GOLMAC plays Emily Short's Bee (podcast episode up)

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

OK. I haven’t yet figured out how to find it, but I see it in the js file. If anyone has a suggestion on how to reach it, that would be welcome. Meanwhile, I’ve pulled it out of the game files (with a lot of hand-editing). I’m sure the source would be easier to read, but I realized that too late.

Aside: is there away to make js in game files more legible? It’s hard on the eyes.

“orange-and-purple-christmas”:{“id”:“orange-and-purple-christmas”,“type”:“scene”,“title”:“Orange and Purple Christmas”,“subtitle”:“A Christmas of simplicity.”,“newPage”:true,“viewIf”:{“$code”:“return (((Q['poverty'] || 0) > 4) && ((Q['month'] || 0)===12));”},“frequency”:1000,“priority”:2,“onArrival”:[{“$code”:“Q['month'] = (Q['month'] || 0) + 1;\nQ['poverty'] = (Q['poverty'] || 0) + 1;”}],“tags”:[“menace”,“top”],“options”:

“Orange and Purple Christmas”,

“The boxes under the tree are as always wrapped in paper that Lettice has decorated. Lettice's ambition this year has led her to specialize in camels and wise men.”

"Brown crayon camels, when folded, look like mushrooms.

“Inside the boxes are a lot of crumpled newspaper, and among the newspaper are cards with messages on them. Like: \“This represents your new textbook for social studies that you got in September!\” or \“This card good for one trip to Co-op movie night!\””

“Co-op movie night is free, but usually you do not get to go, because it means driving out at night, when they are tired.”},“When you and Lettice are done, you each have a stack of cards beside you. They look not much different from a half-hour's worth of spelling drill.”

“Mother is looking at you and Lettice very closely to see if you are sad.”

Oof. Note the mention of “poverty”… what is that? A property or variable? I wonder if there is a “poverty” path. I think I 'll hold off on commenting now, since this seems more about capital/wealth than religion. We’ll get back to it.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Institutional Playthrough of Bee, Part Two

We’re back! As I mentioned yesterday, this has turned out be a spelling and religion playthrough, as there really isn’t a lot of content related to home-schooling. We’re more than halfway through my playthrough, so this should be a shorter post.

This is school-related: Alex overhears a conversation among persons outside of her community.

At the Bookstore
------------------------

It’s a quiet afternoon and you have a rare and precious sort of privacy. You are at Rainbow Books. Alone. No one to supervise you; no one to tell you which books you ought to prefer. You’re browsing half-guiltily through a selection of science fiction young adult books: ones with alien romance and secular interplanetary governance and all kinds of things of which your father would not approve. On the cover of this book is an attractive young man with black hair and unnatural lavender skin.

“You can always tell,” says a customer voice from the front of the store.

“What’s that?” asks the clerk.

“Those home-schooled kids,” says the customer voice. “Social rejects. You can always tell when you meet them.”

1. Show them. Win your Bee and prove the value of your kind of upbringing.
2. Then again maybe you are obvious…?
3. Keep listening.

> Keep listening.

“I haven’t noticed that,” says the clerk tactfully.

“My sister-in-law is home-schooling her son and let me tell you, whoa is that one little weirdo,” the customer goes on. “He never looks you in the face when he talks to you. He keeps a big tank of tropical fish and he likes them more than people.”

1. There’s a kid at Co-op like that.

> There’s a kid at Co-op like that.

There’s a kid at Co-op like that. His mother took him out of school because he got scared in the classroom and would scream at the other kids. He’s doing better now. But it’s not like being at home made him that way. And he’s a good guy, really, if you can take him at his own rate.

The bell rings at the front of the store and the customer is gone.

Alex’s choice of book is significant, isn’t it? She is drawn to science fiction, though part of her resists it. This is a brief-yet-tantalizing insight into her interests beyond church and spelling, and it draws out multiple threads of interpretive interest: attraction, parental disapproval, secularism. In other playthroughs, we see more responses to media and art, but our current story is rather constrained in this regard.

Presumably, Alex is practicing plain dress, since that is discussed elsewhere in the text, which might draw attention and/or comments from impolite “outsiders”. Despite the 500+ subscribers to father’s newsletter, it seems a small world; Alex knows the boy with the aquarium. Alex responds to the comments about the specific boy, but that’s all we get. It’s hardly a full-throated defense of home schooling "He’s doing better. But it’s not like being at home made him that way. Made him what way? Which way would that be? There is an implication of neurodivergence, but it isn’t enough to engage with meaningfully. It may not be a reality that Alex is prepared to discuss or understand.

In any case, Alex’s ambivalence implies–what?–weary acceptance? Indifference? She is likely embarrassed and/or marginalized by outsider responses to her educational life. Because the situation is so obviously uncomfortable, the absence of editorializing is effectively sufficient.

A school vignette!

Choosing the Year’s Curriculum
---------------------------------------------

At the end of summer every year, Mother gets out a big block of graph paper and plans what you and Lettice are going to study for the year to come. You are allowed to make suggestions.

1. Consider possible textbooks.
2. Schedule more drill time.

> Consider possible textbooks.

Sometimes Mother will bring home some used textbooks from the Co-op to see if they’re any good. She and Father will pick out the ones that are too extremely religious – the science books where Noah is shown feeding a dinosaur. The social studies books with maps of where the heathens live. One of the history books so upsets Mother that she “accidentally” spills a whole carafe of coffee on the Civil War, and ruins it.

“I won’t burn a book,” she says to Father. “But there are some ideas I don’t plan to encourage either.”

“No,” Father agrees.

“And that’s just the sort of thing people stereotype us for,” she goes on. “They think we’re all reactionaries! Because of a few hardcore parents who just happen to be the ones that stand out the most.”

Father leans back in his chair. It’s what he does when he knows Mother is going to be talking on for a while.

This is productive reading because it helps delineate the edges of the family’s theology. However, it leaves out more than it says. Where are the heathens? Is this the global south generally? Arkansas, which is overrun with Southern Baptists? What is the issue with the characterization of the Civil War? My guess is that it is insufficiently critical of the southern states, but there’s nothing here to bear that out.

More provocative (and humorous) is the family’s rejection the text featuring Noah with a dinosaur. This is not far-fetched. Religious persons who object to the theory of evolution sometimes fictionalize encounters between biblical figures and extinct reptiles:

You may recall the “A Call to Arms” anecdote that involved writing letters to a lawmaker. It contains a comment about Mrs. Perry’s pedagogical stance regarding evolution:

She reviews textbook materials. She has her children give ratings to everything they read or study, to identify for other home-schoolers how thorough, correct, and Godly those materials are.

Mrs. Perry’s children gave a 3.5 out of 10 possible points to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, entirely for thoroughness. The definition of evolution did not meet with their approval.

It is productive to put these passages in conversation with one another. Perhaps Alex’s parents are more open to scientific content than they are to more socially-concerned texts. We also see that, whatever a textbook might contain, burning it is a bridge too far. Alex’s mother clearly sees this as a bright line between her ideology and that of more “extreme” conservatives. This is an interesting follow-up to the bookstore vignette, since concern over outside perspective is once again discussed. “They think we’re all reactionaries!” One must ask: at what point does a reaction become “reactionary?” I feel invited to think about it for myself, as the text has no easy answers.

Advent again. We have not yet looked at the option involving an Advent calendar.

> Open a door of the Advent calendar.

The Advent calendar is not one of those childish sorts with candies inside, but a beautiful painted scene of Nazareth. There is silver glitter on the night sky, and the angels are made of gold foil.

Each day you open another door and read another verse about the coming of the Christ child, and admire the snow, and the sheep.

A very short passage this time, focus on specific, descriptive details. The calendar is “beautiful” rather than “childish”. For reasons hard to articulate, this reminded me of something from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (happy Bloomsday!).

Ash Wednesday and Lent are largely unchanged, though Alex has the added option of fasting on Fridays.

> The discipline of fasting on Fridays.

On days of fasting, you eat no solid food. Mother and Father have only water, but you are allowed juice or milk. Orange juice makes your stomach hurt if you drink too much by itself, though, so you stick to apple.

The effect is floaty and dreamy. You don’t concentrate well. You spend the day lying on your bed, reading a book for English, and having fantastical reveries about scrambled eggs. With mushrooms. Sliced mushrooms sauteed in olive oil.

Until now, Alex has not been old enough to practice fasting, so this is a new option. Like the others, it doesn’t necessarily feature the interiority one often associates with (or perhaps hopes for) with regard to religious self-denial. I’ll reserve further thoughts for now.

The rest of Lent repeats previous options.

Easter Vigil is different. There are four available choices (and a fifth one for year three) for Easter, even if we only have three years to work with.

1. Drill yourself on spelling to keep focused.
2. Be still.
3. Keep an envious eye on the acolytes.
4. Be a bad influence on Lettice, and vice versa.
5. Tactically indulge your pyromania.

Obviously, I chose the spelling bee option on my first playthrough, and Lettice will be featured in later run. For this text, I chose “Be Still” (already discussed here), “Keep an envious eye on the acolytes,” and “Tactically indulge your pyromania.” Let’s have a look at those last two choices.

> Keep an envious eye on the acolytes.

The altar boys for the service are allowed to tend the candles, lighting them at the beginning and snuffing them at the end. This is by far the most interesting thing to do in the service, but you are not allowed to do what they do. Father and Mother feel that it is not appropriate; even though there are female acolytes sometimes, some places, they prefer to keep their daughters sitting quietly in their places.

1. It would be nice to have everyone at church respect you, if you were an acolyte.
2. But it is wrong to think of service in terms of how it would make others look up to you.

But it is wrong to think of service in terms of how it would make others look up to you.

When you look sideways at Mother, her face is turned downwards and looks as serene as the Virgin Mary’s.

I think that Alex’s parents refusal to allow her to be an acolyte is especially noteworthy. Despite the frequent discussions surrounding clothing, there hasn’t really been an exploration of what “modesty” might mean in terms of gender. It isn’t yet time, but at the end of this series we can discuss the various schisms and divisions that have occurred in the Episcopal church, all of which seem to involve the dignity of women and LGTBQ+ persons.

Meanwhile: Alex’s aspiration is contrasted with the serene acceptance of place indicated by her mother’s demure and downward gaze.

Why did I choose pyromania? I just didn’t want to repeat a choice, and I didn’t want to do Lettice early. Religious playthrough be damned, I chose pyromania.

The service begins with the lighting of the New Fire: a pagan-seeming ritual, though it wouldn’t do to comment about this to Mother and Father. The New Fire is made with twigs and scented sticks out in the courtyard before the rest of the service begins. Then everyone lights their candles and processes into the church proper, where there are no lights but the lights held by parishioners and a handful of candles on the altar.

The candles drip. There is a guard made of cardboard that is supposed to protect your hand, but it is never entirely effective and sooner or later some of the wax always dribbles through onto the sensitive webbing between forefinger and thumb.

To prevent this as much as possible requires careful and prolonged tending of the candle. You turn it this way and that way so that the wax drips down different sides, forming gnarly protrusions that look like a knobby tree or an old man’s face, rather than streaming straight down onto your hand.

Ahead in the darkness, the lector reads of God’s promise to Israel, of the dry bones raised to life, of Noah’s rainbow.

It’s not about pyromania at all! This is one of the few times Alex editorializes regarding Episcopal ritual: the New Fire is a bit pagan! The vivid detail of the candewax carried me back to my own Easter Vigil experiences. Of course, I wanted to play with the wax, and I often did until my father stopped me. But enough about me! This passage is a great characterization of religious practice, and the plan list of Biblical stories invests the scene with a significance that is largely off-screen.

Our last pentecost. While we are allowed the choice of a word, every year ends with “it makes a fire of God.” I can’t help but feel it’s a diminishment, repeating one of the best lines in the game three times.

…and that is the religious episode in this playthrough of Bee! What would I say about it? I’d like to wait until the end (and until the podcast, which Callie and I have been planning) to make any broad critical assessment. I do find that the way religion is portrayed in Bee seems very much a “thing of the world” with its emphasis on appearance, possessions, and social hierarchy. Of structures and rules. There simply isn’t enough theology to assess here, so we must talk about its absence instead. I suspect we’ll see that borne out in subsequent dives into the text.

What is next, anyway? Let’s do the Lettice playthrough, aka “arts and crafts.” We’ll spend every possible moment with Lettice, and we’ll try to exercise Alex’s creativity as well. I’m sure I can dig up some great passages to discuss.

As always, chime in! Let’s discuss Bee.

[Hidnook]

@kamineko

Aside: is there away to make js in game files more legible? It’s hard on the eyes.

I use https://beautifier.io/ to clean up one-line code like this.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

That’s really nice! Thanks.

[alyshkalia (Tabitha (ey/em or they/them))]

Something that struck me about both the homeschool vignettes and the church vignettes is the absence of peers. The protag doesn’t have any friends her age (until Jerome); the co-op seems like it might be tailored toward younger kids, and presumably there are other kids her age around at church, but she simply doesn’t connect with them. I wonder if her maturity and intelligence compared to other kids her age isolates her from her peers moreso than her physical circumstances—or at least is a significant contributing factor; her family’s lifestyle, avoiding pop culture and wearing homemade clothes and such, definitely doesn’t help.

Re: location, there’s a mention of her mom taking a train to Sacramento, and going to Washington, DC for Nationals is stated as being a “cross-country” trip. So it seems we’re somewhere in the western US (but not too far south given that they get snowy winters).

[JoshGrams]

I managed to get there on the first year by searching the source for everything that bumps poverty…

And here I am jumping ahead from literary to craft again… but I thought it was notable how well the game does (despite it being pretty gamified) of pushing back against you trying to minmax it and towards playing what’s in front of you. You might guess that the option “It must be very expensive to keep all of that going” is an expression of the protagonist’s family’s lack of money, but you have to choose “Your favorite thing is the flowers and stained glass” to get there. Which does a nice job of making sense and fitting with the stats after the fact but you wouldn’t probably pick it out for that beforehand. Or even after, unless you’re approaching it pretty mechanically.

Anyway. I liked the line about “Brown crayon camels, when folded, look like mushrooms.”

And also after you make the forced choice, that final sentence:

Mother is looking at you and Lettice very closely to see if you are sad.

• So you’re not, of course.

Afterward in bed you look out at the snow-laced trees, which are orange from all the reflected street light. This is the way the world is. Orange snow under a purple sky. Frosty the Snowman on the neighbor’s roof. Boxes of newspaper under the tree.

What you feel is something else that lives next door to sad, a regret that consists of sadness on behalf of someone because that someone feels sadness on behalf of you.

In all the vocabulary you know there is no word for that. If there were it would certainly be German. You slip out of bed and flip through the German box just in case, but you don’t find any such thing, and the floor is cold under your feet.

In heaven there will be no place for feelings of this type, which are made partly of sadness and partly of love. This too is a loss.

---

If/when you want to look in the source, it may be easier to read if you go to the github repository (click the green Code button and Download zip) and look at the files in the source/scenes directory – less JS formatting.

bee-orange-and-purple-christmas-2025-06-16_17-28.txt (31.2 KB)

---

@alyshkalia

I wonder if her maturity and intelligence compared to other kids her age isolates her from her peers moreso than her physical circumstances—or at least is a significant contributing factor; her family’s lifestyle, avoiding pop culture and wearing homemade clothes and such, definitely doesn’t help.

I don’t know if it necessarily has to be “maturity and intelligence,” but the attitude difference could be as much an isolating factor as the physical ones, for sure.

I think most of my early childhood was about this isolated, until maybe 8 or 10 or so? There were other families with kids our ages that we spent time with sometimes, but up until they passed the new PA homeschool law there were very few other homeschoolers. We were rural enough that we weren’t in a neighborhood. We went to a church from a slightly different denomination because that’s what was within reach, so we were always a little bit outsiders there too.

And even once there were more homeschoolers – we were pretty active in helping run the local group, and had a weekly open house for people to just hang out and play at our place for years – we never quite fit there either. Most people were pulling their kids out of school for religious reasons, or pulling them out for a year or two to get them in a better place because they weren’t being served well by the public school (getting bullied, falling behind, or both) and not the long-term “we’re pretty sure we can give them a better education and we’d rather they don’t pick up the bullying and other specific bad behaviors from the other kids” of my folks…

It’s interesting, because the protagonist of Bee feels more socially uncomfortable – I don’t think we had much of that at all – but other kids didn’t figure much more largely than this in the things that were interesting to me as a kid. They were more kind of… ambient. So I just thought yeah, of course there are other kids there, but they’re not the things that are on her mind. The isolation hadn’t stuck out to me until you pointed it out. Neat

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Thanks for that, Josh! The source will definitely be useful.

I have to apologize; I wanted to type up another response today, but my shoulder is killing me and I think I ought to stay away from the keyboard. See everyone tomorrow for the “Arts and Crafts” playthrough!

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

OK! My shoulder is still bothering me a bit, but I’m up for a bit of typing.

The goal this time is to make sure I emphasize Lettice while also exploring possibilities for self-expression. Like the previous church playthrough, we can’t stay busy doing just these things, so I decided to be defiant, keeping the parental annoyance high whenever possible.

Let’s see what we can come up with.

Let’s revisit our introduction to Letitia, aka “Lettice.”

Lettice
-----------

Your sister, Lettice, suffers daily from being named almost after a vegetable. Her full name is Letitia. As a little girl, she couldn’t say all the syllables. She called herself Lettice, and it stuck.

Lettice does not mind your parents as much as you do. This is true in both senses of the word “mind.” If Father gives a direction Lettice doesn’t like, she will sit under the table and draw instead. She still sucks her thumb when she feels like it. She eats what she wants to and ignores the rest of the food. Once she took a bowl of lentil soup out in the back yard and dug holes and planted little dollops of lentil every two inches.

Though your family is odd, Lettice doesn’t seem embarrassed when new people come to visit. She doesn’t apologize for the purple drapes Mother made of remnant cloth, even though, if you look closely, the purple drapes are patterned with tiny purple aliens.

Lettice is not interested in learning to spell for the Bee, either.

1. Possibly Lettice is not the sharpest.
2. Then again, she’s your only natural ally.

> Then again, she’s your only natural ally.

Who else is there to talk to on long road trips? Who else has to wake up as early as you do for prayers? Even the other home-schooling kids you know aren’t home-schooled in exactly the same way.

One night you’re sent to bed early. For comfort, Lettice puts a drawing on your pillow. It shows Father with a cloud of exclamation points over his head, shaking his finger, his eyebrows represented by one black V. And Mother working at the sewing machine, making a dress big enough for a giantess.

In learning Lettice’s name, we get the sense of her destabilizing and headstrong persona. She can’t pronounce her name, so she gives herself a different one. She doesn’t care what others–including her parents–think. Lettice, unlike Alexis, is an artist, uninterested in the technical and/or mnemonic demands of spelling bees. Her drawing of their parents seems insightful, too. The comically disciplinarian father and overworked mother. Perhaps, instead, she dramatizes a mother overcoming Herculean challenges. Whatever her intent might be, the passage affords an insightful view into the family’s dynamics.

While not a Lettice episode, she does feature in the coupon-cutting vignette:

“That’s enough for fast food hamburger!” Lettice says.

Yes. Lettice is obsessed this week with fast food hamburgers, which she is not allowed to eat as a rule.

Meanwhile, during a family game of Scrabble:

You rack out with TOILETS, which isn’t so high-scoring in itself, but the fifty point bonus is something. Plus it disables Lettice for the next turn and a half because of the giggling. At any rate, you come in firmly in the lead.

In one of Alexis’s rare attempts to make something artistic, her father shuts down her efforts:

The Doll
--------------

Father takes the doll away from you one morning. “Is this what you are spending your time on?”

You’ve been working with Mother’s cloth remnants, making calico dresses and white aprons for the doll with tiny stitches. It is hard work. The patterns are not easy to scale to doll size, and whenever you need to use a button or a snap it is comically large in comparison to everything else. Also, ruffles and frills do not scale down. The cloth may be cut shorter, but it is still as thick as ever.

“Sometimes,” you say. It’s not for you. It’s to amuse Lettice.

“You’re too old for such things,” Father says, frowning at the doll. He seems aware, vaguely, that the outfit it is wearing – an apron with satin-stitched apples in the corner, and a deep blue gown – is not the outfit it came with. “We will give it to charity.”

1. (Charity. C, H, A–)
2. Grab the doll back.

> Grab the doll back.

You seize the doll and pull. “It’s not for charity,” you say.

Father is holding the doll by the hair, and its head pops off. “Well,” he says. “Looks like it’s not for anyone, now. Let that be a lesson to you to speak civilly rather than trying to grab and pull things.”

As if speaking civilly would have gotten the doll back.

An interesting episode! Why is this effort sabotaged? Perhaps it is simply that the dress’s satin fabric and apple flourishes do not constitute plain dress. It is a poor model for play, then. I don’t think that is all, though. Another, less vocally-articulated problem, is that of Alex’s role within the family. She is meant to be the serious, logical person with a spelling bee to win. Lettice is better suited for trivial passtimes. In fact, Alex even says that the doll is “to amuse Lettice.” I see here a combination of religious restriction with a very narrow idea of what Alex is allowed to be or to experience.

While we can attempt to promote and encourage Lettice’s art within the family, we aren’t always successful.

“I want this newsletter to stand out,” Father explains. “Both for the quality of its content and for its playful appeal.”

1. Volunteer to provide some puzzle content.
2. Suggest including some drawings by Lettice.
3. Say they already have plenty of content.

> Suggest including some drawings by Lettice.

“Why not one of Lettice’s cartoon drawings?” you suggest. Lettice has been drawing comics lately. They involve a superheroine in a cape. The superheroine has a magic ray gun that solves math problems.

“I’m not sure,” Mother says, “that everyone will appreciate Lettice’s drawings as much as we do.”

“Did someone mention me?” Lettice comes in from the other room. There are marker streaks on her fingers.

1. Lettice should know what you’re talking about.
2. It doesn’t look like Father wants you to bring it up.

> Lettice should know what you’re talking about.

“Father is looking for content for the newsletter,” you say.

Lettice’s face lights up. “Oh, let’s put in my drawings, please please please.”

Father gives you a dirty look. “I’m not sure that’s the kind of content we’re looking for, Lettice. Though, of course, we all enjoy your comics and stories very much.”

Lettice opens her mouth. Then she remembers herself and closes her mouth again. She disappears down the hall. Her bedroom door shuts firmly.

Father goes away, tapping his pen against his lower lip. “Five hundred thirty-two subscribers,” he says. “And counting.”

We’ve seen some newsletter anecdotes in previous posts, but here we take a different direction, suggesting that Lettice’s artwork be included. It doesn’t go over well, naturally, and it’s worth considering that Alex’s own content–puzzles–are accepted as a good idea. Why? It’s facile to say that one is “serious” and the other is not. That’s true, certainly, but I think it’s also worth thinking about child contributions in terms of capital, be it material or cultural. We have an entire post about the topics of capital and labor coming soon, so I don’t wish to think about those topics in too deep a way. I think that for now it is enough to recognize that puzzles have cultural capital in a way that individual artistic expression does not. More on that soon! We can say, right now, that Lettice feels the weight of this valuation, stomping off as she does to her room.

We have another fleeting chance to explore the creative impulse with Alex:

Handwashing
--------------------

Mother teaches you how to do the handwashing, with a capful of Woolite and cold water. However, the only place to do it is the bathroom sink, and the bathroom sink cannot be left occupied all the time. It’s vital to do the washing early in the morning before anyone else is up, so that no one else will be disturbed.

The caps and scarves and so on are not so bad.

The sweaters, however, are awful. They fill up completely with water, and the rough wool scrapes your fingers when you rub it together to get the dirt out. Lettice’s sweaters are inevitably stained in interesting ways, with dirt and fruit punch and the odd marker stroke. And you can’t always tell which stains are going to be removable until you’ve had a go at all of them.

While you work you make up stories in your head.

1. About how even Cinderella got away.
   2. About how you were switched at birth. [Unavailable]
   A bit hard on your parents, perhaps.
   3. About becoming a designer and making more stylish clothes.
   4. About becoming so wealthy that you could have servants. [Unavailable]
   People who have servants are definitely too worldly.

> About becoming a designer and making more stylish clothes.

You don’t have time now, of course, with spelling as busy as it is. But perhaps one day when you are too old to be in the bee, you could look into designing clothes. You could draw pictures and patterns for Mother, and they would be much more stylish than what she makes now. She would experience a sudden increase in sales. There would be more spending money around the house. Your designs would be discovered, and you would become famous…

The rinse water is getting cold.

This passage performs multiple duties as comment on both labor and artistic inclinations. We will focus on the latter for now. After the unsurprising news that Lettice’s clothing is “stained in interesting ways,” we get to listen in on Alex telling herself stories. Two options are concerned with wealth and capital, while the third option seems to combine both wealth and creativity. This is the option chosen this time. The hoped-for outcome is wealth and notoriety, while the primary limiting factor appears to be time. It’s noteworthy that a young girl with a seemingly self-directed program of study is too busy, but I think this defecit underscores the extreme nature of Alex’s spelling regiment. Well, in some other playthrough, anyway, I hardly studied at all this time.

At the end of the anecdote, it is Alex herself who throws “cold water” on the fantasy.

A central feature of the Lettice-centered playthrough is the Aquarium project. Over a series of vignettes, Alex can check in on Lettice’s project, choosing to either encourage or discourage Lettice’s work.

Lettice has a blue sketchbook that she has been working on for years. On the front are silver letters that she cut out of sticky paper, which spell A Q U A R I U M.

The inside of the aquarium is pages and pages of fish, and curious shelled creatures, and things with tentacles.

1. Check out what she’s been working on lately.
2. Correct the spelling on the latest page.

> Check out what she’s been working on lately.

The current drawing is a picture of a red puffer fish. Lettice has drawn it in crayon, and it has many many spikes. Strange objects from under the sea have gotten stuck to the spikes of the puffer, including something donut-shaped.

“What is that?”

“It’s a tire,” Lettice explains. “Sometimes people throw them into the ocean, remember? In that documentary on pollution?”

“I think tires are much larger than puffer fish,” you say.

Lettice looks stumped for a moment, then shrugs. “I guess then it’s a doll’s tire.”

As in many cases throughout Bee, some sort of spelling activity is usually offered as an alternative. To choose human connectedness is often to decline the spelling bee. Here, Alex decides to see how Lettice’s aquarium-themed collection of drawings is progressing. This ocean is a bit like Franz Kafka’s Amerika, isn’t it? A fantasy informed by media. This particular anecdote illustrates Lettice’s creativity, certainly, but it also reveals her to be a thoughtful girl concerned concerned with environmental realities.

Later, Lettice is not so interested in the Bee, choosing to spend her time in the audience drawing: “Mother applauds in the back row, while Lettice sits quietly and continues to draw in her book.”

Yet another Aquarium episode:

Lettice’s Aquarium
---------------------------

Lettice has a blue sketchbook that she has been working on for years. On the front are silver letters that she cut out of sticky paper, which spell A Q U A R I U M.

The inside of the aquarium is pages and pages of fish, and curious shelled creatures, and things with tentacles.

1. Check out what she’s been working on lately.
2. Correct the spelling on the latest page.

> Check out what she’s been working on lately.

Lettice has traced a starfish from a picture in a book. It is wrapped partially around a rock. Next to it there is something roughly wedge-shaped.

“What is the wedge-shaped thing?” you ask.

“The starfish’s other leg,” she replies. “It lost that one but then it grew a new one.”

“Oh.”

She continues filling in the blue of the water.

“Is starfish edible?” Lettice asks.

You shrug.

“I bet it is,” she says.

Over the water she draws a sign, like the sign at the front of a ranch. STARFISH LEG FARM, she writes. PICK YOUR OWN.

Lettice extrapolates from the Starfish’s capacity for bidirectional regeneration. I think the Kafka comparison still applies: a creator takes a single, documented truth and builds away from it. In this case, an outlandish leg economy is soon imagined. This isn’t so strange, given the financial pressures that the family lives under (more to come on this). These factors converge as a sweetness. Lettice has a highly generative imagination. Can it survive its constrained conditions?

Over the years, Lettice grows increasingly capable with making Halloween cookies.

First Attempt:

There are sugar cookies, rolled flat by Mother. You and Lettice cut them into bat and pumpkin and cat shapes and then decorate them with colored frosting and sprinkles. You paint the frosting on neatly with a spatula, acquiring a clean, even distribution of color. Lettice tries to get fancy with a frosting tube, which mostly makes wormy blots on her cookies.

She gets a bit frustrated, but Mother shows her how to hold the tube and apply a more even pressure, and by the end of the session she is at least able to put eyes on all the bats and cats, and even some of the pumpkins.

Year Two:

There are sugar cookies, rolled flat by Mother. You and Lettice cut them into bat and pumpkin and cat shapes and then decorate them with colored frosting and sprinkles.

Lettice is handy with the piping tube and draws stems onto her pumpkins, or shades them with tiny stippling dots of black frosting. Sometimes, just to mess with everyone, she draws a frosting stem on one of the cat cookies, puts whiskers on the bats, and so on.

Finally, if we stick with cookies next year:

There are sugar cookies, rolled flat by Mother. You and Lettice cut them into bat and pumpkin and cat shapes and then decorate them with colored frosting and sprinkles.

This year, Lettice has gotten clever with the sprinkles. She pours the different colors together in tiny dishes, mixing herself a whole vast palette of different sprinkle shades. “It’s like the pixels on a screen,” she explains. “The colors close together blend so they look like one thing.”

There’s more, about something she’s been reading in her art history books, to do with impressionist painters and pointillism; but for you pointillism is only a word that is surprising for having two Ls in it, you do not completely follow this discussion. Father appears to follow, however, and encourages Lettice to continue explaining her method as she dusts the cookies delicately in different colors until they look three-dimensional: the cats furred with black and grey fur, the pumpkins rounded by having a shadowy brown side as well as a vibrant orange one.

There are two dimensions to her growing competence. The first seems to be a measure of age and practice. The second, on the other hand, arises from self-directed study of art history. This is a case in which Lettice’s knowledge surpasses Alex’s. It’s hard to ignore what appears to be a new development: the father’s approval of Lettice’s artistic efforts. Has she broken through a wall somehow? Perhaps the cultural backgrounding has invested her work with a new seriousness or even a valuation, as in something that could impress those outside the family. In any case, Lettice’s artistic competence is recognized by Alex as adding depth and texture to the cookies’ appearance.

Elsewhere, the Aquarium project continues.

On this page is a sort of chambered nautilus, shown in cross-section. Someone told Lettice that there was a mathematical proportion to the size of the chambers, and as a result she has drawn each one in carefully with a ruler to make sure that it is the right width in comparison to the one before.

“What do you think?” Lettice asks, turning the page so you can see it. “If you were a shellfish, would you live here?”

It seems that Lettice could be basing her art on the Fibonacci sequence. Like her pointillist cookie art, Lettice’s precisely-measured shell suggests a degree of precociousness that Alex may not fully understand. Her focus on spelling may well have limited the scope of her education. We never see in Alex any particular interest in mathematics or science. Humanities, at least, might be pursued with the help of Sara in a later playthough. We will have to see! For now, though, it seems that our early impressions of Lettice might have sold her short.

While Alex’s spelling work tends to be an isolated affair, we do have a chance to teach Lettice about art concepts via French loan words.

> Tell Lettice about the concept of collage.

She gets the idea without very much explanation and gets as far as cutting up two back copies of The Old Schoolhouse before Mother confiscates the scissors.

“You might ask,” Mother says tartly. “There was an article on humility I wanted to save.”

Lettice pouts.

1. Give Lettice some big-sisterly advice.
2. Offer to let her cut up some of the discarded coupon flyers the next time you clip coupons.

Offer to let her cut up some of the discarded coupon flyers the next time you clip coupons.

“Next time I clip coupons, you can have the rest of the flyers to cut up,” you say.

Lettice weighs the offer for a moment, then shrugs and says, “Okay, that’s cool. I don’t really want this many pictures of schoolbooks anyway.”

During Easter, we have an opportunity to be a bad influence.

Lettice is not as good as you are at sitting still. During the third lesson, she sets her service leaflet on fire. It is only a little on fire and it goes out almost immediately, but Father is angry and takes away Lettice’s candle and yours as well for good measure.

“But!” you begin, as he sets both extinguished candles on the pew beside him.

Father gives you a very angry look. “Listen to the lessons,” he says sharply.

You listen.

“Early the next morning, Abraham rose up and saddled his ass,” says the reader gravely.

Lettice giggles. She knows the giggling is wrong and she stuffs the heel of her hand into her mouth to stop it, but Father has already noticed.

Somehow you know that there will be no chocolate eggs in your basket tomorrow morning.

A refreshing change of pace. I forget that these children are, in many respects, just that, despite their sometimes-single-minded seriousness.

Elsewhere, Alex can tailor a pedagogy to Lettice’s interests.

Lately, you’ve been devising art lessons that happen to have words in them. Vowel sounds have their own specific colors. Qs are polka-dotted, and the dots are the color of U.

Alex can choose to spend our time at the zoo a variety of ways, including doing so with Lettice. We can again see the way art informs and motivates her intellectual curiosity.

Seeing the zoo with Lettice is a curiously relaxing experience. She is interested in biology chiefly as a component of anatomical drawing, and she takes a great interest in the plaques that show animal skeletons and other similar details.

She sketches the baby elephant repeatedly, from a bench under a tree, while all sorts of other zoo visitors come and go. Sometimes she draws no more than the curve of its trunk as it explores picking something up. Sometimes it’s the flap of the ears. By the end of the day she has her sketchbook completely full of meditations on the concept of elephant youth.

“I don’t think it’s been a very educational day for you,” she remarks, as she tucks away her pencils. “I don’t know what you’re going to tell Mother when she asks.”

This a year three experience. It’s impressive to see how far Lettice has come. Knowing how much time sister Alex has spent on failing to win the spelling bee, there’s a pathos in it. This is another type of self-direction, and it is hard to see Lettice as Alex’s foil living in a wider and more rewarding world.

As the end approaches, I feel Lettice has surpassed her older sister in terms of worldly synthesis.

Lettice is drawing with colored pencils now. She copies pictures carefully from the encyclopedia. As a result, the fish look much more realistic, but they are usually shown completely still, as though they’d been stuffed and mounted on the wall.

Currently she is completing a picture of a big-mouth bass. The sheen on the scales is surprisingly persuasive. Along the bottom of the page there is already a collection of notes that she wrote down from the encyclopedia to remind her of what the fish is, where it swims and spawns, and how it behaves.

“I am learning the most populous fish species,” she explains, glancing sideways at you. “And in particular which ones are overfished so I can avoid ordering those in restaurants, because it contributes to the depletion of ocean life. Did you know that the Atlantic Ocean has run out of cod nearly completely?”

There’s something sorrowful about this playthrough. I feel, as I have felt, that Alex is missing out on life, and Lettice’s growing capability as an artist seems to underscore that. There’s a precocious awareness of environmental issues that I presume was not taught in school. At least, those concerns don’t arise onscreen. She flourishes as a self-taught person, informing her interests with science, math, and political realities. By contrast, Alex seems to have been sacrificed–at the behest of her parents and others–in order to demonstrate the legitimacy of home-schooling. Well, that’s the parent’s job, isn’t it? It’s hardly surprising that the Cain ending is so bitter: the event is what justifies everything. Without it, what is there? Lettice, on the other hand, has her notebooks and some math to show for her efforts. As the story ends, it seems that Lettice is coming into her own at last. Not as the troubled younger sister, but as an achiever in her own right.

There is an ending that apparently has to do with mistreating Lettice. Eventually, she rebels, saying she wishes to go to public school. To get away from Alex! However, Alex gets shipped off instead.

I consider this ending apocryphal and refuse to play it. Mistreat Lettice? Come on, now.

Sincerely,
Drew Cook, president
Lettice appreciation fan club

PS: transcript
bee-transcript2025-06-20_11-08.txt (157.3 KB)

[alyshkalia (Tabitha (ey/em or they/them))]

Oh wow, there are a lot of unique Lettice-centric scenes! I never picked the aquarium option more than once in a playthrough, assuming it would just repeat like some of the others do, so it was nice to get to see how it progresses here.

@kamineko

“Why not one of Lettice’s cartoon drawings?” you suggest. Lettice has been drawing comics lately. They involve a superheroine in a cape. The superheroine has a magic ray gun that solves math problems.

…

Father gives you a dirty look. “I’m not sure that’s the kind of content we’re looking for, Lettice. Though, of course, we all enjoy your comics and stories very much.”

With how concerned the parents are about how the family is perceived by others, I figure that the superheroine, the magic, or the gun (or all three!) could be what makes them reluctant to publish the drawings. Clearly they don’t see Lettice’s engagement with these subjects as a problem, but it seems plausible that they might be concerned about being seen by newsletter recipients as condoning feminism, magic, or violence (based on my upbringing and other families I knew as a kid).

@kamineko

for you pointillism is only a word that is surprising for having two Ls in it

This line really got me; really speaks to the narrowness of Alex’s world.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I didn’t want to sidetrack my discussion of Lettice, so I saved this little tidbit. At the end of my playthrough, Alex ran away from home! Or, almost did. If Alex’s frustration with her parents reaches “Autocratic” status, she is offered a chance to leave. The specific options depend on her relationships at the time.

Running Away
----------------------

The only question is where, and to whom. You can’t just run off onto the streets; you know that much.

1. Go to Mrs. Perry.
2. Go to Mrs. Barron.

> Go to Mrs. Barron.

“Oh dear,” says Mrs. Barron when you turn up. She goes into the kitchen and returns with a wineglass whose contents are clear. “William — that is, my husband was afraid this would happen.”

She sits on the sofa. “Would you want to go to private school?” she asks. “We could set that up, me and William. Someone as bright as you could get a scholarship and then we could give your parents the rest of the tuition. Might only be a few thousand a year.”

Mrs. Baron may not have been the best choice, but she seemed better than Mrs. Perry. Alex might thrive in a private school, but there are severe logistical challenges. I also feel that Alex’s perception of herself is bound. She cannot yet see herself beyond the bounds of her constrained life. At least, not yet.

“Boarding school?” you ask.

“Well, er, I was thinking of a local day school,” Mrs. Barron admits. “Boarding school usually costs a lot more. But of course if you… I mean. Hm.”

It does seem obviously impossible, when you think about it.

“No. And. I mean. I don’t think my parents would let you pay for something that expensive,” you say.

“No,” Mrs. Barron says. “Probably not.” She looks sadly into her glass. “I think the reason why I feel there’s a kinship between us is because we’re both sad, you and me. No one understands us.”

A kind of prickly feeling goes down your neck.

“You have your husband,” you suggest.

“Yeah.” She drinks off the rest of the glass. “Well. That’s a tale not to tell to little pitchers.”

The conclusion of the exchange is moving. Alex prickles. This feeling presumably arises from a sense of empathic recognition, even if the source of misunderstanding is different for each of them.

“I think I’ll go home,” you say, standing up.

Mrs. Barron raises her empty glass in your direction. “Go on ahead,” she says. “I’ll catch up later.”

I believe that what follows is generic in the sense that it happens regardless of which runaway “destination” Alex chooses.

So you go back home; but you go back home with a difference. The difference is that you can see other lives you might lead, other futures you might have. The spelling bee and the homeschooling are your right now, but they are not your eternity. When you think about the numbers, they’re not very many years of your life at all. You could live to be eighty, or a hundred, or a hundred and two.

It still feels like a horribly long sentence to serve from this side. But there will be a time when it doesn’t.

Later, when you’re older.

Borne out of this experience is the realization that Alex will be free eventually, even if she isn’t now. In that sense, this conclusion is much more hopeful than the “Cain” ending (finish the spelling bee in second place). She is able to imagine her future self, and the choices that will be open to her. I would say this is a “good” ending even if the goodness is deferred. If we count the “mean to Lettice ending” (and I suppose that we must), we have found two “bad” endings and one good.

I have foresworn playing the bad Lettice ending, but it must be dealt with anyway. I have culled it from the source code. Note that this will include different formatting and print multiple options for the vignette choices.

= Lettice Revolts

“I want to go to public school,” Lettice says. There is corn on the cob for dinner, and Lettice’s announcement startles Mother so that she drops the corn on her plate.

“Why?” asks Mother. “You remember that a lot of public schools don’t have any money for art lessons. You wouldn’t be able to work on your drawings.”

“I just think it would be nicer,” Lettice says, giving you a side look. “She could stay here and be schooled at home. But I think home-schooling isn’t so good for people who are the younger sister.”

“Lettice Revolts” becomes an optional vignette once Alex has been mean or discouraging to Lettice a sufficient number of times. Our response options aren’t potentially introspective. Alex can’t say she’s sorry, for instance.

• @point-out: Point out that Lettice is just lazy.

@point-out

“It’s not because you’re youngest, it’s because you’re lazy,” you say indignantly.

Mother looks back and forth between the two of you. “Sweetheart,” she says to you, “it’s for me and your Father to judge how well Lettice is doing, not for you.”

Lettice sets her corn down on the plate and begins picking individual kernels off it with her fingers. Father doesn’t even tell her to stop.

• @manners: Correct Lettice.
• @your-job: It’s practically your job raising her anyway.

@manners
go-to: next

“Lettice, that’s rude,” you say.

“I bet at public school no one punishes you for eating with your fingers,” she says.

“That isn’t exactly a good argument for public school, is it?”

@your-job
go-to: next

“It is a little bit my job,” you say to Mother. “Because you make me watch her do her work and things, and get her to finish her homework.”

I believe that Alex’s treatment of Letrice is meant to be an indicator of her bitterness and resentment generally. That is, it is expressed via her relationship with her sister, but this bitterness is larger than just a feeling about one person.

@next

“You’re not my Mom!” Lettice howls at you. And she throws the cob of her corn across the table and it hits you on the forehead just above the right eye. SUPERCILIARY ARCH, you think, touching the spot.

“Lettice!” Father says. He scoops her up from her seat and carries her – even though she’s gotten pretty large for carrying – away to her own room. Half her food is left behind on her plate. Mother silently begins packing the plate away.

This kind of physical outburst is unprecedented–within the context of the game, at least–and feels quite shocking in this otherwise emotionally muted (stifled?) narrative.

“I bet you and Father are going to just let Lettice do that,” you say darkly.

“I don’t condone Lettice throwing things,” Mother says. “But you’ve been provoking her pretty hard recently.”

“She gets away with everything!” you say. “It’s never fair, she’s never punished as much as I was for things, you don’t expect as much from her, and then you make me be in charge of her so if she’s bad I get in trouble too. She does it on purpose.”

Mother sighs. “I know you think that, dear. It’s not true, and saying it over and over doesn’t make things more comfortable for Lettice. If anything, I think we made a mistake with you. Maybe you’re the one who should be put in public school for a little while. I’d hate to do it, but…”

• @what: What!? How in the world is that fair?

@what

“What!? How in the world is that fair?” you shout. “Lettice asks to go to school so you decide to send me?”

“Lettice just wants not to be under your thumb all the time, and constantly compared to you. She used to worship you,” Mother says. “She’d be just as happy at home if you were sent away. And you I think could maybe stand to learn something about tolerating the foibles of other people.”

• @what-about-spelling: What about your spelling?
• @standards: It was your parents who taught you to have standards in the first place.

I think that this version of Alex will be hard to recognize for a lot of us. Then again, we haven’t been playing bee in a way that would culminate in this ending. Even if it might to appear to come from nowhere when read like this, I presume it would feel natural if we had been choosing to bully Lettice for an hour or so.

@what-about-spelling
go-to: anyway
on-arrival: spelling-relief += 1

“What about my spelling?” you demand. “What would happen then?”

“Maybe you’d be able to keep it up,” Mother says. “And maybe not. But it’s more important that you learn to be a kind and loving person than for you to be able to spell every word in the dictionary.”

@standards
go-to: anyway
on-arrival: parents += 1

“It was you who taught me to have standards in the first place,” you say.

For a moment Lettice’s voice rises in her bedroom and Father is heard making vaguely soothing noises.

“We wanted to teach you to have standards for yourself, to push yourself to fulfill the special potential that God gave you,” Mother says. “But Lettice’s gifts are not the same as yours, and that’s okay.”

@anyway

You breathe heavily.

• @still: Still not fair.

@still
on-arrival: month = 26

But that’s how it ends for you. Just like that. Mother sews you a backpack out of funny shiny material. Father walks you down to the school on the corner. There is a grim, shamed quality as though someone were being escorted to jail.

“Try not to pick up too much of the secular bearing of your peers,” Father says, looking unhappily at an eight-year-old girl in pink mini-shorts. “But at the same time, remember that you are here to learn to love those who are not like you.”

“I thought we didn’t believe in Purgatory,” you mutter, kicking the sidewalk.

“We don’t,” says Father.

He goes away, and you’re standing alone by a flagpole. The grass is brown. The school is beige stucco. Inside there is not one person who speaks your language as you speak it. The bell is ringing.

Plain details of the school seem perfectly chosen. The flagpole must be an indicator of Alex’s exile to the secular world.

All that precedes is a path to this ending:

title: Epilogue
subtitle: Down the corridor of years.
new-page: yes
tags: top
view-if: month = 26
on-arrival: epilogued = 1

= Epilogue

So you go to public school, and you don’t go to Nationals.

Language arts classes are never up to your level. Listening to other kids read aloud badly is a special kind of pain.

Science class is more interesting than you expected, and you get to cut up a frog.

Lettice stays home and works with Mother. She gets her own art tutor. She does illustrations for different story books she reads. Suddenly she’s the talented one. She hardly remembers to hate you at all.

It hurts for a while, and then it stops hurting. And one day Mother and Father say you’ve come a long way and you don’t have to stay in public school if you don’t want to.

• @and-choose: And you’re allowed to choose for yourself.

@and-choose

So you decide for yourself.

An interesting conclusion! One thing I have wondered, and this isn’t a comment on home schooling generally but on the workings of this game world specifically: “where will the labs be?” In Alex’s assessment, public school seems to better at some things (science) than others (English). Alex is probably in middle school by now. Math isn’t mentioned, but perhaps the divide is between STEM and humanities. Alex’s mother has a classics degree, after all.

It seems noteworthy that we do not know whether Alex chooses to stay in public school or not. In that sense, it is not so different from the running away ending. After a period away from we players, Alex will decide. In a sense, the control is wrested from us. We can choose to lead Alex to an ending, but we can’t choose what follows. I find this ambiguity pleasing, personally, and as a writer I see it as a gutsy move that pays off. What do you think? And what does Alex do?

Next up: we are running out of novel vignettes, so future posts might be shorter. The next scheduled reading is the humanities playthrough, in which we cultivate relationships with Sara and Jerome.

[JoshGrams]

@kamineko

I believe that what follows is generic in the sense that it happens regardless of which runaway “destination” Alex chooses.

I think that’s my favorite ending when paired with running away to Sara…

---

@kamineko

One thing I have wondered, and this isn’t a comment on home schooling generally but on the workings of this game world specifically: “where will the labs be?”

Yeah, it’s only very lightly touched on: Jerome and Flauberta’s family is a little more science-y so you’ll probably see those bits next. And there’s a mention in the homeschooling booths at the state fair, of course… not sure I’ve seen anything else.

I’m sort of surprised there’s not more of it: the protagonist’s parents don’t seem like the kind of people who’d avoid it particularly hard? But maybe that’s a result of the focus on the spelling bees…

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

@JoshGrams

I think that’s my favorite ending when paired with running away to Sara…

I’ll try to set us up for that next time.

@JoshGrams

Yeah, it’s only very lightly touched on: Jerome and Flauberta’s family is a little more science-y so you’ll probably see those bits next.

Great! We can have a look at that soon.

[JoshGrams]

Huh. This ending also points up… for all that the spelling bees are the central focus of the game, I don’t feel like I know how much they’re our protagonist’s idea, or her parents. And with them letting Lettice (maybe? or is that just our perception?) go more her own way: is that parents going overboard with their first kid, putting them in all the things, is it them trying to find something for Alex because she didn’t show much of a direction of her own, or is she obsessed with spelling originally and they’re building on that? Or some other combination?

Have you noticed whether there’s much support in the text for any one of those over the others? Off the top of my head I’m not thinking of much…

[EJoyce (Emery Joyce)]

I don’t get the impression that the PC’s parents are avoiding science the way some of the more fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers might be, but more that they seem like humanities people who are biased towards their own areas of interest and expertise and end up shortchanging science education a little, maybe without even really noticing.

I don’t know whether spelling was originally something the PC had an aptitude or passion for, but the impression that I get from both the “second place” and “public school” endings is that the spelling bees were more the parents’ idea, and that they’re important to the PC in large part because she perceives them as being of all-consuming importance to her parents. Of course, the spelling bee qua the spelling bee isn’t actually that important to her parents; they clearly think it’s good for her educationally and character-wise and also hope that it will make their community and them in particular look good, but it’s not an end in itself and they’ll change tacks if it’s not working out. But the PC doesn’t seem to have quite grasped that nuance, so when they do change tacks there’s a note of “wait, I thought this was your dream, and now suddenly you don’t care???” to her reactions.

But none of that is actually explicit in the text, it’s just the feeling I get from the PC’s indignant “but what about the spelling and all the stuff you said about why it was important?” reactions in those endings. Which could also be interpreted as evidence of her genuinely loving and valuing spelling, really.

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Hi all! I’ve let several days pass, so I wanted to touch base. Yes, I’m still doing this! I got busy with a work in progress. Since we don’t have a Spring Thing hype thread, I’ll say that it’s either a prequel to Zork I or a sequel to Repeat the Ending. I look forward to talking more about that in the future!

Meanwhile, I have finished a playthrough emphasizing poverty, Jerome, and the Barron family. It’s funny, it’s sad, and… it can end with a pretty positive vibe! I think this will be my headcanon playthrough.

This will likely be the last playthrough. I feel we’ve exhausted most of the content and narrowed in on what I consider the work’s key themes. What’s next? Two posts: one about this currently-discussed playthrough and a general summary/critical discussion.

The podcast with Callie will come after. We’ve been planning it, and we hope you will enjoy it! More soon.

[Wynter]

I don’t get the impression that the PC’s parents are avoiding science the way some of the more fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers might be, but more that they seem like humanities people who are biased towards their own areas of interest and expertise and end up shortchanging science education a little, maybe without even really noticing.

Agreed. And there’s a suggestion throughout that in general they’re a bit more relaxed about some things, such as Hallowe’en.

I’d missed this thread until now, but I’m having another go through Bee, which I have played numerous times before (it took me a while to find all four endings). It’s reminded me of the streak of sarcastic humour that the main character has sometimes. Such as when her dad talks about having to drink chocolate milk at school, and she answers,

“I hear that Roman Christians were also forced to drink chocolate milk in the arena”

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

final 1: Mrs. Barron, capitalism, Jerome

OK, is this it? I think this is it: my final playthrough of Bee.

Having sought it out, I found very little content related to Sara. Since my “humanities playthrough” was evaporating as a sensible thing, I decided to pursue the “late stage capitalism” playthrough instead. Here are the areas of focus:

• material things: Alex’s family struggles financially. This comes up often. What if we directly seek out situations involving capital?
• Jerome: Jerome is an intriguing boy that young Alex may have an innocent interest in.
• the Barron family: The Barrons have money, but their homelife is difficult. Mrs. Barron is troubled, but we haven’t yet seen what that might mean.

Having already seen so much, we will only examine specific anecdotes. This might prove to be a short post, although there are many great scenes. Let’s see what develops.

We’ve seen the opening multiple times. Without quoting everything, let’s draw out some passages related to capital. Alex can admire the splendor of the church:

> It must be very expensive to keep all of that going.

It must be expensive to buy all the flowers and candles all the time, and keep up the church building, and have all the plates and goblets, which look like they might be made of gold.

They probably aren’t. But even so, they look like they might be.

“Would it be better if the money for those things went to poor people?” you ask Mother.

“The church also gives money to charity,” Mother says. “It doesn’t have to be either-or.”

“But poor people could always use more money,” you say.

Mother looks at you thoughtfully. “Yeah,” she says, giving your shoulders a hug. “I’m sorry, sweetie. That’s one of the not-very-nice things about the world.”

We’ve discussed Alex’s thoughtful nature. She is unusually thoughtful, provided we make thoughtful choices. Another opening choice–related to Mrs. Perry and the co-op–is concerned with the cost of books:

> Sometimes the books supplement when families are on a low income.

The battered set of Saxon Math books has been in circulation since possibly the 1990s. “Help me virgen mary” is written several times in pen in the margin of Algebra 1/2. This caused a bit of a ruckus when the book was returned. Mrs. Perry put a warning sticker on the front that said “please note marks on page 34” so that no Protestant parents would be taken by surprise.

The warning sticker is a good, humorous detail, though it draws attention away from the fact that the co-op keeps outdated, “surprising” books around because it can’t afford to replace them. I find this an effective rhetorical technique, blending as it does humor with difficult truth.

The jam-making episode, which we’ve seen from other angles is incited by capital. It’s easily lost as a single sentence at the beginning of the storylet: “Time has come for making jam and other fruit products to use in barter.”

And now, Mrs. Barron. A central concern of this playthrough, Mrs. Barron is a wealthy and worldly woman whose life seems mysterious to Alex. But first:

There are things piled everywhere. College-ruled pages with Latin declensions written out on them. Graph paper with quadratic equations. Physics problem sets. Clippings from a local newspaper, mostly the crosswords and logic puzzles, but sometimes also stories about scientific advances.

We find a rare mention of STEM disciplines here! In a previous post, I speculated regarding the co-op’s access to science expertise. Someone clearly has it in this house! Perhaps we will discover the enlightened party soon.

“Just shove over some of that,” says Mrs. Barron, pointing at a sofa covered with textbooks. "I’ve got a pineapple upside down cake in the oven. Do you like pineapple upside down cake?

You don’t, but this doesn’t seem the moment to say so."

Mrs. Barron, we learn, is not especially tidy, although we get the impression that other members of the co-op community might consider upkeep of the house to be a woman’s responsibility (with help from the children).

“I was hoping you and my sons could be friends,” says Mrs. Barron. She talks with her hands, and the bright red nail polish has you mesmerized. Your mother would not approve of nail polish like that.

Mrs. Barron fascinates Alex. She is not like the other women Alex knows. In fact, given what she has been taught regarding modesty and plain dress, Mrs. Barron is theologically incompatible with Alex’s life. And yet, there she is! One of the options is “What sort of Jezebel paints her nails and doesn’t clean house?” If we choose it, we get this:

You gather the papers on the sofa into a sheaf and set them and several textbooks on top of the coffee table. It’s precarious, and several of the pages slide off. You stoop to pick them up.

“Oh, don’t bother,” says Mrs. Barron, with a generous sweep of the painted talons. “The boys won’t mind if I don’t get to those. They’re not graded yet, but I have strongly the impression that they won’t have done very well.”

Alex is surprised when the conversation suddenly concerns her family:

“Listen, sweetheart, I’ve got the sense that your parents don’t let you do much visiting,” says Mrs. Barron. “Our house is on the extreme end --” (she laughs here) “-- but I think you’ll find that very few mothers are quite as house-proud as yours.”

What an off-balance experience this must be for Alex! It’s a casual, off-the-cuff insult directed at her mother. There are three options spawned from here, but let’s choose to defend Alex’s mother.

“Mother likes the floor to be clean enough to eat off, she says. She does what she can for us, even if there isn’t always a lot of money.”

“Oh, sweetheart. Your parents do have plates…?”

“Of course they have plates.” You feel the blood coming into your cheeks. You have the same troubled sense you get when you’ve just played a bad set of tiles in Scrabble and opened the triple letter score to Father.

This is yet another scene that effectively blends dismay and humor. The literalist wordplay of “clean enough to eat off of” bounced against the question of whether her parents have plates pulls us in many directions. Alex’s family must be known within the co-op community as being unusually poor. Mrs. Barron is an eccentric who cares little for community norms (we later learn that she might be drunk).

Despite some discomfort, it is clear that Alex has enjoyed the experience. It seems adult, and there must be something bracing about Mrs. Barron’s strange honesty in a world of platitudes and, we sometimes see, theological rationalization.

“Stay here,” she says. “That’ll be the cake. I so rarely get a chance to have anyone over to tea! But with the boys camping…” And so the prattle goes on, and Mrs. Barron serves you adult tea with caffeine in it, and pineapple cake that is too sweet. However, it is the first time you can remember that you’ve been a guest at an adult’s house, just you, by yourself.

What follows is one of my favorite series of vignettes in Bee, If Alex initiates a relationship with Mrs. Barron, she gets invited to the salon. This begins with a discussion of Alex’s usually haircare regiment, which sounds in keeping with her parents’ theological views regarding plain dress:

Mother gives you and Lettice your haircuts once every two months or so. Your bangs are cut straight across the forehead; the rest of your hair is trimmed “for split ends.” Sometimes she braids your hair into twin braids.

One of the kids at Sunday school says you look “like that girl from Little House on the Prairie.”

It’s understandable, then, why Alex might be curious.

On a friend’s television you recently saw a movie where women at the beauty salon had enormous pink helmet-like machines that came down over their heads. It would be interesting to know whether these machines exist, and, if so, what they are meant to do. Lettice suggested that they were intended to program the women into cyberbots, but the movie did not bear out this theory.

On the very next turn, we are offered a chance to go to the salon with Mrs. Barron. We accept! However, Alex is not prepared. “You realize after you get in the car that they are the packet from last week and are already completely memorized. So you will be stuck at the salon while Mrs. Barron has her hair fixed and you will not be able to do anything useful at all.”

Note the use of the word “useful” rather than “interesting” or “fun.” As we saw in the “Cain” ending, winning the spelling bee promised significant social capital (within the co-op) and cultural capital (for the co-op). While I think the bee matters to Alex as a personal achievement, external realities may be even more important to her. We can play a part in this, emphasizing the bee over relationships and personal growth, which culminates in the previously mentioned “Cain” ending. One way we might consider Alex’s narrative arcs is the divergence between outward utility and internal development.

“We could listen to the radio,” proposes Mrs. Barron after a couple of silent minutes. “What station do you girls like?”

“Mrs. Perry listens to End Times Radio,” Lettice announces from the back seat. “They have a man who tells you what is going to happen at the end of the world, and when it is prophesied to be this year, and what the four horsemen will look like and everything.”

“What a delight, ha ha,” says Mrs. Barron distractedly. Then she gives the finger to the man in the next lane who is trying to merge into this one. Lettice doesn’t see, but your cheeks feel red.

Some fun! There’s a zany, off-balance quality to the Mrs. Barron vignettes. At least, until there isn’t. This passage speaks to the girls’ isolation from the wider world, doesn’t it? They can’t name a secular radio station. Or if they can, they aren’t interested. They don’t even seem to be interested in National Public Radio.

At Mrs. Barron’s salon, there is a blonde lady waiting behind a desk when you come in, just like at a restaurant.

“Barron appointments for 4:15,” says Mrs. Barron.

The blonde lady consults her computer. “You and your daughters for Kiley, Manie, and Jolie, correct? Excellent.”

You and Lettice look at each other in confusion. “We aren’t getting our hair cut!” Lettice says. “We’re here to read about social studies!”

Mrs. Barron says, “Surprise! It’s my treat, girls. It won’t do any harm.”

The salon lady gives you and Lettice each a silky little robe, and a room to change into it.

Kaboom! Alex and Lettice do, in fact, get their haircut! But the experience is so much more than that, isn’t it? The sisters might as well be on another planet, given the salon’s pervading air of exotic luxury.

When you come out, Mrs. Barron is also wearing a silky robe, with no shirt beneath. She is sitting on a leather bench, drinking a cappuccino and reading a glossy magazine about houses.

“Mrs. Barron–”

She raises a finger to her lips. “Salons are for quiet relaxing,” she says.

So you and Lettice read Lettice’s social studies chapter about the native peoples of New Zealand. A salon lady brings each of you a square of dark chocolate in an individual wrapper, and a tiny bottle of water with bubbles in it. Lettice does not like hers because it’s not the sweet kind of soda, so you drink it for her. Then, in whispers, you teach her to pronounce “Maori”.

Consider each well-chosen detail in Mrs. Barron’s description: a trio of simple actions (drinking, reading, and reading) makes for taut and effective pharasing. This must seem a kind of secret world hereofore concealed from Alex, or else a place no less fantastic than any fiction she has seen. But will she cut her hair?

Manie takes you to a chair, which faces a mirror framed in lights. Mrs. Barron and Lettice each have their own chairs nearby.

“We look like we’re ready for something a little bit more grown-up!” announces Manie cheerfully, pulling your bangs to one side. “We could give you a little more volume, pump up your eyes a little… here, what do you think about this?”

The person looking back at you in the mirror is someone new. She looks…

We are offered to think about the hair as a way to distinguish herself from her family or else as a way to feel, internally, more of the world. I choose the latter.

Yes. Worldly. Like a soundtrack plays when she walks. She might wear a hat with a brim, and know how to ride in taxis. People might give her flowers. Possibly she even goes on vacation in airplanes.

There’s such a yearning at the back of this humor. A desire for escape. A desire to become.

You nod once. Manie takes you to have your hair shampooed in a deep black sink, and then she snips, and then she blow-dries. She sprays your hair with a mist that smells like watermelons, and another one that smells like strawberries. When she is done, the worldly little woman is back in full force. Manie gives you a second mirror so that you can observe the back of your own head.

IT should be noted that, as a set of sensory experiences, the salon is a lush place: dark chocolate, sparkling water, smooth silk, and the smell of fruit. We get a sense of just how strange this place is when Alex incorrectly calculates the cost of all three haircuts as eighteen dollars: “twenty divides by 3 as 6 with a remainder of 2; so it must be $6 for each haircut and then there will be $2 in change?”

Taking a break, we can spend time clipping coupons, a crucial activity for our “late stage capitalism” playthrough.

One of your chores is maintaining the coupons. There are coupon mailers that come with the newspaper, and coupon mailers that just come in the mail on their own, and a few coupons that Mother prints off the internet.

Once a week you sit down with a big pair of sharp scissors and cut out all the ones that might be useful to the family. Then you file them by category in a red coupon wallet. The coupon wallet is divided by index cards and has such categories as SOUP, PERSONAL CARE, PRODUCE (there are rarely any produce coupons), PAPER GOODS, and so on.

The coupons, we see, play a meaningful role in the wider family economy. I have the impression that the elaborate system of organization is a matter of necessity rather than thrift. The types of coupons most desired are meaningful, too.

Mother brings in the week’s shopping list, and you go through and match it up as well as you can to the coupons you have, so they’re all ready-pulled for the store trip.

It is sometimes a frustrating process, because the kinds of goods that have coupons are usually not the kinds of goods the family needs. There are never coupons for bulk flour, say, or rice in a fifty-pound bag, or store-generic toilet paper.

This is kind of a dismal scene, isn’t it? Serious poverty is in my own past, and trying to save money on generic toilet paper is quite a vibe. These details are chosen for their pungency, aren’t they? I’m sure the family would like to save on cheese or meat, but we are instead offered up these stark details as representative.

We have two choices here. If we choose to emphasize poverty (that’s what this playthrough does, after all) we get a very short answer in return:

Mother has been more stressed lately than usual.

We’re closing in on 3,000 words, which is probably the ideal length for a conference presentation. So let’s wrap things up for now. A few thoughts:

Mrs. Barron, at this point, seems like an emissary from another world. A worldly world, as it were. I feel that the salon episode is so crucial to understanding Alex that it really ought to be canonical. I’m not sure that we can understand her without it. We get a rare glimpse into her thoughts regarding the relationship between appearance and external perceptions. There appears to be a desire to not only fit in but to be seen. This desire enriches our understanding of her motives regarding the bee. Winning is a way to be perceived. After a lifetime of being set apart in a potentially negative (or ambivalent) sense, she might be set apart in a positive sense. But we’ve already discussed how that turns out!

While Callie and I plan to discuss gender on the podcast, it is noteworthy that, despite the father’s employment, Alex’s mother appears to be in charge of the finances. It’s never discussed, but what does this man do for a living? It isn’t enough, which is hardly a crime these days, but one wonders if it is so taxing that his ten-year-old daughter must mow the lawn instead of him.

Next time, let’s pick up with more Mrs. Barron. Perhaps we will have our first encounters with Jerome and Sara, too!

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

I’m back! I had life stuff and then my big game WIP got behind schedule, so I had to set this aside. Apologies! People are having a look at my current project right now, so I’ve set aside the Inform IDE for a much-needed break.

Anyway, I see that I am not even halfway through my final transcript, so this may yet take a while. The first haircut episode is not yet complete; let’s dive in. I would like to wrap this up before the forum gets busy with IF Comp stuff.

While it is left to the discretion of the player, I chose to read about parental responses to the new haircut.

When you and Lettice come home with your haircuts, Mother looks at you both narrowly, but she says nothing about how you look. “You’re late for dinner,” she says. To Mrs. Barron, she adds, “I hope they were not too much trouble.”

“It was a pleasure,” Mrs. Barron says. She is positively glowing, whether from the new cut or in a spirit of mischief.

“I won’t keep you,” Mother adds. “I’m sure you’re eager to be home and cooking for your family.”

“Actually,” says Mrs. Barron, “I was planning to make the D. H. bring home some Chinese take-away.”

While the episode gives the impression of humorous conspiracy, I think there is also a sense that, laughs aside, Mrs. Barron is concerned that both Lettice and Alex are missing out. I say “missing out” in a very broad sense. isn’t just about haircuts or even toys. I think its fair to say that this story doesn’t depict many experiences of wonderment. Lettice fares better than Alex in this regard; as a creative type, she can create her own wonder.

Sure, the case can be made that Alex experiences wonder differently, and that her preparation for the spelling bee is wonderous, but I don’t find that rationale convincing. Descriptions of bee prep often come across as lexical vivisections. Episodes such as “The Desert Fathers” push against my claim, but those are often informed by anxiety. Likewise, thoughts of words often interrupt the drudgery of everyday tasks and interactions, but I believe that their function is comfort via repetition and a desire to create cultural capital for her community by winning the bee. More on this later!

You brace yourself.

“Your Mother got some brussels sprouts,” he says, finally. “They’re a little expensive, but since they’re your favorites…”

Lettice is already serving herself buttered sprouts from the bowl. There are also chicken pieces. Everyone eats in silence.

“It is good of you,” says Father heavily, near the end of the meal, “to offer your company to Mrs. Barron. I know that going to the salon with her did not appeal to you, but your duty towards a lonely fellow Christian was more important than demonstrating your distance from the Things of the World.”

What are we to make of this unexpected—I did not expect it, at least—acceptance? It isn’t clear to me whether the father is rationalizing, or if he really misunderstands his own children to this extreme degree. Either is entirely possible. I can say after playing this game many times that I really don’t have a sense of what this man believes, other than thinking that his wife belongs at home. Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, but I really can’t tell what he is thinking, here.

> Seems that you’ve gotten away with your new haircut.

In the morning, you can’t get your hair to fluff out after your shower as much as it did at the salon.

“I think you have to blow dry it,” Lettice explains in a whisper. “We don’t > have a blow-dryer.”

“Humpf.” You pluck at the hair in the mirror. It still looks infinitely cuter than the old flat hair, even if it’s not blow-dried.

This is a fine detail that underscores the fleeting nature of wonder.

Ironing

Mother is at her sewing machine. You are at the ironing board. When you’re not needed, you’re allowed to read your book. The rest of the time, you’re a well-oiled part of Mother’s operation: getting the creases out of newly-sewn items, ironing on facings and setting pleats. Not having to get up and do these steps herself saves Mother a great deal of time.

1. Give dutiful attention to the pleated skirt.
2. Set up your spelling list so you can see it while you iron.

>> Give dutiful attention to the pleated skirt.

The pleated skirt is tricky work, and you give it your full attention, and many squirts with the water bottle. Hot steam rises from the cloth.

There is rain on the windows and Father and Lettice are out shopping, but the room feels cozy, just because of the hot steam and the smell of clean cloth.

While it isn’t stated explicitly in this passage, it is reasonable to assume that “mother’s operation” is labor for capitol. Alex sometimes irons other people’s clothes. The experience is complex; we players are offered an opportunity to escape into spelling, as we so often are. Because this playthrough focuses on economics and things of the world, I chose to focus on the work. The room is “cozy.” Curiously enough, the scene is largely characterized as a sensory experience: heat, dampness, the “smell of clean cloth.” It seems a pleasant episode. It is easy to imagine other factors of significance, for instance Alex enjoying time alone with her mother. This vignette is distinct from the episode in which the children clean Mrs. Barron’s house, in which Alex and Lettice dislike the work (see below).

Snow Shoveling

A night of atypical snow. The sky is a strange orange-brown color, much lighter than it should be. The world is hushed, except for the occasional sound of a car slithering down the hill.

Tunnels across the yard indicate the miserable progress of the neighbors’ cat.

It is therefore your job to see that the driveway is clear before Father needs to drive anywhere.

1. ANIUK, clean snow for drinking.
2. AQILLUQQAAQ, deep heavy snow.
3. KAVISILAQ, snow hardened by rain. [Unavailable]
   You are too young to have to scrape the windshields, at least.
4. MINGULLAUT, thin powder snow that blows in through cracks and veils the floor. [Unavailable]
   That would make a mess for Lettice, though.
   5. These words will not be in the Bee.

> These words will not be in the Bee.

There is soft heavy snow, and dry powdery snow, and rivulets of ice that form on the driveways and walkways and cannot be removed without rigorous scraping. There is thin, light ice that skins over puddles, trapping bubbles and brown leaves beneath; and ice that has frozen and broken in a craquelure.

They say that Eskimos have hundreds of words for these things. That is a myth. You were only able to find 30 or so online, but you learned them off by heart. The names have the quality of incantation.

You name each type of snow as you clear it away.

While this is not work for money, it presumably enables Father to go out an make money. Why his ten year-old daughter is the one to do it must remain a mystery, it seems, but we have here a strong representation of Alex’s tendency to escape into spelling when confronted with unpleasant, menial tasks. The scene also demonstrates Alex’s capacity for evocative description of both visual and auditory natures. I would argue that these encounters demonstrate an as-yet unrealized capacity for wonder. It seems that Alex might make a fine writer, and is in her own way as creatively gifted as Lettice, but her linguistic gifts have been largely by the bee, with its hoped-for social and monetary rewards.

Dinner Service

Mother has taken the train to visit your great-aunt near Sacramento. That leaves you and Father and Lettice to fend for yourselves, and it is understood that Father should not be the one to make dinner, because unfortunate things can result.

A humorous episode. It may or may not be odd that the 11-13 year-old should cook because things go poorly when the man cooks. Unsurprisingly, children encounter problems, too.

> Improvise something with spaghetti.

You’ve watched Mother do this often enough. The spaghetti sauce is stored frozen, made monthly in a batch, so you only need to reheat it and serve it over the noodles. Cheese is nice when it’s available, but the can of parmesan gratings is empty and you haven’t been given a budget for additional purchases.

It proves a harder thing than you were expecting. First, not all the noodles can be fit into the pot; they’re too long, and stick out. Pushing them with the wooden spoon doesn’t help, so you have to break most of the noodles to make them fit under water.

Then the pot boils over and gets whitish scum on the stove. Mother’s spaghetti never does that.

Then the pot is very heavy and hot and clumsy, and you half drop it when you’re trying to pour the noodles into the sieve. A good third of the noodles fall out into the sink, some of them slithering down the drain. They can’t be eaten now, can they?

Some interesting details, here. A month’s worth of spaghetti sauce is in the freezer. The family cannot afford parmesan cheese. Alex has, in fact, no experience cooking pasta. She doesn’t know how to boil water safely, either. Despite the slapstick nature of the scene, there is something unsettling about an unsupervised child doing all of this while an adult is off somewhere doing, well, who knows what he is doing.

Pour hot water over the noodles to clean them, put them back in the pot, and say nothing.

> You run hot water from the tea kettle over the sinked noodles. This should — should! — render them clean enough to eat. Then you scoop the results up with the noodle spoon and plop them in the pot. No one the wiser.

The humor rests on firmer ground here, as this seems a very child-like thing to do. One can perhaps imagine Lucille Ball doing the same thing.

But wait, when Lettice gets involved, things get even funnier.

“I saw that,” says Lettice, coming in from the doorway. “You’re going to give us all tapeworms.”

1. Reason with her.
2. Offer to tell Father about the time she buried the dead bird and then didn’t wash her hands.

> Reason with her.

“That’s not how you get tapeworms. And I sanitized the noodles.” You stare at her very hard until she drops her eyes.

“Okay,” she says. “But if I get sick later I’m going to pray for you to have the tapeworms also.”

A very tempting, very sanitized meal! Lovely.

What of Jerome and Flauberta, the children we previously met in our first playthrough (“House of Mildew” episode)? We hoped to see more of them in this playthrough. Let’s get back to them.

J E R O M E

Jerome is the only student in Sunday School class when you walk in. Even the teacher is not there yet.

“Hi,” you say.

Jerome does not answer.

> Try to draw him out.

“Nice to see you again,” you say.

Jerome twists in his seat. “Look, what is it? Do you have a crush on me or something?”

> Cop to some earlier curiosity.

A curious moment. We don’t see Alex use slang. Is this her “cool talking to boys” voice that we previously haven’t seen? Or is this an authorial lapse in voice? Whatever the case, it is a side of Alex we have not yet seen.

“I was curious about you,” you say. “All my previous crushes have had names that started with J.”

“So I’m the latest J in your collection?”

“No, I was curious, but then I actually met you. Now I’m holding out for a Jedediah.”

“Yeah? I hear there might be a Japheth in this Sunday School lesson,” he says. “Could be a very big day for you.” He goes back to staring out the window.

“Previous crushes?” This shouldn’t be a surprise, as young people often have crushes as a matter of course, but this is a story with close narration and crushes haven’t really come up. It is also interesting because we see Alex flirt! The “Jedediah”-“Japheth” back and fort is genuinely humorous. These kids think on their feet and don’t seem especially shy.

I think it’s important to really soak this in, since it is a rare instance of Alex interacting with peers in a very natural way.

As I said in the previous post, I wanted to explore the relationship with Sara the English tutor, but there isn’t a lot of content to see. We’ll go through what I could find, of course. It’s worth noting that the player can choose to run away to Sara–which fails–but we are chasing a different ending in this playthrough.

Middle School English

After a certain point, you stop gaining anything from workbooks. Your parents put up an advertisement at a local college. “English student wanted,” it says. “$20/lesson. To teach extremely talented middle schooler literature and composition. High school level reading materials would be appropriate.”

There are applicants. College students are always poor. There are a series of interviews that you are not encouraged to attend. Sometimes, stopping outside the living room door during these interviews, you hear snippets of conversation. “Academically advanced,” says your mother’s voice firmly. “Spelling champion… Superb grammar… Very disciplined… No disobedience.”

At the end of each interview, Mother leads the student to the door of the study and lets the interviewee look in at you as though you were a creature at the zoo. No words are exchanged and the student is led away again.

> Look interesting.

You contrive to be diligently reading a young person’s Homer translation when they look in. It conveys the right sort of image, you think. Though there are only so many times you can read about the Cyclops and his cheese.

The teacher your parents choose is Sara, a skinny girl with thatch-colored hair who bites her nails. She always looks cold in your house. After the first lesson, she always wears a lumpy woolen sweater knitted with pictures of sheep.

It makes sense that Alex’s parents would want to offer her more than her homeschooling cooperative can offer. It is complicated though, isn’t it? The mother is presumably capable, given her educational background. Given the amount of money the family is willing to pay—twenty dollars per session—wouldn’t it make better sense for the mother to do it? One possibility is that the total time spent (the lesson, preparation, reading) might cost the family more than twenty dollars. There might be costs for buying two copies of books.

We might get a better idea as we read on.

Seeing the way Alex’s mother describes her is notable. “No disobedience.” Is this something college students hope to hear? I ask in my capacity as a former college student.

Mrs. Barron Commands

“You will lend me your daughters, won’t you?” Mrs. Barron has Mother buttonholed. “I need a couple of hours, really just a couple of hours of help to get the place tidy. Mr. Barron is bringing the boss over for dinner tomorrow night, and --” (a little laugh) “-- he didn’t really give me much warning. Isn’t that just like a man?”

A strange expression crosses Mother’s face, but it does not turn into words.

What, we have to wonder, might have shaped Mother’s expression? Perhaps it is the rather unbelievable story, as Mrs. Barron can afford professional housecleaners. It might be, instead, the nature of Mrs. Barron’s conspiratorial question: what is a man “like” in the world of Alex’s family? He isn’t having the boss over for dinner, that’s for sure. I can’t recall: do we know what Father does for work?

> Pray.

You offer up a sincere request that this task might pass from you.

“Oh, of course,” says Mother. “We’d be happy to send the girls over this afternoon, and we usually have dinner ourselves around six, so if they could be back at about five thirty…?”

Mrs. Barron squeezes Mother’s upper arm. “You’re an angel,” she says. “Truly.”

At the Barrons’, the state of chaos is even more advanced than when you saw it last. Lettice, who hasn’t been here before, turns to you with eyes the size of saucers and says under her breath, “It’s just like Cinderella.”

Mrs. Barron is not as deaf as you might have hoped. “Well, ha ha. Perhaps a little. Now, listen, girls, what do you think is the best way to go about putting the place in order?”

There’s a thumping noise from upstairs, and a sound of someone making laser noises. “Pew! Pewpewpew!”

“Ignore that,” says Mrs. Barron. “Just the boys playing.”

We have here another example of youthful humor interleaved with more adult concerns, a strength of Bee: “It’s just like Cinderella.” It’s funny, but then again it isn’t the kids do a lot of free work, but there is no ball in anyone’s future. The contrast of the boys’ play with the girls’ work is telling, and perhaps representative of gender expectations in the world of Bee.

“It looks like if we got some of the laundry out of the way, it would be easier to see the rest of the mess,” you say. “Lettice is good at laundry.”

Taking your nudge, she begins going around the room and picking up articles of discarded clothing and looking at them curiously: a T-shirt with a monster head on it, a flannel shirt, a pair of boys’ underpants.

Lettice’s nose crinkles, but she doesn’t comment. Mrs. Barron looks on approvingly as Lettice rescues the hat from where it’s sitting on top of the bamboo.

You and Lettice improvise as well as you can. Mrs. Barron doesn’t have stain treatment for her clothes, so Lettice tries something with baking soda paste that she thinks she saw Mother do once; but it doesn’t get the red wine stain out of Mr. Barron’s shirt. “Never mind,” says Mrs. Barron, picking up the shirt and dropping it into the trash can. “Just do the other things.”

You manage to uncover enough of the floor to vacuum it, which is probably the first time this has happened in the Barron household for at least a calendar year.

At 5:50, Mrs. Barron calls your mother to mention that you’re going to be home late. She feeds you some cold pizza from the refrigerator instead of dinner. (“So we don’t get plates dirty again, right girls?”)

The pizza is a novelty, but it has spicy bits on it. Since you have no plates or napkins, Lettice spits the jalapenos straight into the trash.

As the scene unfolds, though, we might question Mrs. Barron’s assumptions: did she really thing these girls would do a good job? Is this another spaghetti story? I think the answer is that Mrs. Barron cared more about helping the children than cleaning the house. One question might be whether she really meant for the family to buy parmesan cheese with the money, or if rather she hoped that the children would get something nice out of the experience. The smart money is on the cheese, I think.

In any case, Mrs. Barron, whatever her intentions, may not understand the children very well, either, since their young palettes don’t appreciate jalapeños.

It is nearly eleven o’clock when Mrs. Barron gets you back home. You and Lettice are drooping at this point and climb sleepily into your beds. Your mother comes in.

“Hey, kiddo,” she says in the darkness. “I’m sorry I got you into that. It doesn’t sound like fun. But we have to show charity and help to our neighbors.”

> Did Mrs. Barron give us something good in barter?

“Did Mrs. Barron give us something good in barter?” you ask.

“Mrs. Barron doesn’t barter,” says Mother. “But she gave us a check. Two hundred dollars. If she has that kind of money to throw around, I’m surprised she doesn’t just hire a maid service.”

“Her house was really messy,” you say. “Maybe she thinks maids would laugh at her.”

“Hm,” says Mother. “Maybe. Now get some sleep. You’ve done good work today.”

Mother goes out and the door clicks shut behind her.

Two hundred dollars must be, as the saying goes, “real money” in the family’s fragile economy. It could pay for ten weeks of lessons with Sara, for instance. How curious for Mother to refer to the work as charity! Somehow, the haircut was reconfigured as charity, too. It is hard to know how sincere these positions are, or if they are just the sorts of things parents say to children.

So far in this playthrough, I think we see stability in different forms. There is economic stability, which the children sorely lack, but there is stability in the absence of chaos, too. The children do at least have that. But is there not enough chaos? There is a sort of wild hilarity in this and the haircut episode that would simply be impossible without an external disruptor like Mrs. Barron. These experiences demonstrate Bee’s capacity for leavening financial and social pressures with wry humor.

We aren’t done yet, though. There’s more to come, featuring Mrs. Barron, Jerome, Sara, and some pretty rotten Christmases. Stay tuned!

[alyshkalia (Tabitha (ey/em or they/them))]

Yay, glad to see the Bee series resuming!

@kamineko

“-- he didn’t really give me much warning. Isn’t that just like a man?”

A strange expression crosses Mother’s face, but it does not turn into words.

What, we have to wonder, might have shaped Mother’s expression?

My thought was that it was to do with her religious principles, with the husband as head of the household, and “wives, submit to your husbands.” Mrs. Barron is not evidencing a submissive attitude here!

[kamineko (Drew Cook)]

Yeah, I think that’s probably part of it. I also don’t think Mother has any experience that would make Mrs. Barron relatable. Mrs. Barron might as well have said, “You know how flying cars are.”

Perhaps it is a mixture of religious rebuke and jealousy. Perhaps Mother even feels insulted as an object of charity (it is Mrs. Barron who is being charitable, after all). I think there’s a lot going on here! Once we get to the ending of this playthrough (in which Mother goes back to work), I think this question gets even more interesting. I’m excited to talk about it.

Something that is going to keep coming up for me is: what do these people really believe?

Does anyone have thoughts there?