TIMMY HAS RETURNED. I love Timmy. Timmy is one of my favorite characters. Getting this one right is gonna be a pain, though.
Timmy and the Fat Man
If Timmy was a grownup, he’d have made the Fat Man meet him in a bar. It wasn’t that Timmy wanted to be old enough to start drinking, because he didn’t. All of the bad memories he had about his parents had the smell of alcohol in them. It wasn’t because Timmy thought that bars were cool, or he was cool, either. Bars were smelly and dark and not cool at all. Timmy was pretty sure he wasn’t cool, but that was okay because he was dangerous, instead. No, the reason Timmy would have picked a bar was because he knew the Fat Man would hate going somewhere like there to talk to somebody like Timmy. That was the idea. He wanted the Fat Man to get right from the start where the two of them stood with each other.
Unfortunately, Timmy was only — maybe thirteen, by now? — so there was no chance of fooling people in the bar into not seeing him. Some things are just too hard, or out of place, to ignore. So Timmy picked the food court at a mall, instead. Nobody ever pays attention to anybody else at the food court. You could even be a kid, meeting an old guy. You just had to talk quietly, not look scared, and not make a scene. Timmy was okay with doing all three, even if it was the Fat Man.