His classmates always teased him about his back-fat and meaty kneecaps. That’s why he avoided the beach during the warm weather. While all the other kids were having after-school swim sessions and enjoying bonfires beneath the stars, he was sitting at a desk in his mom’s spare guest room, working on his dioramas.
Considering his lack of enthusiasm for school work, he constructed the dioramas with a surprising amount of precision and focus. You could see his skill by simply looking at the battlefields, ballrooms, graveyards, castles, and crime scenes sitting on shelves around the walls of the room. But he never got too attached. He’d often break his dioramas apart, pilfering characters from one to make another, sometimes turning sailors into scientists and mob bosses into mimes.
But he was getting bored with that stuff.
Tonight, he was finishing something new; his biggest project yet. It had taken weeks of planning and construction. He built the landscape from sand, shells, beach wood, and sea glass. He painted the ocean midnight blue with hints of grey and glued down clumps of paper to recreate the look of the waves. Finding the materials for each figure was the challenge, and for weeks he found himself rummaging through school trash bins, lockers, and bathrooms gathering everything from band aids to bras to breakfast sandwich wrappers....
But it was all worth it at the end. After laying the final character on her beach blanket, he took a step back to admire his work. In front of him was a sixteen square-foot box complete with sandy beaches, sun bathers, swimmers, a volleyball net, paddle boarders, and a big, blue sea, in the middle of which was a frenzy of sharks devouring the body parts of his least-favorite fellow eighth graders.