The Social Contract

Erasers

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 Abraham Foellinger, 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 1996, 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."

But our honeymoon bliss was not to last. It was Tuesday morning, and I hadn"t even taken off my rain boots yet before I caught sight of Abraham"s head in a very familiar headlock. "Duckbutt!" he cried by way of greeting. "Dirty, dirty duckbutt!"

Tim tightened his hold. "Stop calling me stuff, professorhead!"

"No!"

"Oh my god, what do you even think you"re doing? That doesn"t even hurt! It feels like a ... Nathan, get this i***t off me. It feels like a little kitten"s trying to dance with me."

"I bet a kitten could take you, you jerk!"

"Of course it couldn"t; I"d step on it. Do you want me to step on you, Foellinger? Are we in step dancing class?"

"You sure know a lot about dancing for a boy."

"Oh, no!" Tim falsettoed, ignoring him and continuing the horseplay. "I don"t want to dance with you, kitty! Go back to your mousy hole."

"Seriously though," said Nathan. "I"m trying to be nice and give you advice. Go sit down."

"No way! Did Galileo sit down?"

"No, doofus, he never sat down in his whole life. He just stood in his sleep."

Later I told myself firmly that I would have stepped in. I would have. Maybe not cheerfully, but my sense of honor would have forced its hand. And you know, it would have been good for me to smack Tim one. Probably good for him too, and definitely good for our relationship. Crowds of classmates would have borne witness to the powers of loyalty, nerve and teamwork, instantly resolving never to play deaf to the cries of a fellow sufferer ever again.

Obviously that isn"t what happened, but it was a nice fantasy.

"You"re a dog AND a duckbutt, you waste of bones!" Abraham insisted.

Tim looked more annoyed and confused than anything. He asked his new armrest, "What"s your problem? I didn"t even do anything to you. Did you just wake up this morning and want to get punched?"

Something wasn"t right about this. Tim didn"t even like fighting. He liked standing around being so intimidating he didn"t have to fight. He walked right past nerds normally. I raised an inquisitive eyebrow at Nathan, who was nearest, but he just looked stunned.

"What"s going on?" I asked.

Nathan giggled. "Foellenger"s gone insane!"

"But why? What set him off?" I asked myself as much as Nathan.

"Who knows? Who cares?" Nathan said. "This is the funniest thing ever; it"s like being attacked by a preschooler. I don"t even think he knows how to throw a real punch."

I had to admit Abraham wasn"t the most fearsome opponent in the world. He wasn"t flailing to get free or anything; he was just standing there, confidently spewing insults and pretending his head wasn"t in an arm necklace. "Big talk, Lindstrom, but it just so happens I found the cure for stupid this morning and here I have the perfect test subject." At this his eyes met mine expectantly.

And suddenly it was all clear to me. That jerk! Tricking me into a contract so he could go around picking fights with impunity? That was book-readers for you.

All right, so it was partly my fault for assuming it would be other kids causing all of Abraham"s conflicts. "Oh, Tyler, I just want to be left alone to think my smart thoughts in peace" – ha. The trouble was, he"d been shoved so many times that, far from minding, he"d developed a taste for it.

Not to say anyone went out of his way to make trouble for the kid. That would have been too much effort. But half a dozen years of only being noticed when he was in the way, of only being spoken to harshly, of only being used as a sort of boredom relief, building up in his unconscious memory alongside a healthy male ego, must have fueled a desperate desire to force certain self-assured schoolmates to bear witness to his existence. There didn"t need to be pain involved, or terror; merely a glint of respect and a wide berth would do it.

And the sad fact was, it wasn"t fear that had kept him from taking on his adversaries in single combat all this time. It was sure knowledge that the young men in question wouldn"t even take him seriously enough to give him a manly broken nose. No, it was a headlock and the same dismissive tone as always. So he"d adopted the most human strategy there was, one that street kids and small nations and weak men everywhere all came up with eventually. He"d just taken it a little too far.

Unsure where my loyalties lay, I took hold of Abraham"s shoulder and said, "Let him go, Tim; I"ll handle this." Tim complied, and I led my ally into the waiting area"s curtained cloakroom.

"I"m suing you for breach of contract," he told me sulkily. "What was up with that? I made the high sign and everything."

"I could ask you the same question. You really thought I"d fight Tim with you just for kicks?"

"Hey. We didn"t say anything about motives. It was an unconditional agreement."

I pulled out my copy. "You weren"t being hurt and you were the one trying to tease him."

"Yeah but he was teasing back," Abraham insisted. "For longer than three minutes. And I made the high sign."

I shook my head, pointing at the paper. "I did the contract. I was doing number four. You lost something and I lent you some."

"What did I lose?"

"Your dignity."

He looked at me as if he were thinking about trying to fight me, but by that time his adrenaline store had been lost and he just sighed and closed his eyes a minute. "I was sick of him. He thinks he"s so great but it"s only because nobody ever challenges him."

"So do you," I countered. "But everyone leaves you alone."

"Not like Tim though. Look, you weren"t there when it started. He totally deserved the wrath of the Abe-Ty alliance."

"Did he throw the first punch?"

"Well no, but --"

"We"re not using this thing to go around punishing people we don"t like," I said firmly. "I just wanted a backup plan!"

"But why shouldn"t we?" he asked. "They do it to us all the time. And then they think because it"s funny to them that it"s not a big deal to us. Maybe this way they"ll see that it matters. There"s consequences."

"Why couldn"t you just wait until he struck first though?" I groaned. "Then people would actually be on our side."

"This couldn"t wait," he asserted.

I realized I still hadn"t gotten the whole story. "Fine, how did it start then?"

Abraham swallowed. "He was making fun of you with Nathan, okay?"

I just stared.

"You weren"t there to make the high sign but it went on longer than three minutes."

The first bell rang and he ran off.