January Boy, Part 15

January Boy, Part 15

Setting: Franky Jones’ Igloo
Date: January 1st, 2000 (Pretty big and notable time jump here)
Time: 12:31 PM PST

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“Happy birthday to me…. happy birthday to me… happy birthday, dear Franky!... Happy birthday to me……”
Franky strummed a long chord on his guitar, then took a deep breath and pretended to blow out the nonexistent candle (which was actually a plastic fork) atop the blue-frosted cupcake sitting at his flippers.
“Woohoo!” He tried to get himself hyped-up for the occasion. He should have been, right? It was his ninth birthday, after all, and he was used to doing things alone. Still, he felt like something was missing, and he knew what it was-- a candle.
He pulled the fork out of the top of the cupcake and licked all of the frosting off it. The cupcake was delicious, and had come fresh from the Coffee Shop just that morning. With the amount of money he was making, he had scraped up the coins to buy the cupcake, and a few other things as well. His once-humble and bare igloo had become his official home. There was a small bed and a dresser full of miscellaneous articles of clothing, along with a place to put his rations of food. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a table, couch, or any of the other items his family’s igloo had included. Those were old luxuries that he no longer had access too. But he didn’t mind-- he had a blanket on his bed, food to eat, his guitar, and a way of getting by.
He took the wrapping off of the cupcake and bit into its chocolate-vanilla marbled center. At the taste, he closed his eyes and smiled. Desserts had been a new thing ever since he set out on his own two years ago-- and he loved them. Chocolate, he had decided, was his favorite food of all time, and always would be. He had even written a song about chocolate once. It calmed his mind and soothed his soul. That had been the first line of the chorus.
“I’m tired,” he said out loud abruptly, even though he had gotten a perfectly good night’s sleep before and had no reason to be. Maybe it was just the season getting to him. It was snowing hard outside and the winter was in its full effect.
“I am nine,” he said to himself and his guitar. “And I don’t feel any different.”
“Should I feel different?” He paused, then shrugged and strummed a loud chord. “Nananananaaaaaa!” he sang loudly, smiling to himself, then taking another bite of the cupcake. The blue frosting lodged itself all over the front of his beak, and he rolled his eyes. “Great. What do I do now?”
His tongue couldn’t reach it. He would have to wipe it off.
He reached for the napkin that the Coffee Shop employee had given him earlier that day when he had purchased the cupcake, then wiped the blue off of his beak and smiled contently. Little did he know that there was still a rather large, circular blue stain there. But Franky didn’t care, whether he knew about the frosting stain or not. The mere fact that the frosting was even present was a great thing to him, and he was determined to enjoy his cupcake, not worry about his messy beak.
The igloo was even warm, which was certainly an upgrade. He found that, if he tried hard enough, his will power would make him feel warmer than he actually was. He had determined that this was his home now, so he would make it the best that he possibly could.
He wasn’t sure what a nine-year-old boy who couldn’t and didn’t want to go to school but was much too young for a job should be doing with his life. His days were structured in a steady routine which repeated each morning-- he would get up, eat something for breakfast, then play his guitar in his igloo for awhile before setting out to the streets to play for other penguins. Some days were better than others. If the weather was nice, it was a pleasant affair, but sometimes he wasn’t so lucky and there weren’t as many penguins to watch him. Either way, he usually ended up with a decent amount of coins at the end of the day, and would use them to buy food from the Coffee Shop or the Gift Shop to make his dinner. The nighttime was his time to write songs, and he embraced it wholeheartedly-- he had even acquired a book on how to read and write music. He had very little knowledge on how to read books, signs, or anything else with regular words on it, but he was very good at writing music. He had a large stack of music in his igloo, and next to his guitar and Joey’s baseball cap, it was his most prized possession.
Today was his day off from singing, because it was his birthday, it was New Year’s Day, and it was snowing. Nobody would be outside and wanting to listen to some little kid sing in this kind of weather. He had taken most of the past week off, because he found that with snow came conditions in which his guitar would quickly go out of tune. He would have to tune it every few minutes in order to keep a steady tone going, and that was just a nuisance. Inside his igloo, though, where it was less cold and the strings were less stiff, it only needed tuning every hour or so that he played.

“Okay, Franky,” he said to himself, rising and taking a breath. The cupcake in one flipper and his guitar in the other, he waddled to his bed, pulled a blanket off of it, and wrapped it around himself. “Let’s… I don’t know.” He sighed. “I’m bored.”
“I know!” He shoved the rest of the cupcake into his beak quickly, then had difficulty swallowing and regretted the decision. When he was finally able to swallow, he took another breath and then swung his guitar over his shoulder and into playing position. “I’ll pretend that I’m playing a… birthday concert!”
“Yeah!” He nodded. Talking to himself had become a habit of his. He wasn’t sure if it was normal or not, but he didn’t care because nobody could hear him when he did it.
“Okay.” He started strumming a tune that he had never played before. “I guess we’ll just see how it goes.”
He jumped around his dark igloo and pretended that he was being watched by hundreds of penguins who had come just for him. He dreamed of this when he was playing for his small crowds in the Lighthouse or Town Center. Sometimes he would actually dream of it, late at night when he was trying to sleep and preoccupied with other thoughts.
He had a dream and he wanted to do it.
So do it, he would.

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