SCENE: PENNDEL APT D5. – AFTERNOON

ERIC is sitting in a warm chair, dressed in black, watching YouTube.  His shoes are off.  He is comfortable.  Hearing someone fiddling with the door, he looks up from his laptop.  

Enter SCOTTY, dressed casually in a grey t-shirt.  He has just come in from the snow.  The hem of his pants is damp.  He is panting for breath and carrying a winter coat, a scarf, a Cairn sweatshirt, a diabetic briefcase, and a plastic lightsaber.  His eyes are wild, his face flushed, his hair curled from now-evaporated sweat.

SCOTTY: You’re gonna want to hear this.

ERIC: (bemused) Yeah, it…looks like you’ve been on an adventure.

SCOTTY: I was. (still panting, sets down his items, trying to collect his thoughts)  I was.

ERIC: Let’s hear it.

SCOTTY: So, as you know, I parked my minivan on campus last night.

ERIC: Your, uh, Mercury…

SCOTTY: …Mercury Villager Mini-Van Sport ™ .  1999.  Yes.

ERIC: Hot ride.

SCOTTY: Right.  So today I walked up to campus for lunch.  I only took my medicine and my lightsaber.

ERIC: Why?

SCOTTY: I need to take insulin to eat.  Diabetes, remember?

ERIC: No, why the lightsaber?

SCOTTY: Oh, I figured there would be snow on my van and I don’t have a shovel. Better than using my arm.

ERIC: Gotcha.

SCOTTY: Turns out there wasn’t any snow on it, but there was a considerable wall between the back of the van and the road behind it.

ERIC: Where was this?

SCOTTY: Behind Stillman, to the far right of the dumpster.

ERIC: Okay.

SCOTTY: Adam Green, thank God, is also out there, and he has shovels.  So once he’s done with his car, the two of us start working on mine.  In a couple of minutes, we’ve made a nice, wide path behind the van.  So I get in and begin to back out.

ERIC: Right…

SCOTTY: (pacing about the room) It goes for a bit and then, suddenly, stops.  A bit frustrated, Adam and I resume our shoveling, scraping away some of the more base-level snow around the tires.

ERIC: How long is this story?

SCOTTY: But the car will not move.  The tires continue to spin.  We shovel more, this time bringing out our ice scrapers, chipping any frozen bits we can off the ground.  When  I try to move the car, I smell burning rubber from my front-right tire.

ERIC: What the…?

SCOTTY: AND STILL IT WILL NOT MOVE.  Adam and I return to our knees with a new determination, pulling off our outermost layers to ward off heat exhaustion as we kneel in the snow, hacking at the solid ice with the strength and precision of ancient artisans, banging down on the ice with our shovels like those first ancestors of man.  Asphalt flew up with ice in our fervor, as we nearly broke through to what seems like the earth’s mantle with our four-and-seven-dollar ice scrapers.

ERIC: No lightsaber?

SCOTTY: What? No, I put that in the van.

ERIC: Aww…

SCOTTY: We spent half an hour or more shoveling, scraping, driving, and pushing.  Our arms and lungs grew tired, but we cracked jokes to keep our spirits up, refusing to quit til the van had at last been freed.  

ERIC: And…?

SCOTTY: We eventually got it out of the parking space, but couldn’t drive it any further.  So I got in my van and…called my parents.

ERIC: Ooh.  Rough.

SCOTTY: But then, as I’m talking to my Mom I glance down at the dashboard, and…

ERIC: The parking brake was on.

SCOTTY: Wait, yeah.  It was on the whole dang time.  How did you know?

ERIC: I guessed pretty early on.

SCOTTY: Well.  That’s my story.  That’s it.

ERIC: What’s the moral?

SCOTTY: That, in college, you can go from feeling like a man to feeling like a boy really quickly.

ERIC: Nice.  Want some tea?

SCOTTY: (collapsing on the couch) Please.