Portico Reeves is a young boy who lives in a large urban apartment building complex called Skylight Gardens which he refers to as a castle. The building is large and densely populated with residents who are all characters in one way or another. As a result, Portico begins to see the residents as something more akin to characters in a TV show in which he is the main character. This makes a lot more sense with the understanding that the castle is really big and constructed from the glassiest of glass and the brickiest of bricks. It is filled with many doors behind which all sorts of secret lives play out. In the mind of an imaginative youth like Portico, the Skylight Gardens is easily imagined in terms of castles and TV shows.
Portico himself lives with his mother and father, grandmother, and a cat. Life is pretty good for the most part for Portico except for when it’s not. And when life isn’t good, he finds himself overcome with feelings of anxiety. His grandmother has a peculiar name for this feeling. She calls it “the frets.” Portico finds himself dealing more and more with the frets as the relationship between his parents gets worse and worse. Whenever they begin to argue, they tell him to go somewhere else and find something to do “in the meantime” until the arguing has subsided. Thus, the title of the book plays out on a double level of meaning. The meantime also refers to those periods in which his mother and father begin talking to each other in mean ways.
Portico becomes friends with a girl named Zola Brawner on the first day of school when he steps in to protect her from the school’s number one bully, Herbert Singletary the Worst. Having been denied the easy target of Zola, Herbert turns his attention to Portico. Becoming the object of bullying also gives Portico a bad case of the frets. Meanwhile, however, his friendship with Zola deepens when he is invited to her apartment, and they bond over their shared love for a TV show called Super Space Warriors. The title characters of the show inspire the Portico to create his own superhero secret identity. That is the origin story of Stuntboy, a defender of all those in need of protection against all things. For the most part, these stunts are pure acts of imagination, such as sucking up all the foul air caused by a student passing particularly noxious gas. He vows that this particular stunt will never be done again.
What even Stuntboy can’t protect, unfortunately, is the marriage of his parents. Upon arriving home to find them arguing over ownership of a simple folding chair, he learns they are planning to live in separate apartments. He is not quite capable of processing this connection without the gentle assistance of Zola, however. It is Zola who helps him better comprehend the situation by comparing it to an episode of their favorite TV show. This stimulates Portico to quickly return to his apartment and intervene by performing a stunt designed to keep his mother and father from using the chair as a weapon to injure the other. As the weeks drag out, however, Portico continues to come face-to-face with his parents fighting over possessions. Each of these confrontations results in the same routine: he runs to Zola who compares the situation to something from the show which in turn sends Portico back home as Stuntboy to carry out another stunt designed to save the day and the relationship even though his efforts are doomed.
In the meantime, Portico and Zola are forced by circumstances to see another side of Herbert Singletary that he tries to hide behind his bully veneer. Herbert escapes from his problems by hiding out in a secret lair inside the apartment building’s boiler room. Eventually, the three put aside their differences and develop a friendship. It is while they are in Herbert’s secret hiding place one day that they hear the sound of Portico’s mom and dad through the wall. The fighting is a familiar sound for Herbert. His parents used to argue like that. Portico realizes at this moment that his parents are heading not just for separation but divorce. When he confronts them and directly raises this issue, however, they are quick to deny it and insist they are just trying out a separation.
Portico realizes that there is nothing he can do—there is no stunt he can perform—that has the power to stop his parents from splitting up. Their fights have consistently been over who has the right to claim ownership of the possessions he had always assumed belonged to the family equally. When he sees that his cat may be the next in line to become an object to fight over, he decides to perform a stunt to save it. This decision opens his perceptual understanding of the entire point of becoming Stuntboy in that meantime whenever his parents are fighting. The realization hits that the only way he has to deal with the frets and overcome the paralysis caused by the onset of anxiety is to push Portico to the background and take on the persona of Stuntboy. It is through the imaginative exercise of his non-existent superpowers that he can find the strength to overcome his fears and face the reality of an uncertain future.
