FicWad

Once upon a time there was a man who married a walrus.
Well, no, actually its more like:

Once upon a time there was a boy who promised to marry a walrus.
They never had the chance to share a single kiss, seeing as the only ones who kissed in kindergarten were the girls in their pigtails and cute frilly pink dresses who dared one another to go grab little Jimmy during recess and duck into a play tunnel with him, poor Jimmy kicking and screaming.

They were different.

Or rather, we were different.

We didn't kiss.

We bit.

It was actually Peter who made that up, even if unintentionally.
I remember one day he told me he'd always wanted to know what hair tasted like. With eyebrows raised he tried to pull his own down long enough to reach to his mouth, but it only came halfway. Pouting, he then he grabbed a handful of my tangled chestnut mess and chomped down on it when I wasn't looking.
After being smacked painfully upside the head, he told me, spitting out brown strands that stuck to his tongue,

"Your hair tasteded funny."

And we never were flashing Bambi eyes over the snack table at the little blond girl who's name was Carly. Or was it Kimmy?
No, we didn't engage in naive puppy love like our poor classmates, the kind where you barley know your current 'girlfriend's' name.

At only five, I was destined to marry the little boy named Joseph Mark Trohman.

He told me so the first day I met him. We had just barley been enrolled in Sister Loin's class, and we had all been standing timidly near the door, some shaking, some staring defiantly at the play blocks and the My Little Pony deluxe set on the other end of the room, staking out what would soon become their territory. Of course, there weren't any parents who's legs we could cling to, and most had learned by five years of age how to survive without it.

And then there was me. I was the only one that stood in the back of the classroom, staring out the window.

I liked nature. I was called 'unusually observant and mature for my age'. If that meant I was more interested in the things going on around me and had a dislike for social interactions, then I guess that's what I was. I also liked nature.

Being recently deposited into North Wilmette Saint Vincent's Catholic School and Orphanage, I had nothing and no one.

I only knew that one day. I referred to it as my day of reckoning, where all the experiences of my life started. This was the one that had its very first impact on my life. Like, when I turned 8 and broke my ankle on the school playground and I wasn't allowed to go on the field trip to the zoo. When I was 11 and I listened to Blink 182 for the first time. When I had my first kiss. When I spend a whole night in jail after I was found smoking a spliff in a ditch one cold night. And this.

My mother's house. It was late afternoon on that spring day.

I remember standing at the screen front door, the smell of the spring breeze, the familiar jumble of shoes at the front door, including my beat up old pair of sneakers, the bowl of the stray cat I had fed for 3 weeks until one day he never came back, holding the hand of the kindly child protective services rep, her name I can't remember. She took a deep breath and looked down at me, more worried about the situation than I certainly was. At this point I had learned when it was necessary to numb my senses. I think she and most people just assumed it was because the situation was too adult for my understanding.

But I saw everything.

I just knew better than to let it affect me, so I smiled a glassy, innocent, tooth-gaped smile that you would expect from a five year old who just had their world shattered, and we went inside.
I could smell dank, heavily smoke-stained carpet that was familiar of this apartment. Her hair was unbidden, her breath stale with smoke and her hands fidgeted under her long sleeved sweater, which she continually pulled further down her wrists, even though it wasn't coming up. She talked in slow, calculated sentences like talking was such a trying task. That quickly dissipated as she finally let her body rack with sobs. The representative bent forward compassionately, nodding her head in an understanding way. She had the situation under control, that was until she followed my mothers unfocused stare to my face. I was sitting unaffected, my face blank, and I think this is what made them most uncomfortable. My mother quietly dissolved into sobs again, and I left with the rep. It wasn't until after we left, she was buckling me into my seat and looking questioningly at my face. "Did you hear me Videl, sweetie?"

I didn't look at her. "Yes," I responded.

"Can you answer me? Do you understand?"

I hesitated. "Yes," I paused again, looking at my shoes.

"My mommy is sick, and she can't take care of me."

The representative nodded slowly, taking my answer for satisfactory. She smiled kindly. "I'm very sorry sweetheart, your mother loves you and cares very much about you, so she wanted to make sure that you were going to be taken care of very well."

My mind replayed it. The real tears my mother had shed versus the false origin of them. The smell of alcohol on her when she hugged me, the sadness with which she watched me walking away, the rawness of her voice when she told the representative that she loved me over and over. And the fact that my mother is called a 'junkie' and she probably will always be, by her own decision, her inability to help herself stop, her dependence on escape from the real world and its responsibilities, the main cause of which was myself.

"I know"

She did want me, she just didn't want to be bothered with me.
The outcome was the resulting car ride to the orphanage three towns away and I let my mother drift to the back of my mind, now a ghost that had never really done anything for me.

Nothing mattered to me, until I met the boys that changed it all; my first friend, my first love, my first bad choice, my first learning experience, and my last.

I was just watching a red cardinal flitting boldly on the branches of a maple tree, brittled by dropping fall temperatures, when I noticed him standing in front of me.

"Hi, my name is Joseph Mark Trohman, but they call me Joey. Well, its kinda just me that calls me Joey, but you have to call me Joey."
He was short, so short I didn't have to move my head to look him in the face, and he had a slight lisp that slanted his words.
I looked back at him and said,

"Okay."

---

So progressed a friendship over the next five minutes. If that was possible.

Then, when Sister let us out for recess, I sat alone on the edge of the playground and drew shapes in the dirt. After a few minutes I felt someone sit beside me. It was Joseph Mark Trohman. Or Joey.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Why did you sit all alonesome at play time instead of playing Ponys?"

"I don't like ponys. One bit me one time, so I only like one pony."

"What's its name?"

"She's Gabrielle, but peoples just used to call her Gabs. She was my bestest best friend. We got torned apart," I said knowingly to the ground. It was a phrase I had heard on Lost one time. My mother liked to watch all manner of reruns of it in the middle of the night, and she would let me stay up and watch it with her.

"Your bestest friend was a pony?"

"Yup."
A pause.

Then, without a single decent trace of fear, like any other normal human would have, he said firmly,
"Will you marry me?"

He thrust a small grey stone he had picked up off the gravel under my nose. It was covered in tar on all sides except for one, which was more silvery and shinier than the rest. Obviously, he thought it was pretty and obviously, he didn't know that there had to be a ring present, and anything shiny would do in its absence.

Neither did I.

Joey, with his wild brown hair and his lisp, barley taller than me. Still, it was my first sign of friendship since I had moved into the orphanage. And when you are in preschool, there is no 'why', just 'why not'.

So I said--

"Okay."

Joey and I later agreed we'd wait until we were both old enough. That way we'd always be friends. We never shared the woes of puppy love, though.
Joey said marriage was another word for bestest friends forever and ever and ever.
And I believed him.

Then, three weeks later, Joey and I noticed a new kid sitting on the edge of the playground, drawing shapes in the dirt all by himself.

His name was Peter, but he said he didn't like that name. He was a little older, but he had been held back in kindergarten. He took to us instantly, clinging to me and Joey, and we stuck together, closer than probably all the kids in the kindergarten put together. I looked after Peter and Joey (tried) to look after me.

Unlike Joey, Peter seemed shy and closed. He didn't say a lot, but he did listen.

That all changed the day he pushed Kristen Bark off the swing because she had swiped the good Play-Dough right out from under his nose.

Peter became un-Peter.

Enlightened by Joey's decision, he too changed his name and became Petey.

Better know as, "PETERRRRR!"

Which was always followed by a "NO! PETER! Don't do that!!" or a "PETER!! Come back here!" or even, "PETERR! Get down from there, right now!!"

He was constantly chased by the Sisters, but outcasted by all the kids.
If you made trouble in kindergarten, you were considered weird.
If you were little taller than three feet, you were considered weird.
If you didn't fight for the pink My Little Pony at playtime, you were considered weird.

But we stuck together, clinging to each other's smiles regardless of what the others would whisper about us in clearly audible voices, because Kindergarteners don't know how to whisper and don't really care.

But what I most remember about that whole year, and the next seven, was the day Petey asked me to marry him. We were almost in first grade, when we were all knowledgeable of the world and everything in it.

He didn't say it like Joey, which was probably where he'd picked it up from. That or a really cheesy soap opera. He stared at the ground and went as red as his dark skin would let him.

"Why?"

He wasn't expecting that. I could see on his face a simple 'yes' or 'no' would have done.
We're kindergarteners. 'Yes' or 'No' doesn't fit into the curriculum.

He fidgeted.

"I don't want to be all alonesome one day." He admitted finally, more to the floor than me.

"But I'm already getting married."

"With who?"

He looked up, shocked, his face fallen.

"Joey. I met him first."

He went redder still.

"Hey Peteys, why do you look like a fire truck?"

I hadn't ever seen things in him like that since he'd upstaged Bark, and the only color I'd ever seen him go was blue when he tried to show me how long he could hold his breath.

He didn't answer. He started to walk slowly away back to the play kitchen he had been tinkering at moments before, to attend the stew simmering in the plastic yellow cup. I dropped the black crayon on the page with Elmo and his fish and walked slowly to the cubbys, where my backpack was kipped.

"Petey?"

"Huh?"

Petey stopped walking and turned, almost hopefully.

That's when I pulled him out of my bag, from under my sweater.

"You can marry him." I said tentatively, and held him out, waiting for approval. His brown coat was mangled and he had a small chip torn out of his right flipper.
But he was mine.

Petey froze. Then he smiled.

"Okay."

And that was the day Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz the III promised to marry Walbut Gabs Marquee, the Walrus.

Author's Musings:
So here it is, -deep breath in-
I'm actually rather excited to be writing again.
This may be the most concise and complete thing I've ever written. And things are only going to get more interesting from here.
Let me know what you think.