Lynn waited impatiently behind the seemingly impregnable barrier of her door. The time was nearly four fifteen in the afternoon. She sat in a rickety chair by that door waiting. Finally a knock came to end her vigil. She whipped from the table and spun the old doorknob with a motion more fluid than a karate master’s chop. When the door opened in stepped a rather consternated Peter.

“I must admit I was a little bewildered to have such quick door service, Lynn,” he said taking off his light spring coat and scanning the walls for a hanger.

Lynn smiled and tossed the coat unto a chair without a second glance.

“Okay,” Peter croaked, only a little bit befuddled. “Where are your parents?”

“Oh, uh, dad’s downst-st-stairs w-working.”

“And your mother? Shouldn’t she be making supper?” Peter queried, ruffling his eyebrows in his probing fashion.

“Sh-she’s in Los … Angeles.”

“Visiting her family?”

“No, not exact…ly,” Lynn started, pressing her face down in embarrassment. “My p-p-parents divorced when I was s-s-seven. I, uh, usually microwave my … dinner.”

“Oh,” Peter crowed, he had never thought about that before.

“Can, can I get you a c-coke?” Lynn asked.

“It’s a bit chilly, I could use a hot drink if that’s okay.”

“C-c-coffee?”

Peter recoiled, “You know what, I’ll be fine, thanks though.”

Lynn grinned and waved Peter to follow her down the corridor. Peter noticed that unlike his refrigerator that was fully covered with artwork both inspired and uninspired from various siblings of his, the May’s was entirely bare. The walls of their house were all painted variant shades of burgundy and white and they were also entirely barren except the occasion photo of Lynn and what Peter assumed were other relatives. Lynn brought Peter to her room in the middle of her hallway on the west side of her house. Lynn turned to Peter.

“P-p-please don’t t-tell anyone what you … see in here, ok-kay,” she pleaded.

“Okay,” Peter shrugged.

Lynn opened the door and instantly he felt more at awe than the Israelite that had finished the pyramids. He gradually put one foot in front of the other, like a pilgrim approaching sacred ground. Lynn’s room was covered in the most beautiful tapestries and drawings and paintings his mortal eyes had ever been laid upon. There were pictures of Chimeras, of coliseums, of warriors, of lovers, of fruit, of fire all deliciously woven and draw or painted with the Technicolor magic that would outdo Joseph’s dream coat any day of the week. Her desk was cluttered with sculptures more real than the work of Michelangelo and more striking than the tallest of sky-scrapers. One was of a woman screaming, her face moulded in such perfect agony one could almost hear her cries.

For all his literary training, all his extended vocabulary, Peter could only come with, “wow.” He took another step and slowly recollected some other words. “This is simply astounding. How did you ever do all of this?”

“I go t-to an ac-cademy for t-t-the arts.”

Peter smiled in amusement, “so do I. I really need to get out of the drama section.”

Lynn giggled and Peter smiled at the sound of it.

“No seriously, though, you need to show this to some other people. This is incredible. You could be like Botticelli’s and Donatello’s great grand kid.”

“I’m th-th-third generation Chinese.

“Artists had active social lives, who knows,” Peter proclaimed with glee raising his hands in the air. After a pause he spoke, somewhat less jokingly: “You really need to tell some other people about this.”

Lynn shrivelled up like a potted plant in the desert. “No,” she returned in disgust.

Peter realized he wasn’t going to get anywhere approaching from that angle. He tried something else. “Lynn, do you think that someone like me does sports.”

Lynn scrutinized him for a few moments than shook her head.

Peter snapped his fingers in victory, “exactly, you wouldn’t expect I would. Except, I play football in a non-competitive league every Saturday. I’ve blindsided so many other players they don’t call me ‘Pudgy Peter’ they know me as ‘Killer Kelley’. But if I hadn’t have told you that you would have never known. You would have assumed I hadn’t participated in physical activities since I first began to crawl. Do you really want people to make those kind of assumptions about you. I mean, why do all this stuff if no one ever gets to see it?”

“Comp-p-pens-s-sation.”

Peter was bemused, “compensation for what.”

Lynn hung her head in a pitiful mixture of shame and commiseration. “My moth-ther was infer…tile. She had a tr-treatment and that’s how th-they got me. But it never … worked again. I was the only ch-child they could have and I was def-f-fective. That’s why … mom l-left.”

Peter put his hands on Lynn’s shoulder. “You are anything but broken, Lynn. You’re the best artist I have ever seen. You make living things out clay and paint. That song you played on our piano, you made it up, didn’t you?” Lynn nodded. “You’re not defective, Lynn, you’re a genius.”

“Eas-sy for you to s-say. My head is f-f-filled with words all … day and when I try to sp-sp-speak they can’t c-come out. When I p-p-put my … pen to p-paper they emp-pty out of my head. When I look at let-t-ters or num-num-numbers they all sw-swirl around in my … brain. Even if I … made a m-m-million doll-lars s-s-selling my art, my dad would tr-trade it all for me to p-p-pass one … math class.”

“I’m sure your father doesn’t think like that. Just show him your work, he’d be amazed.”

“You c-couldn’t p-p-possibly … imagine anything different th-than your p-p-perfect … little family and all your … A’s where everything is p-p-peachy and life is as str-str-stressful as a vacation in the Ba-Baha-Baha,” Lynn seethed in frustration.

“My family,” Peter whispered, a gloomy reflective state taking him over, “is not perfect. I have four siblings that fight from the moment they awake to the moment they fall asleep. We have three kids in private school and a house in uptown Boston we cannot afford to pay for. In a few years I’ll be off to College and my parents had some investments started to help me along, but then our good friend Mr. Recession came along and changed that plan. I just hope I can get a good scholarship. So I study every night, I do extra homework, and I know that every test will count in the end. If I get to the top of my class and get the scholarship I can be a lawyer, a doctor, or an orthodontist. I can have two houses, drive three cars, and go on vacation in Florida every year. I don’t get the scholarship, I don’t go college, and I work in McDonald’s for the rest of my life. That’s the reality I look forward to every day. And just like you I know what it is like to hide from society.”

“How?” Lynn asked, her eyes discarding her sombre look and being replaced by genuine curiosity.

Peter thought a moment, weighing the options and then said: “I’m a Mormon.”

Lynn smirked, “oh, d-does your fa-fa-father hide his other wives in the cellar.”

Peter almost tore his hair out in vexation. “That’s exactly why I hate telling people,” he scowled. “Ever since those trials in Texas everyone’s been saying such awful things about us. That we’re polygamists, that we aren’t really Christians, that we’re Satanists. And what else do you really know about us. I had a poster of Mitt Romney in my room, I have four siblings, I refused both coke and coffee from you, I even have a picture of Joseph Smith on my Wall of Heroes. Yet, you had no clue until I told what I was.”

“Who’s Joseph-.”

“Doesn’t matter!” Peter snapped, barely able to keep his temper. He slowly regained his foothold on calmness and looked back at Lynn. “Do you know why John F. Kennedy is on my Wall of Heroes.”

“He’s from Massa-Massa-Massachu-.” Lynn tried to guess.

“Not just because he’s from Massachusetts.” Peter peered around the room imagining where his WALL OF HEROES would be located if he occupied it. “Kennedy was from a different religion than most folks too, and there were a lot of people that didn’t trust him because of it. But when he spoke they listened. He told them things could be better. He made them believe that one day America wouldn’t be the torn-up hateful place it was then. He put dreams right into people’s hearts and everyone loved him because of it,” an image of Harvey Lee Oswald crossed Peter’s mind, “well not everyone I guess.”

Peter turned back to Lynn and looked directly into her eyes, and he spoke words meant to be placed right into her soul: “Speaking, Lynn, that’s the cure. When people talk, when they communicate, that’s when they realize they were wrong all along, Lynn. If you don’t talk to them they won’t know they’re wrong. You have to speak, Lynn, regardless of your stutter, show them what you can do, starting with our presentation.”

Lynn curled her lip in remembered anguish, “Th-they’ll make f-f-fun of me again, just like they … did in ele-ele-elementary. The girls would c-c-call me names and the boys w-w-would … make me say w-w-what st-state I was in or beat … me up if I d-didn’t.”

“You think they didn’t do the same to me, Lynn. I’m ‘Pudgy Peter’ after all. I got my fair share of name calling and I got tossed around and held down plenty. But I was smart, just like you’re smart Lynn. Those boys who thrashed me, they needed help with their homework and I was happy to give it to them. Sooner or later I made friends with the people that used to bully me. They weren’t all nice guys, but I would never have known if I hadn’t talked to them. You can’t just leave society because you were hurt, Lynn. You have to talk to make things better. You have to join the world if you want to improve it.”

Lynn’s façade of anguish was viciously replaced by a look of anger. “Join this world,” she bellowed, “This world where the average CEO makes in a day what the typical worker makes all year. This country where we build the best hospitals and schools in the world and made them too expensive for anyone to use. This world where a single farmer can feed over five hundred people, up from eight a hundred years ago, and five million people still die of starvation every year. This world where the wealthiest people make all the decision for their billions of underlings and still promote it as “fair”. This world where we dump toxins and pollutants into the only planet we have ever found that is habitable for life to make a few quick bucks. To hell with this world, Peter!”

Peter looked at her, his eyes wide in shock. Lynn looked back with mired repugnance. “You’re not terrified because I said ‘hell’ are you?”

Peter slowly shook his head, never blinking once. “You didn’t stammer,” he murmured in amazement.

Lynn put her hand to her lips, her visage now covered by a concoction of terror and astonishment. Peter carefully lifted her hand away. “Don’t censor yourself now, Lynn that was an excellent start. The world can’t fix itself if it doesn’t know what’s broken.”

“I guess I don’t have any excuse not to the … skit now, huh,” Lynn said, just getting used to not stumbling over her syllables.

Peter beamed and shook his head. “Let’s get to work.”

They laboured on their script for two more hours. Lynn managed to convince Peter to remove the ridiculous Shakespearean lilt. Peter managed to convince Lynn to perform her part. And when Peter checked his watch again and saw that he was very late, they were entirely finished, and it was a work of art just good enough to put on Lynn’s wall.

Lynn saw Peter to the door and just as he got his coat on and was about to leave he turned back to her and spoke.

“Lynn, if you’re worried about the presentation tomorrow here’s something I always tell my fellow actors before going onstage. There was a study in France a few years ago where girls and boys with identical marks were asked to remember their scores on federal tests. Since girls are supposed to be better at art and worse at math they inflated they’re art scores and deflated their math scores. The boys did the opposite. If a boy and a girl both got an eighty out of a hundred, the girl would remember getting a seventy and the boy a ninety, exactly what they were expected to do. The moral of the story is this, Lynn. People will do what is expected of them. If you expect to do poorly, you will do poorly. If you expect to do great things from yourself, you’ll do great things. ” Peter leaned into to Lynn so that they were only inches apart. “I am expecting great things from you, Lynn.”

With that he closed the door and walked to the loving embrace of this waiting family. They saw each other at school the next day where they both got an ‘A’ for their presentation. It took a while, but Lynn found friends. The year afterwards she ran for Class President and won a resounding victory. Lynn planned to be a painter, and an activist on the side and Peter planned to be a playwright. They both planned to get married. Lynn never stuttered again.

So that’s my tale of heroism. Yeah, maybe Peter didn’t save Lynn from a burning building. Maybe he didn’t stand up to a corrupt state. Maybe he didn’t even snatch her from the clutches of a dragon and ride off with her into the sunset. But Peter helped Lynn find her voice, and for Lynn, that made him hero enough.

                                                                               -The End-