The first step I took towards updating "The Fair Maid of Astolat" was to reread the text twice. I considered the story to be somewhat timeless, so I didn't really foresee any problems with setting it in the present day, but I knew it would be difficult to do so while keeping it brief and true to the original tale. Essentially, I tried to pare away all of the unnecessary detail in the story, and represent the core of the relationships between the characters.

Luckily, a great deal of the details in the story were unnecessary in an updated version. For instance, it wasn't essential that I list all of the names of the people that were involved in the skirmish or to give a blow-by-blow description of it. It was sufficient for me to merely have a skirmish to mirror the action and narrative structure of the original tale. The most difficult aspect of shortening the story was my attempt to accurately portray the way in which the characters related to each other. For instance, the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere (Lance and Gwen in my version) was extremely complex because it was established and described in several tales before "The Fair Maid of Astolat." I had to show how completely nasty Guinevere is in this particular story, while at the same time trying to make it understandable that Lancelot does not leave her for Elaine. Not only was it necessary for me to crystallize all of the relationships, but I had to give a true representation of the characters themselves. Arthur had to be kind but a little bit mysterious. Guinevere had to be mean but vulnerable and scared. Elaine had to be pure and tragic. Lancelot had to be full of bravado while at the same time helpless in the clutches of love. It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be.

Above and beyond that problem, I had to find a setting for the story that would be believable. This tale deals with a lot of strong emotions such as love, anger, covetousness, and guilt. Then it is necessary to take all this emotional turmoil and play it out against the backdrop of a battle. My first idea was to have the story revolve around the events of a war, but then I realized that I really know very little about war, and besides, in the original the story involved a tournament, not a real battle. I kept throwing around ideas involving adults fighting until I realized that adults don't really fight in this way anymore, except for in sporting events, and that what I really needed to do was to change the age group of the characters. Once I began to think of the characters as younger, and I placed them in Middle School, all of the rest of it just fell into place. I had forgotten that, for the most part, knight's tales are really just adolescent fantasies. Therefore it only made sense to play out the events in the surreal and hyper-emotional world of kids that are too old to be innocent, but too young to be jaded. I just hope I managed to pull it off.

 

Lance sat and stared out the window at the frosted leaves that slowly scraped along the pane. The seemingly vacant expression on his face matched the vapid, slackjawed wonder with which his younger brother, Boris, was watching Disney's "The Sword in the Stone." Contrary to the looks of things though, Lance had a lot on his mind. The annual Middle School Snowball Fight was this afternoon and Lance had been looking forward to going with his best friend Art. They had planned to show those punks from Central how it's done. But everything had changed last week when he was passed a note in math class from Art's girlfriend, Gwen. It informed him that she had a secret crush on him. Since then, Lance and Gwen had been sneaking around and meeting each other to talk and hold hands. Yesterday he'd even managed to get her to let him give her a quick kiss on the lips. Now, Lance had to decide whether he was going to go to the fight with Art, or if he would take this opportunity to be with Gwen when he knew that Art and all of his other friends would be busy on the other side of town.

Fifteen minutes later he picked up the phone and called Art. He told him that he couldn't go to the fight since his mom had gotten a call from one of his teachers saying that he wasn't doing his homework and that his mom had grounded him. A sharp pang went through him when Art told him it wouldn't be as much fun without him, but he shrugged it off, got on his bike and pedaled as fast as he could towards Gwen's house. He didn't get the warm reception he'd been expecting.

"What are you doing here?" Gwen demanded as her eyes quickly scanned up and down the street to see if they were being watched.

"Nothing . . . I don't know. I ditched out on the Fight so I could come over and hang out with you. I thought you'd want me to," Lance mumbled while staring down at his right foot, which he was kicking against the door jamb in order to loosen up the snow that had packed itself between the treads of his new sneakers.

"You can't be here, my friends are coming over. They'd tell on us," she said. "Look, why don't you go to the Fight and give me a call later, O.K.?" The door slammed in his face.

Lance loped back to the curb and picked up his bike that had fallen over, due to the fact that the kickstand was broken. He stood there for a little while, looking at her house and trying to decide what to do, before he finally got on his bike and started off in the direction of Winchester field, the designated site of the Fight. It took him about twenty minutes to wind his way through the deserted suburban streets before he reached the field, and when he finally arrived the Fight was already under way. The kids from The Camelot School, his school, had assembled in the north end of the field, while the kids from Central had taken over the south end. A steady barrage of snowballs was flying in every direction over the space dividing the two camps. Lance could see Art behind his school's lines frenetically packing snowballs for ammunition and telling the other kids where and when to attack.

Then Lance noticed a pretty girl that looked to be about his age sitting on the sidelines, watching the action with a younger boy that he guessed to be her little brother. He walked his bike over to her and plopped down on the ground beside her. He noticed that she had a notebook with her. She closed the notebook as soon as he sat down, turned her head away from the Fight and looked at him for a long time before she smiled and said,

"Hi, I'm Elaine."

"Hi, I'm Lance."

"Aren't you going to join in?" she asked him.

"Nah . . . I don't really feel like it. I don't feel like helping out my friends right now," he said, and he gave her a sort of half-smile that seemed to be all that he could muster.

"Well, you could join my school's team," she suggested.

Lance shrugged and noticed that she was wearing a bright red ski hat--the kind of hat that turns into a ski mask when you turn it inside out. Lance had just gotten a very interesting idea.

"I think I might do just that," he said, "if you wouldn't mind letting me borrow your hat."

Elaine smirked and gave him the hat. He turned it inside out and put it on so that none of his friends would be able to recognize him. Then he and Elaine's little brother, Vinny, packed a bunch of snowballs and he gave out a loud whoop and ran down into the south end of the field to help out the troops from Central. Lance had a strong arm and had been blessed with a dead aim. He almost always hit his target, and within minutes of his joining the Fight he had managed to nail almost all of his friends.

Unfortunately, in all of the maelstrom he failed to notice that his little brother, Boris, who was also gifted in the aim department, was on Art's side. Boris had decided that he was going to take down the guy in the mask with the great aim, so he dug around in the snow until he found a nice-sized rock. Then he packed snow tightly around it, took aim, and winged it at Lance as hard as he could. This lethal snowball zinged across the field and slammed into the side of Lance's head. He immediately fell to the ground, moaning in pain.

Elaine saw Lance fall and ran into the field to help him. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to his feet. Then she helped him walk to the side of the field and sit down. Meanwhile Vinny was covering their escape with a frenzied barrage of snowball and insult throwing.

"Are you O.K.?" Elaine asked as she eased the mask off of Lance's head.

Yeah, I'll be all right. Don't worry about it," he sighed as he grabbed her wrists and removed her hands from his head.

"Well . . .listen, you can come over to my house if you want and I'll put some ice on it," she whispered, an uncertain smile playing at the edges of her lips.

"No thanks, I gotta go," Lance said as he stood up and brushed the snow off of the seat of his jeans. Then he walked over to his bike, which had fallen again even though he'd leaned it against a tree, and pedaled away down the street as fast as he could.

Elaine stood and watched him go for a while before she sat down again and resumed writing in her journal. She turned to a clean page and wrote down one sentence:

I wish that Lance had liked me.

Then she ripped the page out of her journal and folded it into a little ship. She took the little boat over to the stream that ran alongside Winchester field and dropped it into the water. Then she stood and watched it swing and slide over the ripples of water until it floated around a bend and out of sight.

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