The Social Contract, Second Chunk

I returned to my friends, and we left to pursue our normal recess activities.

“What did Foellinger want?” asked Nathan, lazily bouncing his basketball.

“It's a secret,” I said.

Nathan looked at Tim, who looked back. “Did he ask you to be allies?” asked Tim, as if he already knew the answer.

“Yeah! Did he ask you, too? Are we all allies now?”

Nathan caught the basketball and shook his head. “You must be in Tyler Land today,” he said. “He's asked half the class already. You didn't actually say yes, did you?”

I tried to look innocent.

Tim smacked his head. “Bats in hats, Tyler! Don't you remember the pond race?”

Ah, yes, I did vaguely remember the pond race, an ill-fated venture of Abraham's in which he had tried, and failed, to swim across a pond faster than Connor Rowland could paddle his older brother's kayak. But that had been nearly a year ago. Could one silly shenanigan really mark a kid for life? Perhaps the contract had some sort of magical powers, because I found myself wanting to defend Abraham.

“He doesn't even speak English,” Nathan added. “He speaks some weird alphabet language. Why would you say yes?”

“He just spoke English to me,” I said uncertainly.

“Well then, he'll understand you when you say you changed your mind,” said Nathan.

“I can't. I signed a contract,” I said. “Maybe it'll be fine. It didn't sound too hard.”

“Why does he want allies?” asked Ross.

Nathan laughed. “He probably knows someone who wants to beat him up.”

I swallowed. “Really?”

“He's a smart kid,” said Tim. “He probably knows it's only a matter of time.”

“Yeah,” said Nathan. “And now they'll have to beat up Tyler, too.”

I glanced at Abraham a few times during the afternoon, to make sure he wasn't in any fights. He wasn't. He seemed to be trying to start a conversation with various classmates using long sentences of complete gibberish. All of them responded with a cryptic “A-X-D!” before walking away.

I was in trouble.

The next morning, though, all thoughts of contracts and history nerds had been driven from my mind by sheer excitement. My mother, who was always trying to get me to read, had finally presented me with something that caught my interest: a book of simple games. Most importantly, it contained a whole chapter on variations of tag.

Tim and Ross and Nathan and I loved to play tag! I thought they'd be so excited they'd immediately plan to play straight through the book with me. “Hey, guys!” I exclaimed as I saw them. “Guess what I have!”

They were not amused. “It's a book,” said Tim.

“No, but, it's a game book!” I explained. “There's nine different kinds of tag in there! We'll never get bored again!”

Tim shrugged. Nathan shrugged. Ross actually looked a little bit interested, but had the sense not to say so.

Over the course of the morning, my plea in favor of Elbow Tag, complete with interpretive dance, fell on deaf ears that led to sharp tongues. Unfortunately my protests came off as yet more bothersome. They spent half the morning trying to get everyone to call me 'Popup', like I was one of those internet ads that showed up unbidden and tried to sell you on something you didn't care about.

“You don't get it,” I said as we retrieved our books for spelling. “It's like, it starts off with just you on your own, trying to tag everybody, but then if you tag someone you link elbows and become a team.”

“I don't care if you link belly buttons,” Tim told me. “It's still dumb.”

“No, listen! So it's like you get to switch teams in the middle of the game!”

Nathan wasn't following, possibly because he was concentrating so hard on punctuating my sentences with sarcastic jazz hands. “Pop,” he said, miming the motion with his comically large hands. “Poppop. Pop. Pop.”

“Stop it,” I said, blocking his imaginary ads with my arms. “And then at then end it's like … everybody's on one team together! Like, you started with five or six little teams and then now you have one big team.”

“Oh, no, Nathan!” Tim said, nearly knocking me into an innocent fourth grader with an armload of books. “Popups everywhere! Click the X!”

“Yeah, or it'll keep making noise!”

Nathan then poked me right in the forehead, silencing the unseemly display for another hour or so. Of course I still had Ross, but well, expecting Ross to go against the others on a matter of any importance was like waiting for a taxi to stop in the middle of the highway at rush hour.

At lunchtime, Tim, Ross, and Nathan chose seats at a different part of the lunch table after I was already seated. This could have been coincidence, or it could have been on purpose. Perhaps they were punishing me for my flagrant violation of the Law of Diminishing Amusement. I felt myself jumping every time they laughed.

In fact, my side of the table was looking pretty darn empty until Abraham slid into the seat across from me. “Hey, Tyler!” he said by way of greeting. And believe me, that far into a nickname crusade, my real name sounded real good.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi! Hey, you know what else allies do?”

I scratched my ear. “Oh, are we still playing that?”

“Yeah! We signed a contract! That means keep playing forever or until it gets boring.”

I was down; Abraham's game obviously wasn't going to interfere with the absolutely nothing I was already doing. But first I had to make sure of something. “Abraham,” I said, very seriously, “you don't know anyone who wants to beat you up, do you?”

“No, of course not,” he said. “Anyway, remember in social studies, when--”

“Nope.”

He frowned slightly. “Maybe you should pay attention once in awhile. We learned the other thing allies do.”

So far, our alliance hadn't quite lived up to my superhero daydream expectations. “What's that?”

“They trade stuff. So maybe we could trade stuff!”

The offer was tempting. Abraham appeared to be nibbling the celery from a SnackPack Deluxe, completely unaware of its market value. I could probably get him to trade the Dunkers for my unwanted hot lunch noodles.

But, looking up, I realized what I was doing. I glanced to the left, where my normal crew was still happily ignoring me, and then forward again. It was starting to sound like this was Abraham's weird way of trying to make friends with me.

I'd never dreamed of befriending a person like Abraham. I had nothing against him, but he mostly spent his recess reading books, and while this appeared to be his preferred occupation I suspected it had to get boring eventually; I personally considered myself 'sooooo over reading' after a hard-won mastery of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. If it didn't have speech bubbles, you could count me out! Then again, I might feel differently after a few hours with Abraham the Contagious Literate. What if he brainwashed me?

My current friends certainly annoyed me now and again, but could I actually leave them forever? I wasn't sure if a nerd in the hand was worth the opportunity to sidle back into Tim-and-Ross-and-Nathan's good graces. Furthermore, there was a very real possibility of Abraham passing me some sort of social disease from which I would never recover.

“Defending each other and trading things. Sort of sounds like being friends,” I said, almost like an accusation.

“No, definitely not,” he assured me. “This is totally different.”

“How is it different?”

“It's more like a business,” Abraham said. “I wouldn't be friends with you.”

Somehow he'd made me forget that I was the one who didn't want to be friends. “What the hell's that supposed to mean?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing personal. I'm just not a friends kind of guy.”

“What?” I asked. “But everyone has some friends.” It had never actually occurred to me to doubt this statement.

“Well, sometimes I do, but they're not too fun. I don't think I'm going to have any anymore. I mostly just don't play sports very well, and my mom won't let me have sleepovers.”

“Well, why do you want to have allies then?”

“Because it'll be fun and kind of like being in history.”

“I don't want to play history. I thought we were playing war!”

Abraham laughed. “Tyler, the wars are IN history. Plus we're not going to dress up and fake shoot each other or anything. It's just a maybe once in a little while thing. Just for when you want some help. You can just kind of forget about it until you're in trouble, or you have stuff to trade.”

I stood up and grabbed my tray. “I don't know, Abraham. This isn't really as fun as I thought it would be.”

Of course, a second after abandoning my seat by Abraham, I realized there weren't many other empty places available. It was girls' territory or nothing. So, rather awkwardly, I managed to pace around the cafeteria while finishing my food. I wasn't doing too badly until the old lunch monitor caught up with me.

“Sit down!” she screeched, marching me back to the fifth graders. “You're going to bump into something and hurt yourself.”

All present laughed, none louder than my friends, and I had to wait it out with the girls after all until recess. They weren't impressed. They kept staring at me suspiciously as they talked, like they thought I was trying to run off with their secrets.

On the way out to the playground, I tried to rejoin Tim and Ross and Nathan, but they managed to slip away from me every time I got close. It appeared they weren't having my company for love or money today. Well, that was just fine, except no one else was either.

“Hey, Roger,” I said to my old friend from karate. “What are you playing?”

But it was Alex who answered. “We're playing a game called Pop the Popup!” he said. “Guess who the popup is?”

The tether ball kids weren't any help either. “You're not tall enough,” the pale one told me, as if for my own good. “You have to be at least eight feet tall to play tether ball. Or you might get hit in the brains.”

Even the fourth graders ruling over the kickball field turned me away. And wouldn't you know it, I ended my morose stroll by nearly bumping into the kid I'd been trying to get away from in the first place.

A smug grin played about the edges of Abraham Foellinger's mouth. “Need any help?” he asked.

I thought for a moment. I never was one for thinking about next month, or next Tuesday, or anything like that. I had to dig myself out of the untouchable zone, and fast. Our school enforced a rule that everyone had to play with a group at recess, and no one wanted to be dragged into someone else's game by the playground monitor. All but the least self-aware found it a humiliating experience, so mostly kids like Abraham found a good hiding spot if they wanted to be left in peace. And suddenly I was visited with a cunning plan of my own.

“You said we could trade things,” I reminded him. “Can we trade favors?”

Abraham looked uncomfortable. “Yeah sometimes, but it's got to be a good fair trade. Like in writing.”

I didn't have any paper on me. “Actual writing? Why can't we just shake hands?”

“Because,” he countered.

“Uh, what, it's a rule?”

“It's not proper.”

“We're ten!” Jeez, Lizzie and Devon got married on the playground with a handshake and a gum wrapper.

“Yeah, but we still need boundaries.”

“What, you don't trust me?”

That had him looking at a spot over my shoulder. “Look, we're not friends, okay? I don't do that anymore. A lot of people are friends with me for a little while, and then I share my stuff with them, but then they get bored, and I have to start over. So but then if we have actual official real IOUs or something you'd still have to pay me back even if that happened.”

That made me feel terrible. I wasn't buying this voluntary friendlessness thing – you'd have to be crazy to give up on having friends. He was obviously just trying to make himself feel better.

My gut instinct was to tell him I would be his friend. He wasn't my first choice, or my twenty-first, but having no friends wasn't a fate I'd wish on anyone, even Abraham. Besides, it couldn't be that hard. He mostly looked after himself anyway.

But then I realized: that was probably what the other kids had thought. There had to be a reason why no one would stay friends with Abraham. Not even the other nerds would give him the time of day these days. And good intentions wouldn't help when Abraham was reading me French philosophy textbooks from atop his Marie Curie bedspread.

“I don't know about this,” I said. “I heard you already asked everybody else, and they said no.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I had to ask a few other people first, because of a different contract. But I think you'd be really good if you gave it a try.”

“Why do you want me to do it? Why don't you ask somebody else?”

Abraham looked up. “Well, I watched everybody today, and you're the second worst in our class.”

“What? The second worst at what?”

“At having friends.”

“What? I am not!” I cried. “I've got three friends. You don't have any!”

“Three friends? Where are these three friends exactly, Tyler?”

Uh … no response …

“You get passed around more than a bootlegged copy of Megatrex III. You were Roger's friend, but then he's friends with Alex now, and then now you're sort of friends with Tim and them, but they're mad at you half the time anyway. Ever get tired of it?”

I seriously wanted to punch him. Of course, it was not uncommon for me to want to punch someone in those days, for ordinary reasons ranging from a tripping to a rude parody of the way I walked. I rarely followed through on these violent impulses, preferring to seethe in silence. But the way Abraham was talking to me was a little out of the ordinary. It was a brain-tripping. It was like he not only knew the stuff nobody was supposed to put into words, but, well, put them into words. I couldn't even think of what to say, I was so mad. And unfortunately, Tim and Nathan chose that exact moment to walk by. Nathan was hiding something in his coat, and the pair of them were laughing like it was the greatest secret in the universe. As much as my pride willed me to, I couldn't disguise my scowl.

So, I ducked my head to the side, and I said to Abraham, “Stop. Friend. Stalking. Me.”

Abraham made some well-planned eye contact. “Look, Tyler, it's okay! You're like me. You're too cool for friends.”

“What? That doesn't make any sense.”

Abraham smiled earnestly. “No, it makes brilliant sense. Listen. We'll agree to help each other out … and then we just won't ever hang out together. That way, we can't ever fight! So … so if you're not getting along with your friends, you'll still have me to trade favors with. It's an awesome idea.”

When he put it that way, I could see the benefit. No risk of growing apart if I didn't pretend to like stuff I didn't like. No gestures of good faith going unappreciated. No servitude to the whims of misremembered arguments about accidental offenses. We would simply continue aiding one another just the same, come hell or high school, in service to our mutual self-interests.

“We can update the contract after school,” he suggested.

“Okay but can we start now? I'll give you this spoon as an I.O.U.”

“Only if it's a small favor,” said Abraham.

Sudden inspiration hit me. I tried to look saintly. “Will you punch Tim in the face?”

Abraham laughed. “No. No preemptive strikes.”

“Well, will you play elbow tag with me? Just until everyone else sees how fun it is.”

He sighed. “Tyler, you can't play elbow tag with only two people; everyone knows that.”

I tried to think of a decent rejoinder, but then I saw the incontrovertible truth of his statement. By the time the elbow rule kicked in the game would be over. Pointless.

That's the thing about me. Sometimes I get so excited I forget to think, because I'm too busy talking and planning and wishing and waving my arms, until suddenly I'm just marooned on fantasy island with no bridge, boat or signal flare. And after years of trying to back up my ego with increasingly wild arguments, I found it a little bit amazing to discover someone willing to approach me with more acceptance than judgment and more logic than testosterone.

“Hey – who's the first worst at having friends?” I asked him suddenly.

He shrugged. “It isn't important.”

And then it came to me. “It's you, isn't it!”

“Nope. It's Luke Spyer. But he's a tool. So...”

I laughed. I couldn't not laugh.

“If Tim still won't let you play with them you can stay in my tunnel,” offered Abraham. “But you have to let me read.”

I'd never stooped as low as the tunnels before even during the inevitable friendless periods, preferring to ingratiate myself shamelessly into groups too large to notice me, but today they almost seemed cool compared to the alternative.

“It's not your tunnel,” I told him.

“It is if I get there first!” shouted Abraham as he ran off for the far side of the playground.

I followed at a reasonable pace. This was only a temporary measure, I told myself. Heck, maybe this alliance idea would take off. It could even get so popular the whole class would want in and we'd live out the rest of our years in the educational system as radical social communists, ganging up on the sixth graders and dominating the lunchroom economy.

And if that happened, no elbow would be safe.