Short Summary of Nine Stories: "Teddy"
About this book!
An intelligent ten-year old boy named Teddy, curious about the world around him is standing on a-what seems like a very expensive-suitcase looking out a porthole. Teddy is on a ship, traveling home from Europe with his parents and sister after seeing a series of doctors and professors who hear these tapes that Teddy creates. He makes fascinating analogies to things he encounters in everyday life, and unusual descriptions that a ten-year old boy should not be concerned about. For example, when he is looking out the porthole in his room, he sees orange peels being dumped into the ocean. Here he concludes that if he had never seen the orange peels, he would have never known they existed and then compares it to human existence. Later, Teddy leaves his room to go find his sister. After he talks to his sister for a while, he walks over to the main deck and takes a seat in the reserved seats for his family. Then he begins to right in his journal. A young man named Bob Nicholson notices Teddy and walks over to greet him. Then, they have an in-depth conversation that involves Teddy describing some disturbing opinions of his to Nicholson; one that includes him describing his own possible death. Saying that when he goes up to have his swim lesson, there could be no water in the pool-because they are changing the water or something rather-and his sister could sneak up behind him and push him in, causing him to die instantaneously by cracking his skull on the concrete. The conversation ends and they both go separate ways but on Nicholson's way up to the pool deck, he hears a piercing scream that sounds a lot like Teddy's voice. This is the end of the story, leaving us pondering the question, was Teddy correct about his own death or could it have been something else?