I’m not sure where to begin my story. No matter how hard I try, I know I’ll never be able to tell a story like Jason does. Maybe that’s where I should start.
My name’s Richard Glover, and I’m a senior at Alternate Merge High School. School for the gifted, I suppose. As the legend says, they wanted a school to promote ethnic diversity, so they made some entry requirements and made the school supposedly really tough. Naturally, all the Asian kids signed up. Okay, that wasn’t that funny. But there is a fair amount of diversity at this school, especially for one in the South like us.
Anyway, anyone who wants to get in has to pass a standardized test and submit a writing sample. If you get in, congratulations, you are now officially a Merge student. That means you have to survive freshman year. It wasn’t too hard for me; I just had to get over the transition from the small Christian school I went to my whole life. Don’t get me wrong, though. The Merge is a small school. There’s only five hundred students in the entire school, all four grades. About one hundred fifty to two hundred of them are freshmen, and nearly half of them leave the school before sophomore year begins.
But this story isn’t about me; it’s about Jason. He’s a somewhat weird guy I never really noticed until last year. It was one of those weird times where for two years you hardly see a person, yet suddenly you’re taking five classes together. When we finally met each other formally, I was kinda nervous around him.
First and foremost, it was the way he acted. Some people might think he was homosexual, but anyone that actually knew him would know he wasn’t. But he never hesitated to call things “pretty” or “cute,” he wasn’t afraid to do things like put his hand on your shoulder, and he once told me that he spent an average of half an hour getting his hair ready in the morning. Some people would call him a “metrosexual.” After he and I saw the movie last summer, though, we prefer the term “Captain Jack Sparrow.”
But there was something else different about him. It was sort of intangible, so I’ll do my best to describe it. I’m still not the best writer around. It was in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke to people, the way he looked at you and seemed to be able to see straight into your mind…
Needless to say, some people were uncomfortable around him. Maybe that was how he aroused the ire of the Philosophy teacher… Well, let me explain. Maybe this is the best place to start after all.
Every junior at the Merge is required to complete and defend a senior thesis. I just finished mine on video games, and Jason just did his on the media’s influence on popular stereotypes. Anyway, to prepare for the thesis, each junior must take a philosophy class for the first semester and spend the second in a thesis prep class. The philosophy class is called “Theory of Knowledge,” although the pet name some of us have for it is “What You Believe and Why It’s Wrong.”
I knew it was going to be an interesting year when we started talking about the definition of knowledge. I don’t remember much from that discussion, except that we established that knowledge was limited to personal experiences only, or something like that. The biggest thing I remember is Jason saying something about how personal experiences don’t necessarily translate to knowledge since experiences can be fabricated. I think the teacher kinda liked his idea, but it didn’t always stay that way.
But then again, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I really got to know Jason in History class. We worked in groups a lot, and we got put in the same group for a little while. We got through with half our work relatively early, and we goofed off for a little while. I pulled out my notebook and started writing stuff. My creative writing teacher wanted us to have at least ten drafts of each poem, so I was just mindlessly changing words and punctuation in my poem just to satisfy the requirement.
“What’re you writing?” Jason asked me.
I shrugged. “A poem. It’s for Creative Writing class.”
He nodded. “You a poet?”
“Not really. I’m mostly in the class for the fiction half.”
“So you write stories.”
I laughed. “Kind of. I write fanfics, mostly, but I want to do original stuff. Either way, I figure the class’ll help me.”
“Yeah, of course.” I resumed my mindless writing for about half a minute before he started talking again. “What kind of stories do you write?”
The question caught me off guard. “What was that?”
“What kind of stories do you write?”
I grinned. “Fantasy, paranormal, cool stuff like that.”
Jason grinned back. “I concur.”
I wasn’t used to that word being used normally, so I just nodded and smiled.
“I’m working on a story of my own,” he continued. I noticed he began fidgeting his hand as he spoke, as if he was somewhat embarrassed of what he was saying. “Anyway, if you want to come, I’ll tell it to you at lunch tomorrow.”
“Do you have a paper copy? I can read it and—”
Jason shook his head. “You have to hear it. It’s the kind that’s meant to be told out loud.”
I nodded. “I know what you mean,” I said. “If it’s made to be told out loud it’s made to be told out loud. It’s like making a movie out of a book: you can’t do it without changing some things.”
“Which is precisely where so many of them mess up,” Jason said. “Unless you’re Peter Jackson.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “You like that movie?”
Jason nodded. “It’s one of the few good movies I’ve seen in a long time, and that’s saying something.”
The next day was Thursday, one of the few days I didn’t have any club meetings to go to. I told the people I usually hung out with where I’d be, then I found Jason in a corner of the lunchroom. It was incredibly noisy in there, so he motioned for the two of us to leave. I grabbed my $1.45 cafeteria lunch and followed him out.
We couldn’t go in the classrooms, since any place outside the science wing was off limits to underclassmen. The lunchroom annex was just as noisy, the few classrooms that we could go in were crowded, so we headed outside. We found a spot in the shade that was relatively isolated and sat down.
This is the part I always get stuck at. I remember the story he told me. It was very simple, about a warrior learning to survive on his own and struggling with his inner demons. He had help from some spirit guardian, and he left feeling much more sure of himself and all that. I don’t really remember the words he said. But… and this is always hard to explain, I could almost see what was happening.
Halfway through the story I stopped eating my overprocessed cheeseburger, closed my eyes, and just listened. Call me crazy, but I literally saw that samurai with his sword drawn, the sweat forming on his forehead as his eyes darted around at his unseen enemies. His lips were chapped from him licking them so much, and it was almost like I could hear him breathing, muttering prayers for protection in his language.
When the story was over, I opened my eyes to see Jason staring at me with a concentrated look. He blinked a few times, shook his head, and looked at me again with the same friendly face I had come to recognize. “So,” he said with a chuckle, “how was it?”
I grinned broadly. “Man, that was…” I tried to find a word, but I reverted to my usual show of gestures and facial expressions followed by an emphatic “Yeah!”
Jason laughed. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Then you know I need you to be more specific.”
I shook my head. “That was… I really liked the imagery in it. I could definitely see the characters, and I felt like I could relate to them.”
“Both of them?”
“The samurai especially, but yeah, both of them.”
He nodded. “How about the plot?”
I pressed my lips and thought of a response. “Plot’s kinda secondary, here,” I said. “The big focus is on the character coming of age, going through the rite of passage, and you showed that very well. Anyway, I didn’t really see any holes, and that’s saying something these days.”
Jason nodded. “You better get to class,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow, but before I could ask why, the warning bell rang. I smiled and nodded. I had gained a reputation over the past few years for knowing exactly when the bell was going to ring, and he was playing off that.
“One last thing,” Jason added. “You head up the ACTS club, right?”
“Yeah.” The ACTS club was the Christian fellowship club on campus. Attendance was always really good at the beginning of the year, but we were already into the second nine weeks, so by now only the regulars were showing up. I was pretty much the only member left from years before, so I had taken the role of organizer on, although it wasn’t much of a job. People just came; we would talk, say a prayer, and leave. “We’ve got a meeting tomorrow,” I said.
“What do you do?”
I thought. “Not much. We’ll be doing Operation Christmas Child pretty soon, but… yeah.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
I looked for him at the meeting the next day. He didn’t come. But I was surprised he had asked at all.
Over the next few weeks I heard several more of Jason’s stories. He had an incredible variety of stories, and I never once saw him use a piece of paper. There were medieval stories, American stories, eastern and western, ranging from normal to incredibly freaky and weird.
I gave him a few of my stories once in a while. I’d always get them back the next day covered in marks. Sometimes it’d be rough sketches of the characters, a quick exclamation point or question mark, and sometimes he’d just circle a whole section of the page and say “Awkward!” or “Very nice!”
Every so often I would get to thinking. Now, before I start this part, let me explain something about myself. I like to think big. I write every story in a way that it could be turned into an animé someday; I make every website thinking I’ll get millions of hits… and it never happens. Duh. So naturally, I started thinking of what would happen if one of Jason’s stories got published. I quickly ruled out that possibility; whenever I paid close attention to the words I realized that they were the kind of stories that could only be told, not written. It also took me a little while to realize that he couldn’t really tell these to a crowd of people. Jason had a high invisibility rating, even for the Merge. To put him on stage would just be out of character for him.
Whenever I thought about it, these were stories that could only be told from one person to another. And… there was something more to it than that. Something about Jason piqued my curiosity…
First there was the time the physics teacher brought out the static ball. You’ve seen it. It’s one of those things you plug in, and when you touch it, it builds up static on you until you shock yourself (or someone else) by touching it. Rumor has it, Jason was walking by the AP Physics room when they had the ball out. Well, he went up to it, puts his whole palm on the thing, and just stood there. At first a few people touched him to get a shock, but he just kept standing there. Eventually he asked them to stop so he can see how much of a charge he can build up. He stood there for a full minute and a half. By the time he was done, his hair was standing on end and everyone in the room could hear the static crackling around him.
After he pulled his hand off, someone shut off the light so they could see the charge jump. Jason walked up to the door and started to touch the handle. The teacher said it wouldn’t be a good idea since it hurts more when you use a finger than when you use the whole hand. Jason pretended not to listen and kept inching his finger closer to the door.
When his finger got close enough, the people in the room, including the teacher, swore that the charge that jumped was as bright as a flash of lightning. The force from the charge flung the door open. Several people in the room cursed, but not Jason. He just muttered, “Cool,” and walked out.
After I heard that story, I started paying closer attention to Jason. That’s when I started to notice his white ball. I only caught a few glimpses of it, but it was no bigger than a ping pong ball and not out of the ordinary. He’d pull it out and toy with it when he thought no one was looking. The first few times he noticed me looking, he’d thrust it back into his pocket and look away. Every time after that, he’d calmly put it away and put a finger to his lips, motioning for me to be quiet.
But the things that struck me the most (and that worried me the most) were the stories. The more he told me, the more I realized how real they seemed. Maybe it was just my imagination taking things too far, but I almost felt like he wasn’t telling me the stories; he was projecting them into my mind! I kept telling myself that I was imagining things. After all, telepathy is only in sci-fi movies and fan fiction, not real life.
But the last straw came in Philosophy class. We were having the grand discussion on religion, and every time someone spoke, the teacher entered her two cents before calling on the next person to talk. As you can imagine, the discussion was beginning to slip to one side. Finally, one person made the comment that he didn’t like religions that claimed to be the only true religion. “It just seems very self-important and closed-minded to me,” he said.
Both Jason and I shot our hands up, and I could tell by the look in his eye that he and I were in agreement: we were not about to let that comment slide.
“You’re right,” the teacher said. “They shouldn’t be able to say whether they have the only truth or not. Richard, what do you have to say?”
I chose my words carefully. “Well, I don’t think you can really say that. I wasn’t the one that said that Christianity is the only way; Jesus said that. He said, ‘I am the way, no one comes to the Father except through me.’ I didn’t make it up, and if it was up to me it wouldn’t be that way, but I don’t have that choice.”
The teacher nodded. “Well, Richard,” she said, “you can choose not to believe it.”
By now Jason was clearly itching to talk. “Jason, you look like you have something to say,” the teacher said.
I still think to this day that she regrets saying that. “First off,” Jason said, clearly not bothering to step lightly, “you don’t exactly have the right to say that.” The next sentence was drowned out as the teacher attempted to call Jason down. By the time she stopped Jason was almost yelling. “You don’t know what he thinks, you don’t know how he feels, but you’re up there telling him what to believe. Isn’t the whole point of this class to learn what other people think? You’re up there basically telling him he’s wrong! You said yourself that we can’t know the truth for sure, so why are you acting like it?”
The teacher made another move to cut him off, but Jason kept going. “You know, the more knowledge we get, the more we discover how little we know. Take science, for example. Once they solve one mystery, five more come to take its place. So, since you claim to have so much more understanding of this chaotic cosmos we call life, you must be the stupidest person in this room.”
You’ve heard the phrase, “the silence was deafening?” Well, this was it. The teacher was clearly furious. “That’s crossing the line,” she said. “I’m going to be telling the assistant principal about this.”
Jason just looked at her. “Go right ahead.”
Mercifully, the bell rang. Jason gathered his things as quickly as he could and left the room. It was lunchtime, so I figured I had time to talk to him.
I found him in the stairwell at the end of the science wing. It was at one of the far ends of the school, so naturally no one used it.
“You all right?” I said.
He snorted. “Frustration gets built up after a while. You know how it goes.”
I nodded. “You gonna apologize?”
“Why should I?”
I was thrown off guard by the question. “Well, you insulted and talked back to someone in a position of authority over you.” Seeing no reaction from Jason, I continued. “I mean, she’s the teacher, she’s gone to school longer than you, and—face it, she’s older.”
“Is she?”
Something in the way Jason said the question told me he was serious. I looked at him, and he looked back at me with a face that was hardened and jaded, not the Jason I had gotten to know the past three months. “Are you sure she’s older than me?” he said again, a touch of sadness mixing with his frustration. “Or have you not figured it out yet? I know you’re not stupid, Rick.”
When I did it I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I still think I shouldn’t have done it. But when he asked me those questions, something snapped. I just started walking, and next thing I knew I was in the library on the other side of the school with half an hour left in lunch.
I knew it all fit together somehow. The static, the ball, the… illusions? I pulled up the last available computer and did a Google search for “lightning” and “illusions”. Needless to say, I didn’t get a whole lot. I threw in the word “Japan” since Jason had seemed to talk a lot about eastern myths, but all that did was narrow the field to lightning sightings in Japan.
Finally I put in the word “fox” on impulse. I guess it was because that last look Jason had given me was like… I don’t really know. Looking back, Jason might have put the idea in my mind just like he made me go to the library.
Anyway, the first link I found was for a Pokémon website. I nearly skipped it over, but the page was about a Japanese legend called the “kitsune.” It could cast illusions that are as real as reality, it can generate lightning by rubbing its tails together, it has a small white ball that has an unknown purpose… it fit!
I performed a few more searches and found out a bit more. It turns out that kitsune gained new tails after stages of enlightenment, five hundred years of existence, et cetera. When I read that, I kicked myself for not noticing it sooner. For the past couple of years or so I had spent a large amount of time in the Sonic fan arena, and one of the characters in Sonic is a two-tailed fox named, appropriately, Tails. I had heard the term “kitsune” thrown around in a few fanfics or messageboard topics, why hadn’t I made the connection sooner?
There were only ten minutes left in lunch, so I found a quick picture of Tails that clearly showed both his tails. I printed it out, circled the tails, and wrote on the bottom, “This you?”
I left the paper face down on his desk in history. We had a test that day and he was late getting to class. He walked in with a pink pass, so we all assumed he was seeing the assistant principal. I didn’t see his reaction to the paper, but before he started his test he folded it up and put it by my desk. After I finished my test, I unfolded it. Underneath my message he had written, “stairwell between classes.”
We only had five minutes between classes, so I was wondering what Jason would be able to tell me in the space of two minutes. Nevertheless, I made my way to the stairwell once the bell rang. Jason was waiting for me there.
“Things are about to get a little weird,” he warned me.
What happened next is difficult to describe, but I’ll do my best. It felt like I was moving and standing still all at once, falling and being lifted up, aware of every tiny thing around me and numb at the same time. It was kind of how I had imagined traveling through a tesseract from A Wrinkle in Time.
When I finally snapped out I was standing next to a park bench on a concrete slab. I couldn’t tell how far the concrete went since there was fog as thick as milk all around me; I couldn’t see farther than five feet. After I waited for half a minute Jason materialized through the fog.
“Have a seat,” he said nonchalantly.
Confused, I dropped my backpack on the ground and sat.
Jason sat down next to me. He looked sad and peeved all at the same time. “I suppose you’re wondering where we are.”
“Uh, yeah. And how we’re going to get back to class on time.”
He smirked. “We’re in a pocket in reality. It’s a… kinda hard to explain. Basically all you need to know is that we’re in a crack between two of the pieces of wood on the door to the stairwell. Time flows slower in here, so we’ve got roughly half an hour before we have to come out.”
I nodded slowly. “You made this?”
“Yes. I—well, let me tell you another story. No illusions this time, though…”
-
- *
“Only the Father has the power to create,” the Teacher said as he touched the golden street at his feet. “This isn’t real.”
Instantly the ornate land surrounding him dissolved, leaving him in the dark reality of the canvas tent at night.
The illusionist looked around him in horror, trying frantically to resurrect his illusion. “But it is real,” he said, trying to convince himself that he was right.
“Only in your mind,” the Teacher said. “In his heart one may plan what he wishes, but the Lord determines his steps.”
The illusionist was shocked. Only a man who knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what was real and what wasn’t could dissolve an illusion like that. “What must I do, Teacher?”
The Teacher wasted no time. “Leave your country, your people, and your family’s ways, then follow me.” He got up and left the tent.
The illusionist sat alone. He could go home, or he could follow the Teacher and discover something new…
-
- *
“I think you can figure out which one I chose,” Jason said.
I nodded. “So you’re a Japanese fox-spirit?”
“Yes. Child of two of the greatest nogitsune—troublemaking kitsune—known to mankind. The art of illusion runs quite deep in my family on both sides.”
“Well… what are you doing here?”
Jason laughed. “I like to stay culturally relevant. Every fifty years or so I go through the citizenship test, get a social security number, then go through school. If I’m good, I go through college. Of course,” he grinned especially at this point, “it all has to be free since I don’t exactly have that kind of money.”
“So how do you eat?”
“Free breakfast and lunch. That and I’ve got savings stored up from various jobs of mine.”
“Right.” I tried to think of my next question, but there was so much I wanted to ask him. “So… your ball?”
Jason pulled out his ball. “This thing? What do you think it is?”
“Well, I read that it can be a focus for magic, or that a kitsune puts part of their power or spirit into it.”
“Power, yes. Spirit, no. The spirit cannot be separated from the body like that. But it is used for power. You see…” Jason closed his eyes and appeared to think about something. “When one of us manifests as a human, we have to contain our energy. If I was to hold all of my energy inside myself, my hair would be standing on end, my eyes would start glowing, and it wouldn’t be pretty. So I keep part of my energy in here where it won’t draw attention to itself. Sort of like a… battery.”
“And if it was destroyed?”
“My body would dissolve and there would be an enormous extra-dimensional explosion. In other words, it would blow me halfway across the state and severely wound the spirits of everyone in a five hundred foot radius. So don’t do it.”
“Point taken. And the static?”
“Foxfire. I can build up a pretty incredible charge on my own; that machine just helped me a little. I can do the lanterns too, you know.” He clenched his fist and opened it up. When he did, a small ball of fire about the size of a shooter marble was sitting there. He waved his hand, and the fire flew around his head a few times before coming to rest above my shoulder.
Up until this point I was relatively okay with the whole idea of Jason not really being human. But… seeing that fire kind of threw me off balance. Sitting next to me was tangible proof that my friend was… something else.
“You… you aren’t going to hurt me, are you?” was all I could say, even though I knew it was a stupid question.
Jason didn’t laugh. “I haven’t changed, Rick,” he said. “I’m still the same person, the same guy, you just know something different about me. You—” He broke off and turned away from me.
Slowly it started to form in my mind. “You’ve been alive for how long?”
“2432 years, give or take a few.”
“And I’m not the first human you’ve told, right?”
Jason shook his head. I may have been imagining, but I thought I saw his eyes start to water.
“And after you tell them, they avoid you like the plague. They’re afraid that you’ll possess them in their sleep or take over their minds when they least expect it or… drain their energy in some way.” As I was saying it I realized that I was giving voice to my own fears. But Jason was my friend, wasn’t he? He wouldn’t do a thing like that— would he?
Jason closed his eyes, and I saw his breath quicken. He was fighting back tears as hard as he could.
But why did he tell that story? “What happened between you and the Teacher,” I asked.
Jason wiped his eyes and looked up, but not at me. “I followed him. It was all I could do. You see, when a kitsune’s illusions are destroyed, it’s a devastating experience. You make the best illusions when you believe that your illusions are actually reality, just like you tell the best lies when you honestly believe you’re telling the truth. So when my illusion was destroyed—and that was my best one to date—I didn’t know what to do. All I could do was follow him.
“He had his messages for the people, and when I could work up the nerve I would ask them what they meant to me. Sometimes he would tell me to meditate on it, other times he would tell me outright. I learned one thing more than anything else: my illusions were deceptions, and deception was wrong, especially when it was used for my own gain. All the things I had learned at home about meditating and enlightenment seemed useless. I knew I had to change, but I wasn’t quite sure how…
“And then they killed him. I tried to numb him to the pain, put an illusion of comfort around him, but he rebuked me every time. I couldn’t bear to see him in pain like that, so I got as far away as I could. I followed one of the men that was with him— the one that cut off the Roman’s ear?”
“Peter.”
“Yeah, that’s who.” By now Jason was facing me and absorbed in his story. “This guy seemed just as hard hit as I was by this whole thing. I suppose if I had had enough time to think about it, I would have gone back to my old ways, you know, making life miserable for humans. But then— you know where I’m going right?”
I nodded. “Peter went out fishing, didn’t catch anything. The next morning he saw a guy on the shore who told him to send his nets over to the other side. When the nets were full, Peter knew who was on the beach and swam to shore.”
“Right! Anyway, so he had come back to life, it was all fine, and I didn’t mind him leaving this time since I knew I would be with him in Heaven eventually. It wasn’t until a week or so later when—it looked like that foxfire you’ve got next to you except bigger.”
I looked at the fire on my shoulder again. “Pentacost,” I said. “The Spirit came upon the people en masse for the first time.”
Jason nodded. “It was the most incredible feeling I’ve ever had. Now… I knew then and I still know now that my mission is to tell people about this.”
“Like your family?”
Jason rolled his eyes. “I did tell them. I told them a thousand times over. At this point I can only hope that what I do speaks louder than what I said. All my brothers and sisters care about is finding the best humans to harass.”
I nodded slowly. “But you tell stories…?”
Jason smiled. “I learned that not all illusions have to be deceptive. There’s the kind of illusions that trick people; then there’s the illusions that people want to see, the kind that only work if you have an imagination.”
I smiled. “That’s what you were doing to me!”
“Right. C. S. Lewis once remarked that all stories are a reflection of the one great story. I figured I could try taking that approach a little bit.” He made a weird face as he said that, and we both laughed. He looked at his watch and groaned. “We’ve got five minutes before we have to get out.”
I rolled my eyes. English wasn’t that bad of a class, but going to any class after a conversation like the one we just had seemed like an anticlimax. Just then I remembered one last question. “Hey,” I said, “how many tails do you have?”
“Your picture was a little off,” he said. “I’ve got five myself.”
I looked around us. “And what’s with the fog?”
“Oh, that? Well…” Jason blushed. “I’m not exactly very powerful as far as realms are concerned. I can barely make a park bench. I can’t even put it on grass! Do you know how hard it is to make the grass seem real? And— short answer: it takes three five-tails working together to make a decent realm. I’m only one, so I BS the rest by saying there’s lots of fog. It’s like those PlayStation games that are always on foggy days.” He looked at his watch again. “Hold on.”
After passing through the “tesseract” again we were standing back in the stairwell with two and a half minutes to get to class.
Jason managed to get out of English early. I left class like normal when the bell rang and made my way out to the busses. On the way I passed the philosophy teacher’s room. Jason was there talking with the teacher. I overheard a small snippet of the conversation…
“I don’t hold grudges, Jason,” the teacher said. “I just took what you said a little personally, and it was uncalled for.”
“I know it was, and I apologize,” Jason said. “It’s not my place to question how you run the class.”
“Well, I accept, and I do appreciate you coming to me like this. Just try to control your temper in class, okay?”
I saw them shake hands. Jason glanced at the door, saw me, and gave me a small “thumbs up.” I returned the gesture with a peace sign and walked on. It was a Friday afternoon and all I could think of was getting home.
It is a half hour walk from the bus stop to my house, the second half of which is on a neighborhood street lined and arched with magnificent oak trees. I had just reached the start of that road when there was a rustle in one of the bushes beside me.
I jumped away. One never knew what kind of animals you could run into.
I saw a fox’s head peek out, a head with very familiar eyes…
“Jason?” I said.
The fox walked out of the bushes, showing all five of its tails.
Of course he would show up. “Where’s your ball?” I said.
The fox shook its head. It’s easier to hide energy when I’m in my fox-form, he said directly to my mind.
I nodded and started walking again. Jason started trotting beside me.
“Is it hard to keep all those tails above ground?” I asked.
Kind of, Jason said. It’s just something I get used to after a while.
“So what brings you here?”
Well, you once told me you get your best story ideas walking home, so I wanted to hear some. That and there’s food at your house.
I laughed. “Well, let’s see. Right now I’m thinking there’s this kid whose family likes to do mean and nasty things to make other people’s lives miserable.”
I wonder where you got that idea…
“But the kid knows the stuff’s wrong and doesn’t want to do it.”
I get it! It’s a conflict of interest, right?
“I suppose. He doesn’t know what’s right, obeying his parents or not hurting people.”
Kind of simplistic, you know.
I nodded. “Yeah, but we’ve got to write a children’s story by the end of the year.”
Richard?
“Yeah, Jason?”
I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
“Humphrey Bogart, Casablanca.”
Of course.