“What’s that?” Wells had asked in his rather stiff, and proper English accent.
Jules had looked up, his mouth quite stuffed with pastry, with topping oozing around the corners of his lips and said profoundly. “Mmmph?”
Wells had broken into laughter. Jules had thought he was making fun of him and was ready to jump up and stuff the pastry between Wells’ ears, until Wells flopped down beside him, and offered a different sort of pastry made of whole ground wheat and topped with raspberries.
Jules eyes bugged out. “You have raspberries?” He asked, his pastry spitting out as he tried to talk and swallow at the same time.
Wells nodded his head, then did a remarkable thing. He split the pastry in two and offered Jules half. And that did it. Their friendship was sealed in gold. And never to be broken.
Jules accepted the offering, setting his own pastry aside to savor the raspberries, eating each one as if they were the last his lips would ever touch. When he had finished those, he nibbled at the pastry proper, relishing the deep brown sugar that was thickly addressed to its sides with his tongue, and then gulping it down before it could melt away.
In between their snacks the two boys covertly examined each other. Jules noted that Wells had a kind of dark look to him, besides the obvious hair color. It was like he was a storm waiting to happen. Later on, Jules would remember that first insight when Wells burst into one of his famous tempers. But Wells was not an unjust person. His anger was not generally reserved for the innocent, but rather those things he couldn’t change, or those things he wanted to change, but hadn’t found a way to yet. He, just like Jules, loved writing. He had read all the eclective literature of his time from Asimov, Heinlein, Disney, Pixar and the late, but great Lucas and Spielberg, one of the finest writing teams on the planet that ever lived.
There wasn’t a child alive who hadn’t read one of the team’s super stories about beings from other worlds and wars between distant galaxies.
In fact it was those two that had urge Wells to pursue his own story “War of the Worlds,” about the Atlanteans and Lemurians who had demolished each other and ruined most of the planet in their efforts to conquer the other.
He had described the Atlanteans as giants with a third eye in the middle of their forehead, and the Lemurians as winged creatures that resembled humans, but had foul temper and no love of life whatsoever, even going so far as to eat their own kind when annoyed with them.
That had set his mother in fits of terror after reading it. “People eating people.” Oh, Wells, that’s just horrible! No civilized being would ever do such a thing.”
