By Ross D. Willard
Nap Time New Never News
There was a time when Van had it all. A star athlete dating the most popular girl in school, he had a loving and wealthy family, and his future was all but guaranteed. These days Van is working a minimum wage job and sleeping at the local Y.
What happened? Just a few sips of alcohol. Oh, and about a hundred years.
According to Rip V. Winkle, Van to his friends, it was a normal, boring day, the kind of unremarkable time that wouldn’t have even garnered a note in his journal, if he hadn’t decided to take a shortcut home after school.
Everyone in New Neverland knows there are certain places you just don’t go after dark. Or just before dark. Or during the middle of the day. Well, back a hundred years ago, people didn’t know it quite as well. Van was looking for a way to shave a few minutes off his commute home. What he found was a bowling alley under a hill, a bunch of strange old men, and a few sips of alcohol that knocked him off his feet and kept him there for about a century.
Needless to say, Van’s girlfriend didn’t wait ten decades for him to show back up. His family ended up selling most of his stuff to get through the great depression. Oh, and that highschool diploma he was a few short months from getting isn’t going to be quite so easy to come by.
“Never mind how well he remembers it all,” a school official explained, “the simple fact is that a significant portion of what he learned in school is now obsolete. The math might be pretty much the same, but almost every other subject is completely changed, both in what’s taught, and how it’s taught.”
Van tells us that he’s going to try to get his G.E.D. and, after a couple of years, hopes to work his way up to a management position at the grocery store that employs him. But he also wants to give lectures at local highschools about the dangers of underage drinking.
Specifically, the dangers of underage drinking in bowling alleys under hills in the middle of the forest.
It’s a lesson all of the kids of the New Neverland need to know.
