Not your average Joe

For the students gathered at the John Marshall Ballroom in Richmond April 24, the moments before the announcement of the four members of the prom court were tense—but perhaps few were as nervous as junior Joey Frye.

“I was thinking, ‘Please don’t call my name,’” said Frye, who later explained, “I don’t want to get a lot of attention.”

Nevertheless, it was to wild cheers that he was crowned Prom Prince, winning, as Caroline High School English teacher and prom organizer Kristen Booth explained, “by the biggest margin of any person I’ve ever had win in the 10 years that I’ve been planning prom.”

“Practically every junior and senior in the building voted for him,” she wrote in an e-mail. “The other three guys running for Prom Prince even voted for him.”

When told that, Frye paused a moment to reflect before concluding, “I guess I’m popular.”

But even more importantly, when he stood up in front of his classmates, alongside his nervousness he also felt, he said, “joyful.”

Prom is a rite of passage for most CHS juniors, but for Frye the evening was particularly notable. Diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum at a young age, Frye sees the world he shares with his peers through a unique lens.

“He just really thinks about things from all different points of view,” said Stephanie Sadler, Frye’s English teacher. “He’s got a real analytical mind.”

According to the definition generally accepted by the medical community, autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects individuals along a spectrum. Still imperfectly understood, the condition—which many prefer to think of as a “variant”—appears in the population in hundreds of different guises, with few cases following the same path.

Nevertheless, a few characteristics that appear early in childhood are shared by those on the spectrum. Difficulties communicating or navigating social situations are common, as is a preoccupation with routine or repetition.

For Frye’s parents, the first indicators were their son’s speech delays and extremely negative reaction to noise. Still, when he did start speaking, he jumped into the English language wholeheartedly.

“Joey’s first word was ‘gondola,’ referring to that type of train car, and he used it correctly,” Carrie Frye, Joey’s mother, recalled in an e-mail. “Not mama, dada, but gondola.”

Although he was officially diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, an affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, “the most accurate label if one needs one” for Frye, wrote Carrie Frye, is Asperger’s, a condition that falls toward the more high-functioning end of that spectrum.

But while living with such a variant can be challenging, Frye and his parents have chosen to focus more on his talents—which are many.

Art in particular is an area in which Frye excels. His drawings, which exhibit his technical skill with perspective, are displayed throughout the house. One that is especially lovingly rendered depicts the family’s former home in Milford, where they lived until 2014. Another picture, not in the house, won Best in Show in its category at this past year’s State Fair. Depicting a monster that descends from space to devour the Earth, the painting sparked a burst of creativity in another of Frye’s passions: screenwriting.

Film fascinates Frye, who especially enjoys the action, science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres and hopes to one day build a career in the field through screenwriting, the type of writing he most enjoys.

“A screenplay actually describes what is going on,” he said. “The setting, the characters, the action, the dialogue.”

Building on the scene depicted in his Best in Show painting, he is already working on his first screenwriting project, a science fiction thriller called “Monsteroid,” which, he said, “I want to do…very desperately.”

It was these various interests that Frye tapped into to design his campaign posters for Prom Prince. Despite his initial reluctance to be part of prom court—he turned down one nomination, according to Sadler, before finally accepting the nomination of a different class—he entered into the design process with energy, drawing images from his favorite movies and the steam engines he loves under the slogan “Not your average Joe.”

His classmates showed their agreement at prom, which Frye attended with his parents, dressed in a dapper white jacket and black pants—“James Bond style,” he said.

For now, with prom a memory behind him, and one he isn’t sure he wants to repeat, Frye is looking forward to finding a summer job, working on his screenplay, and making plans for his future.

As a senior next year, he said he is considering college, possibly for filmmaking, where he could explore the craft in more depth, as well as the techniques such as live-action, motion-capture, and animation that particularly interest him.

“I’m getting older,” he said, echoing a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever been a teenager: “I’d like to have a life of my own.”