[SOLO][Delta 3] Diary of a Wimpy Kid [Candidate]

[medigel]

It was the sensation of floating that brought him to consciousness. Floating! Not flying, not walking, but floating!

”No drowning for me!”

But trees were still quite a hazard. For instance, not five seconds in he was viciously attacked hit in the face by a piece of paper.

Oh God. The trees were sending their minions after him first to soften him up with terrible paper cuts. Deli gasped and pried the thing off in a spasm-like fit, forgetting momentarily that his face was quite protected from such disastrous wounds. Once he was quite over his momentary shock, however, he noticed that said piece of paper had words. Only a few words, and scrawled words at that:

my names Thomas Foole evrione calls me Tom n
evrione hose not evrione calles me Foole n then they laff.
you can laff all you need to right now, jurnal, i can wait.

The rest of the page was blank - waiting indeed! Deli might have had time to comment on this had not a voice chimed in with particularly loudness in the silence.

“Ohai there, not-so-stranger~!”

“W-Wah!” Deli stepped back in surprise as a figure suddenly was before him. More importantly, this figure looked very much like him – and not just in the manner of dress (as for sure there were many others who had that claim), in the fact that he had the same posture, height, and voice as himself.

In fact, the only true difference between them was that the other guy had reddish hues whilst Deli had green. Which was just a random detail, really.

“But not really!” the other insisted. “Don’t you know red and green are complementary colors? You knew a lot of trivial facts, really. I like our Christmas colors personally~”

Christmas colors . . . Waaaaaait. He had picked green and red out when the stranger had told them to chuck boxes at the zombies. Was there a mysterious running trend about to reveal itself, or had he finally jumped off the deep end even in Death, with a mind so hell-bent on deteriorating it took minor details and attempted to make them walk and talk?

“Um . . . First off, how’d you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Read my mind.”

“Durr. I’m you! Of course I know what you’re thinking~”

Deli just stared at him for . . . all of three seconds. And then he shrugged it off and went about his Deli way with this opportunity. “Cool! So is the part where I get to know all about myself before all this weird puts-Wonderland-to-shame s**t happened?” 8D

And Red!Deli nodded quickly, as eager to impart knowledge as his other-self was eager to hear it. He snapped, and without warning a paper airplane nosedived into Deli’s goggles.

“What the-! Hey man, a warning?”

“Kekeke~ Just read!”

“Fine. Sheesh.” He unwrapped the plane and obliged the request.

Im going to be in 5th grade again. Mom says I need more time.
I don’t want to see Ms. Bradbury’s face again but Mom doesnt care.
Wish Dad was here instead of Afrika. Js birthday party is coming
but I dont want to go. He thout I peed myself when the fire alarm
went off, but my jeans are already kind of green!!

I dont like school. I want to stay home and watch tv. Mom says I
need friends, but evrione just stays in clicks. I want dad back.

“. . . Was I seriously that bad at English?”

“You got better! Here, some more papers~”

“Oh yay, a book! When was the last time I touched one, Other Me?”

“Good question.”

“And is my name really Thomas Foole? Really?”

Red!Deli nodded.

“Not something cooler like Wolfgang Steel or Magnus Ragnar?”

Red!Deli shook his head.

. . .

. . .

. . .

 

[Mediciner]

And on that note, Deli read the novel of his life. Thankfully, it was in far better working order than paper plane messages.

His younger self wrote with surprising clarity in spite of its various misspellings and grammatical errors, pouring his heart out to this journal over the years. It was thanks to that that Deli learned many things quickly.

For one, his mother and father were a homemaker and a doctor, respectively. Almost always at home, almost always away on some job-called venture, respectively. Desiree Gatsberg prior to marriage and Renard Foole, respectively. Very small family and very large family, respectively.

They fell out of love, but not respectively.

Deli cringed as he read the entries, and eventually skipped over a few of them.

Surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly, for those that knew Deli), Thomas was an extremely awkward boy beyond these pages, which had led to countless tests and visits to therapists and psychiatrists out of concern from his mother. No true diagnosis other than social anxiety, possible co-dependency. Nothing that could not be grown out of, they said.

Young Thomas had an inkling people thought he was stuck up since he had an odd way of approaching others for most of his early years in school – mostly first through third grade. Really, he just had an issue of opening up in fear of being rejected. A very nice, very well-oiled cycle throughout the pages and pages of the book, if his descriptions were any indicators. It went something like this:

Be loud and obnoxious. Annoy the teacher. Become the talk of the lunch table. FRIEND GET? Overstep boundaries. Make people shy away. NO FRIEND GET. TRY HARDER.

Rinse, lather, repeat.

It may have been because of his father leaving at such a young age, the therapists, the psychiatrists, the doctors said. Transplanted guilt was what Thomas was forced to believe. Was it his fault that he wasn’t good enough for his father’s love? Was it because he didn’t eat his vegetables at dinner, or tracked in mud that one time all over the carpet, or was so afraid of the dark it was rare for the adults to wake up alone in their bed?

He didn’t want anyone leaving him anymore. If it meant being an attention-seeker for the wrong reasons, so be it.

But Mother would shush him and say it was nobody’s fault: she had married a fool of a man indeed, but from that mistake came the greatest joy that sat in her arms.

Shadows and separation were only several of his greater fears, however. The other? To get in a car crash, survive, but be a vegetable. Or wake up with total amnesia.

But that came later.

~~~

Thomas tried to tell his mother about his Special Friend, he honestly did. And the woman allowed herself to listen to his tales of how he would watch the shadow of his lamp twist and turn – how his Special Friend made it dance for them both. Special Friend never came into his sights, he would say to her. Special Friend liked to be invisible, but sometimes followed him when he went to school. Special Friend was always there when he was scared.

This was all right until he hit the age of twelve. When his mother started asking if he was using the name as a euphemism for his “badboy downstairs”, things got just . . . weird. So he dropped it.

But the feelings, the extraordinary sense of energy that filled the air whenever he was scared . . . It was in and of itself frightening. And intriguing. From that day when he took notice of the energy and how Special Friend seemed to be just beyond his vision when it occured, Thomas began keeping notes about it.

Maybe he’d discovered a fifth element better than love? Maybe it’d get him award money! Then Mom wouldn’t have to work so much to keep up the house. Maybe Dad would come back.

Maybe he could buy some real friends.

~~~

Thomas eventually began to develop a mischievous sense of humor that both tugged at his mother’s heartstrings (as Renard had been somewhat dashing in his own risky behavior) and tugged at her hair.

No, really. Thomas had a thing for pulling hair for a period of time in his repeat of fifth grade. Specifically girls’ hair. He was a tiny menace on the playground and the bane of the female students at his school.

But attention was nice, even negative attention. He proudly wore the signature of the principle on his disciplinary card like it was a diploma signed by the president himself.

In all honesty, Thomas thought himself a hero. Sometimes he thought he saw monsters, and the only way to make them go away was by making the girls scream. So he did so the only way he could best – hair-tuggin’.

His sole friend, Delphia, chided him often, though. And really, that was what made the difference. When you had someone who could offer an opinion from the opposite end, it really brought the problem into perspective. Perhaps without ‘Phi’s influence, Thomas would have continued on to things worse than the incorrigible hair puller he was for that brief span of time.

He did lessen it after a while and let ‘Phi think it was attributed to her words. The monsters had let the girls well alone anyway by this time. The girls also let Thomas well alone as well, and he had the distinct impression that not even the many apologies he had been forced to give were enough. He was glad he never had to tug Delphia’s hair, though.

Thomas felt, well . . . like he had to be different around her. Not in the same sense as the people who were “hooking up” at the time – far more platonic. Though if you had told this to the young boy, he would have thought you were talking about geology, spout a random fact about the rock cycle, and then switch topics with the ease and innocence only a kid has.

Not that he stayed “innocent” for much longer, for deeper reasons beyond puberty. But it was a nice, simple relationship for a nice, simple guy. No showing off, no supremely forced conversations.

Just . . . floating through the days like nothing.

~~~

Delphia’s older sister Madison was a handful of years older than them and had procured her license when he was thirteen and Phi newly turned twelve, to the younger ones’ delight. With Thomas not having any siblings of his own, the idea of being in someone else’s car for a ride for once was like telling a kid they got a new toy to play with – only Thomas was quite alright with not being in control of the mid-sized car.

It was an arcade adventure to the mall! He didn’t get to go very often, so this was a treat he was very grateful for; anything to get out of the house! He had taken an age and a day to get to the car since his shoe had decidedly disappeared into the junk pile that consisted of half his room most of the time, but by golly was he glowing by the time he hopped in the car.

Thomas knew immediately that something was going on outside of the car, though, and when he was not chatting with Delphia in the backseat, he was passing glances outside his window. Dark shadows fleeing beyond his peripheral vision . . . Was he hallucinating again, or was it the darkness he had once called Special Friend?

Having been taking notes for several years at that time, Thomas was pretty sure Special Friend and its shadows only came when someone was starting to get scared. Was Madison nervous since she had two kids in the backseat to watch out for?

And then Delphia suddenly cried out: “NO! Go away! Stop it, don't hurt us, get out of the road!”

All was frantic suddenly. Immediately Thomas had wrenched his gaze away from the window to try and comfort his pale-faced friend, his heart racing from the scream alone. But then Madison turned to see for herself was the matter –

- And then his ears became acquainted with far too much noise at once. Metal shrieking, what sounded like an explosion, someone’s screams, a horn blasting, glass shattering -

- the ceiling was the floor and his feet were dangling upwards and there were stars in front of his eyes, or maybe black holes -

- And maybe as soon as it started it stopped. The pain was unregistered, blunted by the pure adrenaline pumping through his body. Something was trickling down his face, be it tears or blood. He did not care. All was chaos in his mind, and like a mad animal he struggled to be free of his seatbelt.

No good. He was pinned by half of Madison and all of Delphi, who had been thrown by the collision to his side. All he could do was scream.

It hurt . . . It hurt so bad . . . Everything had shadows now, shifting as if in a dream, and blood and sweat and tears mixed as he panicked. . . .

And then . . . sirens . . .

. . . More shadows . . . Taller, not moving . . .

. . . . . . The door giving way . . .

Thomas was as still as death when the firefighters were prying the crumpled door open. That was frightening.

But nothing was quite as frightening as the feeling of two bodies even more still as death upon him.

~~~

It was a miracle that he came out with nothing but a broken arm, bruising, and some stitches required for his face. A miracle.

A curse.

Madison dead. Delphia in critical condition for so long he feared to ask his mother for updates. And then Delphia in better condition but . . . asleep. In a coma, they said.

How long, he asked. How long until . . . ?

They weren’t sure, they said. Only time would tell.

But time was cruel and waited for no man, much less no boy, and Thomas had to adjust.

His 14th birthday was celebrated alone. His 15th with several actual friends from shared classes. Thomas was not incapable of staying alone, after all, and with the sudden blow of losing Delphia, he made up quickly.

He learned to take advantage of the awkward charms of puberty and began to make jokes more often. Good jokes. Bad jokes. Dirty jokes. Blond jokes. Racist jokes. Play on words and puns. Anything to make other people smile, like him, want to hang out with him.

If he could make other people smile, then he would be happy, Thomas told himself. And the boy could chatter on and on about the most trivial things, it was impossible to find a moment’s notice of silence. He was a brook that babbled in an endearing or annoying way, with mileage variation from person to person.

Be it of pity or genuine like, he indeed managed to round a small group of friends using these tactics. Things appeared to return to normal at the Gatsberg household over the course of two years. Thomas never forgot about Delphia, however, and made his rounds to visit her when he could – be it once a week or once a month. He found solace in “writing to her” in his journal, updating her on things that mattered and things that didn’t, what his opinions were, his zany thoughts.

It was what kept him going: the idea that one day she would read it all, close it shut, and give him an odd look while saying, “You’re really cheesy sometimes, you know that?”

The idea that one day he’d nod unabashedly and say, “I always did prefer cheddar after all.”

~~~

Lo and behold, Delphia did wake up. Thomas was not around at the initial stirrings, but once he caught wind of her restored condition several days later he was at her side and as whipped as whipped cream. It was different between them now with the gap of 2 years and such, but Thomas made it clear to her that he would have no trouble staying friends with her so long as she was alright with that.

“I did my career as an emo kid. Trying to find more prospective horizons now~” he had once said with a wink before handing over his journal for her to read.

He had, however, made sure to remove his notes about Special Friend. He had his suspicions about her, having replayed the memory of that day in his head many times, but he did not want to throw so much upon her when Delphia already had so much to adjust to. Maybe later.

Thus the two entered high school and spent that time re-educating her. Well, except when it came to her newly developed body. That subject, he didn’t touch. All he could say was “boobs”.

Aaah, boobs~

Towards the end of his career in high school, Thomas snagged a job at a local delicatessen and became something of a small attraction for the place – at least, to common customers. While remaining respectful of his boundaries, he was known to crack quite a few jokes, suggestive hints, and generally be a charismatic (if not amusedly awkward) oddball.

“The name’s Foolery. Tom Foolery~” he would sometimes introduce himself, for instance. With the Sean Connery accent. Or some days he would turn his search for the appropriate sandwich materials into a journey Indian Jones would be envious of. Thomas was careful never to try the same thing twice in too short a span of time, or be too much of a goofball with the types of people who had stern faces and sterner voices.

It was a good life, though. He took it upon himself to treat those who were down when they entered, such as a certain man who came in one day looking as if he had broken up with a girlfriend, or some equal degree of asdlkfndlsn-ness. Thomas unloaded some of the jokes in his arsenal to cheer the guy up, as he felt compelled to see that his customers left with some sort of smile – it made himself feel better at the same time.

What was the guy’s name again? Jude . . . Yeah, Jude. Sounded familiar.

One day, however, when Thomas was ready to close up and head home for the day, one final customer decided to show up. It was eerie how he or she had done so, since the bell had not been rung – the door had not been used?

“Can I help you?” Thomas asked as he cleaned the counter off. “We’re about to close, but I think I can squeeze in one more order.”

“I believe I can help you,” said the figure.

It was then that Thomas noticed that shadows shifted slightly about this guy. But different from what he had seen, not towards but almost away from . . . Like they feared him.

Already Thomas liked that fact and, in spite of the creepiness of the stranger’s entrance, he offered him a seat and in return listened to a nice, compelling story. But even more than that.

A chance to become something more than his average life called him to be. A chance to be someone, to protect someone for once.

Not to mention it'd make one hell of a biography, if he kept entries going in his journal.

And thus Thomas agreed to the stranger's proposal without having to stop for much thinking. Thinking was never quite his style, after all.