down onto the paper, leaving a dark round spot. Dorothy was glad Gerald was at work right now, getting footage of whichever house caught on fire today. He wouldn't understand how she could be so worked up over Frank's being at camp. Being away.

For brief fleeting moments from time to time, Dorothy could use that deep level knowledge that Frank was having fun to realize just how irrational she was being.

But dammit, she wasn't just being irrational. She was being a mother. A concerned mother.

She picked up her ball point pen and sighed, finding a second's worth of contentedness in the knowledge that her son's fingers would soon be touching this same piece of paper, and slowly, carefully, began to write. posted by Lex Friedman 5:34 PM

 


Dear Babyface,



Hello sweetheart! How are things at Harmony? I miss you very much and I'm sure you miss Dad and me as well, but hopefully you're having such a wonderful time that you can even forget that we're apart!

Have you made new friends? What are their names? What are they like? What sort of movies are you making this summer? Are you eating right? I know you're a big boy now, Frankie, but it's my job to worry. Are you planning-





"What's that?"

"Uh, nothing," Frank said, quickly crumbling the letter up in his right hand.

"It doesn't look like nothing," Jenny said with a smile. "Let me see it."

"Forget about it. Besides, we have to get back to the script. Once we get this scene written, we can finish recording the whole movie." He reached over the table to grab a pen, brushing her arm in the process. Jenny's skin was warm. Now his cheeks were, too.

"Fine," said Jenny. "Just let me do one thing first." And with that, she reached back over the table and swiped the crumpled letter from Frank's hands.

"Hey!"

Jenny laughed. "I knew it wasn't nothing."

Frank sank back into his chair, defeated. He didn't want to make a big deal about the letter. That wouldn't be cool, and Frank wanted Jenny to think he was cool. To know he was cool. He was cool, wasn't he?

He didn't want to keep staring at her as she read his letter, so he looked down at the script in front of him and tried to look extremely involved, tried to look like she wasn't reading an extremely embarrassing letter from his mom right there in front of him.

"Frank," Jenny said.

He looked up from the script he was paying no attention to. "Yeah?"

"This letter..."

A never-ending pause, a pause that, by Frank's estimation, lasted longer than the movie Titanic in slo-mo. It's so stupid? So sappy? It's awful? For babies? What?

"...it's so sweet."

A sigh of relief. Minimal relief, but that was something.

"Yeah. My mom's pretty cool." Frank made sure to call her "mom" - "mommy" was reserved for little babies, and Frank sure didn't need Jenny thinking he was a baby. Because he wasn't a baby.

Jenny looked back down at the letter. And then she laughed. A quick laugh, through her nose - actually, mostly through her eyes - but Frank noticed.

"What? What's so funny?"

She laughed that sweet little laugh again. "How come she calls you 'Babyface?'"

"Oh." Babyface? That's ten times worse than 'mommy.' "I don't know. I wish she wouldn't."

"Aw, c'mon, Frankie! I think it's cute."

"It was cute when I was younger, I guess. Now I just really wish she would just call me Frank." He certainly wished she would't call him "Babyface" any more.

posted by Lex Friedman