he was feeling like the little boy he had once been , the boy with few friends ( he had enjoyed a brief period of babyhood beauty until about age three , had been a fat and ugly joke ever since ) but many enemies , the boy who had been more or less taken for granted by his parents - their eyes had been trained on amy as she began her long walk down the miss america/atlantic city runway of her life - the boy who had turned to books for solace , the boy who had escaped never being picked for baseball or always being passed over for school patrol boy by becoming long john silver or tarzan or philip kent ... the boy who had become these people late at night under his covers with a flashlight trained on the printed page , his eyes wide with excitement , barely smelling his own bedfarts ; this boy now crawled upside down to the bottom of his sleeping bag with frannie 's diary and his flashlight .