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The Best Friends You'll Ever Have | 8: The Dangling Conversation
Chapter Title: 8 | The Dangling Conversation
Prompt: #089 – Commitment
Universe: Mid-canon (#32 Kristy and the Secret of Susan)
Genre: Friendship
Rating: T
Warning: None
Word Count: 7,491
Summary: James Hobart has perfected the art of one-sided conversation.
Links: FF.net | LJ | DW | AO3
It seems I'm destined to never write anything short for the prompts over at
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babysitters100, but when something turns out as satisfying as this? I certainly don't mind =)This is probably my favorite thing I've written for BSC fandom (so far), and I'm incredibly proud of it...which means it'll probably be almost completely ignored, if past experience is anything to go by, LOL. Of course, it doesn't really help that it's centered on a minor character, but hey ~ that was half the fun! =)
This idea literally struck me the moment I finished (re)reading RS #32, Kristy and the Secret of Susan. I was never all that fond of this book even back in the day, and man, is it a cringe-worthy read now (so much outdated information ~ its amazing how far autism research has progressed in the last twenty or so years), but one of the final scenes is incredibly poignant:
So I helped Mr. Felder load Susan’s trunk into the back of the car. Then Mrs. Felder led Susan outside. She was just about to settle her in the backseat with her pillow when we heard, “Hullo!”
Who else but James?
The Felders and I turned to see James Hobart running across the lawn toward the car.
“I came to say good-bye!” he called. “Susan’s leaving, isn’t she?”
“Yeah,” I replied. Then I added, “Mr. Felder, have you met James Hobart? He and his family moved into Mary Anne Spier’s old house.”
James and Mr. Felder shook hands. Then the Felders and I kind of stood back while James approached Susan. “So long,” he said. “I’m glad you were my mate.”
No response from Susan.
“Susan?” said James. “Susan?” Nothing.
James extended his hand as if he were going to take Susan’s, then thought better of it, and pulled his away. “Well, good-bye,” he said. “I’ll miss you. I hope you come back soon.”
Mrs. Felder started to cry, and James looked at me as if he might cry, too, so I put my arm around him. Then the Felders buckled Susan into the car, climbed into the front seat, and rolled down their windows.
“Good-bye!” they called as they backed into the street. “Thank you, Kristy! ‘Bye, James!”
“’Bye!” we called back.
“I wish Susan would say ‘good-bye,’ ” said James, as we watched the car disappear down the street.
“Me, too,” I replied. “Maybe she’ll be able to after she’s been at the school for awhile. Who knows what she’ll learn there.”
“Yeah, who knows,” echoed James, sounding as if he didn’t believe she’d learn a thing. Then he added, “My mum says it isn’t nice to pity people, but I do feel sorry for the Felders. I can’t help it. Susan is their only kid and she won’t talk or anything. I know how that feels, because for awhile she was my only friend, and I wanted a friend who could talk. I wanted that really badly.”
It screamed for resolution, to me, beyond the one given in the book. A few pages earlier, Mr. Felder says that his dream is to one day see Susan's name in lights as a famous concert pianist - and combining the two notions made this idea blossom. I had a vision of these two, meeting ten years later backstage, before Susan's big debut as a professional musician, and I quickly jotted it down in my notebook.
Only to have it sit there for nearly three months, LOL.
One of the first things I did was look up autistic savants, since that's what Susan is supposed to be. She does actually fit the profile, albeit as a severe case. Her form of autism is actually childhood disintegrative disorder, and it's a rare match, indeed, to have savant skills with such low functioning. Musical savants are the most common type, with piano players near the top of that list, so it was pretty much so far, so good. Susan also exhibits stereotypy, which some believe can be controlled with practice and integration into the environment.
I really wanted Susan to develop as realistically as possible, but also into a rich, interesting character - I tried hard to avoid the "magical autistic" trope, and hopefully I succeeded. She was such a difficult character in the book, but there is a lot of room for growth - and using the one overdeveloped skill she has is pretty much the key to that. I find it interesting that she sings as well as plays piano, and that she has a perpetual calendar. That gives rise to some logical ability, rudimentary math, and a vocabulary of words, even if they're meaningless. I basically re-imagined her as a person trapped in her own body and unaware of her dysfunction, slowly pulling the pieces together to find some form of consciousness. There's a breakthrough in communication, but it's difficult and unreliable. She would definitely have language development, even with a personal catalog of show tunes and pop numbers, and her remaining mute wouldn't be all that surprising, even if she learned how to read and write.
Er...as you can see, I definitely spent most of my idea development time shaping Susan into a character that could have some meaning in this story :P Actually, it was doing some research on James that brought out the structure of the piece, and ultimately gave me the roadmap to write it. I knew I wanted there to be a series of letters tying the scenes together, but what would those scenes be?
How about - actual subplots from the book series? In correct chronological order, with allowances for the characters to age?
Using this brilliant link, aging the BSC correctly, I was able to pull all the final elements together.
I lucked out, for a start. Book #32 takes place during what would've been the older BSC members' freshman year in HS, had they been allowed to age. Thus, I didn't really need to tweak the ages right from the start, and could have my grounding firmly in canon. The first note/scene from the story is original, but takes place maybe a week or two after Susan has left for her new school. James has a new friend, but it's hard for him to forget about his first one, and he decides to keep in contact with her, perhaps foolishly believing that one day, she would be able to open up and respond. It's very much a child's innocent optimism, something that touches the already-pregnant (and thus, overly emotional) Mrs. Felder =)
The next letter is from James's ninth year. It's the subplot of book #37 Dawn and the Older Boy. James writes a play starring his neighbors, the Perkins girls and Jamie Newton, and is teased mercilessly for it by his new "friend," Zach Wolfson. This is the same friend he managed to win over in book #32, after taking about as much of his teasing as he could stand. I'm not surprised James started questioning his friendship with Zach, nor that he couldn't completely let him go, allowing the older, more aggressive boy to dominate him. He shows signs of his own spirit, but mostly he seems a shy type, which is what I ran with here :)
Hope Felder originally played a much bigger part in the story, being the character that ultimately bridged the gap between James and Susan, but by the time I got to that section, my muse decided to take a different course :P Nonetheless, her birth is a pretty Big Deal, considering how much her parents longed for her - and hoped against hope that she would be normal. James had a complex reaction that he doesn't fully understand until much later in the story, and I wanted to contrast that with Kristy's reaction upon hearing the news. It kinda goes to the whole maturity difference, too. Kristy saves the day, too, in typical perfect-baby-sitter fashion, a little nod to the classic portions of the BSC series where thirteen-year-olds know best, LOL.
The third section starts off with a postcard from Australia. It was hard to decide what sorts of origins I wanted to give the Hobart family, since they are basically a really bad stereotype in the books, but I tried to pick something that was fairly obviously associated with the country of Australia and run with that. The Great Barrier Reef was the first thing that immediately came to mind, and from there, it was a short trawl through Queensland cities to find something that seemed appropriate. I chose Cairns because it's fairly large, and sits right on the coast, so daily trips to the beach wouldn't be out of the question :)
The Valentine's Day party is a slight variation on the subplot of #51 Stacey's Ex-Best Friend. In the book, the BSC host a V-day party for their charges; in the story, I made it a school dance, simply because that seemed more likely for eleven-year-olds :P The rest of it is straight from the original book ~ James thinking he has to dress up and put a carnation in his lapel, bring a girl as a date and give her flowers, and even Carolyn Arnold having a crush on him. Haha, I even threw in her big, gushy 3-D valentine, with a couple of adjustments! (I had to leave the very unlikely construction paper spring, though - very BSC, LOL.)
The fourth section pulls from the subplot of #88 Farewell, Dawn. James breaks his leg playing a pickup game of football with Nicky, Margo, and Claire Pike, and he's laid up in the first floor family room for most of the summer. Intent on kicking his morose feelings to the curb, the BSC and James's friends decide to give him a 'Christmas in July' party. They decide this coincides very well with the fact that Christmas is a summer holiday in Australia :) In the original book, James's parents buy him a Gameboy, but I updated it to a gaming console that was available around the turn of the century. It probably shows that I don't know diddly about the PS2, and I'm not sure I picked an appropriate game for him to suggest playing with a mute autistic girl, LOL, but I took one look at the Wiki list of available games and threw up my hands. (I'm definitely a Nintendo girl at heart :P)
Anyway. The importance of this section is that James realizes that all of his years spent writing unanswered letters to Susan might just have been in vain. Laid up with a broken leg, he starts questioning this habit he never quite broke, and wonders whether it's time to give it up for good. It's hard not to think of Susan, living across the street from her parents and her younger sister, who's everything Susan isn't (but James wishes she could've been when they were kids). Just as he's about to give up - the breakthrough! I didn't want these characters to miss each other in their stages of development, so I knew it had to come sooner, rather than later.
I really debated the final section, whether I wanted to have another letter from James, or if I wanted to put in an example of Susan's level of communication skills. I ultimately chose the latter, because it would be what finally tied the fic all together. This final scene is the one that sparked the idea for the story, and it was an absolute joy to write :) I probably haven't been so engrossed in writing a scene since I wrote Chapter 7 of Fragments nearly a year and a half ago, if that gives you any indication of just how deep I was into this.
Susan's school is Stamford Alternative Academy - the place that Claudia was sent around fourth grade or so, in order to test her learning abilities. I thought it only fitting, really :) Though I wanted to write this scene a perfect ten years after their final meeting, it didn't quite work out. Would three years of correspondence back and forth have been believable? I just didn't think so, now that I was actually at that point.
The song was also a plan from the start, which was something of a shocker :P I *love* Dusty Springfield, but "The Look of Love" is an incredibly sexy song, and I wasn't sure I had the fortitude to pull it off. Gut instinct is rarely wrong, especially when it comes to music for me, so I just went with it - the lyrics are beautiful and poignant and work well with prose, I think.
I'm really, really satisfied with this final scene, though again, I wasn't sure how much I was pushing the envelope with the kiss. It's funny to think of a kiss being the thing that potentially shatters the suspension of disbelief, but I tried to tread very carefully here. I didn't want to make Susan read as helpless, or non-consenting. I think she retains some classical autistic features, while at the same time, showing that she's still a person under the shell, living and breathing and thinking complex thoughts, even if she isn't able to express them outright :)
The other major bit of this fic that was mostly an experiment for me was the style. It's one of the longest present-tense pieces I've written, and I think using said tense really adds to the feel and drive of the story. I'm slowly becoming more comfortable with it - I might just use it for more than my GH pieces, LOL.
I have a feeling there might be more James Hobart in my future. He has just enough canon personality to really shape into something lovely, I think, and I like the way he turned out here. He's definitely been added to my "favorite minor canon characters" list :)
no subject
I also remember that Ann M. Martin also wrote a book specifically about a boy who had a younger autistic brother (the name escapes me). Did she have some experience with autism in her life, do you know?
I'll definitely check out this story some time, though I'm having trouble remembering the boy on which you centered the fic. It does sound terrific from what you've explained here. :)
no subject
I also remember that Ann M. Martin also wrote a book specifically about a boy who had a younger autistic brother (the name escapes me). Did she have some experience with autism in her life, do you know?
Not that I'm aware of, but possibly, if she devoted an entire book to it. Hmm...
I'll definitely check out this story some time, though I'm having trouble remembering the boy on which you centered the fic.
James Hobart is only slightly less of a minor character than Susan, because he does have appearances/subplots in more than one book :P He's the eldest of Ben Hobart's little brothers, if that helps - Ben was Mallory's sort-of boyfriend :)