Rob's NaNo attempt (emphasis on "attempt")

[Deleted]

Hi, I'm Rob. You may remember me from such films as "The Titan of Brighton," "The Importance of Being William," and "How Green Was My Lettuce." I'm here to promote another wonderful product: my NaNo! Call now, and through this special TV offer, we'll send you not one, not ten, but seven imaginary copies of the novel! But wait! There's more! as a special bonus, we'll throw in the essential novel writers' kit: five pounds of pure caffeine, a wall to bang your head against, and two bottles of distilled angst! But supplies are limited, so call now!



So, yeah. Cheesy infomercial gag aside, here's the deal. I woke up November 1st and absolutely failed to remember it was NaNoWriMo. Then, at about midnight that night, I suddenly remembered. I jumped on my computer and wrote the first thing that came to my head. No plan, no idea where things were going. In fact, I still have no idea; I'm flying completely by the seat of my pants. After that first night, I proceeded to not write anything for about ten days. Then I finally forced myself to start up again, and, almost five thousand words later, here we are. I highly doubt that I'll hit fifty thousand by the thirtieth, but the important thing is that I'm getting words down on paper. Or at least that's what I've been telling myself.

Now, to the novel itself. I don't have a title, and it doesn't really fit into any genre, but if I had to label it, I'd call it a "comic murder mystery." Like I said, I don't know what's going to happen, so it could very well eventually include some sci-fi elements, but I'm going to try to keep it somewhat real-world based. Other than that, I'm flying blind, which is actually kind of exciting.

A note about appropriateness. As a "comic murder mystery," there is a murder. I don't have any graphic descriptions or anything, but still, if having headless bodies lying around offends you, this isn't for you. Also, I don't curse often, but some of my characters do. I'll censor out any inappropriate words or phrases, and probably leave out some parts altogether. I'll try to err on the side of being overly-vigilant, but if anything slips past me or you're offended by something, please let me know so I can get rid of it!

Anyway, I think that's about all! Now, sit back and enjoy Untitled.

SPOILER: Click to show

It was neither a dark nor a stormy night. Instead, it was well-lit and rather balmy. The light came from the moon. It wasn’t full, ominously orange, or obscured by a light shroud of rapidly-moving clouds. Rather, it was a perfectly pleasant waning gibbous perched demurely in a clear sky. A thunderclap failed to sound. Dozens of shrieking bats were nowhere to be seen. The owls whose job it is to perch on leafless trees and stare unsettlingly into the distance had apparently called in sick. It was a normal night.

A house sat perched on a hill. It wasn’t a crumbling Victorian manor, with shutters flapping in the wind. It had no widow’s walk, no hidden rooms, and certainly no gables. The hill it was on wasn’t even particularly high. It was more of a knoll, really. The house wasn’t miles from civilization; it was situated between two other houses that looked more or less similar to it. It wasn’t at the end of a winding road; it was at the end of a cul-de-sac. No briars, thickets, or hedge mazes graced the property. It was a normal house.

It was normal house on a normal night. Therefore, it was all the more surprising when Edgar found the headless body in his kitchen.

***

“Ah, [expletive],” said Edgar, after several seconds of stunned silence. It figures, he thought. You walk downstairs for a snack, stub your toe on something, turn on the light, and, oops, it’s a corpse. And a headless one at that. Society these days. (As a general rule, when Edgar had any sort of mild complaint, he attributed the blame to “society.” If he were to be asked what he meant by that, he would doubtless respond with something to the effect of “You know, society,” and then possibly mention rap music and low-hanging pants.)

Edgar tried to calmly reassess the situation. Upon closer examination, the body was still a body. It was sprawled about in a rather undignified manner, suggesting either a violent struggle or carelessness on the part of the killer; everyone knows that the more refined murderers have the decency to arrange their victims nicely. The body was male, and dressed in a snappy, if slightly out-of-fashion, suit. It was laying face-up. Well, as much as something can be face-up when it doesn’t have a face. Edgar was struck by the fact that there was surprisingly little blood, considering the rather substantial injury. Then again, he realized, it might be hasty to assume the lack of blood to be surprising. After all, Edgar had had no experience with decapitation before. For all he knew, this amount of blood could be normal.

And yet Edgar couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that something was wrong. Other than the obvious, of course. After a few more moments, he realized what it was. He was wearing only his boxer shorts. He felt that, for the sake of decency, one should at least put on a bathrobe in the presence of company. The fact that the company in this instance was a headless corpse was insignificant. Edgar grabbed the jacket he had slung over the kitchen chair the previous night and slipped it on. It left his legs bare, but he felt it was better than nothing.

Edgar had always been very aware of etiquette. Others would use terms like “obsessed,” but Edgar preferred to say “fastidious.” And, after the initial shock, this is what troubled Edgar the most. He realized that he had no idea what the proper protocol was for this situation. He highly doubted that Miss Blandershem’s Book of Manners for the Upstanding Member of Society or the like would cover a scenario such as this; he was sailing in uncharted waters. It would obviously be a faux pau to offer the body a drink, as it had no mouth with which to consume a beverage, and, for that matter, no ears with which to hear the offer. Presenting it a seat would seem to be similarly uncouth, as rigor mortis had likely set in.

At last, a thought bubbled its way up through the stagnant waters of his stunned and still-sleepy brain. Call the authorities, it said. But that presented a whole new set of problems. It would clearly be unacceptable to place the call while still in the kitchen, since Edgar would then be talking to a third party about the corpse as if it wasn’t even in the room. On the other hand, it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave the body alone in the kitchen. So Edgar compromised. He picked the kitchen’s cordless phone up from its cradle and walked over to the doorway leading to the front hall. He ducked into the hall and dialed 9-1-1, but periodically poked his head back into the kitchen to check on his decapitated houseguest.

But before the emergency operator picked up the phone, Edgar began to have second thoughts. All at once he realized how bad the scene in his kitchen would look to an outsider. Specifically, how incriminating. It took a special kind of psychopath to deposit his victim in a complete stranger’s house; the police would doubtless jump to a much more likely conclusion. Namely, that Edgar himself was the murderer.

Plus, Edgar thought, my toe-print is on the body from when I bumped into it. Do the police even have records of toe-prints? They never show the cops taking them on those procedural shows – they just fingerprint the guy and then make a witty remark. But those shows probably aren’t very accurate. For example, I doubt that the analysis of a fiber stuck to the bottom of the victim’s shoe leads to the capture of the murderer anywhere near as often in real life as it seems to on CSI. Then again, I never would have guessed that murderers actually decapitated anyone anymore, so that goes to show how much I know about these things.

Before Edgar could follow this train of thought any further down its rambling track, though, he heard a woman’s voice on the other end of the line. “911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”

Edgar thought quickly, and responded, “There isn’t one. My mistake. Terribly sorry. I saw a stork and I thought it was a tern, and I forgot that terns aren’t dangerous. I remembered reading an article about how some types of birds can peck out your eyes, but terns aren’t on the list. I confused them with budgies. But either way, it wasn’t a tern at all. It was a stork. And storks can’t peck out your eyes either. That would be ridiculous. Their beaks are too large. So no emergency.” He then realized that the operator had hung up quite some time ago, and he sighed in relief. Problem solved.

But he still had the much larger problem of what to do with the corpse that was rapidly cooling in his kitchen, no doubt staining the floor tiles with its blood. “[expletive],” said Edgar again. He didn’t usually curse, but he felt that these were extenuating circumstances which allowed such vulgarity. He ducked back into his kitchen, finding it the same way that had left it

It was then that Edgar noticed a second abnormality in the room. It was understandable that he had missed it previously, given the more obvious one. This second aberration involved the state of the door of the cabinet under his sink. Namely, it was ajar. This detail would have gone unnoticed by most, but Edgar was very particular that all his cabinets and drawers remain shut when not in use. This prevented, by his estimate, at least two dozen banged knees and bumped heads per year. Furthermore, Edgar specifically remembered closing this particular cabinet earlier that evening (Edgar had an oddly-accurate memory when it came to things with handles or knobs).

Edgar started to head towards the cabinet, but then stopped. Various scenarios of what might happen if he opened the cabinet ran through his mind, and most of them ended with Edgar’s corpse joining that of the unknown man on the floor. The murder himself could be crouching in the recess. He might have left some manner of bomb within it to destroy the evidence. It could contain a poisonous viper or frog. It might be full of very sharp stones that would spill out and hurt his feet. Granted, these last two scenarios were very unlikely, but you never know.

And there was a second problem. To reach the cabinet, Edgar would have to step over the body. This seemed inherently distasteful to Edgar, as well as potentially dangerous. If he slipped in a puddle of blood, he could end up with a nasty bruise.

Suddenly, inspiration struck. Edgar darted out of the kitchen and returned moments later with a broom. Holding on to the bristled end, he extended the handle in the direction of the cabinet in question. After several failed attempts, he finally had the broom inserted into the crack between the cabinet’s door and the surrounding wood. Before he could change his mind, he gave the broom a quick flick to open the door.

Another body tumbled out.

“,” sighed Edgar, swearing for the third time that night. As if one body wasn’t enough, here was a second. At least this one had a head, he noted with some relief. It was a small blessing, but at this point, Edgar would take whatever he could get.

But before Edgar could ponder any further on what a macabre turn his night had taken, the body stirred. The second body, of course; the headless body’s days of moving were over. The second body stirred.

Edgar shrieked and jumped back. “Show yourself!” he shouted. He quickly realized that this was a rather useless thing to shout, as the figure was already in plain sight. He amended his exclamation: “Show yourself more clearly!”

The man (it was a man) moaned and clutched his head as he slowly rose to his feet. Edgar took another step back and looked around for something with which to arm himself. Since his kitchen was unusually tidy, however, there was very little to choose from. All the knives were safely tucked away in closed drawers and everything blunt and heavy was fastened securely to the counter. Therefore, Edgar had to make due with clutching his broom even tighter.

The previously-encabineted man shook his head as if to clear it and moaned again. His eyes locked on to Edgar’s, and he began to slowly shuffle towards him, stepping over the headless body.

Edgar briefly wondered if he was dealing with a zombie of some kind. The moaning and shuffling certainly pointed towards that. Then again, if the thing was a zombie, reasoned Edgar, it would have gone for the body on the floor before coming after him. Then again, the body on the floor was headless, ergo brainless, and if Edgar had learned anything from zombie movies, it was that zombies, above all else, hungered for brains.

“Oh, [British-sounding expletive], that hurts,” groaned the man as he made his way towards Edgar.

Well, so much for my zombie theory, Edgar thought. Unless this is some super-intelligent speaking zombie. And in that case, I’m pretty much [mild expletive]-ed anyway. So I might as well try to reason with it. “Begone, undead menace!” he shouted, as threateningly as possible.

The man stopped dead in his tracks and peered at Edgar quizzically. “The [expletive] you goin’ on about?”

Another theory out the window, thought Edgar. He’s probably just some guy who was lying in my cabinet unconscious for some reason. In retrospect, that seems to be the most obvious conclusion. I don’t know why my mind always goes to “zombie.”

Thus reassured he was not dealing with a member of the legion of dark forces, Edgar relaxed and smiled, lowering his broom. Then he remembered that, zombie or not, this was still a strange man in his house, so he raised the broom again and asked, “Who are you?”

“Who am I?” the man replied. “Who are you?”

Edgar felt that he owed this man no explanation, but still felt compelled to reply, reciting from rote, “Edgar Frampton, pleased to meet you. And you are?”

“Edgar Frampton?” asked the strange man, apparently shocked. “No [expletive]! It’s me, Frank Tinsdale!” He laughed loudly. “Who would’ve thought it?”

“…Pardon?” said Edgar, more confused than he could remember ever feeling.

The man named Frank spread his arms wide in a friendly gesture. “It’s me! Frankie! From high school. Don’t tell me you don’t remember!”

Edgar suddenly did remember, in a violent flash, which almost caused him to drop his broom in surprise. And that was when Edgar swore for the fourth time that night. Standing in his kitchen, well past midnight, naked except for his boxers and a jacket, holding a broom, looking at a headless dead body on the floor, and having just been greeted by his high school friend who had fallen out of a cabinet, Edgar closed his eyes and sighed deeply. “[expletive].”

***

Somewhere far from the scene in Edgar’s kitchen, it was a dark and stormy night. The owls and bats were out in full force, and the lightning was pounding down in fast and deadly spears. If the phrase “an ill wind” were ever to be applied to something, it would be to the ominous gale that shook the leafless trees. It was far from a normal night.

A large, bleak building stood in an otherwise-empty landscape. It was squat, windowless, and angular. It looked like a cross between a mental asylum and soul-crushingly plain office building. It was as if some bureaucrat had decided that shoeboxes were the perfect model for a building, that prisons were too cheerful and bright, and that two or three shades of brown were more than enough; so he plopped this building down as far from society as possible and waited for the accolades to pour in. The monolithic structure sat, brooding, a tumor on the forested landscape.

A flash of lightning illuminated a lone car puttering down the winding path that led to the brick monstrosity. The car came to an abrupt stop outside the structure, and a man stepped out. He, unlike the building, was tall and thin, but both shared an angular nature. The man flipped up the collar of his heavy black coat to protect himself from the chilly wind. He briefly took a look around, then strode through the building’s lone door.

It was, of course, impossible to hear the conversation that was held within the building, what with the wind, the thunder, and the thick walls of brick. But if it could have been heard, it would have been this:

“Is it done?”

“It’s done.”

“No witnesses?”

“One.”

“…”

“Don’t worry, he will be dealt with.”

“Good. You got the item?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

A click as a briefcase opened.

“It is as you expected?”

“Yes. A little worse for the wear than when I last saw it, but still, this is most certainly it.”

“My payment?”

“After the witness is taken care of.”

“Half now, half then.”

“…”

“Fine. I’ll go finish the job.”

The tall figure came out of the door. With long strides, he walked to his car. The ignition sputtered to life, tires squealed on the slick pavement, and the vehicle drove out of sight. Once again, the eyesore of a building was alone in the dark, stormy night.

***

Back in Edgar’s kitchen, half an hour later, Edgar was fully dressed and sitting with Frank at the table while a kettle of water neared boiling on the stove. They were chatting guardedly yet amicably, catching up with each other, and doing their best to ignore the body still on the floor. They both knew the subject would come up eventually, but neither wanted to be the one to first broach it.

Instead, they talked about their days in school together. They hadn’t seen each other, or even talked, since the day they had graduated thirteen years ago. The last time they had been in the same room, they were both trying to avoid the affections of wayward relatives and planning how to get out of their ridiculous gowns as soon as possible. The final time (before tonight, of course) Edgar had seen Frank, he had been nothing but a quickly receding figure throwing his mortarboard away like a Frisbee and tripping on the hem of his too-long robe, shouting something that Edgar was too far away to hear, but sounded like either “[British expletive]” or “[word that sounds like aforementioned British expletive].” Edgar strongly suspected it had been the former.

But their last meeting was not what was running through Edgar’s head at this moment in the kitchen. Rather, it was their first. To get to that point, though, we must first learn a little more of Edgar.

When the two of them met, Edgar had been a sophomore, which put him at the awkward point that lay after the initial floundering and panic that freshmen feel, but before the cockiness and confidence of juniors and seniors. This was not the only awkward transition that Edgar was going through at that point: he was just beginning to grow after a long period of stagnation height-wise, and it was as if his body was determined to make up for lost time by shooting up like some kind of fast-growing plant. A fast-growing plant that was also plagued by a cracking voice. One unfortunate side-effect of this was that any clothes Edgar bought were too small within a matter of months. Thus, he was perpetually showing off several inches of ankle and wrist, and sometimes, if he was particularly unlucky, midriff.

It didn’t help that he had the eyes of a fifty year old man. He had to wear bifocals, which, sadly, were not made with teenagers in mind. They made him look like an old man had been forcibly inserted into the body of an adolescent. An adolescent with poorly-fitting clothes.

Needless to say, Edgar had a hard time making friends. And so he was inevitably drawn to the Mecca of misfits: the school drama club.

The institution seemed deceptively normal at first glance: a group of students who shared a passion for the performing arts. But even a cursory look deeper revealed an assembly of personalities more dysfunctional than any family Eugene O’Neill could even imagine.

The name “drama club” was not a misnomer. More drama occurred off the stage than on it. Friendships were formed and broken faster than alliances on a reality television show. The group was also incredibly incestuous. Of the thirty or so students, most of them had dated at least one other member of the troupe, often more. And, as soon as one of these couples broke up, two other actors were there to swoop in and sink their romantic claws into the victims. If one out of the group caught mono, it was almost certain that it would be passed on to nearly everyone else within a month.

Of course, not all the students were involved in this web of romance. A good number of them were socially awkward virgins, who stayed at home on the weekends and would have been flabbergasted if someone offered them an alcoholic beverage at a party. Not that they would ever go to a party. This left them more time to reorganize their Transformers collections and fine-tune their Magic: The Gathering decks.

In addition to the lothario / virgin divide, there were five main groups that encompassed all the theater nerds. A sort of Linnaean taxonomy of misfits.

[somewhat sketchy paragraph describing the first group]

The next subset was the students who really cared about theater. Like, really, really cared. They could recite passages of Hamlet with decent accuracy, actually watched the Tony awards, and could tell you the difference between a par-can with a green gel and a source-four fitted with a gobo. They would discuss Brecht and Ionesco over lunch, even though they had never read any works by either. They would throw around the phrases “Stanislavski’s system” and “Meisner technique” at any opportunity. They wore scarves even when it was eighty degrees, and looked at all the other actors with thinly-veiled disgust. Interestingly enough, the students in this category were almost always the worst actors, hamming up their lines (when they remembered them), tripping over set pieces, and generally dragging down the quality of the entire production. And, of course, they complained if they weren’t cast as the leads.

A handful of students could be classified as spastic goof-offs, who had decided that theater was a better and less expensive alternative to Adderall. They were very fond of the catwalks and understage area, and generally anyplace they weren’t supposed to be. They had to be kept far away from the prop closet, lest impromptu swordfights break out. They had a special talent for making virtually any sentence into an innuendo. About half of the beleaguered director’s time was spent corralling them and pointing their energy in the direction of actual acting.

Then there were the precious few who actually had talent. They could sing anything after thirty seconds looking at the sheet music, had all their lines learned the day after they got their scripts, and were the only thing that made the school’s shows bearable to watch. But acting came so naturally to them that they almost never cared about what they were doing. They showed up late to rehearsals and left early, but nobody could say anything because the whole theater program hinged on them. They breezed through the shows but never invested anything in them. Everyone else hated them.

Finally, there were the mediocres. They were students who had signed up for theater because they had nothing else to do, or because they wanted something to put on their college applications, or because [implication that a member of the drama club was a female with loose morals]. The members of this group stumbled through readthroughs and rehearsals, and usually managed to not totally screw up during the performances. They were often cast as “Policeman Number Two,” or “Tall Man,” or “Chorus Member.” Edgar was definitively a member of this last group.

Now, we finally get to the part where Frank comes in. The Winter show was going to be Our Town, a play that the director trusted his students could bumble through without too much trouble. Edgar, of course, penciled himself in for an audition time within minutes of the signup sheet being posted on the bulletin board outside the theater. The rest of the names trickled in as the sheet filled up, offering no surprises. The usual theater crew was all there, except the masochistic few who had chosen to specialize in the production end of theater, which meant they did the most actual work and received the least credit. (The lighting designer famously had a nervous breakdown his junior year, threatening to hang himself from the catwalks, shouting, “Operate your own [mild expletive] spotlights!") All signs pointed to it being a very dull evening of auditions.

But then, around the end of the schoolday, a crowd had gathered around the sheet. They spoke in hushed, urgent voices and fluttered their hands nervously. Newcomers to the crowd let out audible gasps as they saw the spectacle. Edgar was one of the last to arrive, and courteously wormed his way to the front of the mob.

What he saw was this. At the very bottom of the sheet, scrawled in huge, messy letters, was the name “Frank Tinsdale.”

Edgar’s knees bucked under him. The Frank Tinsdale? He, as everybody else in the school, was familiar with Frank’s exploits. And “exploits” was putting it mildly. The truth lay somewhere between “shenanigans” and “felonies.”

Frank has both created and solidified his reputation when he had first arrived at the school, at the start of the previous year. He had walked in the door smoking a cigarette and wearing a tee-shirt with the phrase “[very offensive phrase]” on it. When the woman at the front desk informed him that both of these things were prohibited at the school, he proceeded to call her a [British expletive], a [different British expletive], and a [third British expletive]. She had no idea what any of these words meant, but got the general idea by his tone, and the particular finger which he raised while saying them.

He spent the entirety of his first day at the school in the principal’s office. None of the administrative staff could break through his surly demeanor. The school psychologist, who believed that even the most troubled students are good at heart, had to reevaluate his philosophy.

Word about the incident at the entrance spread very quickly, and a small group had gathered at the door at the end of the schoolday to see if there was any more scandal to be found. They were disappointed when Frank walked out, wearing his shirt inside-out so the text was concealed, and hanging his head in defeat.

But just as the crowd started to disperse, he laughed loudly, and, with a twinkle in his eye, shouted, “What, you thought I was [expletive] done? [suggestive phrase]!” After this pronouncement, he stripped naked and ran two laps around the building before hopping on his bicycle and riding home, leaving his clothing in a pile outside the door.

From that day on, he was a legend. And even though very few of his subsequent outbursts were quite as memorable as those of his first day, he provided a reliable stream of outrageous antics for the student population to buzz about.

If one were to look at his school file, they would first see a sizable stack of detention slips, recommendations for suspension, and court summons. But once they got to the actual information, they would see that he was really quite bright. His standardized test scores were consistently in the top tenth percentile and his poetry had been published in two well-known journals (though if any of his peers had discovered that fact, they would have quickly found themselves with substantially fewer teeth). He was new to the school district, and in fact the country, as he had moved to America with his parents just weeks before the start of the school year.

Yes, Frank was British. And not the posh, gentlemanly variety of British. He was more the stab-you-in-a-dingy-London-alleway-and-steal-your-twenty-quid-and-don’t-go-tellin’-nobody-‘cause-me-mates’ll-bash-your-[mild British expletive]-head-in type of British. He had a rather pronounced accent, which made him both interesting and difficult to understand, both of which he played to his advantage. He quickly contaminated the school with the wide array of colorful British profanity he would spout off at the drop of a hat. In fact, he would sometimes make up curse words off the top of his head to see if they caught on. They often did, causing the halls to echo with students calling each other “goggle-swaddlers” and “frippity sputwursts.”

Yup, that's all for now. There will be more to come, just as soon as it pops out of my brain!

[Deleted]

Yay for a productive day! First, there were a few cosmetic changes to what I had previously written. Frank's surname is now Stropford, and I introduced him with the nickname "The Badger." I also gave the group of theater students I described as being "really, really into theater" the title of "theater nerds" for ease of reference.

Also, a somewhat bigger change. I've decided to rearrange a few things, specifically moving the paragraphs about Frank and Edgar sitting at the table to much later in the story, and placing the graduation scene after the other school shenanigans. Basically, I'm putting things in chronological order, since the high school "flashback" turned out to be much longer than I had intended. I'm going to eventually find some way to ease into the history of Frank and Edgar to begin the chapter, but that's on the back burner for now.

Finally, comments specific to this section. I've had to bowdlerize a great deal, but I hope the gist of things still comes across. Also, I'm pretty sure that I typed "Edgar" when I meant "Frank" a couple of times. And this segment picks up right where the last one left off, with descriptions of Frank. So onward and upward!

SPOILER: Click to show

He could tell you where to get the best [type of illicit drug] and which liquor stores didn’t card, although he didn’t [method of ingesting aforementioned drug] or drink himself. Even the cigarettes he smoked were only for show, and were herbal, containing no tobacco. But his lack of physical vices was more than made up for by his addiction to mischief-making. He got bulk discounts on laxatives and bred his own white mice, mating them to select for speed and small size, the ideal phenotype for being placed in lockers, drawers (of the storage variety), and drawers (of the pants variety). His food-based pranks were particularly famous, running the gamut from [two inappropriate food-based pranks, one starting with "a," the other with "z"]. He was careful, though, to never endanger his victims’ welfare unduly. Dislocated shoulders and mild concussions, however, were fair game.

He was able to finance his addiction by a series of Tom Sawyer-esque swindles and cons. [description of how he conned a group of students by making false promises about certain household products, which he sold to them at a high price]

One of his most successful schemes involved posting flyers all over town asking that charitable souls donate to the [name for a fake charitable organization for children living in "unsanitary conditions" which, when made into an acronym, is very rude] He provided them with a phone number to call for more information and informed them that they could drop off their cash donations at any local grocery stores. The stores, of course, allowed Frank to install collection boxes in their entranceways. After all, who could deny those poor [children]? Frank would swing by and pick up the donations twice a week, which he donated to an actual charity the next day. After skimming seventy percent of the cash off the top, of course. He was able to rationalize his actions by telling himself that he was an Underprivileged [child] and that his room was a rather Unsanitary environment, and he therefore was entitled to whatever money he raised. He also got satisfaction from the fact that no one seemed to realize just what his charity’s acronym implied.

He had earned the nickname “The Badger” a few months into his career of anarchy. It started, strangely enough, with an English essay. His teacher had assigned the class to write a five-page essay on any character from A Tale of Two Cities. Frank, fittingly, chose Sydney Carton.

The essay he turned in was written on three sheets of crumpled paper, stapled together haphazardly. He had made his handwriting as large as possible, and the fifth page contained only two lines. The whole text was a rambling, off-topic, almost stream-of-consciousness cobbling together of words and phrases. The whole essay was a masterpiece of underachieving, but it was the final paragraph that stood out the most.

It read, verbatim: "Lemme use a metaphor, okay? It's like, Carton was this badger, right? ‘Cause he’s diggin’ for Lucy’s love and [expletive that has been struck out] (sorry) stuff. An' he keeps diggin' 'round 'til he makes a barrow burrow. But he can see, he’s not blind-like, so he's not a mole. Also, he's got sharp teeth. He's a badger. It’s symbolic or some such. Then, in the end, when he’s about to go to sleep, what with the “far, far better rest” or whatever, it’s like when badgers sleep, they do it in their barrows burrows. It’s their natural hobita hubi he habitat. Also, the word carton’s like an egg carton, and badgers eat eggs, right? Obvious, innit? So, in concluding, A Tale of Two Cities is about badgers."

He received an “F” on the paper.

The moment it was handed back to him, he jumped out of his seat and shouted, “Persecution! You’re persecutin’ me! Just ‘cause you don’t understand my metaphors don’t mean you can penalize me for usin’ them! True art is always unappreciated by plebeians like you!” He then stormed out of the classroom and was not to be seen for three days.

On the fourth day after the outburst, students were greeted with a strange sight when they entered the school. Every available inch of wall space (and parts of the ceiling and floors) was covered with Xeroxed flyers. At the top of each was a photocopy of the final paragraph of Frank’s paper, along with the large, circled “F” that was next to it. Below this image, there was a message: “This is art. If you don’t understand it, you’re stupid. I deserve an “A.” Don’t suppress my rights. Support the Badger Movement.”

And standing at the end of the hallway, there was Frank, grinning and holding a pile of black-and-white striped tee-shirts. He handed one to every student who passed him. When they unfolded their new shirts, they found the words “SUPPORT THE BADGER MOVEMENT” written across the front in neat block letters. By the end of the day, three quarters of the student body was wearing them.

That lunch period, Frank jumped up on a table, produced a megaphone from his backpack, and began to give an impassioned speech on the topic of badgers, and their pertinence to A Tale of Two Cities. After a few minutes of this, he was dragged away by the assistant-principal.

The Badger Movement had just begun to grow, however. The next day, every classroom had a stuffed badger in it. That Saturday, pro-Badger Movement commercials were televised during the local news. By Monday, Frank had somehow managed to commandeer a billboard. On Wednesday, dozens of actors dressed in badger costumes picketed outside the school’s doors. Finally, when the Badger Movement was mentioned in the Eugene Weekly, the administration knew that they had lost the battle. Frank received his “A” along with his reputation for, like a badger, not letting go of something he locked his jaws around until it was pounded into submission. A nickname was born.

This was Frank. Therefore, the surprise at seeing his name on the audition sheet was completely justified.

That evening, the time of the auditions for Our Town had arrived. The interested students gathered in the hallway around the theater. Frank was notably absent. The kids prepared for their auditions in different ways. The theater nerds loudly did articulation exercises while pacing, from time to time pausing and breathing deeply, to “center their essences.” One of the goof-offs had brought a bouncy ball, which was the inspiration for a new contact sport. The talented ones looked over their prepared pieces one last time, then sat down and did crosswords. The mediocres nervously clutched the crumpled pages upon which their monologues were written, struggling to memorize those last few lines.

They went into the theater one by one and stood alone on the stage, squinting into the bright lights, feeling very small and powerless. The disembodied voice of the director would from time to time shout “Louder!” from the back of the theater. After they delivered their stumbling conclusion, they exited the theater, either grinning with confidence or shaking their heads in regret, thinking only of the one line they screwed up, and how their Our Town dreams were over.

After the last of the gathered students left the theater, a hush fell over the crowd that had remained assembled even after their auditions were over. “Next!” yelled the director from his dark seat. The students looked around nervously. Was Frank even going to show up? Had his name on the signup sheet been some sort of joke?

Just then, Frank burst through the door of the nearby janitor’s closet, where he had been waiting for two hours to make his dramatic entrance. He was dressed in full Elizabethan regalia, from his neck-ruff to his codpiece. He gave the crowd a grand wave, and strode into the theater.

The students crowded into the wings to watch the spectacle. Frank confidently strutted to center stage and loudly delivered his introduction. “Good evening. I am Frank Stropford, and I would like to read for the part of the Town.” He then closed his eyes and stood perfectly straight and still for at least fifteen seconds.

A bit after all the observers had become sufficiently uncomfortable, he snapped into action. “Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, or that the Everlasting had not fix’d his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. Oh, God, God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!”

Everyone was flabbergasted. “Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two,” one of the nerds whispered, before being quickly hushed.

“But two months dead; nay, not so much, not two. So excellent a king that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother that he might not beteem the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly!”

Everyone had to admit, the performance was impeccable. Every syllable, every gesture, was calculated for maximum impact, theatrical yet not melodramatic. The students stared raptly, afraid to blink lest they miss a moment of this wonder.

“Frailty, thy name is woman! A little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor father’s body, like Niobe, all tears.”

Cliché as it sounds, he brought the text to life. For a brief minute, Hamlet himself was on that stage.

“Within a month, ‘ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears had left the flushing of her galléd eyes, she married. Oh, most wicked speed, to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”

Finished, he closed his eyes and took a deep bow. “Thank you.” The whole theater was dead still; there was no applause. Breaths were held, jaws hung loosely. And then, just as quickly as he had become Hamlet, he reverted to Frank. “The [expletive] you starin’ at?” he shouted into the wings at the silent spectators, throwing his shoulders back and reassuming his slouching posture. The onlookers quickly scattered, [simile referencing the speed with which the students departed]. Thus, no one saw Frank’s half-smile as he left the stage.

The next day, the cast-list was posted. There were few surprises. George Gibbs and Emily Webb were given to the two of the talented students who had bothered to show up at the auditions. The rest of the Gibbs and Webb family was split about evenly between the spazzes and the mediocres, with the rest of the parts doled out to the nerds and whomever was left over. Edgar was “Graveyard Man Number Two.” But the only role people were paying attention to was that of the lead, the character whom Thornton Wilder had dubbed “Stage Manager.” Joey Burton experienced a brief moment of joy before he realized that the “stage manager” written next to his name referred to the job rather than the part. No, the actual role of the Stage Manager was given to Frank Stropford.

There were mixed reactions to this. Some were excited, knowing that having Frank in the cast would draw huge crowds to the performances. Some, mostly nerds, were outraged, claiming that the part should rightfully belong to one of the “actual actors,” who had paid their dues and deserved a bigger role, rather than some yahoo with no experience who had swooped in at the last minute. Some didn’t care one way or the other, but just hoped that Frank would take the play seriously.

Frank soon showed up and pushed his way to the front of the crowd. After taking a brief glance at the sheet, he punched the bulletin board. “Ah, [expletive], I didn’t get the part of the Town! I would’ve been a [expletive] brilliant Town!” He turned to the other students. “So, what’s this “Stage Manager” part? Some [expletive used as an adjective] [expletive used as a noun] role?”

The looks he got were a mix of incredulity and disgust. “…It’s the lead,” whispered someone.

“You mean you haven’t even read the play?” asked one of the theater nerds with thinly-veiled condescension.

“Of course I [mild British expletive] ‘aven’t!” shouted Frank. “Wot you think I am, a [expletive] [expletive]?”

[wordplay involving various British and English curses]

In fact, Frank had read the play several times, and considered Thornton Wilder to be one of the most significant playwrights of the mid-1900s. He had once sent an essay on the relationship between another of Wilder’s plays, The Skin of Our Teeth, and O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (specifically pertaining to the representation of the female as both a maternal and independent figure in the theater of the 1930s) to The Atlantic. It was not published, but Frank received a hand-written note from the editor encouraging him to continue submitting his works.

And yet, for his own inscrutable reasons, he feigned ignorance of the subject material (despite already having half his character’s lines memorized).

[Amneiger]

Frank sounds like a fun character xD

[Kathleen]

Oh my gosh, this is hilarious. xD I had so much fun reading the first paragraph I had to keep going.

[Deleted]

Aww, thanks, guys! ^_^ I'm glad you like it! That does wonders for my confidence.

Okay, so I think I may have found an at least temporary solution for my pacing woes. I'm splitting the "flashback" part into three sections, interrupted by present-day Edgar and Frank making tea. So it goes First Tea Scene, flashback from beginning to Edgar seeing Frank's name on the sheet, Second Tea Scene, flashback to the descriptions of Frank, Third Tea Scene, yet-to-be-written flashback about how Frank and Edgar became friends. Does that make sense?

SPOILER: Click to show

Back in Edgar’s kitchen, half an hour later, Edgar was fully dressed and sitting with Frank at the table while a kettle of water neared boiling on the stove. They were chatting guardedly yet amicably, catching up with each other, and doing their best to ignore the body still on the floor. They both knew the subject would come up eventually, but neither wanted to be the one to first broach it.

Instead, they talked about their days in school together. This was pretty much all they had in common, since the two of them hadn’t crossed paths, or even talked, since they had graduated in 1995. But we’ll get to that later.

“The [expletive] you been up to, Raven?” Frank asked, leaning back in his chair and propping his feet on the table.

Edgar had three responses, which he arranged by order of perceived importance. “Get your feet off my table, don’t call me ‘Raven,’ and you still haven’t told me what you were doing in my cabinet, which I think takes precedence over updates on my life.”

Frank had three counter-responses. “No, I like them there. It’s either ‘Raven’ or ‘Poe,’ and I think we both know which sounds cooler and less like a Teletubby. And I’ll be gettin’ to that in time, after I’ve got some tea in me. Now talk.”

“I honestly don’t know where to begin,” said Edgar. “My life hasn’t been that exciting. Until tonight, of course.”

“Well, why don’t you start by tellin’ me what you’re still doin’ in the [mild British expletive] suburbs of [mild British expletive] Eugene, eh? You’re living, what, a mile from where you grew up? Reeks of a severe fear of change, it does.”

“First of all, it’s four and a half miles from the house I grew up in. And I like it here. It’s friendly. The name’s nice and reassuring. It sounds like an uncle who visits from time to time: ‘Guess what, kids. Eugene is here! That’s right, Eugene Oregon!’ And what are you doing here, for that matter? You were always going on about how you couldn’t wait to leave.”

“Tea first. Explanations later,” Frank said emphatically.

Edgar sighed. Talking with Frank was always an uphill battle. A battle against an army of stoic, tight-lipped masters of repression. Knowing that he wasn’t going to get anywhere until the water boiled, he allowed his mind to wander. It ended up, unsurprisingly, at the year when he and Frank had met.

SPOILER: Click to show

Edgar’s concentration was broken by the sudden whistle of his kettle. He rose and made his way to the stove, carefully sidling around the body. “’Bout time,” Frank muttered.

Edgar ignored the comment as he readied two mugs (closing the cabinet after retrieving them, of course) and lifted the kettle off the burner, checking twice to make sure that it was now turned off. He distributed the steaming water evenly between the two cups and opened the drawer in which he kept his teabags. “Darjeeling, breakfast blend, or green?” he called in Frank’s direction.

Frank jumped to his feet, outraged, tipping over his chair in the process. “You telling me you’re planning on using teabags? [expletive] teabags?”

“…Yes?” Edgar replied uncertainly.

Frank paced in small steps, pressing the palms of his hands to the sides of his head. “Do you know nothing about the preparation of tea? No, of course you [expletive] don’t, do you? [colorful expletive], teabags are to proper tea as reality shows are to actual television! Pour out the water and start over!”

Edgar reluctantly poured the mugs’ contents into his sink. As he did so, though, he had a sudden realization. “I don’t think I actually have any loose tealeaves.”

Frank stared, stunned. “I hope you’re joking.”

“Afraid not. Should I cut open some bags and pour them into the pot?”

Frank was speechless. His mouth flapped open and shut like a particularly indecisive mailbox. Finally, he mustered the willpower to put his outrage into words. “Put bagged leaves into the kettle? Would you put [something that is very much not caviar] into a jar and call it caviar?”

“Well, then, I’m afraid we’re at an impasse,” sighed Edgar, beginning to make his way back to the table

Frank collected himself and motioned for Edgar to stop. “Fortunately for you, I’m prepared for situations such as this. I always carry a bag of my favorite blend and an infuser just in case I find myself in some barbaric, backwoods locale where the yokels are so [expletive] primitive as to not have the bare necessities.” With this, Edgar dug around in his back pocket and triumphantly pulled out a small plastic baggie filled with shredded, brownish-green leaves. [gag involving a mix-up between two bags] “Pure Earl Grey, British as the [something British].” He tossed it to Edgar, who just barely caught it.

“Thanks. Now, how exactly do I go about brewing this?”

Frank met his question with a withering stare, then an exasperated sigh. “Get out of the way; just let me [expletive] do it.”

Edgar walked back to the table, again avoiding the body, and handing the bag to Frank as they passed. He righted the chair Frank had knocked over and sat down. As he watched his friend re-fill the kettle, he once again began to think back on his days in school.

SPOILER: Click to show

Edgar was once again jerked into the present day by the kettle’s whistle. He rose to tend to it, but Frank’s vicious glare made him slowly sink back into his seat.

“I’ll do it. Knowing you, you’d find some way to [fail] at even pouring finished tea into a cup. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at you the same way again.” Frank shook his head sadly as he made his way to the stove and turned down the heat. “How you want yours prepared? No – don’t bother to answer, you obviously don’t know the first [mild expletive] thing about how to drink anything that doesn’t come in a can. I’ll make yours the same way I do mine. I don’t suppose you’ve got a proper teapot, do you?”

Edgar abashedly pointed at one of his cabinets. Frank flung it open and pulled out the dusty clay teapot it contained. He gazed at Edgar with a look of utter disgust. “Really? A Yixing pot? A brown betty is the only way to go; or at least a cast-iron.” Edgar just looked baffled. “You haven’t even used this [mild British expletive] thing once, have you?”

“Er… I once used it as a vase for some flowers I picked.”

Frank let out a long, disapproving sigh. “Since we have nothing else, I will stoop to using this. I assume you don’t have a tea cozy or porcelain teacups either.” A silent shake of Edgar’s head. “[expletive] amateur. But I’ll make it work. Now, from this point onward, I require absolute silence. You are about to witness a beautiful thing: the creation of a proper cup of tea.”

Frank took a deep breath and began. He first added warm water to the pot and cups to preheat them, swirling the pot counterclockwise four times, briskly. He inserted the infuser into the pot and picked up the baggie of tea from the counter. He glanced back and forth between the bag and the teapot, mentally sizing up the perfect amount of leaves to add. Once he had reached his conclusion, he poured the warm water out of the pot and dried its interior with a clean towel. He gingerly dropped three pinches of tealeaves into the pot, then stared at it intently again, calculating. He seemed to make up his mind, and added exactly twelve more leaves. Then he turned his attention to the procurement of additives.

Edgar watched in mute horror as Frank ransacked nearly every cabinet and drawer in the kitchen while obtaining the sugar, saucers, and spoons, leaving them all open. He then haphazardly opened the refrigerator and grabbed the milk, closing the door with a kick of his foot and severely scuffing it in the process. Edgar winced. Frank set the sugar, spoons, and milk aside and approached the kettle. Unlike his former, chaotic movements, Frank was now painfully precise and alert, almost reverent.

He carefully lifted the kettle from the stove with one hand and took the teapot with the other. He poured the boiling water from the first vessel to the second, not spilling a single drop in the process. Once the pot was full, he immediately set both it and the kettle down, replaced the pot’s lid, and covered it with the towel.

While the tea steeped, he turned his attention to the sugar. He opened the bag and took a pinch of granules into his fingers. He carefully dropped some onto his tongue and closed his mouth and eyes, his brow furrowed will all the concentration of a wine-taster. At last, he opened his eyes and nodded, an “it’ll do” expression on his face. He dipped one of Edgar’s teaspoons in the bag and extracted a sweet mound. He then took a butter knife and carefully scraped the excess sugar off the top, leaving exactly one teaspoonful’s worth. He brushed stray granules off the sides and bottom of the spoon, measuring [very carefully]. Edgar wouldn’t have been surprised if Frank had pulled out a jeweler’s lens. Once the spoon was satisfactorily filled, Frank set it down on the counter. He repeated the process, sans taste-test, with the second spoon.

The milk was next. Frank pulled two more cups from the cabinet to his right and plunked them on the counter. He took the jug of milk, opened it, sniffed it, then poured a trickle straight into his mouth. He once again played the wine-taster, but this time he was able to swish the milk around in his mouth and experience its bouquet. At one point, he briefly gargled with it. When he was satisfied, he swallowed and gave a nod. He approached the empty cups like a samurai would approach a formidable opponent whom he respected deeply. Adding to this illusion, he made a quick bow to the mugs. Then, with the speed of a quick-drawing cowboy (if one will excuse the shift in metaphors), he began to pour the milk. This was more an art than a science, and Frank did the calculations entirely by eye. He darted back and forth from one cup to the other, adding to each one drop at a time. In an instant, he was done. He set down the milk and gave the cups another bow; his opponent had been vanquished after a hard-fought battle.

By this point, the tea had been steeping for almost exactly four and a half minutes. Frank emptied the warm water from the mugs into which the tea was to be poured, and then whipped the impromptu tea cozy off the pot. He poured the tea as he had the milk, swiftly, and measured by eye. When both cups were three-quarters full, he put the pot down and quickly dumped the sugar and milk, in that order, into the cups. He gave each cup five emphatic stirs, then removed the spoons and placed each cup on a saucer. He lifted the saucers and returned to the table, narrowly avoiding tripping over the body (for which he had not prepared a cup of tea). As the saucers clinked down on the tabletop, Frank smiled triumphantly. “Now that’s how you make a [expletive] cup of tea.”

“Sorry, what?” said Edgar, looking rather bewildered. “I’m afraid I spaced out for a moment there.”

Frank scowled and hunched over the table. “[colorful compound-expletive], just drink your [expletive] tea.”

As Frank became lost in the transcendental experience of tea-drinking, Edgar absentmindedly sipped from his cup and proceeded to space out once again. His mind returned to the events that had occurred eighteen years prior.

[Deleted]

Update time! I've gotten less done the past few days than I'd hoped, but still, I've managed to forge ahead a bit. This next segment ends pretty abruptly and has lots of theater-specific inside jokes, but I hope it's still enjoyable. I also introduce a new character, and, as usual, I have no idea how she'll fit into the plot. Also, the second and third "chapters" seem to have a larger font than the first when I preview this post; no idea why.

SPOILER: Click to show

Our Town rehearsals, day one. Frank surprised everyone by showing up on time and ready to work. He also surprised them by wearing a beret, a shirt with horizontal black and white stripes, and very small-lensed sunglasses, looking every bit the Italian independent film director. This likeness was strengthened by his tendency to hunch over in a chair while pressing his fingertips together in a steeple below his chin and muttering “Yesss… yesss… yesss. I have did an art.”

The first readthrough of the script was stumbling and awkward, as it is required to be by unwritten theater law. Frank, however, nailed every line. He had even mastered his turn-of-the-century-small-New-England-town accent. An hour and a half later, he delivered the show’s final line: “Hmm… eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. You get a good rest, too. Good night.” The cast burst into spontaneous applause. Frank rose and took two deep bows, then launched into a thorough critique of every other actor. The director tried to cut him off, but Frank just waved an impatient hand in his direction and continued his notes.

Craig had put the wrong emphasis on his third line, Susan needed more energy, Jim wasn’t selling the part of Emily’s brother, and Edgar – he just shook his head sadly. He had no words.

Once he had finished his critical assessment of the rest of the cast, he left the theater with a dramatic flourish. The director, uncertain of what had just happened, declared the rehearsal finished.

The next day, Frank showed up in a new costume: a tie-dye shirt, sandals, and a different beret. He carried a set of bongo drums under his arm. As the finishing touch, he had somehow managed to sprout a goatee. He looked as if he had been lifted directly from a photograph of a 1970s beat poet.

In the following days, Frank was a pigment-stained oil painter, a classical Greek actor, and a sculptor covered in marble dust. The next week, it was on to Broadway musicals. In order, he sported the costumes of Cats, West Side Story, Pirates of Penzance, Phantom of the Opera, and The Sound of Music (fortunately, he dressed as a Von Trapp, not a Nazi). The week after that featured an array of playwrights arranged chronologically: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, and David Mamet (only a very few picked up on these last two). He then moved on to interpretations of styles of theater. Comedy and Tragedy were easy to guess based on the masks he wore, but Farce, Postmodernism, and Commedia Dell’arte left everybody puzzled. For his final week of costumes, many people didn’t realize he was wearing one at all; he dressed exactly as he normally did. When questioned about this, he replied, “I’m holdin’ a [expletive] mirror up to nature, showin’ virtue her own feature and whatnot; innit obvious?”

The fifth day of that week, however, was a bit of a disaster. It was the final dress rehearsal for the show (it was to open that Saturday and run through the following week), and Frank didn’t show up. The director held off starting the runthrough for half an hour, growing steadily more and more anxious. Attempts to telephone the number Frank had left for the director were fruitless, as he had apparently given him the number of .

Finally fed up with waiting, the director snapped into action. He was normally a timid, mousy man, someone to whom the actors paid little attention. His main functions during rehearsals were sitting in the audience and nodding thoughtfully, and occasionally calling out cues when lines were forgotten. In short, he was a thoroughly forgettable man.

But now, he had a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye. He sprung up on the stage in one grand leap and, raising his arms above his head, announced, “It seems that Frank was unable to bear the burden of the actor–” which he pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable “– after all. But the show, as it is said, must go on. Therefore, I shall step in to play the part of the Stage Manager!”

He paused, obviously expecting the assembled actors to burst into delighted applause and sing their praises of him.

Neither of these things happened.

But the director, undeterred, continued. “It shall be a formidable challenge, but this was the role I was born to play. As was writ by Shakespeare himself, I must ‘drown the stage with tears and cleave the general ear with horrid speech, make mad the guilty and appall the free, confound the ignorant and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.’ And the Bard I shall obey! For the sake of the play; for the sake of the art of the Theater; for the sake of humanity itself, I shall perform!

“…Now, can anyone tell me where Frank’s costume is? Do you think it’ll fit me?”

Ten minutes later, the dress rehearsal started. The director butchered the opening monologue, pacing wildly across the stage and gesticulating violent with a script in his hand, and inexplicably rolling his “R”s. Apparently, the New England town was now known as “Grrrrrrrover’s Corrrrrrrners.”

Finally, after a torturous hour and a half, the play ended. The director delivered the final line with exactly none of the grace with which Frank had. “Hmm… Eleven o’clock–” (dramatic pause) “–in Grrrrrrrover’s Corrrrrrrners. YOU get a good REST, TOO. –” (an even longer pause, in which the director fell to his knees, apparently possessed by Melpomene herself. “–Good–” (the longest pause yet) “–night.” This final line was almost whispered, and delivered with the intensity and weight of a papal decree. A single tear slid from the corner of the director’s eye.

The students were stunned, but not at all in the same way they had been at the end of Frank’s audition. The director stood, and started to clap, very slowly at first, then speeding up. He was apparently hoping that the other students would join in, and the experience would end in thunderous applause, like the end of a cheesy sports movie. But this was not to be. The director kept trying to sow the seeds of applause for about thirty seconds, then gave up. He assumed that the students were so affected by his performance that they had no words with which to express their emotions. Thus ended the dress rehearsal.

On Saturday, the cast had resigned themselves to suffering through another painful exhibition, this time in front of an audience, but they were all shocked and relieved when Frank showed up on time, cheerful and prepared, as if nothing had happened.

“Where were you yesterday?” someone asked in a voice tinged with ire.

Frank looked taken aback. “Wot, you didn’t figure it out? I was dressed up as Godot. God, you lot are [expletive] thick.” Then, with a haughty snort, he went to change into his costume.

When the director was informed that Frank had shown up, his face curled into the very specific expression that accompanies the death of a dream. He briefly considered grabbing the tire iron from his car and breaking Frank’s legs, and was only dissuaded by the realization that Frank would reply in force tenfold. Is there anywhere nearby where you can get a ski mask? he wondered, but then resigned himself to the inevitable: the role that he had been born to play had been usurped by a cocky British [unflattering noun].

The performance went smoothly and uneventfully. As many had guessed, Frank drew huge crowds. Those who had come expecting him to pull an outrageous stunt, however, were left disappointed. All they got to see that night was an above-average high school rendition of a classic piece of theater. They felt duped, and slightly upset that they had been tricked into exposing themselves to culture.

Frank didn’t even act out during school hours that week; he was almost a model student. The remainder of the performances were similarly unremarkable. After the final curtain call, Frank calmly walked to the changing room and neatly hung up his costume. As he walked out, he tipped an imaginary hat to his fellow actors and told them it had been a pleasure working with them. Everyone was slightly puzzled. Had Frank changed? Had the power of the theater somehow exorcised his raucous demon?

This turned out to be far from the case, though, as Frank demonstrated the following Monday by running up the flagpole.

Yes, things were back to normal. But there was one subtle change: Frank had selected a protégé.

VI

While Frank and Edgar were casually sipping tea, events continued to unfold in other locales. The world does not stop for teatime.

Elsewhere, it was a mildly dark and stormy night. This location was somewhere between Edgar’s house and the ugly building in the woods. Here, the sky was partly cloudy, the rain came down in a drizzle, and while there were no owls or bats, there was a small group of woodpeckers, which lie near the mild end of the “ominous flying creatures” spectrum.

There was a building. It wasn’t nearly as foreboding as the squat structure surrounded by trees, but it also wasn’t as inviting and unassuming as Edgar’s cozy house. It was a coffee shop.

Now, many would argue that coffee shops are extremely welcoming and cozy, but they ignore the deeper truth. All coffee shops (the good ones, at least) have an air of hostile pretension. This can be seen most clearly in their décor – almost all of them have at least one exotic light fixture – and their menus – everything can be ordered with soy, the most pretentious and hipster foodstuff – but even in the buildings themselves. They are marked with small, unassuming signs. No neon, no huge block letters. Just quiet, understated text, and maybe a flowery logo. It’s as if they’re saying, “We’re not going to advertise where we are. If you want to find us, go ahead and try, but if you don’t care enough to search a bit, we don’t want your kind anyway.” This is magnified by their tendency to be tucked away in hidden corners of malls and other commercial areas.

The interiors of the buildings are all curves and warm colors, and are often populated with large, plush chairs, sending the message, “This place is more comfortable and inviting than your home. Stay here for hours; read, do work, or even just a crossword. Don’t even buy any coffee unless you want to. We don’t care.”

It’s this air of aggressive classiness that makes a coffee shop the perfect place for several activities: bringing a date to indicate that you are the type of sophisticated and artsy person who drinks gourmet coffee, yet aren’t sophisticated enough to brew it yourself. Meeting a person whom you want to impress by demonstrating that you’re rich enough to spend five dollars on something that will be drunk in fifteen minutes and have enough money left over to leave a dollar for a tip. Loading up on caffeine in a masochistic attempt to write a novel (bonus pretension points for doing it on a Mac, and even more for writing by hand in a moleskine notebook). Plotting revenge.

The woman sitting in a dim corner of the shop was doing this last one.

The shop had closed several hours before, and was almost completely dark. Even the requisite exotic light fixture had been turned off for the night. The only light came from the display case which boasted pastries with fancy names and astronomical calorie counts. It was by this sickly light that the woman considered the torn pieces of paper laid out before her.

She was hidden in shadow, but an observer could have made out a head of long, straight hair, a round face, and very, very red lips. She was dressed in the perfect attire for plotting revenge: black, hooded cloaks were out of fashion, but the rumpled camo-print sweatshirt that she wore was very much “in” that year.

After several hours of sitting perfectly still, scheming, she abruptly swept up the scraps of paper and rose. She briskly left the store, but not before swiping a bag of gourmet coffee beans. After all, revenge requires a beverage as dark, complex, and bitter as the plan itself.

VII

Frank took his final sip of tea and sighed contentedly. Edgar had finished his quite some time ago, and had been absentmindedly tracing the wood grain on his table with his finger, until he realized that this might give him a splinter and so stopped.

“So, are you ready to talk now?” Edgar asked after several impatient moments. Frank nodded.

“Yes. Well, yes and no. Mostly no. After all, what’s tea without biscuits?”

Edgar was puzzled. “Biscuits? Well, to each his own, I suppose. I think I have a tube of those ready-to-cook ones in my fridge. Buttermilk, I believe. If you’ll preheat the oven –”

“You [British expletive]!” Frank interrupted. “Biscuits! Biscuits!”

“Yes, biscuits!” Edgar indignantly replied.

Frank buried his head in his hands and translated his request into American. “Cookies. [expletive], you Yanks are useless.”

“Ah, right, those type of biscuits. I forgot about the language thing. It’s like how you call chips ‘crisps’ and lawyers ‘barristers’ and jail ‘gaol.’ Well, those last two are pronounced the same, but you spell it with a ‘g.’ Sometimes I think that you did that on purpose to trick people reading British novels aloud into saying ‘goal.’ It’s like ‘Thames.’ Why doesn’t it rhyme with ‘games?’ For God’s sake, why?!”

“Right, it’s all a [mild British expletive] conspiracy. The people in charge of namin’ things all gathered together and said, ‘Hold on a tick, let’s spell this river with an “a” so people a thousand years from now will mispronounce it. It’ll be brilliant, trust me.’”

“Well, maybe it didn’t go exactly like that, but I still think it’s pretty disingenuous of you.”

Frank groaned. “Just get me the [expletive] biscuits.”

Edgar obeyed, selecting a package of Chips Ahoy from a shelf. By this point, Edgar had accustomed himself to the body, and stepped around it without a second thought, as if it was a regular fixture of the kitchen. When he brought the package back to the table, Frank tore into it eagerly. “Oh, nice. I love these [expletive] things.”

Apparently, thought Edgar, when it comes to tea, nothing but the best will do, but store-bought cookies are just fine. For the umpteenth time, Edgar marveled at the complexity of Frank’s mind.

***

The student body was also perplexed by Frank’s thought process. When word got out that he had chosen Edgar as his new accomplice, the reactions ranged from confused to very confused. There were so many more-deserving candidates: Billy Flex, who had pulled the fire alarm no fewer than three times during Fire Safety Week. Tom Farmer, perpetrator of the Halloween debacle of ’94. Alex Kramer, whose graffiti was peerless. But no, Frank had chosen a thoroughly unremarkable apprentice.

Many assumed Frank was going to pull a “My Fair Lady,” grooming Edgar and transforming him into something completely different. This was near the truth, but wrong. Frank wasn’t going to change Edgar until he fit the definition of “cool”; he was going to change the definition of “cool” to fit Edgar. He intended to upend the social ladder of the school, glorifying the uninteresting, and demonizing the talented and exceptional. It started in his mind as a sort of social experiment, but he was surprised when he realized that it had become a true friendship.

But that is the ending; first, the beginning. Edgar was one of the last to hear the news that he was the chosen one, and was, if anything, even more puzzled than the other students. During the entire production of the play, Frank had spoken to him maybe four times. And two of those times were to inform him that he was in Frank’s way. That Frank even was aware of his existence was a shock. And yet here it was. An internship, as it were, in Frank’s business of popularity. And business was booming.

Frank had only grown more notorious as a result of his stint in theater. Those who had seen him as a nuisance before were impressed to learn that he could actually take something seriously and excel at it. Those who were already his disciples reasoned that Frank could do no wrong, and therefore acting was now cool.