Palo Alto: Stories by James Franco Page A

books would still be full, but the old ladies never said anything about it.
    “See you soon, Teddy,” they would say, and I’d tell them that they would. Sometimes when I was sitting on the floor reading, the old ladies would walk by the room. I know they saw me but they never mentioned it. There was a gardenbehind the library; they called it “The Secret Garden.” There were sycamore trees in two rows and wooden benches with rounded cement frames. Sometimes I sat out there to think. But I didn’t know what to think about.
    I didn’t talk to Fred for two weeks. I was a little angry that he had predicted the accident, but more because he had gotten out of the car, and even more because I was embarrassed about everything. One day, he showed up at the library. I was on the floor reading
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
He sat down next to me and I read out loud to him. At the end the caterpillar turned into a butterfly. After that Fred came all the time.
    One day, I started reading him
The Rainbow Goblins
by Ul de Rico. It was my favorite book when I was a kid. It’s about this group of goblins that are each painted a different color of the rainbow and they hunt rainbows because they live off the juice of the rainbows’ colors. The way they do it is they sneak up on the rainbows and they each lasso their designated color and then they drain the colors into their buckets and drink them. There are amazing pictures. Well, the goblins get sloppy and a field of flowers overhears their plans and then all the flowers of the valley conspire with the rainbow and the next day, when the goblins attack the rainbow, it disappears and the lassos spring back at the goblins and they’re trapped in them and then the flowers secrete weird colorful juices, tons of them, and drown the goblins. One thing that was always interesting to me as a kid was that the goblins didn’t wear underwear and when they drowned you could see the blue goblin’s butt.
    While I was reading this to Fred, sometimes my gazewould catch a picture on the far wall. It was an image from
In the Night Kitchen
. Those three laughing bakers had such fat faces. Heavy-hanging cheeks and bulbous noses like genitals. I didn’t want to look, but the picture kept grabbing my eye. Fred lay there with his eyes closed and his mouth open. He was higher than I was.
    At the end of the book the rainbow vows to never touch the earth again.
    “That shit was stupid. That was your favorite book?”
    “Yes.”
    “Faggot,” said Fred. He didn’t open his eyes.
    I looked up and saw those bakers again. They were cooking up the naked boy in a pie. I was happy there with Fred.
    “Those fucking goblins were gay!” he said.
    “Not so loud,” I told him.
    Fred didn’t open his eyes. “They
suck
the juice out of rainbows? Rainbows stand for
faggots
.”
    “Shut up, Fred.”
    “What? They’re
gay
! Rainbows are
gay
!” His eyes were a little open now.
    “So?” I said.
    “So, don’t get all worked up over it. It’s just a fact, you and the Rainbow Goblins are
gay
.”
    “Shut the fuck up, Fred,” I said.
    “What? They’re a bunch of dudes, and they all hang out all the time. That’s all they
did,
hang out together. All those dudes.”
    “So?” I said.
    “And they lived together in a cave.”
    “So?”
    “All in a cave! Gay!
Dirty
and gay,” said Fred. As if he was the cleanest guy.
    “Great fucking point, Fred. I mean, what children’s book character
isn’t
gay?”
    Fred didn’t answer. Then he said, “A lot of them.”
    “Cat in the Hat?” I said. “Gay. The Grinch? Gay. Hungry Caterpillar? He turns into a butterfly, gay!” Now Fred was thinking about it. I continued, “The Runaway Bunny, the bunny in
Goodnight Moon,
the Velveteen Rabbit,
Peter
Rabbit, all gay. All rabbits are gay.”
    “No.”
    “They’re sensitive, but different, but also like boys, but then also not.”
    He thought, and then said, “Yeah, I guess they are.”
    “The little boy who