So I went to a park yesterday...

Apparently, as a fansie, I can't go places like that without getting Newsies fic inspiration. I may need help.

Review Responses:

JustVildaPotter: I don't recommend reading about an existential crisis right before bed. It'll give you a crisis of your own, like you said it did. I broke your heart again, you say? Whoops!

Dylan Quagmir: Writing at two a.m. is fun. I stayed up till that time to finish this chapter. Oh good, I'm not alone in my nine-year-old existential crisis! (Figured I'd be alone in the Titanic thing, though.) Welcome to the crazy life of a fansie, and I'm looking forward to those WAN reviews!

I couldn't have written this without the ideas of my fansie group chat, so here's a big thank you to The Magnificent Newsies Pringles.

Hope you guys enjoy!

Elementary Schoolsies

Fall, 1991

Once upon a time, in the great city of New York, there was an elementary school. It was called Roosevelt, after President Franklin Roosevelt. Not to be confused with Roosevelt High School, named after President Teddy Roosevelt. That school was down the street from Roosevelt Elementary. In eight years from the story I will be telling now, the group of children who called themselves "newsies" would be attending that high school.

But at this point in time, they all attended Roosevelt Elementary, even Sean Conlon, who lived in Brooklyn. His parents, for some reason, decided to send him to an elementary school that was a three-hour walk away from where they lived. For the sake of this story, I'll just say it was because they both worked in Manhattan, and could more easily drop Sean off at school there.

Sean was nine, which could be considered old for third grade, but there also happened to be nine-year-olds in fifth grade occasionally, so we aren't going to dwell on that. In Sean's class were several other boys around his age: SJ, Thomas, Michael and Isaac (better known as Mike and Ike), and a guy named Francis who preferred to be called Jack.

Jack had more friends than one might consider healthy, and the group ranged from a five-year-old kindergartener to Sean himself (he was the oldest). But Jack's best friend by far was Charlie, a first grader. Close seconds were Tony and Annie, from the second and first grades, respectively.

Conveniently, Jack and all of his friends happened to have recess at the same time, so they would all meet up and cause the most chaos imaginable in the time allotted. Within this large group were multiple pairs, trios, and sometimes quartets of different people. When they weren't all wreaking havoc together, these groups would split up and scatter around the playground.

One such group was Patrick and Teresa, who were in second grade with Tony. They were practically inseparable from one another. Their friendship began one day during Show and Tell in their class. Patrick's dad was obsessed with all things history, and he had given his son a copy of a comic from the 1930s, called Terry and the Pirates, for that week's Show and Tell. Teresa thought this comic was highly intriguing, so that day at recess, she summoned Patrick over to her when she commandeered the pirate ship-shaped playset. She wanted to play pirates, and because the main character in the comic was called Terry, she was going to be him. But she needed a first mate. Patrick quickly realized how perfect he would be for the role, because there happened to be another character in the comic with the name Pat. He eagerly accepted her proposition, and the pair of them sailed the high seas of gravel together for every recess afterwards.

Close to the pirate ship was a swingset, and it was here that Annie ruled. She was queen of the swingset. No one dared to set foot on her turf, unless they had snacks to give her. One couldn't swing unless they paid Annie with snacks. Teresa was the only exception to this rule. Annie let her swing as much as she wanted, gratis. The reason for this was simple: Annie was in love with Terry. Eventually, Teresa realized this, and the two of them got married in the middle of a block castle war. But more on that later.

Tony, Jack's best friend from the second grade, had a best friend of his own, named Albert. Those two liked to hang around the merry-go-round and spin as fast as they could, in more and more circles until they either fell off or, in Tony's case, threw up and got told by the teachers to stop using the merry-go-round. Those two always had a blast together, although sometimes, Tony would abandon Albert to stalk Sean.

You see, Sean had crowned himself king of the biggest playset on the playground, and absolutely no one else was allowed on it when he was there. But Tony managed to annoy Sean enough to convince him to let him on the playset, after a while. To this day, nobody knows exactly how he did that.

In the flatter part of the playground, where the sand and gravel slowly faded into grass, other random games occurred. Jack had one of those toy sticks with a horse's head at the top, along with a little cowboy hat, and he was very proud of these possessions. It was not uncommon for Jack to refuse to play any game other than "Wild West". To Jack, the wild west was Santa Fe, New Mexico. Most people didn't bother trying to correct him.

One boy, however, did. His name was David Jacobs. He tried to tell Jack multiple times that Santa Fe was in the Southwest part of the country. Jack didn't give a crap about this second grader spewing facts about geography and rattlesnakes. He was too busy imagining he was riding a Palomino and enthusiastically shouting "Yeehaw!" every five seconds. Charlie joined him for this, when he wasn't too invested in playing House.

David really enjoyed playing House. He insisted upon being the "father", and would force Katherine, a fifth grade girl Jack liked to follow around, to play the "mother". Katherine didn't enjoy this very much, until she realized that she could sneakily take control of the imaginary household. Games with her had a tendency to get intense. It was nice of David to put up with her intensity, because Katherine's only other friends, Bill and Darcy, went to a private school in a different neighborhood.

The only other people willing to take part in David and Katherine's game were Charlie and another first grader named Elmer. They were tasked to be the "children", although Charlie didn't care for this. He preferred to play as a cat. It didn't matter what game they were playing; he always wanted to be a cat. As a result, Jack's cowboy was liable to come across a random cat in the imaginary desert, and said cat was quite adept at shouting "Yeehaw!" with much feeling.

The grassy area nearby was where a pair of boys named Nick and Louis spent most of their time. Louis didn't have adequate eyesight like the others did, so the teachers always assigned one other student (usually Nick) to keep him company while the others played. An hour of sitting in grass looked boring to everyone else, but Nick didn't think so. He taught Louis how to make daisy chains, and they had a grand old time.

When they weren't too busy picking flowers together, Nick and Louis would join another kid (Benji) in creating songs and dances that would later be performed for the teachers. If his companions were too absorbed in each other to perform with him, Benji would rally their other good friend Jojo, request that chalk be brought out to the little patch of sidewalk alongside the school, then hold a hopscotch competition. Both Jojo and Benji were equally good, so who won the competition varied based on the day.

As soon as Jack saw a hopscotch battle going on, he would rush over to the sidewalk too. But not for the competition. He was more interested in the chalk. Jack was known around the school for making the snazziest chalk drawings on this side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Occasionally, Charlie joined the artist too, but was quick to get bored of chalk art, as he couldn't work pretending to be a cat into it.

Albert was forced to be a loner half the time when Tony was absorbed in following Sean. If this abandonment made him feel frustrated, he would take it out on the other kids, by stealing the toys they brought from home. Mostly, he stole toys from Tony, which would result in him chasing Albert around the playground, screaming "Hey, that's my [whatever had been stolen that day]!" loudly enough to get a teacher's attention. Other days, Albert would pay the appropriate fees to use Annie's swings. He would then swing forward and jump off, over and over and over. He was not allowed to swing ever again after doing this caused him to lose a tooth, and he and Tony skipped a whole entire class because they were looking for it.

Thankfully, most of the children weren't as problematic as Albert. Thomas was a monkey bar champion, and frequently wowed the others with his skills. Everyone was afraid to challenge Thomas. The twins tried, once, but quickly failed and went to play in the sandbox instead. They built castles for a while until Ike had the bright idea to bury Mike in sand up to his neck.

This didn't end well. Mike choked on sand, and Ike panicked, flailed around, and accidentally threw sand into his own eyes. Neither of them were good in a crisis.

Annie and Teresa, if they got bored of their usual games, would retreat to the little play kitchen and see how long it took them to flip the toy pancakes and get them to land in the pan. They didn't do this often, though, because Henry was usually in the kitchen. He had a fondness for food, and amused himself by making mud pies (sometimes with help from Elmer). Each day, he would make more mud pies and other dirt food items, then store those under the biggest slide at the end of recess. Once Henry gathered enough mud pies, he was going to open a restaurant, just like the one his parents owned, and he would be known as the best chef in the entire world.

If Tony had Sean distracted enough, SJ would take a chance and sneak into a secluded corner of the biggest playset (the one Sean ruled). SJ didn't care for running around and being hyper with the others; he just wanted to read his books. For this reason, he was quiet enough for Sean not to notice SJ reading on his turf until right before it was time to go back inside and there was no point in dramatically kicking him out of the playset, since they would both have lessons to get back to anyway.

On the days Katherine's fifth grade class didn't have recess at the same time as the others, David stayed inside to organize pens and any other mess that had been left behind by his classmates.

There was no reason for him to be doing this. The teacher appreciated it, but the second the bell rang, Tony would come rushing in and destroy all the newly organized materials. Even David should have expected this to happen because he shared a table with Tony, and the difference between their two sides was apparent to anyone with eyes. Each student got their own little plastic tote to keep supplies in, and while David kept his strictly organized (a place for everything and everything in its place), Tony's stuff was more likely to be found all over the classroom floor. On a good day his tote would still contain one pen, but that pen never worked.

Romeo was the only kindergartener in the group, and being such a young, small child, he was forced to do something to draw attention to himself. This thing was flirting with anyone and everyone within a five mile radius. He got his skills from the people on television. In a few years, his main line would be an attractive head nod, accompanied by the phrase "How you doin'?", but Friends didn't yet exist back when he was five, so he couldn't have had that skill. Not that using that line would've helped. No one could put up with Romeo's flirting other than SJ, who was always immersed in a book and barely paying attention to the antics.

On rainy days, the recesstime chaos occurred inside the school rather than outside it. The newsies would be forced to gather in the gym and find other things to do now that they had no playsets to control.

Mike and Ike always dressed exactly alike, and when they were stuck inside they'd go wander in circles, pretending to be each other. Far too often, they managed to convince teachers that Mike was Ike and Ike was Mike. It was honestly concerning. If for some reason neither twin felt like confusing other people, they would go to the corner of the gym that had a collection of toys. Mike loved these little plastic chain links, and devoted his life to making the longest chain possible with them. At the conclusion of this project, Ike would pop up to completely destroy the chain, and Mike would have to start over.

Annie got bored when they had to stay inside, so she would let Teresa play with her hair, which was long back then. Teresa was excellent at controlling hair; her mother had taught her how to braid, and she used this skill on Annie whenever she got the chance. Jack saw this braiding going on one day and decided he wanted to learn to do "whateva' Terry's doing to Annie's hair."

So Teresa tried to teach him. She failed. Jack was horrible at braiding. Tony, however, picked up the skill like it was nothing. He ended up teaching Patrick how to braid too, which came in handy later when Pat and Terry "dated" for one day.

David wasn't allowed to hide out in the classroom on the days the gym had to be used for recess, so he spent time in the toy corner as well. He had an obsession with the dinosaur toys. SJ did too, and together they would turn the floor around them into a Jurassic world. Jack liked to stand over them and scoff at their nerdiness, but they managed to scare him off by spouting facts.

Louis considered himself more grown up than the others, so he took full possession of the play phone. Only Nick was allowed to use it. No one else. Not even Albert, who would insist he had an emergency and needed to call the cops.

Really, the cops should have been called on him. He was stealing Charlie's cute colorful stationery that everyone else was jealous of, and the cat and cowboy detectives had yet to crack the case.

Sean was always one of two places on the indoor days: playing four-square, basketball, or some other organized sport, or building himself a block castle. He enjoyed being king of his castle. But Tony wanted to be king too, and Sean never let him in on the small castle, claiming it was only big enough for one ruler. It wasn't long before Tony had had enough of that treatment and decided to take matters into his own hands by building a block castle of his own. He even went so far as to declare that his castle was better than Sean's.

This started a war.

Everyone else was quick to take sides, except for David. He was only seven, but he was already done with the others' shit.

Despite having no castle of her own, Annie started a third party in Tony and Sean's war. Only Teresa joined her side. They built their own castle out of rubble from the other two, and Annie crowned Teresa queen to rule by her side. To make this extra official, she decided that she and Terry would need to be married. Teresa quickly dumped Patrick, then forced him to marry her and Annie, which he was understandably upset about, though he claimed it was only because there was a war going on and it was stupid to be concerned about marriage. Soon after, Pat was killed in the crossfire.

The battles in this war were as ugly as they could be. Each side threw balls at the opposing castle to try and knock it down. To the teachers, the sounds of blocks falling on linoleum were loud enough to be actual bombs, and the addition of screaming children didn't make things better.

You can imagine how delighted those teachers were on the days it didn't rain.

Remember Henry's restaurant under the slide? On top of that was Jojo's place. They would sit up there every single day. They loved their slide, and the slide loved them back. It was incredibly romantic. Romeo should have been nearby, taking notes. But he was too busy stealing Teresa's hair clips and putting them into his own hair.

Like all great romances, Jojo's time with the slide ended tragically. Albert the savage child came along and pushed them down one day when they were just chilling. Then he took the seat on top of the slide and refused to give Jojo their place back for the rest of the day. He was forced to give it up later, but to Patrick and Teresa rather than Jojo. Albert might as well have kept sitting, since Terry and Pat argued for so long over who got to go down the slide first. Patrick was sure he was going to win with his argument of being eleven days older, until Teresa hit him with the always effective "ladies first" rule. He was annoyed, but let her have her way, and complained about it for hours.

Jack also had his own place. He was the only one brave enough to climb to the top of the jungle gym, so he dubbed the spot at the tippy-top his "penthouse". No one else dared enter, except for Charlie one time, which ended in injury. Charlie wasn't able to climb up with his bad leg, and while he knew this he tried to climb anyway. But he fell off. Right onto his back, and the wind got knocked out of him. (Terrifying for a little kid.) The teacher came running, arrived at the scene to find Charlie on the ground, gasping for air and bawling, with Jack in his penthouse as the only witness. They sent Jack to time-out after that for supposedly picking on a younger student. The school liked to call the time-out desk the "Safe Seat", where kids were expected to believe they weren't in trouble. Jack didn't feel remotely safe in that chair. He just felt awful about Charlie getting injured, with a slight tinge of publicly humiliated on the side, as all of his classmates knew he was in trouble for something when they say him in that chair.

Oscar Delancey especially made a point of teasing Jack for being in trouble. Never mind that he got put in time-out nearly every other day. The other kids didn't talk back to Oscar, not ever, because he had an older brother in middle school that was twice as mean and scary. If anyone didn't do what Oscar wanted them to, they would face Morris' rath, and nobody wanted that.

The punishment of Jack was quickly forgotten the next day, when a lice outbreak started. Teresa's hair clips had somehow gotten passed to Benji, and they were known for outbreaks ever since the cooties epidemic a few weeks before. It wasn't Benji's fault everyone had taken the game way too seriously. No one had touched anyone else for a week until Nick and Louis got everyone to stop being afraid by kissing each other, because (as they said) cooties spread from boys to girls and vice versa, so it wouldn't know what to do if two boys came into contact. That wasn't just solid logic, it was science too, because their experiment had worked.

The lice led to the eventual end of Annie's long hair. After catching the bugs, she realized how unpleasant life was when one had shoulder-length hair, and decided it had to go.

Tony helped with this on another indoor recess day. He'd brought safety scissors from art class into the gym with him (not intentionally, he had left them in his pocket) and started messing around with them in boredom. It just so happened that he was sitting behind Annie, whose hair was loose and just waiting to be snipped. So Tony reached his scissors forward and did exactly that.

Teresa noticed him doing it a second too late, and screamed in horror. But Annie, after feeling the back of her head for herself, said she liked the new haircut. She, Jack, and Tony spent the rest of that break perfecting her new style.

The teachers were as shocked as Teresa had been, but Annie reassured everyone by insisting "I like it."

Back to the saga of the slide now. There came a day when the big slide was deemed too old to be safe and had to be torn down. Jojo was emotionally wrecked. They didn't get enough time to say goodbye to the slide before losing it, and it was all their teacher's fault. They had convinced Jojo to give other people a turn on the slide, and even though they were mad about having to do it, Jojo had willingly shared the slide. And then the school had had the audacity to come along and destroy it!

Henry was upset too. Losing the slide meant the end of his mud pie restaurant. He was going to be sleeping on the streets. Jojo didn't sympathize with him; instead they pointed out that Henry already slept on the street, because his mud pies sucked. Harsh words.

Benji tried to cheer up the pair of them by proposing they all go and sneak a turn on Annie's swings (she wasn't nearby for some reason). Neither Jojo nor Henry liked this idea, so Benji went alone, and ended up having to pay Annie double the usual amount of snacks for illegal swinging.

That pair kept on being upset and frustrated until a new slide was built, this time with two slides instead of one. The new addition solved all their problems. Mostly Jojo's of course, because they could now alternate which slide they sat on each day.

Henry's restaurant was unfortunately gone forever.

Thomas the monkey bar champion grew lonely after a long while of having no challengers. Even his stuffed dog was starting to be an unacceptable companion. And that was when Thomas met Sarah. She appeared out of nowhere, as if he'd been too unobservant to notice her before.

This was exactly the case. She was in his grade, and happened to be David's sister. But Thomas (being unobservant) didn't know anything about this. He just saw a new friend prospect when she showed up at his monkey bars, stuffed cat in hand, and started rambling about her extensive collection of stuffed animals. Thomas had one of those too. If there was one thing he knew about, it was stuffed animals. And if there were two things he knew about, the other one was monkey bars. He asked to train Sarah in the ways of epic monkey bar skills. She agreed, on one condition: Thomas would date her.

Thomas was not a fan of that idea. Not at all. He quickly declined, and Sarah pouted. She no longer wanted to be taught the ways of epic monkey bar skills.

Katherine, luckily, was there to comfort Sarah. They sat together and glared at Thomas from a distance, while quietly agreeing that boys were stupid.

David also confronted Thomas for breaking up with his sister. He shouted a great deal of big words, many of which Thomas wasn't sure were real, like "unauspicious".

This confused Thomas. He had only wanted a friend.

On Friday afternoons, the older grades were given time to mix with the younger grades. They were supposed to bring books and read together, but sometimes they did other things.

Sean, for one, taught the little kids Italian swear words. Jack and Tony joined in, adding their fair share of Irish naughtiness. This upset Elmer, to the point where he started rambling in Polish about how blasphemous those words were. But nobody understood anything he said.

SJ tried to occupy Elmer by bringing out Legos. This quickly backfired, for Tony had bitten all the Lego pieces. Disgusting. Tony's actions were reported to the teacher immediately (by Elmer), but they didn't send him to the "Safe Seat". Oscar was already there.

After Jack got tired of teaching bad words to children younger than himself, he found Charlie and they drew some pictures together. The teachers were soon provided with enough drawings to fill the entire bulletin board. To stop the children from making them artwork as gifts, one of the teachers suggested that Jack and Charlie read the book Charlie had brought.

Both boys thought this was an amazing idea, because Charlie's book was the same one he always brought, The Complete Tales of Winnie the Pooh. Every Friday, Jack would read a chapter of that book to Charlie. His character voices were on point, and he had perfected a fake British accent.

Jack was capable of doing all the voices on his own, but today he wanted something a little different. On occasion, Charlie would voice Piglet while he read for Pooh, and they would go back and forth, reading together. He wanted that this time, but on a larger scale, so Jack elected several of his friends to come and voice the other characters. Charlie was a major part of the extravaganza too, of course, so he got to weigh in on each and every decision. They ended up with a cast list of Crutchie as Piglet (a must-have), Jack as Pooh and Eeyore (his Eeyore voice just couldn't be matched), Tony as Tigger (he was perfect), Annie as Roo (she had wanted to be Tigger), Katherine as Kanga (Jack forced her), David as Owl (Katherine forced him), SJ as Christopher Robin (his fake British accent was even better than Jack's), and Jojo as Rabbit.

No one was quite sure why Jojo had ended up as Rabbit. They had just wanted to be part of it and Rabbit was the only character left for them. David had been going to take that role as well, but he gladly gave it over to Jojo.

With that, the reading commenced, and everyone else gradually gathered round to listen in.

Except Patrick. He was outside, stuck in a tree. He'd been banned from climbing trees since the last time he got stuck. That time, Nick had tried to come to his rescue. But Nick was not good at tree-climbing and had gotten stuck as well. After that, Patrick had promised he wouldn't climb anymore trees, but then Louis had dared him to climb another.

Now he was stuck again.

It was not going to be the first time Roosevelt Elementary put in a call to the fire department.

Woot woot! Newsies in elementary school!

If you want to see me do more of this type of short story, let me know in a review. Otherwise, just tell me what you thought, if it's not too much trouble.

See youse next time!