The Social Contract, Third Chunk

Chapter 3

After school, Abraham and I went to the Waiting Area to plot. The Waiting Area was this big classroom down by the gyms filled with colorful, squishy futons where the kindergarteners took their naps, and happy posters, and weird looking educational toys, and every board game in the world. It smelled terminally of lemon disinfectant and peanut butter crackers, and I'd never seen it less than packed. I could never spend enough time there when I was little.

Dunmore Elementary was big enough that the parents had to pick us up in shifts; as an Aden County kid I partook in the short but critical social scene that emerged every day from 2:55PM to 3:15PM in the Waiting Area. Some kids hated the waiting but I always thought it was nice to have a few minutes to sit back, play a mindless game and process the events of the day.

“Let's write the contract in JAB code,” Abraham suggested. “That way, no one will be able to steal it and see what it says.”

“I don't know your dumb code,” I said. “I wouldn't be able to see what it said.”

“Well, I'll write it then,” said Abraham, “and then I can teach you.”

“No.”

He shrugged. “You say that a lot, you know?”

Here's what we came up with in the end:

We, Abraham Foellenger and Tyler Freimann, promise to come to each other's aid in the following situations:
– Someone is hurting one of us, like punching or kicking or wrestling that's not fun wrestling or anything like that.
– Public teasing that goes on longer than three minutes or the high sign is made, whichever comes first. (The high sign is calling the teaser a 'duckbutt' because that's a pretty good insult anyway.)
– Classroom discussions where Mr. LaFevre is trying to make us look stupid.
– One of us forgot or lost something and needs to borrow it, and the other person has enough of that thing.
– Tyler can stay in Abraham's tunnel if he promises to let him read.
You have to trade with me first if we ever have stuff to trade. If you want to trade a favor, you have to give the other person one of Tyler's four car erasers. We each start out with two starting now. A really big favor might be worth more than one eraser. If you don't have any erasers left you have to do something worth erasers to get them back!

That's all for now. Sincerely,

Abraham Foellenger

Tyler Freimann


“That was kind of fun,” I admitted when we had both signed. “I think maybe I'll be a lawyer when I grow up and make contracts for people all day.”

Abraham had the grace not to point out he'd done all the hard work. “Yeah, that would be a fun job. Well I have to go to band practice now.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll talk to you the next time I need a favor then?”

“X-D-R,” he agreed.

Shortly after Abraham had gone, Ross, who was also an Aden county resident, looked up from his book. “Want to play checkers?” he asked, as was our usual custom.

“Sure,” I agreed, pleased. Ross lost to me frequently and easily at almost every competitive game.

“I had a new idea for how to do checkers,” he told me. “What if we made them fight sometimes? Like, instead of jumping over each other all the time, they could fight for the square and see who got it.”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“It just wouldn't be checkers.”

He cocked his head to one side, said “I guess that's true,” and said no more about it.

I had been afraid Ross would side with Tim and Nathan on the matter of our microfeud, or would object to my new alliance with Abraham, but he genuinely didn't seem to care. He may not have even noticed; he was simple like that. And while he'd shouted 'Popup' with the rest that morning, laughing at the novelty of a joke he didn't get, there was no real malice involved and he showed all signs of having forgotten the matter immediately.

As I double-jumped Ross's king, I considered asking Abraham to add him to our alliance. But before I could decide how to phrase the question, I realized a kid like Ross didn't need any protection. He was so chill he completely flew under everyone's radar. And amazingly, when I was with him, I didn't act like a popup ad at all.

Ten minutes later I made my way downstairs with the others. My mother pulled up in her ancient Honda and I hopped in.

“How was your day?” she asked, and make no mistake, the question was loaded.

“Fine,” I responded in the proud tradition of reticent young males everywhere.

“Did you get your math test back yet?”

“No.” (Yes.)

“Anything else happen?”

“It was fine.”

“How fine?” she countered, and I knew I would have to do better. Best to skate over the homework slip burning a hole in my backpack and the recess spent in a tunnel with the class pariah; instead I used the open-endedness of the question to its full advantage. “I made an ally!”

“An ally? What do you mean?” she asked. I think she must have been torn between finding my antics cute and worrying they would turn out to be abnormal enough to impede ordinary social progress.

“I signed this contract with Abraham,” I elaborated. “We agreed to help each other whenever we asked and stuff. I'm totally set now!”

Mom smiled very carefully. “Well that's nice, honey, but I hope you're still friends with Tim and Ross and Nathan, too. As they always say, 'Make new friends, but keep the old'!”

I opened my mouth to explain about Abraham not being my friend but stopped short, knowing I'd find the conversation both fruitless and embarrassing. As to Tim, I was still unsure. He didn't seem to miss me after our recess apart. It wasn't like I could just ask him what his problem was, was it? So until he came around I was stuck in limbo.

After I'd gone to sleep that night, and most certainly wasn't peeking through the stair railings past my bedtime, my mother broached the issue with my dad. “I'm a little worried about Tyler, honey. This afternoon when he came home from school, he told me he made an ally. Now, what do you suppose that means?”

Dad chuckled. “An ally? Perhaps he's planning to storm the beaches at Normandy.”

Mom folded her arms. “You don't think it's like a gang, do you? He mentioned he signed a contract with the Foellinger boy.”

“Foellinger?”

“You know the Foellingers. They live in that castle-looking house.”

“Oh, yes, with the loud parties all the time. Their son seems like a good kid.”

“He gets up to some pretty weird stuff,” said Mom. “He was the one who built the snowball launcher, remember?”

Dad remembered. “It was a trebuchet.”

“What's a trebuchet?”

“Something smart kids build. What kind of contract is it?”

Mom shrugged. “Well, it sounded innocent enough. They just promised to help each other. You never know though.”

“Help each other? With what?”

“That's just it; I don't know. Everything, I guess.”

“So … they're friends now?”

“You would think. But then he would've just said that, wouldn't he? He said they were allies. That's got to mean something.”

My dad didn't seem to see the problem. “Hmmm. That isn't a half-bad idea. Lots of people never find a relationship that stable.”

“But don't you think it's a bit, ah, parsimonious, signing a friend contract like that?” my mom hinted.

Dad smiled oddly at her. “What's worse, being outright parsimonious or tacitly so?”

“I don't know what you mean,” she said, as if, despite not knowing what he meant, she had her suspicions. “Friendships are more than a business arrangement; friends are there for each other even when they can't be repaid. It's one of the great accomplishments of the human spirit.”

“Well you know my feelings on human nature,” he cadged. “Sometimes we just like to build up a little good will credit in advance, in case we need it later. George Bailey bucks, if you will. True friends can surpass the need for a contract but it's a place to start learning.”

“Learning what? The habit of only seeing friendship as what's in it for you?”

“Would you rather cover the human condition in rose perfume?” Dad frowned and tried to keep his tone light. “Just to take an example close at hand, you've been playing a lot of tennis this week, my dear. I happen to know you don't like tennis, and I'm not sure you like the women you play it with either, but something of value must be coming out of your games because you seem very keen not to miss them.”

He sighed the sigh of a long and inscrutable marriage. “You know, Jules, sometimes I think the world would be better off if the social contract were displayed on public record.”

That was the problem with having really educated parents. They never said what they meant. They pretended they were debating high philosophical concepts when even I could see they just wanted to have a good proper fight with each other. Not that I really cared if my mother wanted to gossip with the backstabbing biddies of the Hillridge “Totally Not a Country Club” Recreational Society, or my father wanted to judge her for it. As a kid I found it pretty difficult to stray from my own problems for five minutes at a time. They were still ostensibly talking about my arrangement so, taking the discussion at face value, I tried to filter out the adult phrases and references my parents were going to explain to me when I was older (like anything with the words 'universal', 'social', 'human' or 'objective' in it) and get to the heart of the matter.

It seemed like my mom thought friendship was a magical talisman that happened naturally to everyone and shouldn't be meddled with. I knew that wasn't true because some people didn't have any friends, and some people had friends who only wanted to be friends when it wasn't hard, and some people had so many friends they didn't know what to do with them all. My mom fought with my dad sometimes and they'd been friends since before I was born!

And my dad was saying it was useless to expect people to be loyal to each other because they only helped each other for selfish reasons. But I didn't think that was true either. Some people really were just lucky in friendship and banded together without question.

I decided to keep my options open. I still held out hope that everything would get better for me, that natural goodness and generosity and all those Care Bear mythical qualities that didn't seem to apply to ten-year-old boys at all would somehow prevail in my classmates. But I wasn't going to let it worry me too much. There was always The Contract to fall back on if they didn't.

Chapter Four

The next morning, by some miracle of limited attention span, I was chilling on the heating vent in homeroom with Ross and Nathan like nothing had happened. “Dude,” I groaned. “No way does Araby Prescott want to kiss you. She definitely likes Jordan.”

Nathan fluttered his feathers defensively. “She hasn't seen my flow yet, son. Two weeks and she'll be begging to hold my hand in assembly.”

I don't know why, but Nathan always talked like that when the subject got around to girls. He seemed to think he was fooling someone. And maybe he was, but it was only Ross, which wasn't much of a victory.

“We should all find some girls that nobody likes yet and like them,” Ross suggested. “That way they'll have to talk to us!”

“If nobody likes a girl, there's usually a reason, fool,” Nathan shot back.

“An ugly girl's better than no girl,” Ross pointed out.

The process mystified me, to be honest. On the one hand, you couldn't really pick who you liked, could you? And they couldn't pick if they liked you back. The chances of a mutual preference, combined with the accurate discovery of such a preference amid the layers and whispers of elementary school intrigue, seemed pretty remote when you thought about it. I figured most relationships were the consequence of person A confessing warm feelings to person B, who then chose to accept the offer and perhaps grew to like person A in return over the course of a few weeks. “I've got it,” I cried. “We just have to find out who likes us!”

“How do we do that?” Ross asked.

I frowned. “We need an in with the girls.”

And in dropped Abraham like a well-timed anachronism. “Tyler, I'll give you a whole eraser if you'll just tell me what a meowmizer is. Emmy and Lizzie won't tell me, and they won't let anyone else tell me either. It isn't in the big dictionary or anything!”

Alarmed, I pulled him away from my friends. “Keep it down, will you?”

“Okay,” he whispered. “So what's a meowmizer? For an eraser and a half?”

I smirked, amazed at how stupid smart kids could be sometimes. “Keep your eraser. I'll tell you what a meowmizer is if you tell me who Lizzie likes.”

“Not you,” he asserted.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, because if Abraham was a master body-language reader, he'd sure been keeping his talent well hidden.

“I don't have enough time to list all the reasons.”

Abraham went to confer with the girls again (maybe they thought he didn't count as a boy?) and I reflected on the genius of our arrangement. Because nobody knew us as an entity, nobody would suspect I was the one who ended the meowmizer game, which had been kept up steadily for the past two months by a huge collective effort and seemed to have finally reached the relatively isolated Abraham. Furthermore, he could probably ferret out the secrets of the unsuspecting girls for me, particularly that of a Miss Elizabeth Murray. I figured if I was going to question all of them in turn, why not start with the best prospects?

“It's some sixth grader,” Abraham reported back. “Told you.”

“Meowmizer doesn't mean anything,” I responded peevishly. “It's just a word Joey Hull made up to drive kids like you crazy. You're the last person in the class to know.”

We sat there for a moment, feeling foolish. “Well,” he finally said, “I know now. It's important to have good spies so you know everything.”

I smiled. “Yeah. Like a secret agent. But the evil kind!”

On Thursday Abraham held out an eraser to me again. “I want you to be my test subject in an experiment I'm doing,” he said.

“What kind?” I asked warily.

He smirked. “I can't tell you. It's double-blind.”

“I don't know what that means, but I'd better not go blind!”

“You probably won't even notice,” Abraham assured me. “I'm testing the placebo effect. And my dad always says when you do an experiment you have to give the test subjects something for their time, or it's not ethical.”

“Deal,” I said, taking the eraser. Sometimes I just had no idea where that kid got his moral values from.

“By the way,” he offered, “do you want some of this gum? It's supposed to calm you down.”

I took some and proceeded to recess. With no small amount of trepidation I approached the bike racks where my friends usually played tag. Tim gave me a look like a chip on a shoulder.

“We don't like tag anymore,” he told me solemnly. “We play poker now.”

My first instinct was to say something to the effect of 'Traitor! Tag is ten times the fun you will ever be!', but I just chewed on my gum instead, thinking. Not upset. Don't be upset. Maybe it isn't personal, and if it is, nothing I can do.

“I don't know how to play poker,” I said noncommittally.

“It's really easy, Tyler,” Ross assured me. “We can show you.”

Two against two. I tried not to look at Nathan. But of course he functioned something like Tim's extra arm at times like these.

“There are no elbows in poker,” Tim warned me.

Instantly my brain thought of a dozen dumb responses to this quip, mostly corny, half-baked notions like 'That's all right, I left my elbows at home' (what? No you didn't), 'I know there's no elbows, because poker's only for hands' (better), 'How do I pick up the cards if my shoulders don't meet my forearms?' (you're losing it Freimann), and 'What if we played poker and tag at the same time? Wouldn't that be a lot more interesting than some stupid old-person hobby that you're only doing to look cool?' (wrong answer, thanks for playing). But in that moment I knew. I knew that playing the wise guy was as pointless as it was fun, because Tim Lindstrom was going to stand there and wait for the response he wanted to hear for as long as it took. Any backtalk would be killed with neglect.

“Fine,” I told him. “Great.”

He grinned. “Newcomer deals.”

Friday morning I handed the eraser back to Abraham. “Can you save me a seat in social studies?”

Our social studies teacher liked to pass around cool old stuff during class. Over the course of the year she'd brought in everything from a zoetrope of a peanut crossing the street to a genuine Civil War bullet. But every time she instructed us to pass something around, some fool kid always forgot about it and left it on his desk so it never made it to the back. For this reason front seats were highly prized; the honors kids, who had enrichment math next door immediately before social studies, invariably claimed the coveted spots.

Abraham grinned. “Sure, easy. I hear Mrs. Nestor brought in pictures of her and her friends at Woodstock this time!”

We had a good laugh at the mental image of our wrinkled, exacting teacher at a rock concert. “Think she's doing anything illegal in the pictures?”

When social studies rolled around I was greeted by a most unusual sight. There he was, waving at me from the front row, his feet planted firmly on the next desk. Something about his bearing told me this was his first seat-saving. Eyes wide, shoulders back, expression hopeful: Abraham was supposed to be doing me the favor, but he was the one getting a huge kick out of the situation, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. For all his dismissive talk about the hassles and letdowns of close relationships, here he was, glowing with a pathetic sort of pride at the expectation of sitting with me in a fourth-period blowoff class. It was then I began to suspect that the stiff associate I'd always thought of as the icicle of the fifth grade was nothing but a bit of snowflake melting in a mitten.

Tim and Ross were laughing, but whether out of jealousy or contempt I couldn't tell. It occurred to me suddenly that Tim had never saved me a seat in his life. Part of me wanted to kick the both of them in the teeth in payment for the blush creeping onto Abraham's face, but discretion led me instead to turn my back and answer my brother in arms with the biggest smile I could muster. “Thanks!”

The Woodstock pictures didn't contain anything remotely scandalous. But Abraham made me smile by speculating in a husky whisper about which bearded weirdo had been Mrs. Nestor's boyfriend.

A few hours hour later I'd claimed the eraser again. “Draw me a sheep, Tyler?” he asked between the first bell and the second. (I was widely known for my excellent drawing skills.)

“Okay,” I agreed, gratified. “What's it for?”

“I'm making my mom a birthday card. It's kind of an inside joke about the sheep.”

For a second and a half I thought about teasing him for having inside jokes with his mom, but then I'd probably owe him an eraser. Besides, what would be the point? Embarrassing people just ruined the mood. So for perhaps the first time in my life, I held my tongue for the sake of another person's pride.

“All right but now I'm curious. Why a sheep?”

He shrugged. “My little sister was born in 1998, so one year on her birthday my parents thought it would be funny to tell her they'd cloned her from a sheep, too. Since then the birthday sheep has been a sacred Foellenger tradition.”

I still didn't get it.

“Geez, Freimann, read a book once in awhile,” Abraham groaned. But his tone was feather-light. I hit him with my jacket and drew what, in my own opinion, was the best little lamb in the history of pastoral artwork.

“Nice,” he crowed. “That looks just like my sister.”

I smiled. “At least your sister isn't a meowmizer.”