MY GOOD FRIEND BARRY
A young adult novel
By
Jeff Provine
Episode One:
Amicus Fictus
“What are three adjectives that describe me best?”
“I don’t know.”
“Seriously, dude. I’ve got to get this filled out.”
“Well, um, how about stippled, dollop, and, um, isomagnetic?”
“Dollop isn’t even an adjective.”
“Dollopy, then.”
“You’re not helping.”
With that, my good friend Barry went back to work on his tedious scholarship application. I sighed and smirked, returning to my own labor. I was somewhere toward the middle of wading through the never-ending Victorian prose of Dickens. Yet another troubled waif was discovering an intricate web of benefactors and relations, and I had two hundred more pages till the action accelerated to anything near today’s standard of enthralling. Dickens worked as an installment writer in newspapers, paid by the word. The more he wrote, the more money he made. As soon as he ran out of plot twists, he was out of a job. I supposed if I were in the same position, I would have introduced new major characters and plotlines halfway through the novel just to prolong it, too. Not that that had anything to do with anything.
We were in Barry’s bedroom situated on the second floor of his parents’ mass-produced, expensive-looking house in beautiful Suburbia, USA, where well-washed German cars rested next to perfect lawns. It was his inner sanctum, his Fortress of Solitude, the little piece of the world that he could call his own. The walls were plastered with movie posters and geographic maps, so much so that the white paint beneath barely showed through the tiny gaps between comic book heroes and interplanetary landmasses. The ceiling was packed with little glow-in-the-dark stars, accurately arranged to depict the constellations of a fall night, though they were invisible since the lights were on. The room was neat, despite Barry’s miscellaneous possessions (from a giant lava lamp to fossilized seashells to GI Joe action figures frozen in a diorama of a titanic battle for the freedom of the world) being stacked on every inch of every surface in an overwhelming array of well-ordered clutter. It was hardly the celebrity-covered, pop culture shrine of the typical high school senior, but then, Barry was no typical high school senior.
Barry was at his desk, sitting hunched in his wheeled, leather, CEO’s chair and poring over the stacks of paper next to his computer that churned out the soundtrack to Amadeus. He would rock back and forth slightly as he worked, carefully printing in ink along thin lines that some distant college advisory board would use to understand him completely as a human being. Barry had already written his “What Possession Best Resembles You?” essay, choosing his computer, though he did ponder for a moment my suggestion of a left tennis shoe.
As he tapped his pen in thought on his lips, I peeked up with narrowed eyes from the dense, almost unreadable words. Truth be told, I did not want him to fill out the application. We could have been doing something much more fun, like playing Monopoly with the mafia rules we had created or just watching television and cracking sarcastic remarks. Anything would have been better than sitting around and watching Barry waste a perfectly good afternoon filling out little boxes of some pre-printed application.
“You shouldn’t even bother with it,” I told him with a sigh. “Scholarships are morally wrong.”
“What?” Barry asked, almost dropping his pen as his eyes bulged. He spun around in his desk chair then stopped to stare at me.
I nodded. “Seriously. These forms here represent the social empowerment of simply being more intelligent. Just because you’re smart, you get free money. It’s appalling to see those without such mental facilities be downtrodden just because they weren’t born as smart as you. And, by filling them out, you’re perpetuating discrimination.”
“You’re being naïve in your sarcasm,” Barry countered. He set his pen down, and I smiled at my success of doing absolutely anything other than the stupid application. Arguing was enough, but I was getting desperate to the point that even exercising sounded fun. “While the scholarship rewards intelligence, it also requires for a great deal of hard work and devotion toward grades. Simply by filling this thing out, I’m proving that I not only have intelligence, but also the will to strive for greater things. They’re rewarding dedication as much as smarts.”
“So it’s also discriminatory toward those who are naturally lazy,” I remarked with a snide smirk.
Barry paused in thought, then shrugged. “Yeah, probably so. I guess there has to be some discrimination somewhere; otherwise we’d be a completely lazy society who never got anything done. Well, not totally, of course. There would be those who have their own drives toward improvement, even if it doesn’t have material rewards like a scholarship.”
“Now who’s being naïve? Like people would actually do that.”
A deep frown crept over Barry’s face. “Hey, that’s crossing a line.”
“Oh?” I challenged.
“Making fun of scholarships is one thing,” Barry said, “but calling everyone in the human race a lazy bum is too harsh.”
I slumped in defeat and pretended to glance back at my book.
“Sociology aside, natural intelligence is hardly the total basis for the scholarship,” Barry said, summing up himself. “The review board will be looking at lots of things, like activities and financial need and on and on.”
“They’re just going to look at your test scores and decide whether you’ll make a good addition to their incoming SAT average,” I muttered.
“You just don’t want me to do it.”
I paused, cut short by the truth of his statement. “Well, obviously. We could be doing things ten thousand times more fun than filling out forms.”
“Too bad,” Barry said firmly. “I’m going to get this done.”
With that, he went back to rocking, rhythmically matching the rocks with the beats of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. Sitting with his eyes pasted to the papers in front of him, he resumed running countless adjectives through his mind, examining each as a positive description of himself. I read a few more lines, and then glanced up miserably. I was Barry’s friend, and I had a duty to help him if I could, even if it were filling out an annoying application. Besides, there were fifteen dull pages to go till the chapter ended, which was usually at a twist so good I would not be able to put it down. Dickens was a cruel, crafty man.
After a forceful swallow, I at last suggested, “Studious?”
Barry did not even look up, but the pen froze in place mere centimeters from another rhythmic tap on his twisted lip as his synapses fired with a thousand thoughts. When the thunderstorm ended, he smiled and nodded slightly. “Yeah, ‘studious’ is good. They’d really eat that up. Plus, it’s kind of true, right?”
I shrugged, shoving the pillows on Barry’s bed where I lay with my shoulders. “Well, maybe not so much with just school work, but you definitely read enough scientific journals to be declared ‘studious’.”
“Right,” Barry agreed. He quickly leaned to scribble the word into place on the application, but paused and cautiously wrote it as neatly as his scrawling hand would allow. As he finished, he sat back triumphantly and asked, “Anything else?”
I laughed. “Hey, you’re supposed to be the one filling out the application.”
“Well, yeah, but…,” Barry muttered something, trying to stall for time till he came up with some pseudo-philosophical point. At last he half-smiled and said in mock seriousness, “I’m too close to see myself accurately, you know? Like when trying to see something an inch from your face instead of holding it out where you can see it well. It’d be much more accurate and objective to get input from an outside source.”
I made a “hrumph” sound and rolled my eyes. “You should put down ‘creative’, too. Or at least ‘good at making junk up’.”
Barry said nothing, only smirked and wrote my second suggestion on the application form. He then sat back again, spun slightly in his chair and looked at me, expecting another adjective from me. My mind was blank, and I simply stared back at him.
“Well?” he asked.
“Well, what?”
“The faster I get this done, the faster I can get back to playing video games,” Barry told me with a bargaining glint in his eye.
“And?”
Barry smirked. “Fine, I’ll even have it be a two-player game. Super Mario Brothers?”
“Not Super Mario Brothers Two. It’s not technically a real member of the Super Mario Brothers canon, after all.”
“Three, then.”
“Deal,” I told him. I found the ragged vintage Last Starfighter bookmark that Barry had gotten me for my birthday years ago and tucked it between the pages deliciously reeking with the odor of decaying paper and tart ink. It was perfect for an ancient Dickens novel. Sitting up, I thought for a moment more and then slumped my shoulders.
“Well?” Barry repeated.
After another pause, I admitted, “I got nothing.”
“Oh, come on,” Barry said egging me on.
“You could do it yourself,” I threatened. Barry said nothing and only looked painfully back toward the nearly completed application. With a thought-filled sigh, I set my mind back to working on the issue, dashing through a forest of words and trying to pick something that applied to Barry’s complex nature.
I finally had an epiphany, and announced firmly with a nod, “Critical.”
“What?” Barry asked, raising his eyebrows over his black-rimmed glasses in surprise. “You’re the cynical one. I don’t go around all the time ranting about how everyone’s an idiot and the world is falling apart.”
“The world’s not ‘falling apart’,” I corrected him. “The world has always been bad. It’s just in a deepening state of badness due to a greater availability of massive weapons and material possessions.”
“Right,” Barry said in sarcastic agreement. “The inventions of penicillin, the computer, and nuclear power have doomed us all.”
I smiled. “See? You just critically analyzed my statement. Like what your English teacher lady is always talking about. Missus, um, Ingle, that’s it. She’s always going on and on about ‘thinking critically’ and how it’s the main facet of higher education or whatever.”
Barry rolled his eyes back in thought, then slowly began to nod. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. They’ll probably like it.”
“It’s not like they read them anyway,” I said with a snide sneer.
“Once again,” Barry said as he was sketching “critical” in the final line, “you’re the cynical one.” As he finished, he set his pen down and let out a happy sigh.
“Finished?” I asked.
Barry shook his head. “Not totally, but it’s to the point where I should let it sit and then come back to edit the essay.”
“Ah, rationalizing procrastination.”
“Exactly,” Barry chirped. He leaped out of his desk chair and hurried to the wardrobe across the room from the foot of his bed. Tossing the doors aside, he revealed his precious television and video game collection that dated back to the days of Intellivision and Atari. As he began to rummage through the chronologically arranged cartridges, a sudden call froze him.
“Barry!” a distant voice interrupted, slightly muffled by the closed door and the conflicting sound of the violins in Mozart’s Requiem.
Barry winced. “Arg, it’s my mom.”
I grimaced, feeling my hopes at improving my hand-eye coordination (one of the many benefits of video game expertise) being dashed.
“It’s time for shoe shopping!” the voice called again, forcing Barry to climb sluggishly to his feet.
Barry looked down sadly at his present shoes: very worn Reeboks that had been patched with duct tape and had mismatched laces. He had worn them for months and months, almost to the point where they had become a part of him. His mother did not share his attachment to the shoes, and she was very much ready to take Barry to the mall for replacements. I knew he hated the feeling of loss of comfortable familiarity and loathed the thought of unbroken strangers upon his feet, still smelling like the store from whence they came.
Barry sighed, mourning the soon-coming loss of his beloved footwear. “I’d better get going. You want to come?”
“No, that’s all right,” I told him. “I should get back to Dickens before something else grabs my attention.”
“You staying here?” Barry asked me. “I’ll leave Mozart on for you.”
I nodded, and Barry disappeared out of the room. I listened for a moment as he and his mother exchanged a few pleasantries and then shut the front door behind them. With the rev of her minivan’s engine, they were gone, and I was alone with Dickens and Mozart.
And so I read, lost in an imaginary world strangely similar to our own, like a mirror with wavy glass. When I could take no more of the drudgery and achievements of the nineteenth century, I set my book aside. Not that I was bashing Dickens, but I was feeling that everything should be taken in moderation, especially exhausting one’s mind on rambling Victorian writings.
Looking up, I rubbed my eyes and allowed them to focus on something other than black and white text inches away from my face. The computer’s play list had run out sometime while I was reading, and now I was caught in a desert of silence. The room was dark and shadowy, too, lit only by the bedside lamp I had been using to read. Crawling off Barry’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comforter to stretch my legs, I stood and crossed slowly toward one of the many bookshelves that lined the poster-covered walls of Barry’s room.
I loved Barry’s massive collection of written works. It was the only place of which I knew where the Spider-man was fittingly situated beside an ethics textbook and just down the shelf from a complete compilation of the adventures of Calvin and his tiger, Hobbes, next to the philosophers of the same name. Barry and I had very similar taste, from superheroes to science fiction to history and on down to old beta tapes of cartoons from the 1980s. The only thing that Barry liked that I did not seemed to be his fascination with monkeys. He found them hilarious; I saw them as stench-ridden, hairy critters. To each his own, I supposed… even if he was wrong.
As I perused through the shelves of classics and comic books, my eyes suddenly settled upon a photograph Barry had taped to the edge of the shelf, hanging down so that it would still be viewable without taking up valuable real estate on a desktop. It was summer camp (or, more precisely, science camp), and he was proudly showing the photographer a robot he had built out of a kit and a MacGyver-esque addition of drinking straws for stronger stature. I sat behind him, my mouth half-opened with a goofy grin as I was suggesting Barry build a whole line of such robots and market them as the latest craze in pets. Or, at least, that was the image Barry and I both saw. To the average viewer, Barry would be sitting alone with his mechanical creation, and I would be invisible.
You see, I was what they call an “imaginary friend.” The scientific classification is something like Amicus fictus. It made me sound like some kind of Polynesian rat, but rats have the ability to exist independently. But, in the words of the wise, anchor-tattooed sailorman, “I yam whad I yam.”
Barry created me long ago, about the time when most kids have imaginary friends. Except, Barry hardly fit into the category of “most kids,” and so I had stayed where most imaginary people fade away, out of mind and out of existence. I didn’t like to get too philosophical about this. Barry and I had been best friends for years. We weren’t just Best Friends, we were Only Friends. Barry had never really had anyone else to listen to his inane ramblings and crazy ideas, and I, obviously, did not interact much with other people. Neither of us had anyone else.
And now, something was changing, as things typically did during the turbulent era of adolescence. As I gazed in nostalgia at the photograph, I winced then rolled my eyes. Somehow my life had become a cheesy teen movie. I suppose I kept hoping that Barry’s senior year would be more like Back to the Future Part II and less like The Breakfast Club. I might even have settled for a Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
As my eyes settled back from their self-mocking roll, their corner caught the subject of my growing angst. With my fists in a clench, I stomped across the carpeted floor to Barry’s desk and the scattered papers that covered the little space between the computer monitor and the stack of compact disks. These were the scholarship applications to the various colleges Barry to which had already applied, his gateway into deciding which college would be most fiscally advantageous for such an up-and-coming youth. They stared up at me, mocking me with their little checked boxes and psychological questions, threatening my very existence.
Barry was excited about heading away to school in a new and distant land, almost more excited than I had ever seen him. The only time I could remember him more excited was the night before the premier of The Phantom Menace, which said quite a lot. He spoke again and again of starting a new life once he hit college, leaving the past behind and voyaging out in a new realm of discovery. He talked of all the classes he could have, the projects and adventures he would undertake, and, the thing that caused me the most apprehension, the people he would meet.
I had never had the nerve to ask him whether or not I had a place in this marvelous new life he was imagining for himself. Every time he began ranting, I would fall quiet, as I usually did when he was racing after his train of thought. Most of our conversations were about the possibilities of capturing ghosts to be used as central heating and air conditioning systems or how he would design controls for a giant robot gladiator, but talking about college was different, with a lower, believable voice. While he talked about what he believed lay in his bright future, all I could do was sit with blank eyes, listening and wondering about my own future.
Listening was my lot in life, listening to a crazy kid who needed me to listen, and now I stood at the threshold of a time where my lot would be lost.
There was the sudden sound of a car engine and the fearful squeal of tires as a minivan rode quickly into the driveway outside. Barry was home, and his mother must have made the mistake of letting him drive again. It was not that Barry was a bad driver. It was just that he had played so many racing games over the years that his reflexes were set to driving at greater speeds than most drivers. In fact, he was an excellent driver, and he would probably never be involved in an accident as his skills allowed him to dodge the cars around him with the dexterity of a fighter pilot. Unfortunately, he was not a very smooth driver, and he routinely scared the gibblies out of anyone who rode with him.
We had a little while still together, and I meant to make the most of it. Perhaps, with a little luck and guile, I might even get to the point where Barry would have me along in his brave new world. Otherwise, I would be doomed to fade into nothing more than an amusing memory to be joked about at office parties. That was a fate I scarcely wished to face. I’d much rather be vaporized and live on as a cloud of molecules floating gently through the atmosphere. At least then I would still exist.