One night, Owen sleeps over Johnny's house and comes down with a fever. We go back in time and get a bit of backstory on events that happened between Owen and Johnny while Tabby was still alive. At the time, Johnny doesn't really get why Owen would do that – and neither do we – but in time we'll all figure it out.
Owen ends up returning the armadillo, except not the whole thing – he actually removes all of the armadillo's claws first. Johnny knows that Owen wants the cards back, so he returns them to Owen along with the stuffed armadillo. That night, Owen gives Johnny his whole collection of baseball cards as a way of showing Johnny how sorry he is. Owen hits a foul ball that smacks Tabby in the head. Meanwhile, Tabby arrives at the game and stands just outside of third base waving at someone in the stands. Chickering, has a "what the heck" moment and puts Owen up to bat in Johnny's place. Their team is losing pretty badly, so their coach, Mr. One day in 1953 when the boys are eleven, Johnny and Owen are playing in a little league game. Owen and Johnny love playing with the armadillo, which we don't really get, but it's sweet anyway.
Johnny loves Dan from the second he meets him, perhaps because Dan brings him a pretty awesome gift: a real armadillo that has been preserved and stuffed. Dan is a drama teacher at Gravesend Academy. When Johnny is ten years old (in 1952), Tabby marries a man named Dan Needham, a sort of geeky guy whom she met on the train four years earlier. Owen also sticks out because he kind of acts like a little old man he's wise beyond his years and isn't afraid to tell other people about his beliefs and principles. We get a sense of Owen's voice from the first time he speaks because all of his dialogue is written LIKE THIS, IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. He has ears that stick out and a voice that terrifies people who hear it for the first time. We learn right away that Owen is totally different from the other kids in town – physically, he's the smallest kid around. Johnny spends most of his time with Owen Meany, whose family owns a granite quarry in Gravesend. All anyone knows is that Johnny's father is someone she met on the train to Boston, where Tabby would travel once a week for voice lessons. Johnny's mom, Tabby, gave birth to him out of wedlock and refuses to tell anyone who Johnny's father is. John (or Johnny, as he's called as a kid) lives with his mother and grandmother at 80 Front Street. He sets the scene in Gravesend, New Hampshire, beginning in 1952. He tells us the story of his friendship with Owen Meany and how it has affected his whole life. Our narrator, John Wheelwright, is an American expatriate living in Toronto, Canada in 1987.
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