BOIL BOY

By Brandon Fitzgerald

9/2/2022

Professor Oodles

WRIT-101

Please review the proper MLA formatting guide  that I handed out alongside the syllabus. Include the name of the university. “Professor” is a common mistake, next time you can address assignments to Fr. Frank Oodles.

I didn’t really want to take this class no offence but after reading past student’s intro essays I am relieved, it seems interesting. But, I didn’t really know what to write for this essay. I know it’s “free writing” and so grammar mistakes are going to not get corrected this time around, but I also have a lack of creativity, don’t expect to be blown away. My life is not very interesting. I’m a lobster from Maine. Typical right. So for the prompt I’m going to tell you something that happened you probably saw on the news. My side of it anyway since you said this is private.

 To give some background, mom is a lobster, like me. I inherited her taxosome so I’m 100% lobster but if I marry another lobster I still might 25% have a mammal kid because my dad is a horse. They were married a long time before they had me, first they had my sister Clara who lives with them still, she’s 38 but she was born a Hybrid so she can’t have kids and has some emotional and physical issues because of that. She isn’t.

Problematic word choice here, discuss with me?

Right before the school year ended I got sick. You’re a poodle so you might not know this (no offence) ???  but when we get sick, we get pockmarks and black marks on our carapace. It’s not bright blue like rolypolys Isopods but it turns heads and that’s negative attention. I went to Seaside Academy k-12 (you probably already guessed what the twist of my story is from the name alone.) If you’re there, and you’re a lobster, even though the school was founded by lobsters, you’ve got to earn some respect. There’s a stereotype that crustaceans get sick all the time. It’s not true. But you’re gonna wanna go home when you are sick people think you look and smell diseased and only this year are people making #FreeMolting a social issue. But it’s gross so most sensible arthropods just stay at home or remote learn for that stuff yea even before the pandemic.

So I’m staying at home on Friday when I hear Clara yelling at the TV but she does that a lot at the news. Only until I hear “Ohhhhh God! Brandon, get in here! That’s your school!?!?!?” Before I can say anything to her she wheels back to the screen and crosses her bigger claw over her heart and goes “Please don’t be an arthropod… Please don’t be an arthropod… Please just be a mammal….” I have no clue what she’s talking about until I look at the screen.

First some background on the school. If you’ve ever spent time in Maine you know it’s a pristigius institution and very high class. Being a crustacean is not actually so hard but it can feel difficult. you don’t really fit on land or in water. well, you do, but you’re ecologically fit for it, but the infostructure doesn’t really allow for it. Us anthro crustaceans have two large arms with claws. Being part  of the order arthropoda, we also have smaller arms leading in fingery nimble hands on their abdomen that’s what I’m typing with right now. every shirt has to be either custom-tailored or bought from a crustacean-owned business. a lot of people thought i was poor growing up. I always correct them. “How can I be poor if I go here? I’m not even on a scholarship.”

 I said that like it was a clever.  Like being on a scholarship to a private academy is embarrassing. I don’t really think that now. I guess I never did seriously but i didn’t want anyone to think my family was another poor Lobster family with a billion hybrid kids like every other Crustacean  So yeah I was one of the kids who joked around and clowned on the scholarship kids. i don’t think my friends were real jerks about it either it was just something to do. We all had to wear uniforms with short shorts and bowties even in high school so we were just pretty mad about it I guess.

It’s big of you to admit this.

There was one other boy in my grade like me - crustacean I mean he was a crab. His name was Corkan but everyone called him Corky. I think his mom and dad were both King crabs but he was an Alaskan crab or something which can happen genetically but you know people like to gossip if they notice that stuff. He was on a scholarship and he transferred in around sixth grade.

Oh…

He was a real pain in the ass but we played lacrosse sometimes but he quit the team because he was so self conscious in the locker room. He said everyone bullied him but any teasing we did was basically during class because he was always writing weird stuff in his journal and making scary eye contact. But one time in the locker room, my friend Con (who is a Clydesdale) thought Corky was looking at his private area so he shoved Corky hard as he could into the shower and turned on the water burning hot and blasted him with water while he was naked. It was funny until Con started saying stuff like “Boil the crab boil the crab boil the crab”

The thing is, before that, Corky was annoying but pretty nice. He always tried to talk to my girlfriend who was also a lobster but it didn’t weird me out, maybe he just was trying to make friends, I kind of assumed he was LGBT or something or anyways harmless. After the shower thing he didn’t talk to anyone at all and started missing school a lot. it only lasted a few seconds and I’m still friends with Con who’s a nice guy when you get to know him but i can admit it was messed up. But he told and nothing happened. The principal had all of us go into his office and made us apologize for bullying him and him apologizing for staring at Con’s junk.  

He kept doing weird stuff like he would sit in the back and take the razor out of a pencil sharpener with his lower arms. Then he would take the razor and like, whittle his carapace down little by little, like tiny pencil shaving size, off the tip of his big claws. Nobody really cared I guess they all thought it was a nervous tic like biting nails or something but as a lobster let me tell you I knew that had to hurt. I will never forget whenever he made eye contact with me while doing that. I feel stupid. Like maybe he was trying to tell me something?

thought we were in the clear.  Except earlier that year senior year halfway through the year on a Monday he came to school red. Like the color Red. Bright red. Like he bleached his shell and dyed it bright, raw red. But it was less, like, he has been whittling his shell down to be raw, and red. Maybe he thought he looked cool but literally everyone in the school just started calling Corky “Boil Boy” from that day on, even me and my girlfriend and the other arthropoda.

You teach history too so you’ll know that before the Anthropocene, when everyone was the same species and hated each other for reasons we don’t even have today, the animals we ate were different too. Instead of geoclams or skitterlings for instance we ate feral lobster. And you’d eat it by boiling it alive and it would scream and froth and you’d hit it with your wooden or like pewter colonial kitchen spoon until it shuts up i guess. Especially in Maine. And even here in Maryland  the pre-Anthropocene American humans used to eat crabs all the time. I’m not offended by it I see the crab stuff all over.

By the way I disagree with what you brought up in the lecture last class about how you think centuries old biases carried over into the modern day. It can be so annoying growing up as a former cuisine animal in the old world but nobody my age cares or even remembers who was what before all that since it happened in 1990. My family has been in America for generations. We were Irish. I know right before the Anthropocene, some humans hated the Irish. But everyone turned into some other species, if all the Irish turned into lobsters that would be weird. But my mom’s family was Irish, my dad still talks about being Irish, and he’s a horse. I think we need to move past old bigotries. God gave us a chance to bury the hatchet. It goes both ways. Corky only snipped mammals, so maybe he was speciesist too just like some people were saying.

But like I was saying.  Clara and I watched TV for the next 2 hours, the news anchor was saying that a P.E. teacher got mutilated and killed and left in the middle of the big field out back but they didn’t say how. Then they were saying how someone was running around “snipping off” body parts. My sister kept doing this weird annoying chant about please don’t be an arthropod, crustacean, please be a mammal. I didn’t get that and it honestly weirded me out like, who cares, people are dying, she is way too online to care about how it looks. But also it was freaking me out because I already had a bad feeling I knew who it was. “We can confirm the suspect who was apprehended was Corkan Murphy…” I usually play it cool in crazy situations but I was freaking out. I cried for the first time in years i didn’t even know what was going on but i was crying so hard and praying to God with my whole family.

All the headlines were like “Lone Clawman Terrorizes School With Natural Weapons.” “Crab Boy Kills P.E. Teacher, Mutilates 3 Others” “Hero cop harpoons killer crab”. I will be real with you seeing that stuff made me want to puke sometimes. I did the rest of the year from home actually anyways because the pandemic happened, it was kind of good timing because the entire school was grieving. My favorite English teacher lost an arm and a janitor lost his snout. I told Clara it proves gun control doesn’t do anything because each animal has their own natural weapon and maybe if he saw the counselor some more times. He was actually a good lacrosse player even if he was weird and he seemed to get along with the coach for a while too, I didn’t know why he felt the need to cut him up like that. I never really know how to end these things but yea that was the worst couple weeks of my life I think, and I felt worse to see everyone joking about it, I feel like maybe I could have been Corky’s friend if he didn’t do it, maybe we could’ve laughed about being boiled at a high school reunion. He was smart. He could’ve made a lot of money.

89/100

Brandon, this is a harrowing and valuable experience. I get the feeling you have a lot more to say on the subject but you’re holding back, or giving exposition to hit the word minimum. That being said, I am so sorry you went through such a trauma. You need to work on formatting and conforming to the tone of college-level writing, creative or otherwise. Please see me during office hours. I believe with a little direction, you could be getting all A’s this semester. 😊