"Stand Before Your God"

[fiefoe]

(We now return you to our regular programming.)

How a boy's character was built -

• I lay in my bed after dark and begged the great forces of magic, good or bad - whichever would listen - to send me back across the water. I offered up toys and money, then teeth and hair and fingers...  Some nights, if these dreams had come true, I'd have dragged myself home from the Canadian border blind and deaf and mute and on bloody stumps, with nothing more than my chin to move myself along.
• There was a mountain range under the Atlantic Ocean named Watkins Ridge... But neither Cuddly nor Nightingale seemed impressed, since the whole thing was underwater and therefore you couldn't climb it and put a flag on top... "Of course you can climb the mountain," I announced, "if you had one of those special underwater climbing suits."..."You do?" Nightingale had already begun to strangle his bear out of jealousy.
  
• Pa Vicker came up the stairs, ringing a bell and shouting. "Pajamas, Prayers, and Potty!" He said he would read us a story. While he read, we sat on our beds and ate toothpaste.
• (After bed-wetting) I did wish I could die then, silently and without fuss.
• There is a certain kind of noise that echoes through your head when you stop a soccer ball with your face. The ball hurts less if it is raining and plastic balls hurt more than leather ones. .. If I heard cheering that I'd saved the game, I found myself hoping that the pain would look just as bad as it felt.
• (First time taking a soccer ball full in the face,) I didn't cry, and was as surprised as everyone else that the tears did not come. In that moment, I realised that I would not die of the homesickness, or the teasing, or the modeling-clay bugs in my desk. I would be all right, but I would have to make sure of it by myself.
• Everything had a value at the Dragon. Each marble, each piece of toffee, and each chair in the TV room. You knew how many toffees it would take to buy a Medium Triple Treb marble... None of this was written down, but everybody knew it. And everybody knew that the most valuable thing was free time, and this could not be sold or traded away and maybe that was why its value was so great.