Welles shouted with laughter, but was sober again as he realized the implications back of that thoughtfulness.
“You’re just like an explorer living among savages,” said the psychiatrist. “You have studied the savages carefully and tried to imitate them so they won’t know there are differences.”
“Something like that,” acknowledged Tim.
“That’s why your stories are so human,” said Welles. “That one about the awful little girl—”
They both chuckled.
“Yes, that was my first story,” said Tim. “I was almost eight, and there was a boy in my class who had a brother, and the boy next door was the other one, the one who was picked on.”
“How much of the story was true?”
“The first part. I used to see, when I went over there, how that girl picked on Bill’s brother’s friend, Steve. She wanted to play with Steve all the time herself and whenever he had boys over, she’d do something awful. And Steve’s folks were like I said—they wouldn’t let Steve do anything to a girl. When she threw all the watermelon rinds over the fence into his yard, he just had to pick them all up and say nothing back; and she’d laugh at him over the fence. She got him blamed for things he never did, and when he had work to do in the yard she’d hang out of her window and scream at him and make fun. I thought first, what made her act like that, and then I made up a way for him to get even with her, and wrote it out the way it might have happened.”
“Didn’t you pass the idea on to Steve and let him try it?”
“Gosh, no! I was only a little boy. Kids seven don’t give ideas to kids ten. That’s the first thing I had to learn—to be always the one that kept quiet, especially if there was any older boy or girl around, even only a year or two older. I had to learn to look blank and let my mouth hang open and say, ‘I don’t get it,’ to almost everything.”