Summer sun shines bright on the New Boston. Although it shares its name with its older brother Old Boston, they have little else in common. Boston is a city of dilapidated skyscrapers, mean streets, and an overwhelmingly powerful spirit. New Boston, which is situated about a hundred miles west of Old Boston, has much more in common with Camp Trin. It is an old college campus, recycled from the Good Ol’ Days and kept in fairly good shape. It doesn’t boast any of the towering steel buildings of its older counterpart, instead favoring a wide expanse of brick and stone structures. It also boasts green space, all of it pristine and expertly manicured. The town common is no exception. A massive carpet of green, each blade of grass dancing in the gentle breeze, a light coat of dew fresh from the night before.
A young boy is peeing on the grass. Kind of kills the moment. In his defense, though, he isn’t doing it on purpose. His bladder is releasing itself against the boys conscious will. This act of urination is so powerfully not on purpose that, to be technically accurate, the young boy isn’t peeing on the grass at all. To be more specific, he’s peeing on the inside of his underwear, from which point it lingers until the fabric becomes fully saturated, after which it runs down until it finds purchase on sweat covered skin. The pee and sweat dribble together down the boy’s legs, where it flows freely onto bare feet and into the grass.
The boy’s name is Lexington Adams. He’s no more than six years old, but the extra weight that he holds in his cheeks and waist are physical harbingers of what he will look like ten years from now. Just as his loins have been moistened by a certain kind of liquid, so too have his pudgy cheeks. Tears run like a faucet from his eyes, and his bottom lip quivers in spite of his great attempts to remain stoic. He looks at the six older children surrounding him with a mix of awe, disdain, respect, and fear.
“Aw, look, little pee pee pants is crying now, too.” His eldest brother, Quincy, a tall and slender boy of 15, pushes Lexington. He doesn’t push hard, but Lexington is both physically and emotionally unstable enough for the force of the push to send him backwards onto his squishy little bum. Laughter erupts from the six children in front of him.
“I’m not crying!” Lex shouts with watery eyes, a runny nose, and a blubbery mouth. “Heroes don’t cry!”
Martha, his sister two years his senior and his sibling closest to him in age, cocks her head back in a hyena laugh. “Yeah, right. Keep telling yourself you’re gonna be a brave hero.”
Arlington, his stocky 14 year old brother, snickers. “All your talk about becoming a knight when you’re older and you can’t even keep the piss in your nuts. Ha!”
Jackie, his sister of 12, pauses her laughter for just long enough to roll her eyes. “Piss doesn’t come from your nuts, dumby. Where do you think my piss would come from?”
Arlington also pauses his laughter for a minute to scratch his chin. “Umm, your nuts?”
Grover, his brother of nine, who had hesitated to join in with his sibling’s laughter and did so with nervous eyes, relishes in the gap in teasing. “I, uh, don’t think Jackie has nuts, Arlington.”
Pursed lips and a furrowed brow visibly paint Arlington’s confusion. “Does Jackie not piss?”
“Girls don’t have nuts,” says Michelle, Jackie’s twin, matter of factly. Then, with bitter spite, she turns back towards Lex, who has been enjoying his momentary reprieve. “Just like how Lexie doesn’t have what it takes to be a knight!”
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With this, all of the children resume laughing and pointing at Lex with various degrees of intensity and cruelty. Lex is again reduced to tears. He knows they’re right. The most frustrating thing about soiling himself isn’t the fact that he’s now covered in his own urine. It isn’t the fact that his siblings will relentlessly laugh at him and call him pee pee pants. It isn’t the fact that he’ll be forced to run back inside and not be able to play with everyone else. The most frustrating thing about soiling himself is that he knows that heroes don’t soil themselves. The only thing that he’s ever wanted in his life is to be a brave hero, like the Knights of the Oaken Tail, or like Daggers McCall.
Daggers McCall, or Dag to their friends, is Lex’s oldest and best friend. Daggers McCall is everything that Lex wants to be. They are brave, strong, powerful, and they have an excellent sense of morality and justice. Any time there’s trouble, Daggers McCall is there to fight the bad guy and restore order to their admiring fans. They are the coolest person that Lex has ever known. Unfortunately for Lex, they are a fictional character. Lex spends every minute of his free time reading, and most of that time is spent reading and re-reading the many Daggers McCall novels.
Just an hour or so ago, Lex had been reading Daggers McCall and Nasty Miss Luckaloo. Nasty Miss Luckaloo, the physical manifestation of mischief and mayhem, had been causing quite a ruckus at a farmstead somewhere in the Midwest. Stealing sheep, eating crops, and kidnapping children. Who would answer the call of the desperate farm folk but Daggers McCall. Using his trusty whip and crossbow, Dag managed to retrieve all the missing sheep, rescue all the missing children, and replant all the missing crops. How he was able to do that last act with solely his whip and crossbow, Rahul Inverness had neglected to say. Rahul Inverness, the author of all of the Daggers McCall novels, was not the world’s most gifted writer. Lex knew this, but he didn’t care. He just wanted to read more and more about Dag’s heroic exploits. Nobody loved Daggers McCall more than Lex.
Nobody hated Daggers McCall more than Lex’s father, King Washington Adams. About half an hour ago, King Adams entered his youngest son’s quarters in the palace to find him reading one of those horrible Daggers McCall novels. He barked at him to stop wasting his time reading filth like that, to get outside and play with his siblings. Lex didn’t want to go; he had some kind of vague feeling that doing so would end up with him soiling his pants and getting laughed at by his siblings (neither of which were uncommon occurrences when he was forced to play with them). And yet, he obeyed the king. The only thing worse than the disappointment of his peers was the disappointment of his father. He had spent many days and nights listening to his father’s disappointed comments, and he didn’t want to listen to them now.
Now, with the urine in his pants mixing with the dew from the grass, and with the laughter in his ears mixing with the echoes of his father’s disappointment, Lex decides that he wants to be anywhere but where he is right now. He’d also rather be anyone but who he is right now, but he has felt the same way for as long as he can remember and he hasn’t been able to change it. It’s as if his body has spent its entire life in utter refusal to cooperate with him. The only thing that he wants to be is big and strong, but his body insists on only being big, and on being the wrong kind of big. In addition, it insists on being uncoordinated, weak, and generally incapable.
Through tears, Lex looks up at his older siblings. “I will be a hero! I will be a knight!” He will, of course, never be a knight. His siblings know this, and they answer his proclamation with proclaimed laughter and proclaimed pointing. He tries remarkably unsuccessfully to keep his sobs from erupting out in embarrassingly loud hiccups and runs back inside the palace. In his heart, he knows his siblings are wrong. In his head, though, he knows that they’re right. He’ll never be a hero, and he’ll never be a Knight of the Oaken Tail.
Nobody knows it yet, nor will they know it for many years, but all of them are wrong.
Not about the knight thing, though. Spoiler alert, he’s not ever going to be a Knight of the Oaken Tail. This series is going to be over 20 books long, depicting nations, characters, and gods over the course of lifetimes, but Lex will never be a knight. Because he’s going to DIE. Eventually. Everyone dies eventually. Well, not everyone. Maybe even one of the characters you’ve already met is never going to die. And maybe one of the characters you’ve already met is going to die by the fifth book. Who knows? I know.Anyway.
Lex stumbles up the stairs to his bedroom. He surrounds himself in his familiar cocoon: A dense array of blankets, pillows, and books. He grabs an old favorite the way an alcoholic might grab their choice bottle. He flips through the pages and finds one of his favorite scenes. Daggers McCall has joined up with his crew of ragtag fighters and they’re clawing their way through an old Transylvanian castle. Seeing Dag whoop out his typical badassery on solo missions is always awesome, but it’s a treat and a half to watch him do it alongside his trusty friends. Together, they cover each other’s weaknesses and complement each other’s strengths. It makes Lex swell with pride, as if Dag is his own brother.
The wet sensation against his legs, though, reminds him of just how far away the realm of fiction is. He gets off his bed and changes his clothes. He looks out the window and sees his six siblings throwing a ball back and forth. Laughing, playing, loving. They’re a good group of kids, Lex knows. They cover each other’s weaknesses and compliment each other’s strengths. It makes Lex deflate with depression. Despite the fact that he was born with a ready-made team of six compatriots, he finds himself again and again feeling like he was born utterly and completely alone.