

### Friends and Allies

By A.M. Hiss

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 A.M. Hiss

# Chapter 1

Abraham Foellinger and I are not friends. Never have been, never will be. We don't go fishing together, and we don't go clubbing together, and he's told me what he does for a living at least a dozen times now but it must not be anything exciting because I honestly can't remember what it was.

Don't get me wrong, I like Abraham, and I care about how he's doing. Not what he's doing – I'm sure it's something really science-y and achievement-y that won't interest me at all – but how he's doing. I would guess he feels the same about me. I mean, I can see him sitting in some martini-slinging jazz club thinking 'God, I bet Tyler's doing something really normal right now, that jerk!' even though if I texted him the words 'four fingers' right now he'd set down his martini and get his ass over here. And honestly, we'd probably find it pretty hard to have to do without one another in the long run. That's why we've never wanted to risk becoming friends.

Not that I'm against having friends – having friends is awesome! I've had a shit ton of friends in my life, whole generations of them. I owe at least half of them a Christmas card and the other half money. But this story isn't about any of my lapsed and predictable friendships.

The relationship between Abraham Foellinger and myself is not a friendship in the same way that an AK-47 is not a crossbow.

You'll have to excuse me if I don't tell this story with complete accuracy. My memory's starting to wither up as I age; the awesome parts jump out at me like boxes falling off the top shelf of a long-shut closet, demanding to be given full dramatic due. But given the choice between trivializing the only great series of events I may ever have to tell, and exaggerating it, I'd rather err on the side of epic.

It all started in the fifth grade when Abraham approached me at lunchtime with an unusual proposition. Back then lunchtime wasn't a desirable social break you waited all morning for so much as the half-period immediately preceding recess. A parking lot tailgate outside the stadium, if you will. We didn't even stress about who to sit with because the teachers had crammed us all into three long tables, and it wouldn't have occurred to us to segregate the ends by anything but gender.

At the hour in question, I was just about as bored as a kid could get without the help of a teacher or an institution of high finance. My friends, Tim, Ross, and Nathan were going on about some trading card game with mages in it. I wasn't sure what mages were, but apparently they didn't wave their arms and shout, 'MAAAAGE!', because Nathan got very snippy with me when I tried this particular role playing technique, then went back to telling Tim about his big shiny enchanted bough.

"Seriously though, the plant class is really useful," said Nathan. "It's like having all your regular cards twice!"

"Really?" said Ross, my most easily impressed friend. "That sounds great!"

Tim shook his head knowledgeably. "Plants are a joke. They can't even attack. They're like ... the pit crew of Dalemark. I'll hook you up with some 'tackers, Ross; they're all you really need."

"No way, fool!" Nathan protested. "I could take your whole 'tack line with one roan magid and a stack of oaks."

And you know, I honestly believe Nathan thought he sounded really cool delivering lines like these. You could practically see his mind drifting off behind his eyes as he fantasized himself into some faraway battle in which, perched on a majestic red horsey thing, he led a charge of sentient trees screaming across the gumdrop meadow and straight through Tim's army of pointy shoe dudes.

Ignoring him, Tim turned back to Ross. "Just give me two enchanters and a bounder. I'm doing you a favor because you're new at this."

Now, like you, I didn't care in the slightest about Dalemark. Sometime in the recent past, board games had become cool again, but my hyperactive pubescent brain was still trying to wrap itself around why. In the back of my mind I knew Nathan would end up ripping Ross off, Tim would own both of them, and maybe we could finally go play basketball. But with my luck, I feared they could keep this up all recess long.

I sat back and allowed my attention to wander to other parts of the cafeteria. It was an energetic place, despite all the faded paint and floor detritus. Next to us, the girls were playing that girly game with the linked pinkies and the chanting. Across the room, some little kids were trying to build a plastic spoon tower. They didn't have any glue or anything, just vanilla pudding, so their tower fell over a lot, but every time it did, they just giggled harder.

"No!" a little girl kept saying. "You're going to crush the ballroom!"

"It's fine," said her friend. "The bees haven't moved in yet. We'll just wait until we're done and get a hairdryer and dry it like in art class and then they can move in."

"You can't dry pudding," the girl insisted. "It's too floppy."

But the other girl was pretty sure you could dry anything if it got hot enough. Her dad said so.

I continued to watch the girls with a healthy amount of mean amusement, because clearly they still had a lot to learn about the world, but also no small amount of envy, because, well, they still had a lot to learn about the world. Why didn't my friends and I ever do anything fun like that anymore? Yes, we were in the double digits now, but couldn't we occasionally set aside our dignity and build something out of pudding? Presently, I got up and went to go get a drink of water, very tired of life.

Right as I passed the garbage can, I felt a tap on the shoulder. My surprised brain placed the tapper as Abraham Foellinger. This was not to say I knew Abraham on any sort of personal level, because I didn't; we just went to that kind of school. For instance, I don't think I ever spoke two words in my life to Katie French, but if forty-seven years from now, in the muddled twilight of my life, you were to place a 2006 Dunmore Elementary yearbook in front of me, open it to Mrs. Santucci's fifth grade class, and point to a particular fuzzy-haired headshot, I would involuntarily say, "Katie French!" Sometimes I wish I could put those previously allocated memory cells to a more useful use, but there you go.

I had no idea what Abraham might want with me. When you think about it, most taps on the shoulder from strangers end with either a request for a favor (e.g. 'Please pass the mustard'), or an embarrassing revelation about your deficiencies in personal hygiene (e.g. 'You've got mustard on your shirt') . But Abraham just motioned for me to follow him, no obvious mustard bottles in sight – and I did.

Let's be honest, the day we met, Abraham was about as poised as a hummingbird. I wish I could say this adventure began with some memorable and badass catchphrase, like 'I have an idea that's going to change your life forever, and you're going to LIKE it.' But the kid walked like a coast guard and spoke like a train conductor, so I'll just tell you how it really went down.

"Hello, Tyler Freimann," he said when we'd reached a reasonably quiet corner.

"Hi," I replied, curious. "Abraham, right?"

"Yes," he said, playing with a button on his pocket. After a long pause, he added, with a hint of hope, "Maybe you've heard of me."

I nodded. Abraham was the kind of kid everyone in our small class knew by reputation – and the color of that reputation was a mixed one. He was what I like to call 'kid-brilliant': he came out with schemes that made kids sigh in awe and adults chuckle in appreciation of the sheer creativity involved. They tended to require at least two random leaps of logic that you couldn't possibly make unless Abraham was holding your hand the whole time, dragging you along with him. And afterward, you'd swear the idea made sense when he'd explained it to you.

In fourth grade, he convinced half the school to wear red socks on the same day in a show of solidarity against the dress code. In third grade, he led his side of Cambridge Lane against mine in the most epic snowball battle I've ever seen. Knocked me right down with a powdery projectile from his homemade trebuchet. We all thought he was kind of a neat kid when we were really little, but I guess one day we woke up and realized memorizing an eight-page symbol code for passing notes in class just wasn't the thing anymore.

Abraham's lips kept opening and closing, as if he didn't know how to do this.

"So what's up?" I asked.

Abraham looked around for a long time before answering. Finally, he seemed to remember I was there."I've been thinking," he said."Remember in social studies today when we learned about allies?"

Obviously I didn't; I'd spent the whole period drawing stylized bubble letters on my folder like any self-respecting ten-year-old. "No."

"What? But you were present in social studies."

I shrugged. "Let's say I forgot."

"But it was only an hour ago!"

"Are you going to tell me what allies are or not?"

Abraham sighed. "Well they're like ... teams for fighting. Countries have them. Like ... in the Middle Ages, England and France fought all the time. So then England made America and they were allies and they kicked France out of the New World. But then America got mad at England and was allies with France and they kicked England out of the New World. And then a lot later England, France and America were all allies and they beat Germany and Japan forever!"

"So?"

He cleared his throat. "So," he said. "We should be allies."

I wrinkled my brow. "What? Why?"

"Think about it. You never know when you'll need an ally, because you never know when you're going to get in a fight. The archduke didn't know he was going to get in a fight. Maybe if he'd had an ally he'd be alive today!"

Still confused. "But who would we fight?"

"Well no one yet."

"Hey, let's fight Joey Hull and them!"

"Uh ... no," he said. "It's not like, you fight people on purpose or anything. But if we ever ended up in a fight, we'd promise to be allies."

"Do you get in a lot of fights?" I asked, because he didn't seem the rough-and-tumble type to me.

"No! But wouldn't you feel better knowing you had an ally anyway? It's just smart! You wouldn't have to be afraid of losing a fight."

"I guess it couldn't hurt," I said, seeing the sense in this arrangement but fervently hoping I wouldn't end up in any big wars before middle school. "Like actual fights with our bodies, or does teasing count?"

He pursed his lips. "Any time we're really in trouble. Maybe we can make up a secret signal."

He'd said the magic words. What life couldn't be made 59% more badass with the addition of secret signals? It would be like playing comic book heroes, but all the time. "Like a bird call!"

Abraham laughed. "Probably something that's not so obvious."

"Oh, right ... maybe a flashlight? I know how to make lots of shadows with flashlights."

"Maybe," said Abraham carefully. "So are you in?"

Something about the way he said this told me he wasn't going to go away until I agreed.

"Okay," I said. "We can be allies."

"Great. Sign this," said Abraham, holding out a new sheet of loose leaf printed in childishly careful script.

"I don't have a pencil."

Sighing at how unprepared I was for this completely unexpected event, Abraham handed me a pencil. Now that I think about it, you're supposed to sign a contract in ink. I could've wimped out whenever I wanted. But by the time I'd realized, leaving my alliance with Abraham wasn't really an option anymore.

With that, 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.

# Chapter 2

The next morning, 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.

"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 the 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, 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."

"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 willing to hang out with me 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, "You weren't my first choice. But I think you'd be really good if you gave it a try."

"Why?"

Abraham looked up. "Well, by my calculations, 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. 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.

# 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 spent a lot of 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.

–And Abraham can come in Tyler's tree house sometimes, but he has to ask.

First preference is given to allies in all trading situations. Favors negotiable by giving in trade 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 ... 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.

Now that I look back on it, my mom probably thought I had joined a gang. She always seemed to think the worst of me.

# Chapter 4

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 idiot 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.

# Chapter 5

In homeroom I asked Ross about it, because he rarely lied – probably because he'd been born with a huge shame deficiency. "Hey ... do Tim and Nathan ever make fun of me when I'm not around?"

"Yeah, sometimes. About as much as they make fun of you when you are around."

Hadn't I already known that though? Why had Abraham's gallant defense made me feel worse? Perhaps it was a matter of 'out of sight, out of mind.' Actually standing face-to-face with my daily sparring mates' contempt brought it all home a little.

"They don't really mean it," Ross told me. "You make fun of them too, don't you?"

I snorted. "Yeah. And I always mean it."

Now Ross looked a little uncomfortable. This wasn't the first time his closest friends had butted heads, but his pattern recognition skills never seemed to tip him off that we'd all be drinking chocolate milk in the park together a day from now, whatever peevish speeches we made in the meantime.

Of course, I had a new asset now that I hadn't had before.

It was the end of the day again, and I'd finally gotten a word alone with my loyal comrade. "Look," I told him. "It was nice of you, what you did. But you didn't have to."

"Yeah, I did," he insisted stubbornly. "I'm supposed to help you."

"Well you could've helped differently. What did you think it was going to do for me, attacking Tim like that?"

Abraham snorted, "Just what it did. Shut him up."

"But it doesn't change anything," I told him. "And it's not really your beeswax anyway."

"I didn't exactly think about it before I did it. And it became my beeswax when your reputation was hurt so there. Your reputation is part of you so you were being hurt."

Why did he have such a pole up his butt all the time? "It isn't what we agreed on and you know it. And just so you know I'm not going to go around beating up all the kids that insult you, because that would take all day."

Abraham flinched so hard at this that I felt moderately bad. Hanging out alone all the time must have dulled his ability to hide his feelings; certainly he wasn't accustomed to boyish banter. "That's fine," he said finally. "I don't care so much about my reputation; you care about yours." He swallowed and looked closer at me. "But I still don't understand. Why do you want them as friends anyway?"

"They're not bad. They're pretty cool."

"They treat you like a chew toy!"

"That's just how they are," I said, shrugging. "We're guys."

"Really? You're a guy; do you act like that?"

It was true; I did seem to be that one-in-a-thousand male who was born defective. Because without a doubt, I carried the 'bothered about everyday insults' gene. Even Abraham had noticed.

I looked the look of a man who knew the real answer but sure didn't want to say it aloud. "I'm the second worst, remember?" I said wanly. "I don't want to start it all again. I just need to stay cool for a little while and I'll be okay. Like, not tick them off for awhile."

"Is it really worth it though?" he asked timidly. "Whatever it is you get from them?"

"Of course," I said. "It's just like in movies and TV. Friends make you happy. You can play with them and and ride bikes and do lots of fun stuff. You can't do anything fun by yourself really."

"Friends in movies and TV sure don't act like yours," he answered.

"Yeah, they do," I countered. "Like in Panhandlers, that's just like Tim and Ross and Nathan and me."

"What's Panhandlers?"

"You'd know if you weren't a nerd."

"Well, I'd know if you told me, too, and that might actually happen."

I realized he'd probably been called a nerd so many times he didn't even care anymore. But that actually made me feel worse.

"Whatever," he said. "I guess if you think you want to be in some dumb movie that's fine."

"Okay, first, it's an awesome movie, and second, you just don't want anyone to have any friends because you don't and then you wouldn't have to be all lonely."

I shouldn't have said it. I wasn't used to my blows landing.

But he just pretended not to feel them. "So fine then. You want to have friends that hate you just because you saw it in a movie once. That's your problem I guess; I just assumed your problem was enemies because that would actually make sense or something. But maybe I should only try to protect you from people you aren't trying to impress."

I squirmed. "It doesn't count if they do it when I'm not around. It doesn't matter. Maybe tell me later so I know but it doesn't really affect me unless they're doing it while I'm there, like, in a serious way, on purpose to be jerks. That's really the only time I'd need backup." And then I looked up. "Wait a minute."

He looked at me looking up. "What?"

"I have to protect you, too. We signed on it."

"Yeah?"

"Well, what about you though? What do you want out of all this?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, I guess ... it's already better than before. It's kind of interesting to watch how your little quests go, so, yeah, I'd keep doing that anyway. And if I help you a lot, I know you'll want to protect me. 'Cuz you'll need me, see? "

"Yeah," I said, "but this whole thing was your idea. You had something in mind and it wasn't Bo Peep's birthday card. Why don't you ask now instead of later?"

But the kid was all tensed up, like a guy in a jail cell who desperately wants to talk about what he's in for but fears his cellmate will end up plea-bargaining his butt to high heaven. He wouldn't even look at me.

"C'mon, I'm in a generous mood." I was, too, which was fiercely rare at that age. But he was like this startled baby robin or something. "You just defended my honor."

"Well I tried to anyway," he said shiftily.

And as I watched him, Abraham seemed to come to some sort of decision. Bowing his head, he murmured,"I just need to know someone's there in an emergency. If it ever gets really bad again like before, you know? Just one person who could ... exist and not try to cut me down for existing, too. Even if it's fun and funny to cut me down and everyone is at once and I'm trapped, I'll think, but I still have that one person who'll come and get me out and explain it all to me, what I did and how I can fix it and all."

I tried to remember about the time when it was really bad for Abraham. The barest hint of a rumor reminded itself to me: a jostle in a dark locker room, a few silent days, a refusal to accept the last spot in line ... But this time, no; whatever he'd gone through couldn't be allowed to happen again. I already knew somehow that losing Abraham would be something I'd regret.

"Yeah, of course," I agreed, a hand on his shoulder. "You can definitely come talk to me if it gets really bad again like before."

I wished I knew what it was I was protecting him from, because he had already started improving my life. The next day at recess, I walked right up to Tim and gave him a small push.

He just looked at me. He hadn't been expecting anyone to push him today.

I looked back very patiently, taking special care to make eye contact.

Finally, he said, "What was that for?"

And, just before dashing off into the noontime, I shouted, "Tag! You're it!"

That's kind of how it was for the next few years. Don't get me wrong, it's not like we ever went to the movies together or made fortune tellers or whatever it is little kids do with their BFFs. (Abraham only likes movies that are horrible movies. Amazingly he says the same about me.)

We forgot about the contract, of course, and it died. In fact it died about seventeen times those first couple years. Maybe two weeks later, when Abraham asked me to watch his sister so he could go on a secret mission, I had no idea what he was talking about and told him to mongoose off ... until, of course, I realized I needed an alibi for Paint Balloon Night, a sacred Aden County tradition. Fortunately, Olivia Foellinger found Paint Balloon Night just as fun as I did, and although Abraham did not seem pleased about my violation of the sacred banns of babysitting, he eventually had to concede that I hadn't let her out of my sight. The favor balance sheet came out even and the contract lived to fight another day.

Also it turned out his secret mission was stopping Paint Balloon Night, but he certainly didn't succeed.

Abraham and I could and did go months without talking. We could and did ignore each other shamelessly at school. (Okay, well, I ignored him shamelessly and he pretended not to mind.) But something always came up, something we'd be just a little too shy to ask a normal friend. So the eraser economy bustled. Pure-hearted cooperation is rarer than diamonds, so when you can't find the real thing it's easiest to make do with artificial compromises, until the grafted-on bonds decompose and become part of our own skin.

# Chapter 6

I bet you've been wondering what Abraham and I look like. A halfway decent writer would've described us in lovely poetic detail many chapters ago. Well I'm not going to tell you. In the first place, even if I waxed flowery about approximate height and eye color and all that sort of thing, the people you would picture still wouldn't be Abraham and me. And in the second place, it isn't even a little bit relevant to the story, because to me Abraham just looked like Abraham. I hardly looked at him anyway – we liked to rendezvous in the park when we had need of it and sit back-to-back, all hunched up, like action heroes in the zombie apocalypse, because some things are easier to discuss that way. And I didn't spend much time looking in a mirror at myself, apart from the week I learned to shave, so I refuse to do one of those girly scenes where I gaze at my reflection in the bathroom, contemplate all my major flaws and features, and conclude that everyone must be repulsed by my completely average face. Besides, we've changed considerably in appearance since we were kids, so I'd have to stop every other scene and explain that Abraham had shot up six inches since you last saw him and I'd sprouted my first gray hair. These things may have been exciting at the time but they're quite outside the scope of this narrative. So just imagine we looked like you and your favorite cousin, if you like, because we looked like young us, until slowly we grew to resemble old us.

Most of the time, Abraham held three to four of the erasers. I always needed help with my homework in elementary school, and he was better at explaining things than my dad. Of course, the erasers weren't the only price I paid for his assistance.

"Ants in pants, Abraham, I don't want to learn the Fraction Song!" I shouted at him one Sunday. "Just tell me what I'm supposed to do with these things."

"I am!"

"With your words, I mean. Does this look like a concert hall to you?"

And he shook his head. "You clearly don't understand the quirks of the human memory."

He continued singing the Fraction Song all afternoon as we hammered away at his miniature windmill, because Abraham didn't build normal things in his backyard.

The next morning I was walking down the hall, barely conscious, and without even noticing, I started singing under my breath. 'Numerator, numerator, on the top, do a flip-flop...' until I realized Ross was staring at me.

"What are you singing, Tyler?" he asked.

I laughed sheepishly. "It's not me. My brain's singing."

And, very seriously, Ross said, "That's pretty neat! My brain never makes any noise at all."

There was this one time, Abraham had all the erasers for a long time, maybe a month. He of course insisted we weren't allowed to go into negative erasers, lest we slip into a life of crippling debt.

"What do you want me to do for some erasers?" I asked impatiently, because I needed somebody to film me doing this great new skateboard trick.

He just shrugged. "I've got to think. I might never have all four erasers at once again. I could make you do pretty much anything."

I conceded the point.

"I know!" he decided. "You have to ... you have to read a whole book!"

"I read books all the time."

"No, Tyler," he insisted, "not that kind of book. I get to pick the book."

Abraham went over to his bookshelf and considered carefully. Finally, he handed me a little blue paperback with an enormous turtle on the cover. "Turtle Brain," he declared.

I picked up the book by two fingers. "Fine."

"I'll know if you didn't read it!" he told me.

A week later, I thrust the book at him while he was at his locker before school. "All right, I want an eraser."

Abraham looked at me suspiciously. "What did Turtle Brain use to climb up the flagpole?"

"The Big Underwear Chain," I answered.

He laughed, proud of me. "That's right. Actually in the third one the Big Underwear Chain comes back!"

"There are more?" I asked, which only made him laugh more.

"Yes. Nine of them. Twelve if you count the expanded universe."

In the early days I was always a little afraid there'd come a time when he wouldn't remember, or would remember and laugh because obviously a contract you made when you were ten could expire whenever its cosigners grew bored with the game. But the more it brought in returns, the more we didn't have the heart. Only once, in a weak moment, did I nearly drop the whole thing. And that was plenty.

The first few weeks of junior high, my social circle received an unexpected boom. My sainted mother, whom I'd dismissed out of hand up until then, imparted a piece of wisdom to me on the eve of registration which improved almost every aspect of the next year.

Sneaking down the stairs at ten thirty in the evening, just like a bathrobe ninja, she'd caught me. I should have been in bed, at least physically if not in spirit. Instead, both my body and my brain were camped out at the dining room table, blearily trying to stuff all of my brand-new school supplies into the pencil case, nearly cracking the cheap plastic protractor in the process.

Mom didn't ask what I was doing. She just sat down across from me and started sharpening pencils.

"Don't worry, hon," she told me. "Junior high will be great."

I didn't look up. Maybe she really believed herself.

She added, "Well ... it might be great."

"Yeah, if I'm alive at the end of it."

"Isn't that a great attitude! You'd think wild dogs were coming to tear you apart."

I breathed in, thinking about some of the sixth graders from when I was a fourth grader, and how much they might have grown in two years. "Might as well be. The kids in junior high are big enough to do some serious damage!"

Her thin mouth conceded the possibility. "Tyler. Let's say, for the sake of argument, some kid takes a dislike to you," she said. "I've got a secret for you. All you have to do is, don't let anyone know they're bothering you. The biggest smile always wins."

"That's a great theory," I said. "But then people will just keep ripping on me. You have to be tough."

"Oh, no," she assured me. "That was in primary school. In middle school it's the kids who get along with everyone who are cool!"

I twitched my lip at her like a horse.

"Think about it. Nobody likes being pushed around, so why would the pushers be popular?"

That was a great question, honestly. "Because nobody wants to get pushed?"

She shook her head. "There comes a time when pushing isn't cool anymore. Younger kids might fight like little banshees, but you're getting old enough to fight with your words. Or, even better, solve things with diplomacy. That's what young adults respect."

Diplomacy. An efficient military tactic. Having lagged behind for several years in physical growth, I felt I ought to give emotional maturity a try. Lately I'd noticed girls reacted more positively to understated excellence than to any sort of horn-butting I could think of.

The morning of my first day of seventh grade, I woke up unusually early. I lived close enough to the junior high building to walk (according to my parents), and for some reason I had this idea that walking anywhere took at least half an hour. In fact, because my mother had drawn me a cute little map with arrows on it, I was there in six minutes. So, I dawdled around, climbing to the top of the dew-soaked metal bleachers as I reached the baseball field, kicking wood chips out of the little cement island of pear trees, and taking in all the unfamiliar trappings of this terrifying new phase of existence.

At five to the bell, I decided enough was enough. I marched right up to the big brick building, strode through the door, and tried not to let on that I didn't know where my homeroom was. Fortunately, enormous marker signs, courtesy of the eighth grade student council, guided me on my way.

With the exception of six or seven little rock stars, the baby class appeared to be as nervous as a homeless man looking at dirty websites in the library computer cluster. All around us, older students were shouting greetings to one another with a vulgar familiarity we feared we would end up taking for our own. A couple kids from my smallish elementary school said hi to me as I passed, like they were afraid they might forget they'd lived a life before the one that started today.

But after seven years with the Dunmore kids, seven years of laughter and pillow polo and premeditated fire drills, I was absolutely convinced that each and every one was a duckbutt. I was here to mingle with the new faces. And my first forays went unbelievably well.

"Hi," I said to a kid at the next desk. "Want to play desk football?"

"What's that?"

I showed him how loose leaf, desk, and fingers magically morphed into football, field and goal posts.

"I got you, I got you." He grinned and kicked off. "Cool. I'm Jackson."

That was it! I just kept my mouth shut for once and by lunchtime I actually found myself sitting with a laughing group of girls. Ross and Jackson and I were amusing them with ease, and no one had realized yet that they were just playing us for attention, like all junior high girls. Today, of course, I'd have Rosemary check me for a fever if I started getting excited about a coed lunch in a cafeteria, but it seemed a big step at the time. Relaxed and prematurely confident, I didn't even let myself get riled when Nathan approached our table, as if by accident.

"What's up, little douche?"

Instinctively I started to stand up, then thought the better of it. This would be the first test. "I'm fantastic Nate! Come sit down."

That afternoon I learned to banter like the arrogant child I was. "Hey Lizzie, this guy once drank a whole gallon of milk at once. That's what really happened to LaFevre's throw pillow. Nathan-juice!"

"And guess who tried to clean it up with napkins like a geek because he thought we'd get in trouble? Yup. Freimann here."

I don't think I had ever liked Nathan, honestly, even in kindergarten. He'd just been part of the package. But a new package was forming, and I was sure it was a better one.

Abraham couldn't have picked a worse time to wave at me frantically from the other side of the cafeteria, clutching my eraser in his fist.

As a technical point of order, I'd like to point out that the contract didn't force us to take favor trades we didn't want to take, assuming immediate physical danger was off the table. But other than the time I wittily offered to give Abraham all the erasers if he ate a lightning bug, we'd both been pretty darn obliging. Abraham wasn't a whiner by nature, and something just felt right about hooking him up with his rather modest set of needs. And at that moment, the same something was firing off little alarm bells.

Well, that was just too bad. I was practically a teenager now, and everything I'd ever said or done before my armpit hair came in embarrassed me. That definitely included the contract. Even if it weren't completely boring, even if it somehow still counted ... we ought to be able to take care of ourselves now, I thought.

He shot me one last look. No way, I resolved. No way am I giving this up to spend the next two years writing petitions to the school board about the lead count of the gym water fountains. So I shook my head at him, hoping nobody had seen.

To his credit, Abraham simply sat down at a nearby table and resumed eating his lunch. I focused my attention back on the girls. But, having missed the middle of their story, I was finding it hard to take an interest.

Not having a recess felt weird; lunch just sort of ended. On the way to English, Ross and I discussed the possibilities for the new year.

"Jackson seems really cool!" said Ross. "I wonder if he'd want to come to LaserPoint with Nathan and us this weekend.

"Yeah, uh .. I don't think Jackson likes Nathan too much."

"What? Why?"

"I can just tell," I assured him.

Ross nodded, his face wrinkled with good-natured concern. I honestly don't think it occurred to him that I might be lying.

The day dragged, and the day ended. After sixth period Spanish, Jackson and Ross and I wandered out the doors, discussing our new digs with great animation.

"Who's the giant eighth grader with the trench coat?" I asked. "He looks like he could be my dad."

"Dude, I think he's actually a seventh grader! He's in my math class," said Jackson.

"Maybe he's just dumb," I suggested. "He looks pretty dumb."

Jackson laughed. "Well maybe. He didn't say a word all through class, just glared at people."

"Probably he could turn you to stone if you made him mad. You should bring him a present just in case."

"Yeah. Like a pile of bloody skulls. Where do you think I could get a pile of bloody skulls?"

I shrugged. "PennyPinch probably has them half off."

Now, you may recall that I walked to school in the morning. But I didn't recall it, at least not until later. Out of plain habit, I followed Ross straight to the bus line and stood talking with the others without a second thought.

Suddenly, in the middle of a heated debate about the relative spinsterhood of our new teachers, Ross said, "Hey, Tyler, don't you walk to school now?"

Well, of course I did. But at this point I was in too deep to escape without an excuse. "I thought it'd be funny to sneak onto the buses. See if I get in trouble."

Jackson gave me the first of many, many Looks. A Jackson Helinski Look comprises equal parts contempt and astonishment, and upon receiving my first, I physically staggered backwards. See, Jackson was the coolest friend I'd ever had, or ever would have, but that's not a compliment. It really made things inconvenient sometimes.

"Just kidding," I hedged, stepping quickly out of line. "See you guys tomorrow."

Jackson and Ross got on the school bus bound for their respective home subdivisions. And while I'd looked forward all summer to two years of adult-independent transportation, I felt vaguely jealous of my old friend, my new friend, and the ease with which their conversation was sliding together.

Walking home, I spotted Nathan and Tim a couple blocks ahead of me, but carefully let them pass out of sight. I was more than ready to let them fall off the face of the planet at this point.

# Chapter 7

The morning of my second day of seventh grade, I was late. I couldn't find my backpack for the longest time.

I wasn't worried enough to run or anything though. This was no longer Junior High, the big castle-y building behind Coleman's that Older Kids went to. It was just school. So, I headed up the hall, planning to turn the situation to my advantage.

"What up, Fields-thru-Hodgsen homeroom?" I announced as I strolled in a few minutes after the second bell. "Your regularly scheduled entertainment has arrived."

Looking over at Jackson, I affected more nonchalance than I felt.

"You're nine minutes late," said Mr. Pohl.

"And you're nine years late," I responded, although I wasn't really sure what that meant.

"You were here for orientation, son," he said. "That's a detention if you don't have a good excuse."

"Haha," I said. "Good one." In elementary school we'd considered detentions a minor form of entertainment. Taking the pink, yellow, and blue slip from his hand, I practically skipped down the aisle.

"Sup," I said to Jackson.

He looked up from a half-finished workbook page. "What'd you do that for?"

"What?"

"You just showed up late for no reason."

I folded my arms. "I'm too cool for clocks."

"Yeah?" he said. "That's cute. You're real precious, Freimann."

I laughed with no sincerity whatsoever. "It's okay. Not everyone gets it."

I texted my mom at lunch that I would be serving detention, making sure to do so in the approved texting area at the proper time, lest I set loose a cascading chain of detentions lasting until grad school. She was not amused. She texted me back, "You should set your alarm at least 10 mins. earlier! I thought jr. high would be difference!" And then five minutes later she texted me, "I meant 'different.' Damn auto-complete." Because she's a mom and all. Then, I told Ross what I'd done.

"Really?" he said. "Was it like in Panhandlers?"

"No," said Jackson. "It was like in BunnyBears, when Blue BunnyBear has his little rebellious phase."

I laughed. "How do you know so much about BunnyBears?"

Jackson shrugged. "Four younger siblings."

"Thug life," I responded.

"Thug life," he agreed. "Diapers everywhere all up in there."

On my way out of my last class, Jackson asked Ross to come over and play basketball when they got home. I frowny faced inside and went to go serve my detention.

Maybe it was my imagination, but the detention kids in junior high detention looked scary. In elementary school they'd basically shut us up in a room with a totally apathetic monitor, and we'd had all sorts of fun throwing erasers and seeing who could touch the ceiling fastest. It was basically a prime networking opportunity. But in junior high detention, we literally couldn't talk or leave our seats. I was going to have to be a little craftier about my shady exploits.

After my hour was up, I walked home through empty streets. I felt kind of weird, like something was missing. You wouldn't think going from being a kid to a slightly older kid would be too chaotic, and yet it seemed like half the people who'd been in my life from toddlerhood to a few days ago were gone now. But it wasn't until I started my homework that I put my finger on the real problem. Biology was hard and unfamiliar, and there was a really no-nonsense looking tiger staring at me from the cover, and I hated trying to face school without an appropriately themed musical number.

But this was my ditch to lie in.

The shift of my loyalties from Tim to Jackson came with its own logistical difficulties. The great reserves of initiative necessary to setting up an out-of-school adventure hadn't quite manifested in me at the time, and I don't believe Ross has made a plan for the future since the yellow pages were culturally relevant, so it was up to Jackson to call us up when the fancy struck him. This happened maybe every three weeks, which I felt was more than enough. For example, soon after meeting Jackson, Ross and I went to see that movie with the talking penguins with him. Afterward, Jackson suggested we walk to ShakeShack, which he swore was only half a mile away.

"We've gone at least two miles," I said with confidence. "We must have passed it or something."

"Do you ever even walk anywhere?" he asked. "That was barely a few blocks. It's ... behind either this place or the next place."

"Well how are we going to know when we get there then?" I asked. In my defense I was sweating pretty badly in the early autumn heat, while trying to convince Ross and Jackson I wasn't.

Tactfully, Ross stepped in. "There's a new miniature golf place! Cool! Let's go there instead."

"I only have three dollars left," said Jackson. "It usually costs eight or nine at least for miniature golf."

"Dang, me too," Ross said. "I don't even have enough for a shake." And believe me, it was completely typical of Ross not to have mentioned this before.

"I bet we can find a way to sneak in free," I said without thinking. "We could pretend to be famous golf stars, right? And say we're just there to practice. And they'll be honored and let us in for free."

Ross laughed. "Yeah!"

"We'll just get a bunch of random little kids to be our groupies. They'll never suspect then!"

"What?" said Jackson, in a tone that knocked the wind right out of my sails.

I looked down. "Well we could at least try. It'd be a good joke."

Jackson said, "You can't just talk to strange little kids, Tyler. You're going to get us arrested."

Ross said nothing. I said nothing.

"You can't just do dumb stuff like that man. We're too old. It's not cute anymore."

We just walked along for a minute. How can a guy be outnumbered one to two?

"I wasn't really going to do it," I said quietly.

"Not with me here you weren't."

I cast about for something to deflect my shame. "Let's just go here," I said, indicating a neon-rimmed diner called Donny's. "It'll be cheap and we can get out of the sun."

Jackson shrugged, and we entered.

Donny's was pretty cozy on the inside. A pair of rocking chairs with a checkerboard hugged the east wall, draped to intensely nostalgic proportions with classic retro movie posters. In the back, behind the counter, grubby glass cases displayed all the home-baked goodies you could imagine. The west wall, where we made our way now, was taken up entirely by a half-booth, half-table configuration.

"I call booth side!" said Jackson.

"Nose goes!" I seconded, tapping my nose.

"What?" asked Jackson.

Looking at Ross for support, I explained, "Nose goes. It means I call ... whatever it is we're ... I mean, I call booth side, too!"

Ross looked confused. "Nose goes I call booth third!"

"Too late," said Jackson. "We already called it."

"But you didn't say nose goes," Ross whined.

"Well, I didn't know about this weird nose game," said Jackson, sliding into the booth side as casually as he could, because possession is nine-tenths of the law.

"I'm safe either way," I said, and followed him. Ross then slid in next to me, which put us in all in a neat little row facing the diner.

"We can't all sit on the booth side," said Jackson. "That'd be ridiculous. Go sit on the table side."

"You're not his mommy," I pointed out.

"Hey!" said Ross, flipping through the menu. "I can get tea. It's only eighty-five cents."

"Do you drink tea?"

Ross tilted his head to the side. "I guess I do now. It has to be better than nothing."

And sure enough, as the waitress approached our table, Ross called out, "I'll have some tea!" and pushed two quarters, three dimes, and a nickel into her hand.

The waitress smiled indulgently. I believe it was Carolynn, the tanned, dyed, pierced hash slinger who was about to become a fixture in our young lives. "I can take your money when you're done," she explained kindly. "For you two?"

"Fries," we both said. "And a vanilla shake," I added.

When she'd left, I turned to Ross and said, "You know the prices on the menu are without tax, right?"

Ross slapped his head. "Oh, no, I forgot!"

"So wait," I said, "You have exactly eighty-five cents? Not another few?"

He was beet red by now. "They're going to make me wash dishes now, aren't they! I don't even like tea!"

Jackson laughed. "I can give you enough for tax and tip. I've got some change."

Crumpling up his napkin, Ross asked him with a straight face, "What's tip?"

Carolynn spent the next five years pretending not to know who we were.

The majority of my weekends I shared with a gaming console and an energy drink. But in school, I put the great wits of history to shame. I imitated teachers, doled out pejorative nicknames, and drew student council political cartoons of such staggering crudeness that of course the whole class loved them. My audience hadn't tired of me yet, and so the actor freely tried on as many costumes as he liked.

Never does last, does it?

A few weeks later I was dabbing orange juice off my shirt front in the bathroom when a familiar voice said, "I've got a sweatshirt if you've got an eraser."

I looked up. "Hey," I said, a remorseful tint to my tone.

"Well?"

"Could we maybe just forget the erasers? They're kinda ... flamboyant."

"True," Abraham agreed, handing me a truly horrible grey hoodie.

"I'm sorry about the other day."

He shrugged. "You're a limited resource. I get it."

"What was it you wanted? Is it something I can still do?"

"Oh, that," he said. "I was just upset because my dad had just died."

Jesus.

"I'm really sorry!"

"You didn't kill him," he said heavily.

"Well you could've said something, man!"

"Dude, why do you always assume I'm totally helpless? I actually met a really cool girl called Cadenza. And her shoulder," he told me, "even smelled nice. So there."

I grinned enough to drive away the guilt. "We'll talk about it sometime."

"H-E-X-N-T-H-M-R-H-R-S," he said.

The contract only grew from there. In fact we keep adding clauses, such as an unlimited venting allowance, free delivery of pertinent gossip, eventually even a foldout couch addendum. It turns out there are an infinite number of uses for a helper who can be called upon after any number of neglected years. A lot of people get sore about that kind of thing, but we've embraced it -- we've taken to answering the phone with "Hi! I thought you were dead!" Some people have relationships that span long distances; we have a relationship that spans long periods of time.

# Chapter 8

Following the dead father incident, I felt I needed to prove I was still in the game. Abraham was still helping me with my math homework on a regular basis, but I wasn't doing much for him in return. Besides, a new development threatened to make me unnecessary.

"What's up with you and Cadenza Nichol?" I asked Abraham after school one day, as casually as I could.

"We're friends," he said, matching my fake-casual tone with his less skilled fake-casual tone.

I smiled with my eyebrows. "That's exciting. I thought you were against friendship or something."

Abraham shrugged. "I've changed my mind. Some people are cool enough to risk it."

Apparently, Cadenza wasn't like my regular old jerkmouth friends. She was nice. Not just nice, but Super Nice. It said so on the button she wore on her messenger bag.

She caught me one time scribbling on her anti-drug posters in the hallway. I had nothing against the campaign or anything; I was just bored waiting for language arts to get out. But you would've thought I was smoking a blunt right there in the hallway, the way she carried on.

"Tyler Freimann!" she announced. "Did you know four thousand babies are born every year hooked on illegal substances?"

"No."

"Well ... maybe you could stop drawing on their feelings! Have some respect."

I shrugged. "What do you want me to do about it? I'm not making crack babies. I'm outlining the letters so you can see them better."

She huffed. "I bet you are."

I wasn't sure I trusted Abraham to this girl. He did look much happier these days, of course, and seeing him laughing with a group of kids – even self-righteous kids like Cadenza and her friends – was strange and sort of nice. There's a reason the words 'comfort' and 'comfortable' are so closely related: grief seemed to have granted Abraham a way out of the absurdly uptight demeanor that had walled him off for so long. But did he really know these people? Sudden states of euphoria sometimes led to equally sudden crashes. I was settling in well with my own friends, but junior high was a flimsy place. My eye was out for opportunities to reclaim my spot.

Sure enough, not two weeks had passed before I spotted Gabe DiMarco pulling leaves off Abraham's tree costume in the foyer. Miss Crack Babies was nowhere to be found.

"Trees are important!" Abraham insisted, holding out his standard-issue Environment Club pamphlets and completely disregarding Gabe's antics. "They keep us alive with their oxygen."

"C'mon," said Gabe's friend Alex Moy. "We just want to jump in the leaves. We just need enough for a little teensy leaf pile."

Now, I'm going to pause for a minute and let you guess what I did about this. You've probably noticed by now that I'm not much of a cape-and-spandex kind of superhero, haven't you? Maybe you think I ran off, or went to find a teacher, or just stood there, frozen in place, watching Abraham stare straight ahead of him with his very serious expression on as Gabe DiMarco slowly drove him nuts.

Well you're wrong. For once in my life, I decided to be a cape-and-spandex kind of guy. Because maybe, if I did it just once, I wouldn't have to in the future.

"Goats in coats!" I cried. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Gabe? Here's this kid trying to teach you something and save the bat-flapping planet, and you're hassling him? Nobody likes you! Your mom doesn't even like you! Why don't you go choke on some smog or something?"

Gabe snickered. "Oooh, I'm sorry man. I didn't know this was your wife."

Where the wombat was Cadenza, anyway? Wasn't this kind of her deal? Probably she was at the other entrance in an equally ridiculous outfit, getting just as heckled, but I felt shortchanged anyway. Abraham finally had a friend, but my job hadn't gotten any easier.

"We're raking leaves off your wife," Alex explained. "We'll give her back when we're done, all nice and raked."

I took a step back. "What does that even mean?"

The pair of them just laughed harder.

"He's not my wife!" I said, but I'd passed the point of recovery now. "I'm just ... you're being jerks!"

But I had a feeling they knew that already.

"I'm going to punch you in the face if you don't stop!" I threatened, desperate to end the situation.

In retrospect I probably shouldn't have announced it like that. It was fairly easy for Gabe to grab my wrist before I could get to his face. "What the hell, Tyler? Were you seriously going to punch me?"

"It was just a joke," said Alex. "You have some serious anger management issues."

Gabe smirked. "It's okay. He just loves his wifey."

Alex cracked up. "Don't worry, Freimann. We're not going to hurt her. We'll just put her in the greenhouse until spring."

I slunk off and didn't catch up with Abraham until the next day.

"Uh, hey, Tyler," he said to me at lunch. "Thanks for, you know, yesterday, and it was really nice and all. But could you maybe not do that again?"

"Yeah. Sorry."

"It's just, now they won't stop calling me 'wifey' and I didn't get any more flyers passed out at all."

I smiled apologetically. "Right. We'll have to think of something else."

"I don't mind them, really," said Abraham. "I just ignore them usually."

"Aw, but you look ridiculous doing that. Can't you at least give them some attitude? Make it look like you're trying?"

Abraham shrugged. "I'll see what I can do."

Somehow word got around to Cadenza Nichol. "Tyler, I heard what you did for Abraham!" she said. "That was so great!"

"Um, no it wasn't?"

"Well ... it's the thought that counts. Do you want to join my no-bullies-allowed group?"

"No," I said frankly. "I don't really care if some random kid gets bullied. Looking out for Abraham's hard enough."

She frowned slightly. "Well, any friend of Abraham's is a friend of mine."

I didn't bother to explain any further. Cadenza is an uncomfortable person to communicate with. I had to see her every Thursday night in seventh grade, because problem sets were due the next day, and we tended to run into each other while hounding Abraham for help.

"Why don't you ever sit with us at lunch?" she asked one time over the Foellinger kitchen table. "Are you ashamed to be seen with us?"

Okay, I sort of was, but not for the reason you'd think. Abraham's friends were, well, you probably knew people like them in middle school, unless, of course, you were people like them in middle school, in which case, I hope you got over it. They were The Weird Kids. Not the actual weird kids, mind you; not the girl with robot legs or the guy whose mom was a stripper; those kids tried to keep a low profile. Abraham and his friends wore weird like an ermine robe, like the train a bride keeps tripping on when she crosses the street to the church.

'We're weird!' they crowed gleefully between bites of their peanut butter and ketchup sandwiches. 'We're crazy!' they self-narrated, performing even the most mundane act of silliness in public as if braving an imaginary guillotine, as if taunting soldiers from the Cool Army. 'We don't care what anyone thinks!' they announced every day to each other, and to a cafeteria of kids who, after years of similar nonsense, didn't think anything of them at all.

"Nope," I replied. "I just like sitting with Ross and Jackson and Bethany."

She frowned, outsmarted. "Well, you could bring them. Everyone should sit with everybody!"

I smiled. "There wouldn't be room. And you guys would be talking about all your hippie stuff."

"Well then they might learn something about our hippie stuff," she said, folding her arms at me. "They might start to like it if they gave it a try."

"Maybe. Or maybe you'd learn to like video games and professional sports."

"I-D-Q-J," she retorted.

"Okay!" shouted Abraham, who'd returned with the chips. "That's enough of that."

For the rest of the night, he steered the conversation strictly back to taxonomy. But I'd won, and Cadenza knew it.

# Chapter 9

On the first day of eighth grade, I woke at dawn. Jackson had concocted a special plan guaranteed to secure us an entire year of notoriety. Dressing quickly, I rendezvoused with him in my backyard.

"Did you bring the goods?" he asked.

"No," I said, indicating a huge cardboard box, "this is just a bunch of teddy bears."

I felt so absurdly badass that morning. I dunno why, because our plan wasn't even dangerous, but where we were from, I guess it didn't take much. The whole thing was Jackson's idea, of course, but he'd picked me – me! – to help. And yeah, it was probably because my huge yard provided a perfect place to stash our supplies. But still. Lucking into immortality doesn't make it any less sweet.

I dunno why we didn't invite Ross. It seems kind of wrong now. I've wondered once or twice why he didn't mind, but, realistically, I know he did mind, and my memory's just airbrushed it out.

Together, Jackson and I loaded the box onto the skateboard I'd never quite mastered and pushed it toward the school. Under cover of darkness, we hauled the contents, piece by piece, up to the roof, and assembled them into their intended position.

Jackson had allowed plenty of time for unforeseen obstacles, but the day was charmed. We had The Edifice up twice as fast as in any of our practice runs. So, dangling our feet over the edge, we watched the sun come up over our mundane neighborhood, our skin crawling with anticipation.

"I can't believe it," I said. "How come nothing went wrong? Something always goes wrong."

"You worry too much, Freimann," he said. "You just need to, like, expect things to work. And then they do."

I smiled. "Easy for you to say."

Finally, our moment arrived. Kids started showing up, a few at a time at first. A few even walked past us without noticing. The rest, lacking anyone to share their amusement with, just chuckled a little and proceeded into school. For a minute I wondered if maybe our death-defying stunt, so epic in our imaginations, wasn't really the huge deal we'd cracked it up to be. But once a group of eighth grade girls stopped in the middle of the courtyard and directed their gazes up, the amused knot of bystanders began to blossom into a large roaring mob. And it was then the party began. I can still see the delight on their innocent little faces as they slowly realized:

There was a swing set. On the roof. A goddamn swing set.

We were gods.

Standing on that rooftop, waving to a huge crowd of cow-eyed seventh graders, was pretty much the high point of my life. Everybody was so psyched, and it was all because of us! Is there anything better than that? Even today, having lived a full life packed with four-day beer benders and unclothed ladies, I can't think of anything.

I can still see Jackson calmly undulating back and forth on the left swing, surveying his subjects. It wasn't enough for me, though. I was the type who had to stand on the swing, and try to do a chin-up from the bar, and wave, and twist around like a little kid, and threaten to jump, and pretend to fall off, nearly falling off for real in the process.

After about seven minutes of glory, the assistant principal finally noticed something was up and came to read us the riot act. But when we finally made it to homeroom, the girls swarmed all over us. Mostly Jackson, of course, but I made do with the overflow.

"How did you get into the building?" asked Kim Sroka.

"Magic," I said. "We practiced all summer, and now we're Super Wizards, third class."

She giggled.

"Jackson's uncle is the maintenance guy," I admitted. "And the swing set comes apart."

"Nice," said Kim. "I'll know who to call now if I need help assembling anything."

"Yeah," I said, completely full of myself, "but I charge by the hour."

I had pretty much forgotten about the Environment Club conundrum until some months later, when, on my way through the foyer after school, I spotted a familiar face working the room from behind a set of rubber swim goggles.

Our school didn't have a swimming pool.

Not surprisingly, he'd drawn a crowd. The redheaded seventh grader who thought he was cooler than everyone was making fishy noises at Abraham, trying to impress some girly-looking friend of his. The more Abraham pretended to ignore him, the funnier Carrot Fro found this. And the redder Abraham turned, the more interested Carrot Fro's friend became.

Now of course, saving Abraham from himself in situations like this was literally clause number one of the contract. But after the wifey debacle, I honestly wasn't sure what to do when I had to see him like this. So I simply paused to observe his altercation, feeling like a spotter overseeing the iron-pumping exploits an overconfident novice.

"The ice caps are melting," Abraham would tell a group of girls on their way home. "I'm just being prepared. You know how else you can be prepared?"

"Water wings?" his heckler suggested.

And Abraham would chuckle, falsely, before handing them a brightly colored slip of paper. "No. But there's some good ideas on this website. Like not using as much hair spray \-- maybe try some French braids there Medusa!"

(I'll eat my hat if that kid knew who Medusa was.)

"Or stop cutting down trees to make flyers for your lame club!" said Carrot Fro's buddy, who might have been slightly more intelligent, although the IQ points were wasted on him.

"Shows what you know, because these are printed on one hundred percent recycled paper."

"I bet. Environment Club's so poor they've started dumpster diving."

The worst was when Cadenza actually stopped to give Abraham some encouragement, at which point Carrot Fro added hand-fins and kissy lips to his fish-based repertoire.

"Jason, what you're doing is not acceptable," said Cadenza, who was literally wearing a little red baseball cap with the words 'No bullies allowed!' printed on the bill. "It's immature, and you're helping to make this school an unsafe area. Please consider the rising teen suicide rate and the recent self-harm trend before you continue with your actions." And she tucked the flyer into her bag and walked away, looking empowered.

In the seven seconds of silence that followed, I could see the premature hope shining in Abraham's eyes. He must have been hoping Carrot Fro was going to run off and cry or something. Except of course he kept right on going.

"Hey Jason," said his dogged friend. "I'll meet you at the beach when global warming hits! I'll play you in beach volleyball. We can build a sand castle."

Abraham had grown too old or too proud to make the high sign, but I knew where my duty lay, just like I knew what he was hiding behind those goggles, even if I couldn't see it. "Come on," I said. "We're going home."

"But my shift's supposed to go until fifteen minutes after the --"

"Don't care. And we're walking. One-two, one-two."

He gave up and followed me to the sidewalk.

"We need to teach you the art of the comeback," I told him. "That was just sad."

"What," said Abraham, "you think I care about what Jason Sumner thinks?"

"Well," I said, "honestly yes, I do."

"Well you're wrong. I know he isn't worth the time of day."

"Oooh, I'm Saint Abraham!" I simpered. "Assheart seventh graders steal my workbooks and throw them out the window, but I'm sooooo mature I magically don't notice! Come on, Brah, you're not fooling anyone."

Abraham said, "Well, what do you want me to do?"

"I don't know, Abraham, maybe stop doing stuff that you hate?"

"I don't hate Environment Club! It's important and fun."

"You looked about ready to strangle him with those goggles of yours. Which by the way, make you look really, really stupid."

"But I'm not stupid. And a pair of goggles can't change that."

"You sure? Because it's very hard to take you seriously with them on. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that they are killing your brain cells as we speak."

"Yeah, well I don't know if you saw or not, but Jason already told me how stupid I look. Many times over. So you don't have to."

And as soon as he'd caught my eye he realized I'd tricked him.

Having induced him to slump to my satisfaction, I relented. "It's not a bad thing. Caring what people think just means you like people."

"I'm stronger than that," he asserted. "Well ... usually. Anyway, I'm training myself to be stronger than that."

"You're not a space alien. You want everyone to think you are for some reason, but you're actually just a guy. And you don't like looking like an idiot any more than anyone else."

"I only look like an idiot when it's an idiot looking at me!"

"False," I said. "Everyone's entitled to their opinion about how you look. You can't prove that you look awesome."

That got him scowling. "Yeah, well maybe you think you look awesome, Tyler, but you don't. And it's worse for you because you care a buttload. You wouldn't have the guts to walk to school with two different socks. So excuse me for trying to break free from superficial crap."

"Why would I walk to school in two different socks?"

"Well I mean ... if you did it by accident. You'd probably freak out and throw your socks out the window or something. Or borrow mine."

"I wouldn't wear your socks, dude, that's disgusting. And my mom bundles all the socks together in pairs, so I don't-"

"Well on purpose then."

"Why would I want to wear two different socks on purpose?

"I don't know," he said, exasperated. "You probably wouldn't. Maybe you never get up in the morning and wish you weren't being pushed around by people who didn't even matter to you."

If there's one thing Abraham and I have in common, it's that each of us holds the simultaneous rock-firm belief that he is cooler than the other.

I said, "All right, I get it. For whatever reason, you think this is something you have to do. But for god's sake, you don't have to suck so hard at it."

"What? How do I suck at it?"

"People don't want to listen to a big dork in a dumb gimmick outfit pushing advertisements on them. Haven't you ever been to a shopping mall?"

"It's an awareness campaign," he explained. "You have to catch people's attention."

"Yeah, dude, I know you want attention, but this isn't the right way to get it."

Abraham looked ready to kill me.

"Think of it this way," I said. "If you look like a geek, all your precious little fliers are going to end up as paper airplanes. So really we're doing this to save the environment."

"Doing what?"

"Teaching you about dignity."

"The hell you are!" he grumbled. "What do you know about dignity?"

"I don't make scenes for no reason, for one."

"Yeah you do. You saran wrapped the entire second floor girls' bathroom!"

"But those are dignified scenes."

"What does that even mean? How can you make a dignified scene?"

"Let's put it this way," I said. "For the life of me I can't see the point of doing what you do, and I'd never want to be you. But if I had to be you, I'd be better at it."

Abraham snorted. "Did that somehow not sound ridiculous in your head?"

"Not listening. You know why? Because I'm so confident, I don't even hear negative stuff. And I can teach you how to get there, too!"

"Whatever. Maybe while we're at it I'll teach you where to get some balls."

My meetings with Abraham were almost always constructive, sometimes brutally so.

"I don't understand it," he said on another occasion. "Cadenza said you can't be bullied if you don't give the bully anything to crow about."

"Dude," I said, "that wasn't bullying. They didn't even touch you."

"Where I come from they call that bullying."

"You're overreacting! It was just a couple guys letting off steam."

"So why do they always let off their steam onto me?"

"Gee, I don't know, Abraham. Maybe because you were walking around in a carbon dioxide molecule costume?"

"Yeah but ... why does it have to be a person at all?"

It was a fair question. You would think in a civilized and logical society we could find any number of salves for our wounds besides the pints and pints of other people's blood we draw for the purpose. Then again, having evolved the way we have, it's no wonder we can't make do with kicking walls and playing electric guitars. You could sooner wean a vampire onto ketchup.

"Just does," I told him. "And you're easy prey."

"What? I work very hard at looking bored!" he insisted. "Check out my 'this is boring and you should go away and bother somebody else' look. Tell me you'd keep on messing with me if I looked at you like this."

I just laughed. Only Abraham.

"It's obvious you're just pretending not to care," I said. "You're twitchier than a bunny in heat. Like, you pull on your sleeves for one. Whenever you're really miserable -- it's sort of a folding, tugging, twisting motion."

Abraham glanced down at his arms and and abruptly let go.

"Or if you're wearing short sleeves you just sort of hold your wrists. It's really distracting."

Abraham grimaced. "Tics are the worst. Every time I try to get rid of one, I just end up with a worse tic. By the way, Kim's telling everyone you asked her out and then nearly fainted."

"I did not! Who the hell faints from asking a girl out? She's not even that cute either. I just thought it was cool she liked the Ocelots. My mom gets half price tickets, and I thought she might want to go."

"Yeah well, anyone you especially want to know that little story, you'd better tell them soon."

Though rarely fooled by my hand-spun false fronts, Abraham usually let me keep holding them up if I wanted to. And on those afternoons when my arms had gotten tired from the long, heavy day, and I felt comfortable setting them down for an hour, he was okay with that, too.

Like when I got detention for posting a suggestive picture of our pregnant Spanish teacher on the bulletin board. And Jackson just laughed and asked me to do more. And Ross started worrying about how much I'd hurt the teacher's feelings. And I sat for an eternal seventy minutes in the back of her classroom with my knees bumping the bottom of the desk in a tight rhythm, unable to think any thought more complex than, 'Embarazada. I don't get it.' And when it was over, Abraham met me at the door, and the first thing out of his mouth was:

"You do your drawings in pencil."

I shrugged. "Yeah. I do."

So he said, "And you always sign with your initials."

I agreed with my shoulders.

"But --"

"Don't worry about it," I said. "It was time I got another detention anyway. Raise my profile and all."

"You're messed up," Abraham told me. And we walked home without another word. It didn't fix anything, of course. But someone knew, without even asking, that I had a conscience.

Heaven knows how he knew. It's not like I ever used it on him.

Our conversations on the walk home could head south pretty quickly if I was in a bad mood. For example, I nearly pushed Abraham off the edge the night I blew my basketball tryouts. I'd told everyone to go on ahead home without me, so I was alone when Abraham sat down at the other end of the bench.

"What're you doing here so late?" he asked glumly.

"Basketball tryouts."

"Oh. Did they go all right?"

'I can't even dribble right,' I didn't say. 'The ball kept getting away and I'd have to chase after it. It was seriously the most embarrassing thing I've ever done,' I thought. 'Jackson and Ross and Shen and them are all going to make the team and I'll be stuck watching them in the stands with my mom,' I worried but didn't feel up to admitting.

Although I couldn't seem to open my mouth, I think he got the drift. "Basketball's a ridiculous sport anyway," he assured me.

"What're you doing here?"

He shrugged. "We've all been writing letters to Senator Reyes after school."

"What about?"

"The EPA referendum. She never writes back though."

"She might not," I said. "Those kind of people usually don't, or get their secretaries to or something. She's probably busy voting on more gun laws."

"But she has to write back! Fish are literally going to keep dying if this referendum doesn't pass."

Why did it feel so good to goad Abraham? Why did he bring out the nastiest part of me every time?

"Yeah," I said, "well, maybe actual senators know a little more about what's important for the country than you. A thirteen-year-old kid in grandpa socks."

Abraham breathed in. I can't remember him ever lashing out at me they way I did to him, except in a self-defense capacity; more often than not he just stood there and took it, tortoise-style, wearing this tired little grin that broke your heart. I don't know where he got the granite to stiffen his upper lip. I should've stopped. I didn't stop. I didn't even soften my tone.

"And you know, sometimes fish just die. They do. I mean, they're all going to die one day, some of old fishy age, some choking on PennyPinch factory sludge. Sucks."

Abraham was twitching at me. "We can buy them years of life though!" he said desperately. "Wouldn't you want someone to do that for you?"

"Yeah," I said. "But that doesn't mean they would, or could. We're all kind of on our own in this world."

And he just sat there, proving me wrong. We bathed in a small shared silence as he worried about some dirty little trout somewhere and I winced to remember my pathetic performance in the gym, as compared to my classmates and my own mental image of what a guy my age ought to be able to do.

I found myself unconsciously reading one of the buttons on Abraham's satchel. 'Take care of your environment, and it will take care of you.'

'Hmm,' I thought. 'That sounds like a nerdy way of telling me not to shit where I eat. Why ... thank you, button. I won't.'

Presently I clambered to my feet, hoisted Abraham up by his forearm, and clapped my other hand to his shoulder, a gesture he performed back more solemnly than anyone I knew. "Everything will get better," I said. "Maybe when people like us are old enough to change it."

Abraham nodded. We had a lot more faith then. I can't remember why.

The next time he went canvassing for Environment Club, I was ready. Carefully, I chose my spot on the opposite end of the foyer. Today, Carrot Fro and Alex Moy were tag teaming it, but as soon as they got within ten feet of Abraham, I made my move.

"Imaginary hot dogs! Get your imaginary hot dogs! Step right up, folks; they'll be gone before you know it."

From clear across the room I heard Alex exclaim, "What. The. Bats."

But Carrot Fro got to me first. "Why, hello, young lad!" I said to him. "Do you want some imaginary mustard on yours?"

His amusement defied all words for a moment. "I ... I guess so?"

Briskly, I handed him the ephemeral goods. "Now, you be careful with that son. It's VERY HOT."

"Hey, Gabe," said Alex Moy, snickering uncontrollably. "Free food!"

"Don't eat that," said Gabe. "You'll get imaginary food poisoning."

Normally I would've been freaking out at this much peer mirth. But a haze of serene joy surrounded me today. Somehow the idea that I was making a fool of myself on purpose for the greater good bolstered me, until I'd built up so much momentum I couldn't have stopped if I'd wanted to. Abraham was grinning like an idiot as he pushed his flyers on people, although he was having a hard time getting their attention.

"Now hold it right there!" I told Carrot Fro. "Were you just going to walk off without paying?"

He spun around sarcastically. But I just smiled at him, daring the world to bring me down. I was having fun, and it was starting to spread.

"Depends. Do you have change for an imaginary fiver?"

I was pretty proud of myself that day. I never did anything of the sort again, but the next week, Cadenza Nichol got a few of her friends to break into show tunes every time they heard an insult. So, same difference.

# Chapter 10

The first day of my freshman year of high school, I was back to square one as far as transportation went. Aden Prep was a fifteen minute car ride away, so my mother had to drive me.

"Have you got your schedule memorized?" she asked.

"Yes." (No.)

"Nervous?"

"No." (No.)

She smiled. "Okay. I'll stop."

At the north entrance, I spotted Ross right away. He was sitting all hunched over on a bench, left leg crossed over right, jangling his foot up and down like a maniac. I spent the next few minutes unsuccessfully trying to convince him he could come inside without fear.

"My brother told me there's this terrible hazing ritual the first week of high school!" he insisted. "They make you eat raw flour!"

"Come on," I said. "Nothing like that's going to happen during school hours, anyway, so you might as well come to class."

"Naw, man, they take you outside between classes and do it!"

"I heard that's only the basketball team," I told him, which was a lie.

"We play basketball sometimes!" he whispered. "What if they think we're going to try out?"

Then, Cadenza Nichol walked past us. In a neon-orange tube top.

What?

You have to realize, I had never in my life seen Cadenza Nichol without her giant flower-printed sweater buttoned up all the way to her chin, even in June. This was a girl who responded to date requests by telling guys to picture the weeping faces of their future children. And she was strutting along the sidewalk like her thighs were allergic to cloth. Maybe high school was going to be interesting after all.

Ross seemed to take this as a sign that, whatever happened, we were never going to draw as much negative attention as she was. We followed Cadenza inside.

It was almost funny in a way; she kept pulling at her top like she didn't really believe it was going to stay up on its own. About as sexy as an armadillo. But she had this look on her face, like, 'Wow, am I allowed to do this?'

She wasn't, thank god; a sympathetic attendance office worker yanked Cadenza out of class and handed her a copy of the dress code and a horrible Aden Prep sweatshirt before she even left homeroom. But the whole classroom had seen her, and the detention she got. And it seemed like every single person we'd gone to middle school was laughing about it by lunch.

Except Abraham, of course. Abraham slid into a seat next to me about two minutes into lunch in an extreme state of distress. The only other person in my lunch that I knew was Ross, or things might have gotten interesting, but as it was I could risk letting him stay without fearing a convo-splosion.

"How's Tangerine Tits?" I asked him.

The kid was practically shaking. "I don't understand this!" he roared. "She's such a nice person! Why would she do this?"

"Uh, because being nice has nothing to do with wearing a shirt?"

"She was president of the Teen Mothers: Not Today club!"

I shrugged. "Yeah, well, the TMNT technically erred on the side of condoms, so I'd say you're being a lot more hypocritical than she is about this. Girl deserves to have a little fun if she likes," I said, and laughed.

But Abraham was taking this completely seriously. "She didn't used to be that kind of fun."

"Just because a girl wears a tube top doesn't mean she's having sex," Ross pointed out. "That's, like, circumstantial evidence."

"True story," I agreed. "Do you seriously think anyone is hitting that? She just wants some attention for her brand-new chest tumors. And as a chest-tumor fan myself, I support her. Better than her shirt does anyway."

Abraham looked about ready to kick everything. "Well if she isn't, she's trying to get a reputation for it, which is just as bad! It's ... showing encouragement for teen sex!"

I looked up at him. "Look, dude, are you really going to do this? I mean, as a normal person, well, you know how I feel about Cadenza. But as a person who has your best interests at heart, I have to say: if the worst thing she ever does is experiment with her wardrobe a little, you're the one losing out. And being a shitty friend, by the way."

Abraham pulled at his sleeves. "Well, she was being a shitty friend first."

"How? By making bad fashion choices?"

"No. By stomping all over something we stood for."

And that was how Abraham lost his first friend. Also, I was pretty sure he was going to lose all his other friends, too, actually. From what I had seen, Cadenza was the undisputed lynchpin of Abraham's little friend group, the Supreme Nerd Queen that the others follow to the ends of the earth. She had that sort of outcast-chic, peanut-butter-and-ketchup charisma that drew everyone firmly to her side no matter how stupid she was being. I wondered if Abraham would believe me if I told him this. If only he could somehow just drop it ... but of course he could not. It wasn't in him.

Once I had calmed my esteemed associate down a little, of course, I realized that Abraham was, somehow, having lunch with us. In fact, now that his miniscule social circle had gone up in flames, it was possible that he was going to think a precedent had been set, and he was free to eat with us all semester. But I decided if Ross wasn't going to sweat it, I wouldn't, either.

Finally, my last class ended. On my way out, I spotted Jackson and waved, but he was talking to a group of guys and barely looked up.

"Doubles are the worst part," said one random guy. "You'll get used to seeing the sun rise."

"Worth it, though," said another. "It's a crazy bonding experience, and it really gives us the edge."

Jackson wasn't saying anything; for once in his life, he seemed awed into respectful silence. For a reasonable period of time, I hovered near him, waiting to be introduced; finally, though, I had to give up and leave without him.

As the rest of my friends started to depart, I wandered downstairs to find someplace to await the arrival of my mother, who had by that time gotten a real job because she didn't love her family. I discovered The Lounge.

Probably I spent about 96% of my life in The Lounge between the years 2009 and 2011, and of that time I spent at least a third of it complaining. It never occurred to me at the time that, had I been able to return home immediately after school each day, I most likely would've squandered those hours in front of Contretemps Online or Hard Shadow or some other mindless game, and by forcing me to sit with my friends and socialize instead, the logistic realities of my life were actually doing me a favor. Hell, I wouldn't even have met half my friends if I hadn't had my hour in limbo each day. But then, I wasn't a very grateful kid.

The Lounge wasn't much to look at; by day it was simply a set of uncomfortable tables and chairs which extended the cafeteria beyond its natural boundaries. After school, the janitorial staff stacked up the excess chairs and swept away the school's daily layer of debris from the grainy neutral-colored floor tiles. At either end stood a trash can and a washroom, and on the left end was a standard-issue vending machine. And, counting out the change from my lunch money, I discovered that I had one quarter, four dimes, and three nickels, which would just about buy me an AirChoc.

Unfortunately, when I deposited my payment, the screen informed me that I had only sixty-five cents worth of credit. And, pressing the return button, I received only my quarter and dimes.

"That machine eats nickels," said an enormously cute girl next to me.

"What? No fair!"

"Yeah. You'd better tell Mr. Portis; he'll unlock it for you."

"All right," I said. "Where is he?"

She pointed to an oldish man contentedly reading a newspaper at the other end of the room. "He's sort of the Lounge guru," said the girl. "Oh, and I'm Jenna."

"I'm Tyler," I said. "Thanks for your help."

Together, we ventured forth to seek the man's aid.

"Sorry about that," he said, at long last granting me the sweet sustenance I craved. "Next time if you have nickels, just come get me first. It'll save time."

Jenna and I sat down next to Mr. Portis. Jenna promptly returned to her book. Dear god, was she hot. I was still getting used to being around nearly adult women at school, but it was definitely a nice change.

"So you're a freshman, I take it?" Mr. Portis asked. "I haven't seen you around before."

"Yeah," I said, thinking that despite her height, Jenna might be a sophomore, or even a junior, if she knew about the rogue vending machine already.

"How are you liking Aden?"

"It's fine," I said, my eyes just barely managing not to wander to Jenna's body. She was making very little noise and hardly moving, but that only made me curious. Somehow, the serious expression on her face just made her extra cute, like a tiny elf determined to finish making all the toys by Christmas. I was seized with a desire to make her look up somehow.

"Yeah," I said, "I went to this special middle school for acrobats and mimes and animal tamers and stuff. So this is pretty boring."

Well, that worked.

"Just kidding!" I said, smiling at Jenna. "Got any tips for me?"

Jenna shrugged. "Nope. You'll figure it out."

Bored, I began sketching my imaginary middle school, with lions and awkwardly stretchy clowns and everything.

"You like art?" Jenna asked.

"Yeah, I do," I replied, happy to have found something she cared for.

"I'm in Studio Art I," she said. "Mrs. Thorne's a bitch, though. I wouldn't take art unless you're pretty serious about it."

"Oh, I'm serious," I said, thinking that tough teachers made it all the easier to amuse the students. "Are you going to be an artist when you grow up?"

Jenna snorted. "Nobody's an artist when they grow up. Maybe a graphic designer though."

"Oh yeah? What's the difference?"

Jenna folded her hands primly. "Well, if you tell people you're an artist, that means you haven't grown up yet."

"Damn!" said Mr. Portis. "That's harsh. I'm glad Andy Warhol didn't have you for a career counselor."

Mr. Portis obliged us to a degree we did not deserve. As we reclined around the foldup plastic tables, he dispensed invaluable life advice and personal theories about his favorite local sports teams in equal measure. On days when he felt particularly kind, Mr. Portis even brought us leftover pizza from the cafeteria, the cool temperature of which we swept aside with our raw adolescent hunger.

Thirty-odd kids occupied The Lounge each afternoon, in little groups of three or four, going about their time-passing business in such a lazy manner that one did not find it uncommon to doze off after an hour or so, cradled in an arm-pillow and covered by a jacket-blanket. Ross and I sometimes played cards, though never poker. Jenna liked to present the transparent delusion that she was doing her homework. One bold afternoon, a couple juniors actually tried to hold a rehearsal for their garage band in The Lounge, at which point Mr. Portis informed them that they could play whatever they liked as soon as they'd paid a visit to the Talent Store and come back with some decent riffs.

Most kids didn't do a damn thing, though, other than sit and chat and drink in the restful air. After the fact, I sometimes wondered if all those Lounge-hours we whiled away could've been used for some higher purpose. Perhaps we could've installed a shuffleboard court, or learned Swedish together. Then again, I was pretty sure even if such a confluence of efforts had been possible, you never could've gotten that group of kids to agree on what to do with it.

# Chapter 11

Enough time had passed before my next adventure with Abraham that he had already started going by "Abra" (a mistake I have not to this day let him forget), founded the first tabletop gaming club at Aden Prep, and found a new group of people with whom to hold social conversations, most of whom knew more imaginary languages than I did real ones. I was, well, pretty much the same.

One day, Ross and I were talking after school with Jenna, waiting for a ride home.

"I could definitely be on the football team," I asserted. "It's too much work though. I'm not going to do all that work just so I can prove to you I could be on the football team."

"That's not the point," said Jenna, looking up from an inky word mural she was working on. "Obviously you could be, like, if your life depended on it. But the guys on the football team are actually out there being on the football team. And you're in here, playing bloody knuckles with yourself on a dumb-class geometry book."

"It's not the dumb class," I protested. "The dumb class is the dumb class."

Ross frowned loyally at Jenna. "We could be in the smart class if we wanted. The average class isn't the dumb class though. We're just, um, taking more of a casual interest in the boring subjects."

Jenna replied, "Well I hope you're taking more than a casual interest in college."

It was true, perhaps, that I wasn't the most focused person in the world. The week before I'd been washing the truck with my dad and he'd practically said as much. "Tyler, I think it's great that you're immersing yourself in the present. There's no need to squander the quickest-passing years you've got worrying about what will happen when they're spent. So I don't want you to take what I'm going to say the wrong way. But ..."

"But?"

"I have something I'd like to talk to you about."

Always the preambles. "And that thing is?"

He waved his hands while his brain matched subjects to predicates. "Well you see son ... Today is the day of opportunity. Your brain is in an unique state right now: of an age for abstract reasoning and yet still very much open. It's capable of things that it won't be capable of when you're my age."

The world never does give you a privilege without a responsibility, and nor do fathers. Somehow I knew he wasn't going to end this speech with 'Isn't that great?' And he didn't.

"You have to start thinking the things you want to think about when that elastic in your mind's still there, and then bringing them out so others can see them. Painting the pictures you see in your mind's eye. You're an insightful boy and it worries me that you don't have a creative outlet worthy of you."

I shuddered, imagining him about to break out the magnetic words and finger paints. "I draw all the time though!"

"Yes," he hedged, "and you have a good eye, but you don't draw what's in your heart. You just do it for laughs."

What was wrong with funny art? Maybe my heart was full of jokes.

"Now I'm not going to try to direct you in this regard, because that would be absurd. It's just something to keep in mind. I know it can be daunting for a young man to find a voice. Just ... keep an eye out," he said desperately. "It could be anything."

My dad had started writing poetry before he knew cursive. My mom had showed me some; it was beautiful stuff. I guess this was the equivalent of the old college athlete signing his reluctant children up for Little League because 'it would be good for them' ... nobody's capable of knowing other paths than the one he took. My parents couldn't see what I imagined as I circumnavigated the old neighborhood park in all weathers, piecing together the world in my own context and dreaming up solutions for everyone. They only knew I always ended up back where I started with nothing at the end of it to show another soul, save my beat-up shoes. The drastic plans for a peaceful world, a productive economy, even a better athletic draft system, would at this rate all die with my sophomoric person. And of course the more persistent my isolation of the imagination, the more I feared that all the mental architecture which seemed so well-founded in my mind would topple when brought into contact with the breath of human speech.

But that wasn't something you could admit to someone like Jenna. And so we sat there: me feeling vaguely bad about myself, Jenna on a very high horse, and Ross still quite confused about this whole 'Tyler and Jenna argue because they're afraid to try making out' thing.

Watching her maneuver the calligraphy brush, though, I had an idea. What if I drew a really nice picture of her, and then entered it in the art show? That would show her how I felt, and my dad would see I was plenty creative.

Oops. She hated when I stared at her.

As my eyes wandered across the waiting area I spotted ol' Abra Cadahhhhbra with his own posse. Now there was a kid who didn't even have to try to rack up mind-blowing achievements – I swear our chemistry teacher literally wanted to have his babies. (In vitro, as an edifying experiment of course.) He couldn't possibly be worried about his post-secondary future ... although he did look a little worried about his present. Miss Rainbow Moonflower Special and Stupid Steuben, replacement friends that almost made me miss Candy Tits, were riding him hard about something again. Must've been serious because suddenly he got up and left – then realized he couldn't go anywhere.

It sure was great being fifteen sometimes.

I don't know if you've ever noticed, but we aren't broken by the people who say 'no' to us. A reasonably tough young human being can and will numb himself to 'no'. It's the people who say 'yes' who cause all the problems. Because we come to rely on those yeses. We hoard them in the darkest recesses we have, coated in strange defensive crusts. We start to panic when the stream of them stops, and to get it turned on again we will roll over and perform any trick.

Abraham had always known who he was. But Abra was starting to look a little lost.

Stomp, slink, slump, annnnnd there he sat against the wall in my peripherals, folding his sleeve and making that too-old-for-him Abra-face. That's when he must have spotted my single elevated eyebrow, because he held up four fingers (our 'come find me when you're done with what you're doing' signal), and took off. Intrigued and tired of the Jenna-fight already, I followed him to the library. "What's up?"

Abra studied the table between us. "G-H," he said. "I didn't think you'd come right away. I haven't really had time to collect my thoughts yet."

Fair enough. I patiently began working on the jigsaw puzzle the librarian had laid out for our amusement, a little bit concerned. "I'll help. What started whatever's up?"

Head tilted, eyes half-closed, Abra said, "Well, when I was talking to Steuben just now..."

That wasn't a huge surprise. In his own way, Abra's friend Steuben was just as bad as Tim had been. Less aggressive, certainly, but more overall disturbing ideas per cubic inch.

Trying to get Abra to meet my gaze I said, "Dude. Steuben thinks it's called 'capitalism' because it's 'capital punishment worthy'. He's a freak. Don't even worry about it."

"We're all freaks," he shot back. Ah, yes. Abra and his group were pretty sensitive about the whole imaginary high school caste system thing. Not that anyone ever hassled them. They had to content their rebellious spirits with getting snippy over the turnout difference between athletic events and astronomy parties. Steuben's girlfriend referred to me as 'Sheep 417' like it was my name. (Once you stopped being a sheep – which involved a forced cultural education I'd never had the time for – you were 'rechristened' and traded in your number for a 'true spirit name'. Last I heard this girl now works at PenShop.)

"Not the good kind," I said."Steuben has very specific ideas about what people should be like for no real reason. You shouldn't let him get to you because he's wrong."

We do a fair amount of this. Cross-circle bashing, that is. I don't think we've ever had a single friend in common, and that is how we like it. It's not so much that we've personally hated every friend the other has ever had, but it makes us feel better sometimes, hearing the people who hold our fragile pursuits of happiness in their capricious hands every day balanced out by a little gratuitous criticism. Just to let off steam, you understand. It got more complicated when we started acquiring girlfriends, of course, but that's another story entirely.

At last Abra leaned forward a little. "All I said was I still liked Morton Enigma, and then Rain Sparkle was all on me about how they'd sold out and you could hear the blood of a dead movement in their latest album. Pretty standard conversation for us really."

I interrupted, "There never was any movement. It's called marketing. She realizes that, right?"

He shrugged. "I don't even know what she was talking about to tell the truth. I don't care what musicians do when they're not making music; I just like the sound."

"It's a long story," I said, waving my hand. "Let's just say they did some attention-grabbing political things between songs at their live shows. You're right though – what does it matter if you still like their music?"

"I know right?"

Okay, so now he had a small smile on. That was something. I prompted, "That's what they got all upset about? You having your own taste in music?"

"Well after that part, Steuben said that was just typical of me, right, because for all my freedom-riding thought energies I secretly still wanted to be a sheep. And that's why I'd never get anywhere."

Abra appeared to be legitimately gutted by this judgment from Word of God. I shook my head.

"Brah. You spent half of the seventh grade wearing a crown of toothpicks to protest the situation in Israel. You couldn't be a sheep if you tried."

"But that's just it," he despaired. "Maybe I've been who I've been this whole time because I knew I couldn't pass as a normal. But that doesn't mean I didn't want to."

I shrugged. "It's not exactly a criminal offense. You were the one who told me about primates and their family groups. They're a good thing. They help keep us sane."

"Yeah, it's comfortable, being typical," said Abra. "But it's important not to just do everything the way the group does. Society needs at least some people to think critically, or else everyone will do things in the old inefficient ways forever."

"But you do. So that's fine."

"Not enough, I guess. Apparently I like the same complexity-devoid music as everyone else my age."

I folded my arms at him. "Sometimes," I suggested, "there's nothing wrong with the way the group is doing something. We're humans, and we like memes. The TV shows we watch, the snacks we buy, the bestsellers we sell each other ... yeah, maybe they're stupid, but we experience them together. That's what's important, not figuring out what's objectively the best."

"What? Why would I want to do stupid things just because I'd have a lot of stupid people to do them with?"

"Because it doesn't matter!" I cried. "What difference does it make if you watch Lavender Ladies with your buddies and make fun of it and waste like half an hour of your life bonding with a good group of people? Would you rather spend all your time alone because they're having fun wrong?"

"But we humans have highly evolved brains!" he protested. "We can fight our base instincts to be the people we really are."

"Well there's the problem," I said. "Maybe the person you really are wants to go to a Morton Enigma concert. And then visit Tostada Tunnel with a girl in shortboots. And maybe a true original thinker would do that even if his friends told him not to."

Abra twitched, but whether with disgust or longing I wasn't sure. "It's okay for you ..."

Now he'd done it, and I was worked up already. "Why, because I'm not as unique as you are? Because it's no big loss for the world if Tyler Freimann doesn't push himself?" I glared at him. "Well I've got some big amazing ideas inside me, too. I'm going to make a statement one day myself. But not before I'm ready. And until then, Brah, I'm going to talk about cars, and watch baseball, and daydream about how to get Jenna to ask me to Turnabout. Because you can't rush greatness."

He shook his head. "What I meant was, it's okay for you because it seems like what you want, what your friends want, and what society want are all sort of the same. You've basically just told me I have to do all three of those. It's more complicated when your friends and your society are at war and you're being tugged at by both."

I'd never thought about it like that. Notwithstanding my serious slacker tendencies, I was still quite a conventional boy with conventional friends in a conventional world. I'd have to land on my feet eventually. Was that just my good luck or my lack of spine?

"It's simple," I told him. "Do what your friends want when it's what you want, or when they all seem to be having a lot of fun. Try to enjoy it, if it doesn't compromise any of your major beliefs or anything. If they ask you to do something you don't like, be very noncommittal until they figure out you don't want to. If this happens a lot of times, start looking for a new group of friends that like doing the stuff you actually want to do. But don't drop the first group; you might need them later. Just tell them you're really busy all of the sudden. When you're in with the new group, you can just hang out with the old group whenever it's convenient."

Abra was laughing pretty hard now. "So that's how you normals do it!" He stopped laughing, saw how annoyed I was and started up again. "All right, I'm going to skip all the parts about lying and take what I can from that. Drop Rain Sparkle because she's been driving me up a tree lately. Only hang out with Steuben in school and anime club. And meet some strangers who are only about a six on the weirdness scale." Suddenly he was serious. "Any ideas on how to find a new group? You're sort of the expert."

The words were out of my mouth before I'd half thought them. "Dude. We're throwing you a house party."

"What?" he sputtered. "Aren't you supposed to do that after you already have lots of friends?"

"Ah, normally, but in your case you basically live in a mansion. People will come, and you can try them all out. I'll make sure of it."

Now this was a more novel suggestion than it seemed. You see Abra and I pretty much never hung out, in the standard sense of the word. We showed up when we wanted or needed something and left when we'd obtained it. We slummed in emotional sewers together but never called out to one another in the light of the sun. The very efficacy of our arrangement depended upon this. You can feel perfectly safe angsting to a guy who's never going to have the chance to bring up your greatest insecurities out of context, three weeks later, on the escalator at the mall, when you're trying to be the carefree version of yourself for just one goddamn afternoon.

But Abra was worth it. The kid never let himself have any fun.

"Okay," he said. And so, for the first time, we mixed business with pleasure.

# Chapter 12

The next day was Friday, so Jenna and Ross and I went to Jenna's for Bad Movie Night, a tradition that lasted at most five months but certainly entertained us in the meantime. (I'd give it a 6.1 on the Tradition-o-meter.) During the two-hour period, her hand met mine in the popcorn bowl about nine times. I started stockpiling kernels in my pockets. Luckily Ross doesn't like popcorn and really couldn't care less who's chasing whom. I ought to have followed his example.

At last I pulled her into the basement storage area. "Okay, what the hell?"

"I changed my mind," she told me in a would-be seductive voice. "You're too attractive to let go."

This wasn't unwelcome news. I tried to preen without making any noise.

"But," she added, "let's keep this quiet. And non-exclusive."

Okay, freaking out a tiny bit. "Sure, playboy; why don't we grab Ross and have a threesome?"

She laughed the laugh of a teenager who's never seen the dark side but fakes it anyway. "What I mean is, we're not going to go on dates and share a malt with a twisty straw. You're annoying as balls. But when I want your services," she whispered, "I'll let you know."

"Hopefully as discreetly as just now, Jenna." But even if I'd wanted to say no, I wouldn't have had the slightest clue how.

As if to prove a point, she pestered Ross the rest of the night. "I bet you're excited for lacrosse," she breathed. "You're so disciplined. All that hard work must be great for your muscles."

Bite me, Jen, I thought. After this sort of company, Abraham will almost be a relief.

"We're going to need some alcohol," I said decisively to him the next day.

"What?" said Abraham, amusingly flustered. "But no one at the party will be old enough to drink."

I gave him a Look. That's right, Abraham's friends were straightedge. The self-righteous kind. The kind with adorable slogans to justify their decisions and a pocket full of inflated statistics and horror stories if the rhetoric failed. But I'd all but lured him to the cool side now, right?

He wrinkled his lips, evidently floundering with a decade of D.A.R.E. and music videos and overheard Monday morning conversations. "Let's visualize both sides of this equation. On one side we have a basement full of drunk kids throwing up and falling down and hurting themselves and someone calling the cops. On the other we have a fun night full of intelligent conversation. This one's easy."

"You've never even tried it, have you?" I groaned. "What kind of scientist are you?"

"I'm trying to meet people I might want to be friends with, Tyler. And friends who drink aren't worth it; they're trouble."

That stung. "Drinking is a verb, not an adjective. It doesn't define you, and it helps people have fun, and it'll get people to your party. So stop making stuff up about something you don't know anything about."

"On the contrary, I know a great deal about the biological reality of intoxication."

He was too much sometimes, he really was. "If it were that bad why would they let adults do it?"

"Because kids are dumb. They have underdeveloped brains and they don't think. Adults are responsible enough not to drive or anything when they're drunk. Their frontal lobes are all developed."

"Yeah, because by the time they're adults they're experienced drinkers! Come on Abra, I'm not suggesting we start a brewery, just a case or two of beer."

Abra smiled his checkmate smile. "I bet you haven't even figured out where you're going to get this hypothetical alcohol yet. It's a moot point. We look like hobbits and we don't have any older friends."

I couldn't deny that. "Uh ... maybe we could rock the youth group vibe... You know, for novelty."

But abruptly we were interrupted by Foellinger the younger, a girl who turned out to be more wolf than sheep. "You guys are pathetic," she sneered. "How am I going to meet high school boys if you can't even score a keg? God, I have to do everything."

Abra reflexively shooed his sister away. "Hilarious, Livvy. Been having champagne tea parties all this time and didn't invite me?"

She folded her arms irresistibly. "Leave the booze up to me. My sugar daddy's in law school."

Olivia Foellinger was the kind of girl where you had no idea if she was telling the truth or not but somehow didn't care because truths were three for a dozen and her lies were priceless.

(If you're reading this Rosemary, don't worry; nothing ever came of it.)

"Perfect," Abra said. "A dry party it is then."

She stuck her tongue out at her brother. I wanted to tell her to keep it locked up where it wouldn't tempt anyone.

"Anyway," I said. "What should we do for music?"

"We could just play the radio," Abra suggested.

I winced. "You don't play a radio station at a party. Too many commercials."

"We could wait for a commercial free hour? Or like, figure out when all the commercial free hours are and string them all together."

Olivia and I facepalmed in perfect unison. "No, and you're just going to have to trust me on that one. Have you got an MP3 player?"

"Well yeah but it's mostly got J-Pop and K-Pop and video game soundtracks and a little classical."

"And Morton Enigma?" I said with a wink.

"Ha, yeah. I was counting them as classical. What about you; you must have some party tunes right?"

"Too poor," I admitted. "Let's download you a mainstream smorgasbord."

"I don't know," Olivia hemmed. "Maybe we could play Hammie's geek music and, like, say it's ironic."

"Later in the evening," I promised. "We'll get everyone here and then we'll drive away the faint of heart with an explosion of techno. Survival of the fittest eardrums."

Abra shrugged. "Is there any point at which I get a say in my own party?"

"Of course, Brah. We're doing this so all the people you invite will come. Now who would you like to get to know better?"

"I don't know," he said. "I would only know if I knew them."

"Well, ask all the people in all the clubs you're in. You at least have something in common with them, right? And it might be the only chance they'll get to come to a real high school bash. I'll invite whoever I can find, too."

Olivia giggled. "So we're going to take a bunch of nerds, and whichever cool people weren't invited to better parties already, and put them in a room together?"

Now there was a frightening possibility I hadn't considered yet. What if half the guests stayed huddled in the video game corner all night? Unstable elements in close proximity always reacted explosively.

"That's not how high school works," I told her. "It's not like, there's cool people and uncool people; that's only in movies. There's just ... people who don't know each other. Yet."

"Lies!" cried Abra.

"Truths!" I replied.

He serious'd. "You're a sheltered boy, Tyler. Don't talk like you know what it's really like."

"I do though," I said. "This clique thing? It's all a very well-organized myth. Ask a hundred teenagers what subculture they're part of; at least eighty will say 'none, I'm just sort of normal', and not one will admit to being at the top of the food chain. Kids like you make this crap up because you love to feel like better people than everyone else."

"They'd only deny it because it's the cool thing to do," he insisted. "Why do you think everyone knows who the athletes are?"

"Because ... It's complicated."

"Well? I'm an honors student. Make me a proof."

Why not? "Fine. Givens are: A) There's nothing to do in this stupid town when you're under eighteen, so B) people go to school sporting events because C) they like to socialize with their school friends and watch something exciting, so D) they know the names of the people at the center of these games because E) they're on the back of their jerseys and being announced all the time. Nobody actually cares what they're doing when they aren't being a cheap source of entertainment."

Stubbornly Abra raised his voice at me. "Nobody goes to the choir concerts but parents; they're entertaining. Nobody goes to the musicals. Nobody goes to WYSE meets." You could hear the years dropping off in his voice as he counted injustices on his fingers, until he was just a little kid again. "Nobody comes to my tabletop club meetings."

Patiently I launched a calm rebuttal. "Sports have the broadest appeal. You can talk while they're going on and you don't need any special art knowledge to appreciate them. They're still fun even if one or both sides isn't very good, because they're a competition, and the end's a surprise. They don't have a million complicated rules like academic stuff. They don't require any participation. You don't have to be clever or educated or even particularly active to enjoy them."

"Bullshit. Sports have just as many rules as tabletop games."

"Yeah, but everyone's grown up watching them so they're second nature."

He looked triumphant. "That's just it! Our whole society is geared toward celebrating a bunch of mindless muscle men. People used to go to the opera and the symphony; now we've devolved into this. Nobody wants to stretch the mind, break the status quo." Harumph of self-importance. "Well my party's going to be different. I'll MAKE people think."

"You can't make people think," I pointed out. "People are always thinking about something. And when you make them think about what you want them to think about? That's called brainwashing."

He ignored me. "It's going to be great. We'll print out philosophical questions and put them on all the tables for discussion, and play concertos, and make up our own civilized party games..."

I suddenly took in his jerky movements and sharp face, angry and yet in pain. So this was it. We'd tried doing something as friends and it had backfired. Why wouldn't it, with two people as different as we were?

I'd had the perfect thing going for five years. Why had I decided to risk it? I fought with people all the time, lost them, replaced them, and went on. But I didn't know if I could do that with Abra. He had become my insurance, my conscience, my guardian, my fuzzy blanket in a very nippy reality. And now I'd broken him.

"Okay."

He looked up. "What did you say?"

"I said okay. If that's how you want it."

"But ..."

I held out my open palms in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm sorry if I made it sound like I was trying to change you. I just want a lot of people to come."

Abra sniffed. "Quality over quantity."

"Yeah, but I want everyone to meet you."

That was certainly a different angle than he was expecting. "Why?"

"To see how cool you are!" I told him.

"You were just telling me I was an idiot!"

"No ... that's not what I meant," I protested feebly.

He was breathing pretty hard now. "It's true. I am. I don't have any idea how to do normal stuff and it's always, always going to be super hard for me."

"It won't," I said softly. "You're smart; you can learn."

"I should just stick to people who are the same way – who cares about the rest of the world? They sure don't care about me."

"They want to though," I assured him.

At this he looked up. "Well then," he said passionately, "why don't they act like it?"

"You're intimidating," I explained. "Sometimes the way you talk, people feel like you're rejecting them. For not being smart enough. That's the only thing I was trying to change."

In the silence I added, "Plus I just always wanted to throw a huge party."

I felt his anger deflating. "Well ..."

"You can still do nerd stuff," I allowed. "You just can't ignore the people who aren't up to it."

He smiled a tiny bit. "Philosophy can be done at any skill level. And we'll try to arrange something for the slower guests."

"We'll market creatively," I promised. "Try to sell people on your unorthodox entertainment. Maybe with some different atmosphere ... Hey, I know!"

"You know what?"

I beamed beatifically. "So you're always telling me how tabletop games have no limit but the imagination, right?"

"Yeah?" he agreed, pleased I had been listening all those years.

"How about setting? Can they be set anywhere?"

"Um ... potentially. People are always inventing more games in more universes."

I rubbed my hands together. "Could there be one set here in our world, in modern times?"

"I ... guess ..."

"With very basic rules, and, ah, some characters that people would already be familiar with."

He grinned. "It's definitely a possibility."

I went to make flyers. The kind no reasonable person could ignore.

# Chapter 13

"Abraham's throwing a party," I told dozens of people on Monday as they shuffled past. "Friday. Abraham Foellinger. Right, yeah, Abra. What? The occasion is, he has a ridiculous mansion basement that's been waiting fifteen years for someone to throw a party in it."

This kind of thing looked so much easier on television. Kids our age were supposed to have some sort of secret phone tree by which the news of available fiesta space could be spread, the better to terrorize innocent households. Unfortunately, the ones at my school seemed to avoid going to strange parties for petty reasons like 'I don't know the guy throwing this party', or 'I don't know the guy inviting me to this party' or 'I'm already going to a party that night, and I might actually know some of the people there'.

What I really lacked was charisma, and a sense of timing. A teenager's silent morning prayer can be summed up as follows: grant me the apathy to accept the things I cannot change, the personality to change the things I can, and the experience to know the difference. But my plea had been ignored so long I'd become a sociological atheist. So I enlisted some help.

"Jenna, I need you to talk to the smart kids for me."

"Um, what's that supposed to mean?" she said irritably, looking up from her Latin.

"Well I'm trying to throw this house party for Abraham Foellinger. But I don't really move in the same circles, so could you make sure all the smart kids know?" I asked, handing her some flyers.

"So wait ... you think we all just know each other somehow? Sure, Tyler. We meet up every Tuesday to play Honor and Horses and debate Asian economics. I'll just march right up to Joey Hull and tell him then," she said, frowning.

"No, of course not," I said, trying to recover. "I'm just saying you all have a lot of classes together."

"Well why doesn't he do it himself?"

"Because I promised I'd help and he's sort of shy."

She sniffed. "Abra Foellinger isn't shy. Not in World History anyway. And I'm pretty sure everyone knows him."

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. You're sort of friends with him." she countered.

I turned up my lips grimly. "Yeah, I guess I do. But sometimes loud people are shy about, well, other stuff."

She seemed to get the picture. "So," she said, turning off the argument, "why are you involved in this?"

Don't tell her, don't tell her, don't tell her ...

"I've known him since we were little. And sometimes we help each other out with stuff. And well, I don't think he's too happy with life right now."

I don't think Jenna had ever considered this. "But like, why isn't Steuben helping him?"

Did she know Steuben? Ha! And she was trying to claim all the smart kids didn't know each other. "He's kind of part of the problem. Abra's like his puppy or something. I'm trying to get the kid to branch out a little."

Jenna shrugged. "Are you sure you aren't just puppy-napping him?"

In the end I think she did talk to the enrichment kids, but none too persuasively. Ross was much easier to enthuse, but he actually was shy, so he didn't know many people but us.

"What about the lacrosse players?" I asked desperately.

"I don't actually hang out with them much off the field ... and Abra hates jocks, right? He told me."

I winced. Sometimes it really was rough associating with a human cactus.

But Ross didn't seem bothered. "Hey, I know; Jenna can ask the smart kids!"

I laughed. So my methods weren't so mad!

"What's up with you guys anyway? Is she your girlfriend now?"

"No," I said. "That would require Jenna pretending to care about something ... Right now I honestly don't even know if I want to date her. She's making this so difficult."

Ross smiled in sympathy. "Aw, but she's a sweet girl when you're on her good side. Maybe you just need to show her you mean it – like a big gesture!"

"I had this idea where I could draw a picture of her and win a prize in the art fair and she'd love the attention. But every time I try to start one, the picture just scowls at me."

"That ... is an unreliable plan," said Ross. "I was thinking more of a cinematic moment."

"Right. So in the middle of the party I'll stop the music and try to talk her into thinking I'm terrific in front of dozens of strangers. She'll love that."

He shook his head. "Think positive. There will be at least two hundred strangers. And I can bring my smoke machine! Let's ask Jackson if he knows any party people."

Jackson, of course, flat-out didn't like Abra.

"I don't understand why you're helping that assheart. He's always hassling us for having pep rallies and cheerleaders, like we ask for them or something."

I shrugged. "If I could make him loosen up I would. I'm hoping if we expose him to some normal people in a social situation he'll realize they aren't evil."

"I mean, that's cool," Jackson said, "as long as those people aren't me."

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. I don't mean that it contained no events; of course it did. The government would never spend your tax dollars providing high school students with six hours of sensory deprivation. However, none of the events would make good fifteen-second conversational anecdotes, so they don't really count.

In first period, for example, I touched a squirrel. But it wasn't just any squirrel, it was Oswald Squirrel, and so it was glorious. You see, I was taking German II while all my friends were taking Spanish III, because I had always hated Spanish, and because everyone knows the first two years of a foreign language are full of cute little songs and indigenous foods, while your third year is about really nailing down that grammar. For this reason I didn't know anyone in German II, prompting me to become semi-friends with Escher Hobbes within the extremely limited bounds of "partner exercise" free time. And if you knew Escher Hobbes, you'd understand why we'd spent hours and hours of vocabulary practice dialogue time trying to tame a particularly independent-minded squirrel who lived outside our classroom's window.

Our efforts finally paid off on the day in question. "Hey!" whispered Escher as he wiggled his fingers at Oswald Squirrel, just as he always had. "Hey, I've got some squirrel treats!"

Escher's 'squirrel treats' were walnuts. I'd told him at least twice that squirrels didn't eat walnuts, but deep down we both knew that wasn't the point.

A freshman glared at us while her partner said something in German.

"What's that?" I said.

"She said," the freshman informed us, "that if you're going to be stupid, you could at least be stupid in German."

"Guten tag, fraulein!" I told her. "Bitte pere noel ruslein auf der hayden." I wasn't sure what that meant, but you can bet your bottom it was something stupid. And because she was actually pretty cute, I made the international stein-swinging drinking song motion and shot her a wink.

The overachievers went back to their practice dialogues, disgusted. But now the junior next to me was intrigued by our quest. "Do you know that squirrel?"

"I think so," I said. "At least, there's always a greyish squirrel on that branch when we come in, so we like to tease it."

"We named it Oswald," Escher added.

The junior laughed. "I bet we could get it to come in if we made the right noise."

Half an hour later, we somehow did manage to cajole Oswald up to the first-floor windowsill, culminating in the aforementioned animal petting session. We must have been very lucky, because I'm honestly not sure I would have come to see me if I were a squirrel.

Clearly we had bonded. "Hey," I said to Escher and the junior as we packed up our books. "Do you want to come to a party this weekend?" The junior looked confused and finally gave a response in the noncommittal, so I handed him a flyer anyway. Escher said he wasn't allowed to go to parties if his parents didn't know the parents.

You see? By the time I'd explained all of those things, it wouldn't have really made a cute story.

Second period was eventful, but only to me, because I had to do my geometry homework. In fact I really should have started it in first period but, well, squirrels. So I scribbled cursory responses while my teacher shot me lingering glances to let me know that she knew I wasn't taking notes on chemistry. Maybe she didn't care, or plan to do anything about it, but she knew all the same.

Geometry was mostly interesting to Ross, but not in a good way. You see, we had to take turns writing our solutions to homework problems on the board. Unfortunately, Ross had this problem where he not only didn't know the answer to a question, but he couldn't even fake it. I mean, I was awesome at creating reasonable-looking solutions – I'd carefully write out the entire problem, including a painstaking recreation of the shape we had to figure stuff out about, add a random theorem from the book, throw in the congruent symbol, maybe, and write '180 degrees', which seemed to be the answer to at least every third geometry question. And on a good day, I could pass for a competent student who must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Today, for example, the answer was 360 degrees, so I ended up sitting down almost proudly. Ross, though ... Ross would just stand there with a blank quarter of chalkboard in front of him, looking guiltier than a boy in the girl's restroom. I never could convince him to guess; he was too honest. And our teacher was starting to catch wise.

"I've got number nineteen," he whispered to me. "What'd you get for it?"

"I dunno," I admitted. "I didn't get that far. Just say '180 degrees', why don't you?"

"It can't be 180 degrees! It wants to know the perimeter!"

"Well, twenty-four then. Twenty-four's a good math number."

Enough was enough; Mrs. Stolz was making summer school eyes at Ross and we knew something had to be done. Thirteen through sixteen were already erasing their problems. I held my breath.

When Ross got up to attempt his problem, Jackson, bless his impertinent heart, accompanied him to the board. And before Ross could do anything, Jackson started drawing.

Jackson drew butterflies. Jackson drew skulls and lightning bolts and peace signs and some more butterflies. He drew until Ross couldn't have worked out the problem if he'd wanted to.

Miracle of miracles. When she came to problem nineteen, Mrs. Stolz laughed and called on someone else.

"Thanks!" Ross whispered. Jackson just grinned. Man, I always did wish I had his balls.

Fourth period interested me greatly, because it was English, and we were reading a very interesting book. It took place in a world in the far future, except if you looked closely you could see it was really making a point about our world. At the time I considered this plot device to be brilliantly original because, as you may have guessed, I hadn't read four books cover to cover in my whole lifetime.

"I don't get it," said a girl across the circle from me. "If Dudek wanted to write about the war, why didn't he just write about the war? Why did he try to disguise it as a story about aliens and settlers? It's not like anyone was going to ban his work or put him in jail or anything."

"Yeah, but that's not the only reason to use metaphors," said Lizzie Murray. "They're a way of giving life to a message people might think is boring. I mean, who likes to read the newspaper anymore? But everyone will go see new action movies, because they're a story, and, well, exciting words and weird creatures can be like special effects for the brain. People with artistic talent can actually use that talent to tell people something they think they should know!"

Man, she was something; always had been and always would be. "Hey, Lizzie!" I said to her after class. "I totally get what you were trying to say, about art and expressing ourselves and everything. Because ask anyone if they want to write an essay, what do they say? Ask anyone if they want to read an essay, what do they say?"

She smiled a little too wide. "Yeah, exactly."

I plowed on. "They say no! Because essays aren't fun! In fact, we should start a campaign to not write essays anymore. We could just write stories for every assignment!"

"Haha, I guess. Although I was mostly talking about reaching the public. English teachers more or less get paid to be bored by what we write."

"I know right! So we could make their lives happier!"

"Uh ..."

"Anyway, hurray for Dudek!"

"Hurray. Yeah."

"I wonder if he has a fan club."

She looked a little lost. "Probably."

Time to wrap up. "Anyway, a little off topic but do you want to come to a party this weekend?"

Her mouth said 'maybe' but her face said 'what?'

I suddenly understood a little bit of how Abraham felt. I still thought he was imagining malice where there wasn't any. But looking through the right mud-colored glasses, a guy could easily grow quite bitter about all the people who would not, for whatever reason, stop for five minutes and try to figure him out.

Sure, nobody has the time to figure everyone out. Due to the petty limitations of the twenty-four hour day, you can only get so deep into so many people, and I suspect even if you tried for the world record of acquaintance breadth, you'd have to sacrifice a huge amount of acquaintance depth to get there. We must therefore exercise some discernment in our choice of society. But it just makes you want to cry sometimes when you're absolutely sure that the person across from you could understand everything you're thinking but isn't going to. Because you don't have the words. Because they don't have the time. Because something about both your backgrounds and thought patterns has thrown a great big gibberish filter across every insight you possess, and you're just standing there trying to translate an entire encyclopedia into sign language, for the benefit of someone who's not even watching.

Not. This. Time.

I caught up to Lizzie as she headed toward the door. "Hey, I didn't mean to creep you out," I said. "I thought you might be interested because there's going to be, like, philosophy contests or something. The party's at Abra Foellinger's."

"Oh, Abraham's party!" she said. "He actually already invited me. Yeah, then I'll definitely see you there."

I brightened up in a hurry. "Oh! Cool then."

"Yeah, I hadn't talked to him in so long. It was weird. But it should be neat."

"Should be."

But my sense of wonder at the literary universe unfolding its secrets to me did not necessarily make for good light chatter. The young people are few and far between who undertake intellectual stimulation for fun and profit.

Finally it was lunch time. "How's your day so far?" asked Jenna.

I shrugged. "Uneventful."

In fact I think I confided about as many personal details to Jenna as I did to my mom, which isn't a good thing.

"So who all is going to this party?" my mom asked before I left.

I smiled with half my mouth. "Everyone, I hope."

"But it's ... it's a high school party, right?"

"Well yeah Mom, Abraham's in high school, and I'm in high school, and we invited other people from high school. Maybe a few of his little sister's friends too."

She looked disappointed. "Oh. I just thought it might be a family party. That poor woman ... too many memories I suppose."

"What, a kid can't throw a party without his whole family getting involved? It's a high school party, and it's going to be awesome."

"All right. Have a good time. I'm sure at least a few people will come."

"What," I said, "no lecture about safety?"

Mom smiled. "I don't think that's going to be a problem."

# Chapter 14

So an hour later, I was sitting on the stereo and kicking my legs. "Five-thirty," said Abra. "The flyer said five-thirty and it is five-thirty."

"That means no one can show up until at least six," I told him, totally bluffing because I'd never been to a real party in my life. "And the really wild people won't be here until eight or nine. Try not to think about it."

Easy for me to say.

Nonplussed, Olivia began playing ridiculous eighties music and trying to spin me. She wasn't nervous. This was just a fun practice round for her; she was going to be unstoppable in high school and she knew it. And Abra knew it, too, which couldn't have helped his fraternal feeling or self-esteem. I wondered how he and his sister could get along so well with such strong values dissonance between them.

"Who all did you invite?" Abra asked me.

I shrugged. "Jenna. Ross. Jackson. Cadenza."

He jumped back nearly a foot. "You invited Cadenza? What the hell?"

"Yes. I did. You know you miss her."

"She sucked off the principal!"

I had heard this rumor myself from Jenna myself. But considering it had supposedly occurred in a helicopter in the Amazon rain forest, I was not convinced.

"Abraham, you know goddamn well Cadenza's never sucked the icing off a SugarTot. Someone just made it up."

"You don't even like Cadenza!" he pointed out.

"You're right. I think she's annoying as bats. But I know her. And I think you do too."

Ten minutes later the doorbell rang. It was Ross, bearing gifts. "Thanks," said Abra. "It's not my birthday though."

Ross grinned. "So you're having a 'just because' party? That's cool. Guess I can tell you what's in the present then." He leaned close to us and whispered, "It's 'Stratego'. It's really fun! Tyler told me you liked tabletop games."

Abra caught some of his enthusiasm. "Haha! Close enough!" he said uncharacteristically. "I used to love that game. One time my sister and I got bored and invented Pirate Stratego."

I bit. "How do you play Pirate Stratego?"

Olivia smiled. "I don't remember, but it involved pillow dueling and us calling each other mangy curs, so it was kind of a house favorite."

"We need to try this immediately," said Ross, and I loved that he was dead serious. Lines like that one are probably the reason it never occurred to me to stop being friends with Ross, Mr. Wizard though he wasn't.

A few minutes later, the doorbell rang again, and it was Steuben. I had told Abra not to invite him, but it was kind of hard to exclude someone who was in all the same clubs and teams as you.

"Hey," said Steuben.

He took in the room in an instant: the Mylar balloons, the eager faces, the enormous bowl of Doritos, and finally Abra himself. And then, as loudly as a steam engine barreling over a prohibition-era gangster, Nicholas Steuben gave Abra a Look.

Because as anybody could see, Steuben hadn't come here to have fun. He had come here for the sole purpose of giving Abra, his devoted friend and disciple, a Look so unpleasant it could melt every icecap in Abraham's big almanac, fell every tree in that forest preserve Abraham and Cadenza used to love, rip every sinew out of Abraham's stupid, innocent, ginormous heart.

'How dare you,' said every centimeter of Steuben's six foot one frame. 'How dare you throw this unironically joyful festival of teenage archetypicality. How dare you even try.'

Pulling on his sleeve, Abra looked back. Then he looked down. And then he looked at me.

And with my own five-foot-eight form, I emoted, "FUCK THAT ASSWIPE, ABRAHAM. YOU ARE BETTER THAN HIM."

Steuben went to go grab a handful of Doritos.

The next guest to the door was – and at first I thought I was hallucinating but there she stood – in a velvet dress – Araby Prescott. "Oh!" she said upon seeing us. "I thought it was formal. I mean my mom said ... and the flyer sounded kind of fancy ... I'm sorry. Hi, anyway. I'm Araby, I don't know if you remembered who I was or if you were just randomly passing out flyers. It sounded really cool so ... should I leave?"

This was unbelievable. How was Araby Prescott standing in Abra's doorway apologizing for coming to his party? What kind of universe was this? My god, she looked amazing. And the best part was, now Abraham would have to believe me. We'd spent half our school career assuming the lovely Araby was too good to talk to us, on what I now saw was no evidence at all.

"Come in!" said Abraham smoothly. "No, I remember you. You used to come to New Year's every year when we were little. Here, let me find a hanger..."

"We used to have kind of famous parties," Olivia explained to me as we migrated downstairs. "I guess since Dad died though no one's felt like it."

Suddenly I understood why the sanctity of this soiree mattered to Abraham.

"Oh my gosh!" cried Araby. "You have so much anime! Like ... that's all seven seasons of 'Duchess Little'! I didn't think that even got released in the states."

"Yeah, it's fan-subbed. Do you want to borrow it?" said Abraham, and even he was surprised now. "I've moved on to the giant purple robots genre."

Araby squealed, "Yes. I do. I was in anime club last year, but then it was the same time as dance team so I had to give it up."

"It's a wrench, trying to choose between the arts," Abraham remarked.

As we went upstairs to find some snacks I let him have it. "So, the most popular girl in school came to your party for no reason. Where is your status quo now?"

"What, Araby?" he asked, all innocent. "She's not a popular girl; she's just nice. She's so nice you couldn't not like her. Now if, say, Cadenza had shown you might have a point."

"Cadenza?" I laughed. "Only if the vote was all male. The girls can't stand her. Araby, on the other hand, is gorgeous."

"Pretty doesn't equal popular though. It's all about being willing to do the dirty deeds. Or in Cadenza's case the dirty faculty. Then people will talk about you."

"So ... she wouldn't be popular if we all got together and refused to talk about her?" A new idea. A revolution of decency. I liked it.

"Well yes. The mathematical definition of celebrity is to be known by people you don't know. And human nature being what it is, Cadenza's exploits are much more interesting for the masses to talk about than Araby being talented and attractive and intelligent. That's how the horrible people get ahead in this twisted system."

"Oh, come on, dude, horrible people? You know that's Jealous Abraham talking, right? You're just pissed because you'd be just as legendary as Cadenza is right now if you hadn't ditched her for the moral high ground."

"So?" said Abraham. "It was worth it. She's popular, but I'm a good person inside. I win."

I made a triumphant face. "Yeah, but we're the ones standing around judging a teenage girl for her rumored sexual habits. That technically makes us much worse people than a girl who likes to give pleasure to lonely old men, even if it were true, which you know damn well it isn't."

He had to think about that for a minute.

I continued, "Face it, there's no person that everyone likes. Either you're weird or scandalous and everyone thinks less of you, or you're boring and no one thinks of you at all, or you're really great and everyone puts you down out of jealousy."

"Yeah," he said, "but even if they hate you they still respect you. They know you have power."

"There's no 'they'!" I nearly shouted. "We are 'they'! It's us! It's people just like us right now, hanging around being nervous about this party, people who claim to be the victims, that keep the whole thing going. We can't stand it when other people are getting more attention than we are. Well-known people don't make us feel like shit, Abraham. We make ourselves feel like shit."

Abraham's face shifted to what could be a brand-new expression.

"Mature people," I said, driving it home, "don't resent people."

"Well damn," he finally said. "Am I ... Am I a bad person?"

"Yup," I said. "But you're a bad person in good company."

You could hardly call a party a success which never contained more than eleven people at one time, but we enjoyed ourselves. They descended in shifts: first Abraham's tabletop friends, then Olivia's tribe, then a couple people no one could remember inviting. One guy in particular was just fascinated by our flyer, in a braindead kind of way. "I'm here for 'Experiments of Society' man. Like it says here. Ready to have my mind destroyed."

I smiled, amazed that my bait had been taken. "You're just in time. Half an hour until the mind destruction."

"How did you get the background all cloudy like that?" he asked me, referring to the flyer's pretty impressive watercolor filter.

I explained about Transistos FlashPact and the many fascinating buttons and menu items you could find if you took Computers II. Or, y'know, messed around for an hour.

"That's really cool," he told me. "I guess I'm just not patient like that. I wish you could just, like, think things and they get made."

"Yeah!" agreed a friend of Steuben's brother. "That's how it's going to be in the future. Computers aren't supposed to just be for smart people. They're for everybody! I read an article in Applied Hardware and they hooked up these monkeys to these wires where they could move the mouse with their brains! You just wait twenty or thirty years. You won't even need your hands!"

The first guy was really into it now. "I need to give you my phone number, man. You have to call me up when that happens! That's be so cool! As soon as they even start making brain-computers you have to call me. Promise."

We learned a lot of things that night that we weren't going to remember in the morning. Jenna even showed up, a couple hours in, wearing a shirt cut lower than the prices at a going-out-of-business sale. It shouldn't have felt so amazing when she took my arm and pranced me around the room, but it did and I let her keep going for a little while. Until she started making cutesy noises over Olivia – then I was the one steering her.

I won Abraham's homemade RPG by killing Johnny Cash with a Pin of Safety, thereby rescuing the cheerleader harem from the Demon of Boredom. Admitting that fair was fair, he agreed to play Capture the Flag with us, and although Steuben and Jenna caught him about every six minutes, forcing us to launch rescue after rescue through the muddy marsh grass in Abraham's massive backyard, it was worth it. I'd never seen him laugh more.

Later on, Jenna pulled me onto the trampoline and took my hands. She seemed different that night than usual. Thinking back, I am almost sure she was hammered, but at fifteen I didn't know what that looked like and just thought she was in a great mood, or in love with me, or something equally silly.

"Bounce!" she commanded, laughing louder than necessary. Not only did I bounce, but a poorly executed double bounce tore our hands apart and we landed in a slippery heap on the dewy mesh.

"I like you like this," I said, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear. "What made you change your mind about coming?"

Jenna smiled vacantly. "I was bored."

"Well, I'm a great cure for that," I said, trying to sound knowing.

"Intelligent company's hard to find," she replied, before hopping off the edge and leaving me flat on my back in the sunset.

What did she want from me? Did she know herself? Maybe it was my job to dictate matters, as the guy or something. Maybe I was supposed to grab her wrist and whisper, 'You're mine, dollface. You're my girl and there's nothing anyone can do about it.' Not that I would have. People took things from me all the time, and now that a live person was involved it could only get harder.

Soon, Olivia came out to find me. "C'mon, Tyler," she said. "We're playing Musical Frescoes."

Olivia really did look pretty that night. Somehow I was sure that she wouldn't have waited for a boy to throw on a corny accent and stake his claim to her. When she wanted to see a person regularly, that person would know it.

Musical Frescoes contained a lot of physical activity as well. I think it's the nerdiest activity that ever involved getting thrown up against the wall. We could only find about five players, though; maybe if Olivia hadn't explained it as 'an artistic mosh pit', it would have gone better. The middle school kids were retiring to the corners to seek edgier entertainments, no doubt. Abraham and Araby were getting really into their debate about drawing styles. And from the corner of my eye I spotted a dark pair of figures, all locked up upon itself.

I knew both of the figures, but I had never expected to see them that close together.

Then Ross pushed me into Madonna And The Cherub and I forgot about my love life for awhile.

Eventually everyone left. Abraham looked exhausted, so I offered to help him clean up.

"We'll deal with it tomorrow," he said.

"Oh," I said. "We're having a sleepover?" I hadn't brought any of my stuff with me.

Abraham shrugged, but he was already pulling two sleeping bags out of the basement closet. "If you want to call it that, I guess."

He wasn't fooling me. Nobody just randomly keeps two sleeping bags in their basement. "I thought your mom wouldn't let you have sleepovers."

Abraham laughed. "That was like five years ago. I'm assuming she's over it by now."

"Over what?"

He shook his head. "Don't even ask."

"Oh?" I said. "What happened?"

"None of your business."

I took off my shoes and settled into a sleeping bag. "You don't have to tell me jack shit, Brah," I said.

"Well good. I won't then."

After a minute or so, I added, "You can if you want to though."

We didn't get to sleep until really late.

# Chapter 15

We woke to a basement full of empty plastic cups and tinsel. (Don't ever store holiday decorations in the same room as a party of teenagers. Human Christmas tree contests will ensue; you've been warned.) I kicked the lump under a Mr. Jenkins' Intergalactic Playhouse sleeping bag of which neither Foellinger would claim ownership. "G'wan," it slurred. "I'm the sloth of ... sloth. This is my rainforest and it's night."

"Brah," I said softly, pulling up the shades. "Come on man. Your mom made us toast so you've got to get up."

"I make the best toast in the house," he asserted. "It's the toast of the ... the town? Or the house. I'm too tired to be asleep, I mean witty."

I rubbed my temples. "Brah, did ... did I have a bad dream or did Jenna hook up with Steuben last night?"

"Think so," he muttered.

"Well that settles it," I said. "I'm not going near those lips again."

"Uh ... good for Steuben?" said Abraham, as though trying to decide where his loyalties now lay.

"No!" I shouted. "Not good for Steuben! Bad for me! Besides, Princess Daisy Rainbow Tutu wasn't enough for him?"

"Bats!" said Abraham, sitting up. "Rain Sparkle! I should ... I should tell her, right?"

I was sort of shaking. "That's seriously what you're worried about right now?"

"Well ... yeah, Tyler, I am. Steuben and Rain Sparkle have been going out for over a year. Jenna was just doing exactly what she told you she was going to do."

"And what's that?" I asked.

"Not being your girlfriend and not pretending to be."

I reflected on this. I knew that, technically speaking, he had me. Making no promises at all was better morals than making and breaking them. Really, I could have ended the whole mess with Jenna in about a dozen words, just asked her to back off and found myself a real girlfriend; it was my own fault for lacking the confidence to stand up for myself. But I still felt upset. I liked Jenna, dammit. She was a beautiful person, I guess you could say. Sure, she could be kind or unkind, interesting or dull, but I just liked watching her do thing sometimes. Even if she was just writing in her notebook, or complaining about her mom, I found myself paying attention, trying to learn every last detail. And I hated that she would never feel that way about me, and that she knew I wanted her to, and that she chose to tease me about it purely to boost her own ego.

"I'm sorry you got hurt and all," Abraham said. "You might have known better though, getting mixed up with a girl like that."

I didn't argue. Abraham always seems to think all girls are perfect angels or ruined women, and there's no use trying to talk him out of it.

"I'm going to go tell Rain Sparkle what happened today," said Abraham, "and you're coming with me."

"Toast first," I insisted. "Awkward conversation with disliked acquaintance second."

Abraham pitched himself back onto the couch and set to snoring.

Mrs. Foellinger was cooler than I expected from Abraham's descriptions. "He'll be up by noon," she said of her son. "Probably."

I didn't say anything because I was munching delicious toast.

"So did you all have a good time last night?"

"I did!" Olivia said.

"I know you did," said Mrs. Foellinger wryly. "My daughter never met a party she didn't like. How about you, Tyler; did you have fun?"

"Yes," I said. "More so than I expected to."

Mrs. Foellinger looked the look of a woman who knew what was what. "That's great! I know how much Abraham was looking forward to this. It was a good idea you had."

It wasn't very often people told me that. I mean, I had ideas all the time, and some of them were good, but I rarely shared them. How could you know which were the good ones before you said them, and how could you recover when you accidentally said the bad ones?All of a sudden I realized it was worth it, sharing ideas. Sometimes they actually happened.

"Now, are you in anime club with Abraham?" Mrs. Foellinger asked me. "I don't think I've met you before."

"No," I said, hoping she wouldn't ask any more questions.

"Well, where did you meet Abraham exactly?" Oh, and she had.

I shrugged. "Elementary school, I guess. Like, fifth grade maybe. I went to Dunmore, too."

She looked at me curiously. "Elementary school? But ..."

I was pretty sure I knew what she wanted to say. Something about her son not having had any friends at all in the period of time I was referencing. Something about the years of worry she went through. I wasn't exactly sure what kind of mom Mrs. Foellinger was, if she liked people as much as my mom, or if she liked books as much as Abraham, if she understood her son or tried to change him, but she seemed normal enough to worry about Abraham's well being.

But then, Mrs. Foellinger's eyes lit up. "Tyler ... You can't mean ... The boy who drove away those bullies?"

I felt a little hot. "I wouldn't say I drove them away, exactly. Distracted, maybe?"

"And the contract?"

I grimaced in agreement. "Yeah. We still have it."

Mrs. Foellinger looked shocked. "Oh! So then ... so then all the other stories ..."

"... really happened," said Olivia bluntly. "Mom and Dad sort of thought you were, well ...imaginary."

"What?" I sputtered.

Mrs. Foellinger tried to give Olivia a stern look, but Olivia continued. "Yeah. They totally thought Abraham had an imaginary friend. Because he'd tell us about all these things you did, but you never came over to play."

I had absolutely no idea what to say to that.

"Oh, no," Mrs. Foellinger clarified hastily. "We knew you were a real person."

"Yeah, after you looked him up in the yearbook!" said Olivia.

Mrs. Foellinger kept speaking. "We just wondered sometimes if Abraham was, well, exaggerating some of the things you two did."

I laughed. "What, did he say we rode around on dragons or something?"

"Never mind that," she said. "We're glad to meet you at last, Tyler."

Back downstairs Abraham was now fully conscious and dressed. I was thankful he had missed that conversation, because I might have sunk through the floor if he'd witnessed it.

"Okay now?" I asked, amused to have found the kid in an undignified state at any time of the day.

He nodded. "Thanks ... for this. I didn't know I wanted it."

"The eraser's on the other pencil then," I said. While he searched for his socks, I flipped on Morton Enigma's first album, which I'd brought along for taunting purposes.

"What's this?" he said.

I was confused. "It's ... Morton Enigma."

"What? Wait a minute ... This sounds totally different. Morton Enigma had that song Mr. Z used to play in homeroom. Romanticism, I think it was called."

I just stared. "No, Abraham. That was definitely not Morton Enigma. It was, like, Maypole or something."

Abraham smacked his head. "My god. You know what? I ... I think I've had them confused with Maypole this whole time."

At this I laughed, loud and long. "So you're telling me we did this for nothing."

He smiled sheepishly. "Not for nothing."

After Abraham grabbed some toast, we really did have to go to Rain Sparkle's house, because apparently I was good for moral support. I was surprised when her dad answered the door looking more or less normal and invited us in. We headed down to the basement to see the girl herself.

"Hi," she said. "How was your party?"

"It was good. I wish you would've come," said Abraham.

Her Looks weren't quite as deadly as Steuben's, but they weren't friendly, either."You had fun playing frat boy?"

"Listen," said Abraham, "We have to tell you something."

Rain Sparkle started holding her elbows and sort of walking in place. "Yeah, well, Steuben already told me."

"And?" Abraham said, surprised.

She just stood there, lips moving silently in place, toes twisting, trying to will my eyes away from her. Finally, she said, "Monogamy isn't the only thing. It's a nice thing, but when something blows away, it's gone, you know? All mature people understand that."

Abraham tried to put a hand on her shoulder, but she pushed him off.

And then she said, "Like you, Abra. You're blowing away. I don't like it, but it happens. I'm glad you were with us for the time you were, though."

"I'm sorry," I found myself saying. I didn't even want to be there, but she really did look terrible.

Rain Sparkle looked up at me. Her entire face started to harden."Don't be sorry for me, sheep," she said. "Be sorry for yourself."

"And why's that?" I asked.

"Because," she said. "Everyone blows away sometimes. At least I know how to land."

I didn't see Abraham again until I got my first flat tire. I didn't need to.

Oh, and I placed third at the art fair. The first two prizes are always unofficially reserved for AP students building portfolios, but the judges said my colored pencil drawing, "The Vampyre", perfectly captured the malice and self-anguish of a young female feeding on the emotions of others.

Jenna had to walk past it in the display case every day for the rest of the year.

# Chapter 16

Sometimes during senior year, I sat with Abraham and Araby and Araby's friend at lunch. Ross and Jackson took geography that year, and some longstanding Tuesday assignment due immediately after lunch contributed to their perennial absence on that day. My decision of fresh company was nothing personal; at the time my self-confidence level was such that I would've had to eat in the library if a convenient alternate group hadn't made itself available.

I wish Araby hadn't been so nerdy. I would have stolen her from Abraham like the snap of a hat. It didn't go much beyond her being cute, I guess; those were pretty much my standards at seventeen. I'd go into a lot more detail here, but I'd end up having to apologize to Araby, Abraham, Rosemary, and essentially every woman everywhere.

As it was, Araby's conversations with Abraham were so convoluted with learning that I hardly caught every third word spoken in their private language. Perhaps I could've skimmed, scanned, and LiveLearned my way through their favorite fandoms, but in this case laziness did what pride and integrity would not. I tuned them out and stared at Araby's chest. Araby's friend, whose name I could never remember, wasn't especially nerdy, but she did creep me out a little.

Once I actually did try to tell Araby about my unified theory of communism ... She didn't actually laugh, but I almost wish she would have and gotten it over with.

"No," I was still saying ten minutes later, "see, there isn't a currency. No money. Obviously there can't be an economy without any money, right? So there's no such thing as a recession!"

Araby looked ready to smack me. "You don't understand, Tyler. There's still an economy even with the barter system. There's still production and markets and stuff ... help me out here Abraham; you've read more Singh than I have."

"It doesn't matter!" I insisted. "Because there's no dollar to be weakened!"

"Tyler, it's not ... I don't think I can have this conversation with you. You don't have the background."

Abraham had my back as he always did, though, and mercifully turned the talk to lighter matters. "It's impossible to say without a bigger sample size. Anyway, did you hear they're changing the skirt rule for next year?"

After school, though, he caught up to me as we were walking down to The Lounge. "I'm sorry about Araby. She wasn't trying to be mean. She just ... hangs out with a lot of people like her."

I shrugged. "Doesn't everyone?"

"But I think what she was trying to tell you was, there are people who've had the same ideas as you already. And they left behind their writings, so the discussion could advance, and --"

"I get it Brah. I'm dumb."

He looked a little shocked, but not nearly enough.

"Why didn't you tell me I was dumb?"

"You're not dumb. I mean ... even if I were somehow the authority on who was dumb. I don't think you're dumb, anyway. There's a difference between being smart and being an academic."

"Same difference," I told him.

"It's not, actually. There is an important difference between native cognitive ability and the amount of material digested."

"Well why didn't you tell me ... whatever you just said. That I'm --"

"That you haven't read all the stuff I've read? You want to know why I don't stop the conversation every five seconds and complain that you'll never be able to understand because we haven't lived the exact same life?"

"Yeah. Or in other words, why you never told me I wasn't an academic, aka dumb."

Abraham looked up at me. "Same reason you never told me I was a loser."

"Anyway," I said."Whatever you call it, it's still a problem. I'd have to read about five billion books if I wanted to be like you and your girlfriend, and have people listen to me and all."

"Not necessarily," he admitted. "Half the stuff I know I got from poking around LiveLearn, just looking at summaries of stuff I found interesting."

"Yeah, but that's still research, isn't it? I'm no good at research. My dad's a damn professor, and I can't even read a few stupid articles before I get bored."

Abraham suddenly took on a very different expression. "Your dad's a professor?"

"Yeah. I'm a huge disappointment to him, too."

He ignored that."The contract says we can borrow things, right?"

"Right."

"Well ... can I borrow your dad?"

I stopped walking.

"It's time I learned how to shave," he clarified.

It was a true statement, on the face of it; I'd wondered at times if Abraham would ever start sprouting hairs below the forehead, and now that he had, they appeared to confuse him. But that wasn't what he was actually after, and we both knew it. A perverse part of me just wanted to hear him say it.

"I can show you myself. It's not rocket science."

He shoved me. "Who says I trust you anywhere near me with a sharp implement?"

I smiled the smile of a man who wasn't fooled, and he sat down. "My dad was awesome," he said. "One time when we were little, he declared the seventeenth of every month Unusual Dinner Night. Because he said seventeen was an unusual number. And I used to ask him stuff, all sorts of stuff. We didn't hang out much, but he'd be around, anyway. And ... you know. Or maybe you don't. But you can imagine."

For neither the first time nor the last, I considered exactly how much it must suck to be Abraham Foellinger. There he was, barely making it as a neurotic preteen, and the only adult who could even sort of relate to his special brand of hereditary madness just had to get sick and slowly die and leave him. Just really get him hooked on all sorts of minority values, from self-righteous environmentalism to cultural hegemony, and then disappear right in the middle of the indoctrination process, like an incomplete bedtime story. How could I shovel any further difficulties onto his back, even in jest?

"All right," I said, "I got you. You can borrow my dad if I can borrow your sister."

That got his attention all right. "What do you want with my sister?"

"Relax. Just female advice."

"I'll bet you just would," said Abraham suspiciously.

"Who else is going to explain to me how to pick them up? You realize we're, like, way too old never to have had girlfriends, right?"

"Eh. Haven't got the time for them myself."

"And Araby Prescott doesn't take up enough of it?"

Abraham shrugged. "Our relationship transcends, um, time-consuming activities."

It wasn't even fun to tease him about his pseudo-girlfriend anymore, it had gotten that sad."It's still fun though!" he insisted. "We like to get together and group-learn for tests. Not just read over the stuff on the sheet, but actually talk about it so we'll remember it. I'd take that over sex any day."

"Well," I said, "how nice for you. But I think Jackson might be able to score me a fake ID soon, so I'll finally be able to get into bars. I just need to know what to do in them."

After a moment, Abraham agreed, "Fair enough."

Something made me say, with a hint of an attitude, "You could do worse than me, you know. For a brother-in-law? You know what to expect from me. Just a thought."

"She's not into guys," said Abraham

Sometimes life was just stupid. When my mom arrived, I asked if she would mind if Abraham came home with us.

"Of course I don't mind!" she enthused. "You know, it's silly for your mother and I not to arrange something since you live so close. Why don't you give me her number and I'll give her a call about it?"

Unfortunately for Mom, her friend crush on Mrs. Foellinger never got off the ground. But Abraham himself was still prime parent real estate. In her world, even a tenuous association between your son and a National Merit scholar is a good thing. She asked Abraham awkward questions all the way home. Thankfully, the drive was short, and we scuttled up to my room as quickly as possible.

"My dad's not going to be home until maybe six thirty," I told Abraham.

"That's cool," he said, for some reason making no attempt to get up.

"Do you want to ..."

"Naw," he said. "I mean ... it'd be weird if it looked like I came over just to talk to him."

I felt curiously uncomfortable in the realization that I didn't know what to do with Abraham for the next ninety minutes. It wasn't like he was a stranger, so I couldn't ask him for vital stats like what grade he was in and what music he liked and What He Did For Fun, even if I had possessed the fluidity to ask questions like that without sounding like a date rapist. But we also couldn't talk about common ground, because there'd always been zero. I'd just never really noticed because every single conversation we'd ever had had been designed around the attainment of some goal. We'd talked fluently of school plays, asexual girlfriends, new world orders, and whether or not Jackson was being a dick on purpose, but we'd simply never talked about nothing.

"So you're ..." I frowned. "So it's been five years now, right?"

He nodded. He was clearly a little too miserable to worry about being awkward right now, given that being awkward takes up half his life anyway. I gave him a questioning look that he didn't answer, and a minute later he sort of went to sleep on my bed, so I just got on with my flash game until six thirty rolled around.

Of course, as my dad walked through the door, I realized the awkwardness was just beginning. We listened from upstairs as he exchanged a few words with my mother, then settled down to read in silence. I certainly wasn't afraid of my father, per se, but this kind of thing was way outside normal territory.

Abraham had awakened at this point and looked just as panicked as me.

"Well," I said heartlessly, "you can go down and talk to him now."

He stared back, looking ready to melt or faint or something. I knew him better than that, and he knew it.

"Hey... be cool, okay, Tyler?"

I snorted. "You're telling me to be cool? What are you then?"

"Not cool. I know that. That's why I need you to be cool, brah, because you know how to do it."

"Hey, I'm not Brah, you are."

"What?" he asked. "I thought it was a pronoun."

I laughed. "It can be, but it's also the middle of your name."

He smiled. "I never noticed that. That's funny. I just thought you were trying to be a surfer dude or something."

"Yes, of course, that's exactly it. C'mon, Abra Cadabra, let's introduce you to my gnarly bro dad."

He shrunk up again.

"After dinner maybe?" I suggested, to which he gratefully agreed.

Twenty minutes later, Mom called us down to dinner. "Hi, Dad," I said enthusiastically.

He looked surprised. "Hello, Tyler."

"This is Abraham," I blurted. "He likes philosophy and stuff too."

"You do?" said my now very pleased dad, who is not always aware of his surroundings.

"Yes," said Abraham. "It's like word science."

"That's nice to hear. It's good to see a young man interested in his mind."

I laughed. "You're not going to find anyone more interested in his mind than this guy."

"Well, Mr. Abraham," said my dad, "I wonder if you can answer this. If a hand claps in the forest, causing an electric rail car to speed toward five morally blameless children, but on the other track Smith allows Jones to drown in a bathtub under heavy coercion from a deterministic worldview, does Rudolph Singh still hate babies?"

Abraham laughed. "Always."

Since that day I have secretly wondered more than once if my dad likes Abraham better than me. I certainly can't sit and discuss foreign literature with the old man. One day I hoped to prove to my father that something besides rocks lived in my skull. But it wasn't to be that particular decade.

In the end Abraham insisted on standing watch on the interview with his sister as some sort of guard of honor, on the condition that he wasn't to actually say anything. It was lucky that I'd already met Olivia a few times, because I definitely would have been afraid to talk to her otherwise. Even as a sophomore, she was intimidating.

"Hey, Liv, you remember Tyler Freimann, right?" Abraham said, knocking unceremoniously on her door the next evening.

"What? Oh, yeah," she said. "Hi."

"He wants to ask you questions about girls."

Assheart. Unwilling to have the shoving match with Abraham my soul burned for in front of Miss Tenth Grade Queen, I shrugged and tried to pretend it was a perfectly normal request.

"So yeah," I said. "How do I, uh, get women to talk to me, in like, a bar?"

Olivia laughed. "Buy them drinks. That's what drinks were invented for. Or wait for your alpha male to buy them drinks."

"My what?"

"Your alpha male. The guy you're with who's doing the leading. Don't you read Dipthong?"

"No. Well ... let's pretend I'm the alpha."

"No offense, but it doesn't seem like you. It's usually the guy who got the fake ID's."

I conceded that point bodily. "Jackson."

She smiled. "Right. This Jackson. He'll probably pick out a group of girls and get them to come talk to you. You just try not to look too nervous and you'll get to talk to the sweet girl."

That didn't sound bad at all. "And what about ... later?"

Olivia wrinkled her nose a little at that. "You're going to Henri's, I assume?"

"Yeah. How'd you --"

"You don't want there to be a later with a girl you met at Henri's."

Henri's was a sacred Aden Prep tradition. I'd heard. "You're too good for Henri's? I thought that kind of thing would be right up your alley."

"Hey, what kind of alley do you think I bowl in? That place is disgusting."

I just looked at her.

"Well what kind of fine establishments do you \--"

"I'm a virgin, Freimann."

Abraham breathed an audible sigh of relief and pride.

"Once it's gone, it's never coming back. Remember that. I mean, there's nothing wrong with sitting in a sticky old booth and laughing with some stupid girls in slutty clothes. That's carefree youth right there. But don't take a girl home you met at Henri's."

I saluted a little cheekily. "Indeed I won't."

# Chapter 17

I took home a girl I met at Henri's. At the time, in my wasted state, she seemed much sweeter than the people I'd come with. Sometimes you can multiply the time you have known a person by the amount of connection between you and still get a sizable product.

Up until Jackson and his older friend sent me up to the bar for a round, my night had mostly consisted of staring at wall-graffiti and feeling miserable. I wished Ross were here, but he'd declined with the excuse that he was trying to ignore women that month, discouraged as he was by a continuous stream of friend-zonings. Watching all the older, more confident packs of pickup artists practice their craft, I almost wished I'd joined him.

I have never been a frivolous drunk. The cheap beer only brought home to me how much I wanted to be away from the place where I was born. But waiting at the bar for my three drinks, I observed a dark-haired young woman who seemed more out of place than myself.

"I'm Tyler," I said, hoping to win her over with my terse admissions.

"I'm Maureen."

"How are you doing tonight, Miss Maureen?"

She frowned. "Sucky. My friends went home. We were only here an hour! That's not worth what I paid for cover!"

"I know," I told her. "I would have done the same thing. I worked hard for that three dollars."

Maureen seemed to give me a bit of her confidence at this point. "So yeah. I've just been watching the karaoke and sulking."

"Come with me," I suggested. "We can sulk together."

Jackson embarrassed me. That may have been the first time I'd ever been embarrassed by Jackson and not the other way around. He asked Maureen about all sorts of inappropriate topics, and all I could do was sit there.

"You shouldn't be wandering around on your lonesome," he would say. "I'm going to punch your boyfriend in the face if I ever meet him. He ought to look after his valuables."

"I don't have a boyfriend," she replied, starting to lean on me a bit from weariness. "You know this. You know that I know that you know this. And I met you like forty minutes ago."

"She has you there," I agreed. "Let's talk about something nicer. Let's talk about daisies."

"Daisies are weird," said Maureen. "Any kind of flower that grows with its middle bit toward you instead of upward is weird."

"Not sunflowers," I said. "Not black-eyed-Susans. Tilted-over flowers are making a comeback."

Maureen nuzzled my shoulder in fellow-feeling. "Let's go to a florist sometime and get one of everything, and then do a poll. You'll see."

Turning to Maureen, I felt a stirring of sweet feelings like I hadn't before. Here was a genuine good girl. If we got to know each other properly, we could sit around being decent to one another indefinitely. We could bind our destinies over cappuccinos, and fill the silent evenings with friendly banter, and, well, take care of one another. Why couldn't we? Maureen looked like she was up for it.

"I'm going to take you home, Maureen," I said suddenly. "You deserve to be looked after."

"Thank you!" she said. "I'm glad you think so."

I can't think of much to say about my six-month relationship with Maureen. I mean, I got her number, and we started dating, and she was my first girlfriend, but there was honestly nothing special about her, except that she was willing to date me. She was a nice girl, but sort of serious for her age. I mean, this one time we were at the community center swimming pool, right, and we'd just stepped out of the changing rooms and set down our stuff on a chair, and I decided I'd pick her up and throw her in the pool. That was the upper limit of my concept of romance right there: involuntary submersion. With high hopes, I grabbed her around the waist, right between the top and bottom of her sexy red bikini.

But honest to god, I couldn't even pull that off right. No upper body strength at all. So what ended up happening was me sort of dragging her by her armpits to the edge of the pool while she demanded to know what was going on. And not even in a cute ooh-put-me-down-you-big-strong-lug kind of way. The annoyance was completely genuine.

"Tyler, what are you -- just -- I can -- wait, I can walk -- hey -- don't -- "splash

Because finally she just jumped in the pool on her own steam and put me out of my misery.

When she bobbed to the surface and looked up at me, I tried to think of something to say.

"Thought I'd make you suffer by drawing it out," was what I came up with.

I think that was the part where she was supposed to grab hold of my legs in turn and pull me in with her, but she just sort of floated there, snickering at me until, with as much gravitas as I could project, I slipped in myself.

Maureen wouldn't even splash me. I think she had some kind of special flirting disability for which she'd never sought treatment. Of course this meant when I splashed her, she just sort of cowered into the corner of the pool and made me feel like a jerk.

"Come on," I finally said. "Let's just go dry off."

"Communal nap?" she suggested.

"Yes," I agreed. "That's the best kind of nap there is."

Because honestly it didn't matter what Maureen said to me as long as she didn't revoke privileges to my new favorite hobby.

I didn't see Maureen that much during the week, because she went to Henley. When I did see her, we mostly cuddled and talked about nothing, which I was fine with, but this lack of deep conversation led to some interesting consequences.

"I got into WCC!" I told her one Friday night in April, excited.

She looked up. "Seriously?"

"Yeah!"

"You're going to White Children College?"

"Uh – don't know what you mean by that."

"It's what people call WCC."

"Why?"

"Because it's a party school, I guess. I didn't make it up."

"Why're you making fun of my school?" I asked her.

She waved a hand. "I ... I just thought you weren't like that. I mean, you don't even like school. Why are you even going to college?"

My temples throbbed. Everyone went to college, didn't they? At least, every kid on Cambridge Lane. "I want to get a good job," I said lamely.

"You want a good job? My uncle could set you up with the electricians' union, have you making six figures in ten years. That's what I'm doing."

As distracted as I was by the thought of petite, feminine Maureen in a skimpy electrician's uniform, blowing on the tip of her welding gun, I could tell there was a problem here. "No, I think I'll just go to college. My parents would probably pitch a fit otherwise."

"Oh, so you're letting your parents decide what to do with your life?"

"No, I'm doing the smart thing."

Maureen's face was redder than a cherry. "Some smart guy! Going to go off to some easy-peasy college and party all the time? Read whatever books some old white guys tell you to read? Yeah, I bet you'll have some great brainwaves there!"

I wasn't prepared for this. "Sorry Maureen," I said. "It's ... that's just what you have to do. It's practical. I need to have a degree."

"Yeah, well, I'm not going to be dating some dumbass frat boy. So have fun with that."

I walked out the door and slammed it, shuffling down the sidewalk into the cool night. I was in a very odd mood now. First relationship or not, I'd never held any delusions about staying with Maureen forever. College and her rather boring personality precluded such. But for her to end it ... to take that satisfaction from me ... I felt annoyed.

But a thought hit me: I was allowed to be annoyed! For once in my life, my feelings were one hundred percent socially acceptable, no weirdness involved. Even very masculine men got annoyed when a woman dumped them. So, I decided to wander over to Ross' house for a nice complaint session. He was much sweeter than Abraham, and I figured he wouldn't judge me.

"I don't know," he said after I'd told him the story, and he'd made all the appropriate clucking noises and 'that's too bad's. "It sounds like she was just sad that you were going away."

"Well, why'd she break up with me early then? She suddenly goes from not wanting me to go away at all to wanting me away immediately?"

He frowned. "Maybe it made sense to her. Like it hurt too much. Or maybe seeing you so excited to go away made her a little mad, because you didn't think about her feelings."

My annoyance deepened. "Well ... great. That's nice. See you Monday, Ross."

I didn't realize for a long time that Ross probably knew how Maureen felt.

All too soon we were assembled on the beach the first week of August, blowing the last of our student council budget on a lavish college sendoff and saying our goodbyes. In fact we'd said them so thoroughly that it almost felt unnecessary to be sitting here still, like hanging out in the ending scene of a video game you've just beaten but haven't yet turned off. I'd shaken Jenna's hand and told her 'no hard feelings', secured a promise from Jackson for fifty yard line seats if he ever started in a game on his shitty D2 team, and gotten strangely choked up when I tried to say anything to Ross at all.

The wind blew warm over the rocks at Fortune Lake. Tim Lindstrom was trying to chin himself on the monkey bars.

How could I have ever feared this young man? How could his whims ever have had a serious effect on my life?

"Hey!" I called to him.

'This is weird,' I didn't say.

Tim didn't say anything because he was counting pullups. But presently he finished up his set and replied.

"Hey," he said.

'I haven't talked to you in six years,' he didn't say.

"What're you up to next year?" I asked. It didn't matter, of course. Nothing mattered now. Time was about to take a bulldozer to the only world we'd ever known.

I think maybe he joined the army or something. Somebody did. At least two people from our class joined the army.

By the swings, Abraham and Steuben had locked themselves in a very solemn conversation with Araby and Araby's friend. Suddenly, having come to some sort of decision, he marched right up to Cadenza Nichol and wrapped her in a huge hug. Mid-hug, he whispered something into her ear that was probably an apology.

She pushed him off, pivoted one hundred eighty degrees, and walked away with all of her friends. And I didn't blame her.

Poor kid. I sympathized but didn't empathize. I felt amazing that afternoon, really immune to life and all its various worries. Moving out of state will do that to you.

"This is going to be a real challenge," said Abraham later on as Lizzie lit the bonfire. "Our alliance still holds in an emergency, of course, but day to day, it'll be tough. Perhaps secondary allies can be acquired."

"Dude," I said, "I am probably telling you this for the last time ever, so listen up: Chill the hell out. We are going to college. College is fun. If life were a second date, college would be the drunken blow job in the back seat of your friend's minivan."

"Yeah?" he said. "Meh. You're probably going to be one of those who peaks in college. My happy hour's not coming for five to ten years."

I could barely hear him, as if we inhabited separate dimensions. "No! It's now! I mean ... college, Brah. It's even fun for nerdy kids! In fact, it's extra fun for them; they get to explore all their obscure nerdy interests and stuff."

He brightened. "Well yeah, obviously, the philosophical debates are going to be great. But starting over from scratch isn't."

"It is though! There's ten times as many people, and you're going to smart kid college so they're all smart! My cousin told me his dorm has a LAN party every Thursday night. You'll forget Steuben and Araby ever existed."

"It won't be the same," he said.

"Well great! I sure hope so! You're always complaining about how this town doesn't even have an art gallery or an orchestra. I literally don't see what the down side could possibly be to leaving it."

Abraham shrugged. "I'll just have to take adequate precautions."

"Abraham, listen to me. We're not twelve anymore. We don't burst into tears every time someone calls us names."

"Really? When was the last time anyone called you names?"

"Uh ... last week, when Jackson called me a cockmongler."

"That doesn't count! You knew he was joking."

I smiled. "Exactly! People don't full-on go at each other anymore when they get to be our age. Other people are nicer, and we're thicker skinned. Therefore all possible sources of conflict are gone."

"I disagree. I think we've just reached a resting state with all the people around us. We think we're over being pussies, because we haven't been tested in awhile. The first time anything stirs us up? Like, say, a new environment? We'll be right back there on the playground, and we won't have any more idea what to do about it than we did then."

I didn't believe him. He'd never even seen Panhandlers.

# Chapter 18

The night before I left for college, I caught my mother wide awake in the front hall, sitting on my dad's old brass-trimmed trunk. I took a seat beside her and gave myself over to her unseemly sentimentality. I was an adult now, and she found that kind of thing exciting.

"Look," she told me, "Your father's going to give you a speech in the morning. He's going to tell you not to do anything stupid."

I nodded.

"Well, you and I both know how silly that is."

"Yeah, I know. He still has to tell me though. It's, like, the rules."

"Well, as your mother, I'm telling you to do stupid things. But do them the smart way."

I grinned, because my mom usually knew what was up, and not every kid was so lucky.

"I could tell you not to explode any homemade meth labs, or have sex in a tunnel, or eat nothing but graham crackers for three weeks, only to be found by your roommate sobbing into a copy of Nietzsche. But we both know you're going to do what you want."

I shuddered. "Why graham crackers?"

"I don't know. I thought they had whole grains in them or something. The point is, you've grown into a very poised young man, and I'm proud of you, and you'll be just fine, even when it seems like you're not."

"I know," I said. Yes, of course I had heard the horror stories, whispered across maternal cookie exchanges. I'd mocked the older siblings of kids I'd grown up with who had flunked out, gotten themselves hooked on some chemical substance with a maliciously scientific sounding name, or simply ignored the existence of such mundane events as class and stayed in their rooms all day playing Combat: Terra. But their lives would never be mine. "Why wouldn't I be?"

She didn't answer. Instead, she glanced over at the clock on the mantle and shook her head. "You'd better get used to these late nights, kid."

I considered the life in front of me: the idealistic collegiate-themed movies I'd left in the DVD player, the laughing kickball games I'd observed on tours of campus, the course schedule packed with academic subjects I'd never known were academic subjects at all. I recalled the peeks at typical dorm rooms I'd gleaned through doors left ajar, always ajar, wired into the hallway like a giant beanstalk of human society.

I started mentally rehashing the e-mails and eyeChats I'd exchanged with my future roommates, going over the plans we'd hatched and the promises we'd pledged. We were going to get a ten-foot python, and name him 'Non-Carnivorous Fish' to get around the rules, and call him 'Carney', and scare the R.A. into doing whatever we wanted. We had an elaborate six-point system worked out to handle just who got the room at what time for which hookup in the case of the three-girl pileups we were sure would occur when we hit the town together.

And with a joy uncharacteristic of my years, my mind reached out to touch the walls of its new chambers and thrilled to feel the wet paint sticking to its fingers.

So anyway, we got to campus around ten AM the next morning. The dorms opened at nine but Mom took the wrong exit and we ended up in the middle of about a billion freshman U-Haul pileup and finally Dad decided we should just park at the bookstore and give our arms a workout with my stuff because there was no way a spot in the dorm parking lot was going to happen.

We were greeted at the front table by a stalwart line of volunteers and R.A.s and I decided my R.A. probably wouldn't mind a ten-foot python. A bunch of boring form-signing ensued and finally he handed me my room key and a big packet o' info and I headed up to the second floor.

A pile of dark blue sheets and blankets covered the bottom bunk of the bunk bed, above a set of plain black duffel bags. One of my roommates was Completely Normal. I didn't see him anywhere, but the next time I reached the room, they had been joined by a big cardboard box. Finally on my third trip,our stuff-hauling paths crossed.

"Hey," I said to him. "I'm Tyler. Are you Zach, or Dexter?"

"Don't call me Dexter," he replied, setting down a plastic bin.

"So ... you're Zach?"

"No, I'm Dexter, but call me Dex," said Dex, with a hint of impatience.

"Oh, right. Anyway, I brought some stuff to decorate. Christmas lights and posters and stuff."

Dex looked at me harder than I would have liked. "But it's not Christmas."

"I know. That's why it's funny. It's like \--"

"Yeah, fine. Just don't put them up until after we loft."

I shrugged and claimed the bed on the other side of the room with my big trunk while my parents smiled awkwardly at the room and at Dex's mom.

"Hi!" said my mother. "I'm Julia Freimann."

"I'm Monica," said Dex's mom, as if it were eleven thirty-nine PM on the longest day in the world.

"You guys must have had a long trip!"

"Yes, we did. Excuse me, but we're only supposed to park in the unload area for an hour."

"Oh, sure!" my mother agreed. "We should get together for a meal tonight. There's so many great little places we saw when we toured here."

Monica (was I old enough to call parents by their first names now?) smiled in agreement and disappeared. As I was about to set off to the car for another load of linens, Dex sort of looked at me like he'd noticed something odd, but I had no idea what it could be, and I quickly left the room before he could put his finger on the thought and set it into words.

By the time we'd emptied the car, Dex had already finished waving his mom off to whence she came and unpacked the essentials. He seemed weirdly comfortable, sprawled out on his bed with his laptop out, like today was just another day to him. I had absolutely no idea what to do after unpacking, as my parents weren't coming to pick me up for dinner until five. It seemed like there should be a million things to take care of, but part of me just wanted to sit down and exist in the space. At moments like this my natural impulse was to text Maureen sarcastic observations about the world, but that wasn't really an option. In the end I just started drawing a squirrel that looked sort of like Oswald.

Dex livened up a little when our other roommate showed up. It would be hard not to.

"You must be Zach," I said. I had reasoned this through process of elimination, of course, but also he just emanated the same aura of Zach-ness which had spilled through all his emails like a bottle of perfume. He appeared in the doorway, the short, hairy avatar of Dionysus, trailing a pair of concerned parents and bearing a yellow plastic swing set slide.

"Yeah," he said. "Are you ... let's see ... Dexter?"

"No, I'm Tyler. This is Dexter, but he's really Dex. And what's that?" I asked, indicating the slide.

"Oh, that's for my loft. I figure getting up in the morning should be fun, you know?"

I looked over at Dex as if to say, "How do you feel about Christmas now?"

Dex, to my surprise and perpetual annoyance, did not mind such antics when they came from Zach. Zach committed.

"So. Dextros," he said when he'd finished moving his things in and sent his parents off to their hotel room. "I hear you're an east man."

"Yeah," he said, laughing like he knew why. "I'm just here for the amber waves of grain."

"Well, plenty of that here. And I see you appreciate the Spade Brothers as well?" he asked, indicating Dex's pile of unhung posters. "Intriguing combo."

"Well, you know," said Dex. "Dougtown's all Spades and grenades."

This wasn't how I'd imagined my first night in college. I had known I was going to meet people from all over, of course, but somehow I'd pictured them all as similar to my high school friends. Like how your character in an RPG wanders across vast distances representing the breadth of the entire known fantasy world, but all the shopkeepers and bartenders are still basically the same person. Childish of me. Traveling is for grown people, who can handle the exotic cultural astonishments with good humor.

I was an infant now. It would take me months to understand their jokes, and I didn't have months. All around me, faster than the speed of light, faster than a freshman finds free pizza, everyone and everyone were making friends. This was going to require a level of effort I hadn't attempted in years. But I also needed to look like I wasn't putting in any effort at all. Clearly, if I were a normal person, it would all just sort of happen -- after all, Dexter had been here six hours and he already had a cool nickname!

Zach was measuring the walls for lofting purposes, flippantly jabbing at Dex with his tools now and then. I was just standing there like the weird other roommate every triple seems to have. And I knew I should say something, or take some action, to prove myself, but my skin was itching, and I just wanted to run away and come back when the magic words made up their mind to float into my mouth.

"There's a floor introduction thing in the basement in half and hour," I informed them. "I'll go save us a spot."

I didn't go save us a spot. I just went outside and sat against the wall for awhile.

# Chapter 19

The next morning we all went to breakfast as a hallway with the R.A. Quietly, I studied the scene around me as Zach told the whole table about snowboarding and concerts and which eighties movies were the best. Some girl with huge glasses kept trying to argue with him, but she was losing.

"Richter did all of his best work before the age of thirty," she was saying.

"Look," said Zach, "I love green comedies as much as anybody, but you just can't compare them to his Condo-era movies. Suspense is the highest form of art."

I was ten years old and playing with mages again.

Dex was also not saying much. I don't know if he was being cautious or just sleepy, but he ate his eggs without raising his eyes from his phone, which kept vibrating. I wondered if he had an Abraham back home, or a Maureen, or even a Ross. It seemed likely. I realized that in a matter of days, we would all be texting each other instead of our friends back home. We'd go home for Thanksgiving break and experience the exact reverse situation from now. I wished it were Thanksgiving break already. This in-between period was getting awkward.

Later that day, we all met The Girl. Not the only girl of course; we'd meet many girls in our time at college. But she was The Girl.

We'd been herded to this stupid freshman orientation event. The theme was some nonsense like 'find the buried treasure', and kids were running around everywhere with these dumb photocopied maps trying to find somebody from a high school with under five hundred students and somebody with a pet whose name started with 'L'. I would have been completely ready to write the whole thing off, but Zach really wanted to win, and to be honest I wanted him to warm up to me. It was going to be a long year if he didn't. We were doing pretty well until we got stuck on the question at the top: Find somebody with a parent that works for the government. For whatever reason, nobody in our group fit the description.

But there was one person whom nobody had approached yet. She was sort of huddled up in the corner with her whole face buried in some big glossy book with armored ladies on the front, and I guess most of us had assumed she wasn't playing, but Zach didn't give up easily. She had on a long skirt and an enormous hoodie that covered up half her face. And she was a huge bitch.

Somehow I just knew this. You may point out that she hadn't done anything to me, hadn't even paid me a bit of notice, but I was not fooled. We had girls like this where I came from, and I didn't like them.

A more generous heart than mine might have assumed she was afraid to come and talk to the group. Such a conjecture was absurd. She was gorgeous. By this I mean she had a nice body and a pretty face (what I could see of it), but also she had all these fancy braids in her hair and a bunch of necklaces and a heavy amount of makeup. I don't normally pay much mind to makeup and such, but this was excessive. I knew lips didn't come in that color. Whatever she looked like when she got up in the morning, she had clearly adorned herself in enough paint and fabric and feminine outer trappings to make damned sure she looked like the front cover of a Bluebird catalog. And now she was sitting in the corner pretending she didn't want us to look at her. I could come to only one conclusion: she was trying to trick us.

I was going to call her out on her reverse psychology, I decided immediately with no thought of consequences or common sense. I was going to let everyone in on her game. Maybe everybody would laugh at me, and yet I still had to try.

Then, my reasonable self kicked in. I couldn't just point at some random girl and shout to the whole room that she was an awful person. I had to make it cool, sarcastic, nonchalant. But before I had thought of what to say, my roommates had already taken the bait.

"Book girl! Are you shy?"

"Hey Dextros, look. She wants to play hide and seek!"

"Do you have a parent that works for the government, book girl? Is your mommy a mailman?"

Like there was something so fascinating about a teenage girl reading trashy fantasy novels in public. You know what happens when teenage boys read trashy fantasy novels in public? Nothing. They're invisible.

"I just really want to finish this," she protested sweetly. "I have to know if Aesoppa makes it out of prison!"

If Aesoppa was the girl on the front of the book, I was going to guess 'Yes'. She looked like one of those Strong Female Characters to me, the kind that isn't allowed to fail at anything.

"He does," said Zach.

"He doesn't," said Dex.

"Aesoppa's a woman," the girl told them scornfully. "And my father's a Marine, so if I initial your boxes, will you go away?"

But they didn't want to go away now. They'd struck buried treasure.

It was hard to say why I didn't want this girl to be part of our group so strongly, but I really didn't, or at least I wanted to let her know I saw through her. Yet, I couldn't let Zach and Dex know this, and anyway I didn't want to be a cockblock. I'd just have to confront her in private. Due to circumstances beyond my control, though, i.e. Zach inviting her down to the basement to tease flirtatiously the rest of the night, our first battle would be postponed some hours.

I felt honestly ashamed of the male gender as I watched my roommates spar.

"Hey," said a visibly drunk Dex to her and her friend Shay, "this guy brought a slide to school. He thinks we're in nursery school or something."

"Really?" said The Girl. "That's awesome! I want to go sliding on it!"

"Yes!" said Zach. "All lady visitors to our cave must slide on my slide."

I was texting Ross and trying not to get mixed up in their display. Ross wouldn't text me back, though, so I texted Jackson, but he also was otherwise occupied. I gave up and played BlockWeasel for awhile.

"Dextros is my guy!" I could hear Zach declaring. "He's an east man. He came here to class us all up."

"I always wanted to go to the east coast," said Shay, although no one heard her.

See, Shay was the kind of girl who just didn't take up space, the kind of girl The Girl was pretending to be earlier that day, only it was her real personality. Shay was nice and sweet and shy, but not in an entertaining way. I was sort of upset on her behalf. I wondered if she'd join me in an alliance against The Girl, or if she'd already become The Girl's friend.

We didn't have classes until Tuesday, so I had no legitimate excuse for heading to bed at eleven o'clock. I didn't make one. I headed upstairs and took advantage of the opportunity to complete my nightly ablutions in privacy – one day I'd find it natural to brush my teeth and strip with apathetic men trying to hold a conversation feet away from me, but my only-child instincts took a couple weeks to break.

I stretched out on my too-clean sheets and tried to reflect. The noise of forty other residents made this difficult – my internal cursor kept floating off to the family troubles of some guy across the hall, and his roommate's conspicuous stutter. So, I stuck in my ear buds and tried to find a playlist to fit this situation. I didn't have one. I made one.

Thus cocooned, thus alert, I floated through pleasant memories for hours, trying to calm myself until the chill fairy waved me off to dreamland.

# Chapter 20

The next morning, I slid into consciousness around eight in the morning. Sure that the famous debauchers Zach and Dex would sleep until early afternoon, I plodded off to the dining hall by myself. Like a dork.

Our dining hall was gorgeous. I loaded my tray with about seven different breakfast foods and sat down. The place was nearly deserted, so I must have been pretty unlucky, because The Girl walked in about ten minutes later.

Hell had granted me my chance to air my grievances.

I was not feeling very social that morning. I was tired out from the litany of names, majors, hometowns, and interesting facts, from empty promises to see people around campus. It was early morning, my verbal filter hadn't kicked on yet, and my defenses were very low, which may explain what happened next.

"Hey, you're Tyler, right? Can I sit here?" she asked. Before I had said one way or the other, she sat down.

I was supposed to say yes. I was supposed to say yes gratefully. My insides resented this girl for reasons I couldn't put my finger on, but she was almost certainly part of the group now. And she was definitely somebody's future girlfriend. One could imagine her singing a gentle lullaby surrounded by woodland creatures, or starring in some teen romantic comedy with David Lee Colt, or teaching a bunch of Inuit children to speak English in an igloo somewhere. That's the kind of face she had. If Zach didn't get her then Dex would.

"What are you doing up this early?" I asked, almost hostile. "You guys must have been drinking until dawn."

"I don't know. It's weird," she said. "I can never sleep past seven. I just have to get up and get on with the morning, and then nap later."

Seven. Jesus. She looked it though; she looked like she'd put on all her makeup and done her hair and everything, all for an impromptu breakfast date with me, who was about to ruin her appetite.

"So I know what you're doing," I told her. "I've seen it before. You pretend you don't care if guys pay attention to you, and the more you pretend, the more attention they pay you. Only they pretend they're not paying attention either. Well, you should know one thing: I'm not like that. When I don't pay attention to you, it's not going to be because I'm playing some elaborate game of seduction. It's going to be because you're a huge tool."

The Girl laughed, but in a way I found gratifyingly uncomfortable. "What?"

"You heard me."

She paused for so long I knew she literally had no idea what to say. "Where do you get this all?"

"The book thing? Oooh, I'm Book Girl, and I'm too cool to notice anyone unless they beg for it!"

To her credit, she certainly didn't cave. No, she just spun the situation as if her mental superiority to a bunch of strangers at a cross-dorm icebreaker game had been unworthy of questioning.

"I just do what makes me happy. Why do you have to hate on me for it?"

"But Zach and Dextros made you happy."

"I didn't know they would. At the time, the book was making me happy, so I kept on with it. But I feel like ... I dunno, like I would have met them anyway. I've been kind of into predestination lately, how it's really arrogant of us to try to control our own fates when if we just let fate take its course, the thing that's going to make us happy will come to us."

Dear god.

"Well, I think it's really arrogant to read chick lit in the corner when people are trying to be friendly to you."

"I just needed a minute by myself, okay?" she said. "I've been surrounded by people since I got here! Don't you ever just want to be alone?"

I stood up. "Yeah. I do."

I returned my tray. I hadn't even tried the mini-waffles yet, but a man has limits. With the help of my trusty campus map, I located the campus bookstore.

It was still only about 9:30, so I'd beaten the main rush, but a line of eager beavers was already waiting for pre-reserved books. Among them I spotted Shay, and she smiled at me. "Did you reserve books?" she asked.

"No," I said. "I like the adventure." I didn't know you could reserve books, damnit. Where did people find this stuff out?

I was still looking for the freshman philosophy book when Shay, balancing her own stack, decided to come help me out. "That one's a course packet," she pointed out. "You have to get it from the copy shop."

"Where's that?"

Shay shrugged. "Maybe we can hunt it down after we drop off our main load."

I agreed, glad to have made such a reasonable friend.

An hour later I realized I was really dumb for not realizing The Girl was Shay's roommate, and would probably be invited along.

"Come to the copy shop!" said Shay. "It will be a fun adventure!"

The Girl said, "Is your friend here okay with that?"

And then I realized: This was ridiculous. I had formed an embarrassingly vocal grudge against a perfectly normal human being, a human being whom everyone I knew here liked, and whom I would have to see almost daily, for no real reason. Perhaps I ought to set the reset button while I still had the chance. Not to say I suddenly liked her, but definitely public civility had to be established.

"Yeah," I said, as if to imply I'd been drunk or high or something this morning. "Sure. The more the merrier."

She didn't seem too mad at me though, the way some girls get, like they're just going to huff around until you apologize. Maureen always did that to me. But The Girl seemed a little amused, and otherwise treated me normally. Maybe she, too, saw the benefits of having at least one guy friend that didn't want to sleep with her.

"I don't even believe this," she kept saying. "We have a thousand page printer quota, and we're still paying fifteen dollars for someone to print out a course packet for us."

"And staple it," I pointed out. "That staple is worth at least $14.95. Look how silver it is!"

"I think we're supposed to save our printer quota for all the really big papers we're going to have," Shay said.

"Yeah," I said. "A hundred ten page papers before Christmas. Better start writing."

Unfortunately, The Girl represented only the tip of the douchebag iceberg.

# Chapter 21

The first day of classes, I witnessed the formation of the Psychic Mafia. In the middle of a long fifty minutes of syllabus-proclaiming and assurances that we weren't going to get away with any of the slacker shenanigans of our secondary careers, I turned to the nearest person and whispered, "Want to play tic tac toe?"

It was the wrong thing to say. He didn't even answer; he barely looked at me.

And when the professor finally paused in his lecture and deigned to engage us, my neighbor was ready.

"Now, who can tell me when the science of psychology was invented?" asked Professor Doyle.

The kid raised his hand. "The formal field of psychology was popularized by Sigmund Freud," he said. "But psychology has existed forever. Every mother who tells her child that angels watch the sleep of the innocent is a psychologist. The general that ordered his men to bake the opposing army's symbol into a bun and eat it the night before battle, is a psychologist. The writer, the demon hunter, the conquering king ... all intuitive psychologists since the dawn of time."

Professor Doyle grinned. "Good answer."

After class, half the hall swarmed that guy.

"I'm Lainey Carroll," said a girl. "Do you want to form a study group?"

The guy, whose name was Alan Synecki, waved this question away. "I don't study," he said. "But I'd love to get together for an informal intellectual discussion sometime."

I smiled a little, thinking of another genius I knew who was hopefully receiving the same kind of hero's welcome downstate. "It's so cool that we can, like, say that kind of thing now, and not just be called a smartass. We should have a psych party."

Alan looked at me. "Uh, yeah, only if we don't have to play tic tac toe."

Everyone laughed and it was horrible. I was suddenly reminded of Maureen's words to me before I had left. It was true. I didn't even like school. So why was I so upset about this?

But it didn't matter for long, because soon enough, my first Friday night as a college student came along, and it was everything I expected.

Dex wanted to go to this nightclub called Flash Mob, which supposedly didn't card too hard. And as we walked in, I saw the exact thing I had been waiting for this whole time. This place was no Henri's. We drank, and we sort of stepped back and forth while The Girl danced, and Zach and Dex and I drank some more. We talked to strangers, too, lots of them. Dex actually picked up a sophomore, who joined us for the rest of the night. I found it odd that Zach wasn't stepping up his game, too, but then I realized he didn't want to look like a man whore in front of a certain Girl. I can't remember anything else that may or may not have happened in that devil's playground, but I know I was jazzed for it.

After the rigors of Flash Mob, we stopped at a diner for some celebratory waffles.

"I call booth side!" I announced as we entered. Everyone else shrugged and allowed me the seat. I guess maybe that's only a thing in Aden County.

Shay grinned and scooted next to me in the booth. "I like booths, too."

"Oh, yeah? Well, do you like strawberry blueberry waffles?"

"I like triple berry! That's one more berry!"

"Naw," I said. "Raspberries do not deserve to come to this party. Two's company, but three's a crowd."

She pouted a little. "Everyone knows the third berry in triple berry is blackberry."

"Not out here," the Girl pointed out. "In fact, at home we have this place called Rippity Dippity, and they've got a Six Berry Pancake with boysenberries, and lingonberries, and one time my friend Charles asked for, like, every fruit they had, and we ended up with this massive array of, you know, apricots and bananas and apples, only there was only, like, two of each fruit, and he demanded that they come back with a full share of each topping, and in the end he had to pay, like, nineteen dollars for one order of pancakes."

Jesus. Now she'd done it. I have no idea why, but girls like her were always bringing up cool stuff other guys had done with her. It was like, 'Oooh, look at me! I have been constantly pursued by men since I was a child!'

Of course Zach took the bait. Slamming his hands down, he announced, "We need to do this but with waffles."

"What if we each get a different waffle, and we cut them up like pies and make, you know, a rainbow waffle with six different wedges?" Shay suggested. "We could all get different color toppings and take a picture. It would be really pretty!"

"Nope," Zach said. "I need to not be able to see this waffle under all the toppings."

When the waiter approached, he was ready. "Have you picked your poison yet?" asked the waiter in that very personable, I-am-going-the-extra-mile-to-be-a-fun-and-cool-waiter-so-please-tip-me-hard voice.

Zach grinned. "We'd like a waffle."

"Just one?" he asked curiously.

And Zach began to chuckle softly. "One will be sufficient."

The waiter shrugged. "Uh, okay. Just butter and syrup on that?"

By this time the tension had mounted slightly. "Oh, no," said our spokesman. "We want all of the toppings."

That was it. We weren't regular old customers anymore. We were special. We were That Table Over There. We were the story Super Cool Waiter Bro was going to tell his girlfriend tomorrow morning as she pulled her own ordinary square waffle out of the iron.

But for just now, our game server was chuckling right back at us. "All of them? Well ... there's a lot of them."

The laughter had spread to the whole table. "Yes. The whole list."

S.C.W.B. was in his element now. "Wow, uh, well we don't really have an official list of toppings. I mean, the menu says strawberries, blueberries, or apples, there's a pecan waffle, you can get all of them with whipped topping or a la mode, and then there's the chocolate chip waffle, which, I guess chocolate chips aren't a topping because they're in the waffle ... "

"Right, well, I guess we'll have a chocolate chip waffle with all of the toppings," Zach clarified, as if this was a completely normal request. "No skimping either. And be quick about it, my good sir."

"Just so you know," S.C.W.B warned, "there's a two dollar charge for each extra topping."

"That's fine. We're high rollers."

Twenty minutes later, S.C.W. B. returned with our waffle. And I guess somewhere back in the kitchen, a Super Cool Chef Bro was smiling, because it was glorious.

The white china plate had been dusted artistically with powdered sugar and looped about with strawberry syrup. In the exact center, a fine golden-brown Belgian waffle, cheekily dotted with chocolate chips, sank under the weight of a carefully packed parfait of fruit and whipped cream. Above it, alternating cherries, pecans, and scoops of ice cream ringed a special chocolate syrup message just for us that read, "Everything Waffle".

Everyone pulled out their cell phone at once.

After the glare of an obligatory round of pictures had nearly melted the thing, we set it down in the middle of the table and awkwardly dug in.

"This is pretty good," I said.

"Good? It's a mess!" said Shay. "What's wrong with the classics, anyway?"

But Zach's eyes were shining. "I'm more of a rock and roll kind of guy. Say," he asked casually, "how does this compare to the Rippity Dippity version?"

The girl smiled. "I like your style."

And having, as a group, enthusiastically consumed a thirty-two dollar waffle, buried somewhere in a perfect sugar palace, thus besting the legend of some platonic friend of The Girl's that we would probably never meet, we paid in singles and left.

S.C.W.B. got maybe a three dollar tip.

On the way out of the diner, we saw one of those dispenser machines with Mr. Jenkins temporary tattoos, and of course Zach stopped and started pushing in quarters until he got every single one from the picture. As any idiot knows, some of them are rarer than others for commercial reasons, so by the time he'd collected Mr. Jenkins' smiling, bearded face, he had at least six of Nifty Knuckles.

"Can we go now?" asked everyone, because the six of us were still crowded into the tiny entrance area of the diner.

He bowed a little. "Yes. We may now return home victorious."

In the middle of the stairwell, we all took a pause at the first landing while Zach tried to sell us on the temporary tattoos. "Come onnnnnnn!" he pleaded with Dex. "You know you want Mrs. Niff Knuckles on your, well, actual knuckles. Don't you want the world to know what you can do with balloon animals?"

Dex, who was clearly trying to escape from the group with his lady friend for lady friend activities, pushed Zach off, his arm around Sophomore Girl. "I will cut you, Z. I really will."

"Well, Miss," he said, totally ignoring Shay, "it looks like you're my only hope. Grumpy Boy Green?"

The Girl smiled and accepted.

I was getting a little tired. I wished everybody would go upstairs, but we'd acquired that special level of People Inertia reserved for dumb college freshmen, and no one seemed to want to call it a night. So, as the conversation sparkled around me, I started doodling idly on a sign-up sheet for One-Act Plays, coloring in the triangles in the A's and the middles of the O's.

"Hey," said The Girl, suddenly turning away from her conversation, "that's Lainey Carroll's sign. Stop it!"

"Oh my god!" I said. "Is that girl everywhere?"

"She's really sweet! She brought crumpets for Alan's big Psychic Mafia tea party. Which I noticed you weren't at."

Alan Synecki had become a department legend before we'd even completed our first week at WCC. Alan's homework was so perfect, the TA used it as a rubric. They said he landed an internship out east before the fall career fair was even over. And nobody even hated him like they were supposed to. I didn't hate him either. I just wished sometimes that life came in weight classes, in strings, in A teams and B teams, because we schmucks of the world needed a place, too.

"Uh, did you consider that maybe not everyone was invited?" I said

She looked crushed. "Oh!" she said, as if she really cared a lot. And honestly, knowing her as I do now, I can believe that she did. Because The Girl's special power, if you could isolate it down to just one, was giving the distinct appearance of liking every single person so hard and so genuinely that you couldn't help but want to give her a huge hug.

I felt this even more strongly while ducking behind my loft every other night to watch from a safe distance as my roommates sparred for The Girl's attention.

"How can you not know ballet?" Zach would ask her as she laughed. "You're so tiny and twirly. You'd be so cute at it. I could make a snow globe of you."

And she would smile and shake her head. "Ballet is the lamest dance. There's no heat to it. Ballets are all so stylized and big, no subtlety to the characters."

"Yeah," Dex would agree. "Nobody likes you, French people!"

"No, no, the French are great! I just don't like their favorite dance."

"Oh, sure, no," Dex would say. "They're great for, like, food and art and shit. Just the dancing is stupid."

And then Zach would swoop back in. "Name one French food that doesn't suck."

And nobody could think of one. I'm not sure why. Brie is goddamned delicious, but I didn't feel like saying so.

A gentleman doesn't take bets, but the probability that she was playing them both for attention just kept growing. They were the only ones who couldn't see it. Not that they ever asked me; I barely existed even when it was just the three of us.

But for whatever reason, she didn't seem to shy away from me. Geographical proximity and a shared major brought us together from time to time; she never could remember her handouts, or the address of the website where every single damn handout was posted, or it's possible she just enjoyed pestering me.

"Go ask your Psychic Mafia to study with you," I told her once.

She suddenly got a very smug, smiling expression on her face. "They don't study; they just argue about obscure pop psychology articles and drink. And anyway, I don't go to their meetings anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because. I would rather not associate with people who are exclusive."

I laughed suddenly, more amused than anything that she had taken my side. It wasn't especially flattering, of course, being taken as the underdog, and it didn't mean anything personal, because she would've done the same for anybody. But it gave me a little bit of hope somehow, that this place I'd come to might possess the same share of loyalty and human goodness as the birthplace I'd taken for granted.

"Well, thanks," I finally said.

"Thank me with your printer," she requested. "The paper's due in four hours and I really do need that handout."

I think she just thought that because I was friends with her friends, that we were all some kind of big friend family and she could ask for shit without it being awkward. That's what happens when a girl has too much self-confidence – she literally won't accept somebody not being friendly with her. You take a girl like Shay, and if anybody looks cross-eyed at her, she'll never try to talk to them again. Of course, Shay presented her own problems.

"Come on," I said to her one night, "You have to face your fears! Billiards chick isn't even going to remember you."

"She was there that day in the class where I fainted though! It was mortifying! Please, can't you just rent the cues?"

"No, you have to give them one student ID per cue. We can, I dunno, put a bag over your head."

"That's a great idea!"

"What?"

"Not an actual bag, but we could, like, disguise me so she didn't remember."

"Aw, Jesus, Shay! Maybe we should just play Thumbles instead."

She smiled. "Yeah, that's definitely the safest option."

I really liked just relaxing with Shay around the dorms sometimes. Friday nights, I usually went out with Zach and Dex, but after the novelty wore off, it wasn't really fun. I just wasn't any good at it. Zach was crazy, always dancing on the highest possible spot like some kind of party lightning rod, leaving Dex and me to watch from the bar and laugh. It should have been extremely fun, except it wasn't.

I can't actually enjoy being drunk. Every time I drink, I start thinking about how much I don't matter and how little I can do.

But I couldn't just not go out with them. I mean ... of course I could've; I realize that now. They wouldn't even have minded if I had stopped going out with them. It was just that such a simple solution never occurred to me at the time. I'd somehow lucked into a default friendship with two guys who were really cool, guys that created stories every time they went out, and I loved that part, even if actually being there for the stories kind of sucked, and I never seemed to be the main character, and the moral of all of the stories seemed to be: we are silly and we love it when people notice.

# Chapter 22

Everything continued as normal until around Christmas of our freshman year. Shay and Dex were both in our university's orchestra that year, and like good roommates we'd come out all the way to the other end of campus to support their long and inoffensive stream of notes.

"They have to play it though. Dextros told me for sure they would. You cannot have a Christmas concert without Frosty the Snowman!" Zach assured The Girl.

"Nope," she said, flipping through the program. "I see ... Handel's Messiah, and Here We Go A-Wassailing. No Frosty the Snowman."

Zach shook his head. "What a lame band. When I was in high school band, we played it every year."

"It's not that kind of band," she told him, laughing. "WCC Orchestra wins, like, awards at competitions and stuff."

"Yeah, well ... clearly they don't win the 'Best Performance of Frosty the Snowman' award."

And indeed, the concert contained no surprise fun times, only really, really old masterpieces of surprising monotony that killed the Christmas mood forever.

The classical music had a curious effect on me. I didn't like it especially at first, but it sent me into this weird thought coma. I thought how serious and happy Shay and Dex looked up there, and how much I wanted to be part of something important like that. I thought how great it was for a group of people with their own distinct thoughts and concerns to get together and plan something so precisely that the harmony could drive me into this soothing stupor in the first place. Yet, what a waste it was that I didn't appreciate it, simply because I lacked the background they all shared.

While I thought these innocent thoughts, Zach and The Girl were whispering quietly about something that seemed to amuse them both.

After the show, we took our places near the backstage exit to wait for our friends. We had only been there a few minutes before we heard a jaunty trombone making its way toward us. It was indeed Frosty the Snowman!

Dex grinned at Zach. "I told you I'd play it. I didn't say it was going to be during the concert."

"That is my absolute favorite Christmas song!" The Girl declared. "Thank you, sir!"

"Me too!" said Zach, with a smile that looked a little frozen itself. "We must dance!" And with a huge amount of pomp and circumstance, he took The Girl's hand and sort of awkwardly stepped left and right for a few steps. The Girl, who clearly knew lots of more advanced dance moves, played along.

Later that night, though, when Zach and Dex had retired to our room, the claws came out.

"Great move back there!" Zach said. "Guess it's true what they say about musicians."

"I can't even believe I'm having this conversation," Dex replied. "I told you I'm not going to try any movie crap, and I meant it. But that doesn't mean I'm just going to never do nice things that people like."

"Oh yeah? Would you have played Tyler his absolute favorite Christmas song?"

"Sure," he said. "Tyler, what is your absolute favorite Christmas song?"

I shrugged from the top bunk. "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear."

Dextros played me my absolute favorite Christmas song. And I must admit, it kind of made me feel special, even if he was only trying to prove a point. I wondered what else my friends might do for me if I simply asked.

Zach frowned as he pulled the sheets up over him. "This bullshit ends tomorrow," he said. "We've had enough stupid games."

So help me god, the next day he made this big long Christmas playlist and found a friggin' poinsettia and went to her door and turned on his iPod and knocked. And when she answered, he said, "Would you like to go on a date with me this Friday?"

It is important for you to realize that this didn't sound weird at all to Zach. He was very dramatic sometimes.

The Girl giggled. "Uh ... no thank you, Zach."

Zach hadn't been expecting this. "Saturday then?"

"Well ... no. I don't want to go on any dates with you. I just want to be friends."

And that was the end of peace in section 2 Southwest.

At six, when we usually went to dinner, Zach said he didn't feel like going.

"Really, dude?" said Dex. "You're going to sit here and cry about this?"

"Come on," I said. "We can't go to dinner with the girls, not tonight. That's just too weird."

Dex stood up. "Well, I'm going to eat with my friends. You all can do what you want."

Zach and I waited a few minutes, then went to West Dining Hall. It was kind of weird, hanging out with just Zach. He kept trying to banter with me, but it didn't feel right.

"You and I are Serious Gentlemen," he kept saying. "Serious gentlemen don't pussyfoot. We put it all on the line, and if a lady says no, well, she says no."

"I dunno about that," I responded. "You're definitely a Serious Gentleman. I'd just as soon ride the Slow Boat to Friendzone indefinitely."

"No way. Do you realize I could've put up with literally years of her crap if I hadn't put an end to it today? And she still would've said no. What good would that have done anyone?"

I nodded. "That is one good thing. No more of Princess Posy's crap."

"Of course Dex probably thinks he's got a clear shot now, so he's going to have to sit through the years of crap anyway. Poor dude."

I shrugged. "Well we can't all be you, man."

I couldn't really make up my mind which of them was being dumber, her for playing him or him for getting played. I just hoped this would blow over and we could start hanging out with girls that actually had an interest in us. I still liked to hang around with Shay, but we needed some fresh prospects.

When we got back from dinner, Shay waylaid me in the hallway. "Dexter's in our room watching a movie," she whispered. "You'd better keep Zach in your room for now."

"Yeah, whatever, Shay" I said. "We're all adults; I think we can work things out."

"Well I just ... I don't know where I should go! Should I try to stop her and Dex from being alone? Or would that show my support for them?"

"I dunno. I have to go finish a turkeyload of German, so I'm going to the basement where there's no whiny roommates."

"I'll come with you," she said quickly.

But nothing could have prepared me for the conversation I had with The Girl on Monday after sociology.

"Tyler," she said as we left class. "Can you come get some lunch with me?"

"Uh, I guess," I said. I didn't have lunch at the same time as anybody else, so I usually ate with these four guys from Studio Design, whom I didn't think would miss me. Normally I would have been scrambling for a valid excuse to say no, but I kind of wanted to stew in her anguish today.

"Great," she said, and we headed to East.

"Meet me in right right down," she said when we got there. "I'm going for stir fry."

Stir fry at 12:30 on a weekday usually took at least fifteen minutes to get through the line. It was typical of her to go for it anyway. I grabbed some biscuits and gravy and was nearly done when she sat down next to me.

"So ..." she said. "Uh ... I don't really get what's been happening."

"What's not to get? You led Zach on for four months, he finally asked you out, you said no, he thinks you're a bitch."

She scrunched up her face at this. "Oh, wow. I mean, I knew you'd be blunt, but ... It's just not very fair, is it? Why does it have to be girlfriend or nothing?"

"It's totally fair. He wanted to date you, but you didn't want that; you wanted to be his best buddy for ever and ever, and he didn't want that."

"But I don't understand! We were all friends, and ... I mean it's not like I promised to date one of you after a certain period of time. I'm not a trophy you know."

"Yeah?" I said. "Well then you shouldn't have kissed up to him like you did."

"I wasn't!" she wailed. "I told you, we were all friends! I treated him the same way I treat the girls – nice!"

"Whoa, whoa, you're flirting with girls now?"

And she gritted her teeth like a willow in a hailstorm. "This is so stupid. This always happens. Guys always assume shit, but you guys were all so chill I thought you wouldn't do it but you're just like all the guys in high school."

I smacked my head. "Yes. Because you teased all the guys in high school. Stop smiling your cute little smile at dudes and you wouldn't have to deal with this kind of mess. But of course you won't, because, well, you live for attention."

"I'm not letting a few people's sexism stop me from having good friendships," she insisted. "I'm not going to let it change me. I am a nice person, and it just doesn't mean I'm going to have sex with you just because we can laugh at a joke together."

"Keep telling yourself that," I advised her as I got up to leave. "Maybe the world will stop being how it is."

But as I turned away, she suddenly said, "What about you and Shay?"

I whipped around. "Shay?"

"Yes, Shay. Your friend. Who's a girl. But somehow that's okay with you, asshole."

I looked at her, honestly surprised. But of course she was just grasping at straws, I realized. "I have no problem with men and women being friends. I'm not trying to tell you that your having a vagina was what led Zach on. It was you leading him on that led him on."

"Well, what the hell is it?" she demanded. "I'm supposed to not smile, or not banter, or wear a bag on my head or something? What would make it clear to you idiots that I'm not trying to fuck you all?"

I sat back down. It was just possible she didn't understand. "Look, it's your whole ... thing. You treat every day like it's some great game, and you dress up all pretty and yeah, you smile, but it's not like when Shay smiles because she saw something cool. You're a very personal smiler. Your smile's like, it walks up to guys and thanks them personally for being born. And you laugh at things like, 'look at me, I'm all sparkly!' and I mean, if you want to just be innocent friends with a guy, you have to stop ... you can't ... "

"Enjoy life?" she said. "Well, great. You're making that extremely easy."

I sure hoped Shay didn't have a secret crush on me or some bullshit. I was pretty sure she didn't, but it was hard to shake the idea. I mean, maybe The Girl genuinely thought Zach didn't have a huge crush on her before the incident.

I realized I needed to do the one thing none of my babymouth friends had thought to do in the first place.

"Shay, we're just friends, right?" I said as I walked into her room.

She looked up from her magazine. "Yes, I'd assumed so."

"You're not secretly pining for me or anything?"

"No. I mean, you're not ... Tyler, you're a very nice boy, but I'm --"

"No, no, no, I'm not into you either. It was just something ...she said."

Shay relaxed. "Oh, right. Well, she teases me sometimes, but only because of, you know, the circumstances."

Because we were geeks and couldn't get anyone else, she meant.

"Oh, well that's dumb."

"I know!" Shay said. "It's like, when Zach wants to date her, she agrees with me that men and women can be friends, but with you and me she's all, 'oh, I just have a sixth sense about these things'. It's so silly!"

"Everyone should just not assume shit," I agreed.

"Obviously. And not expect things. You know, when I want to date a boy, he's going to know it."

I smiled. I really hoped Shay found a nice guy her own speed someday.

No real resolution came out of this event. In a few days, I started eating with the girls again, and Zach eventually rejoined us as if nothing had happened. But our group was marked for a long time by the incident.

# Chapter 23

A week later, I arrived home for Christmas break with two bags, no presents, and low spirits.

"Welcome home!" my mother greeted me at the door, pulling me into a hug before I could even set my luggage down. "How was the drive in?"

"Not too bad," I told her.

"What did it take you, about two hours?" She had to know every little detail of everything, my mom.

"Yeah," I said. (It had taken me over three hours. I'd gotten lost again. Why couldn't I ever remember how to get home?)

"So how's life? How were finals?"

Did she really expect a straight answer to any of these?

Finally she gave up. "Let me show you our new reindeer," she offered, guiding me to the window.

"Cool."

I wanted to see Abraham, to be honest. I missed him. We had never spent oodles of time together or anything, but he'd always been around. He hadn't taken effort to reach if I wanted a quick talk; half the time I had just run into him. Away at school, I actually had to bother to text or IM him. And it wasn't like with my friends where I could just text them random silly thoughts. I had to think about what I wanted to say first, which meant half the time I decided it wasn't worth it. Even when I did, I discovered he wasn't great with written words. The last time I'd texted him had been late on a week night, and the conversation had gone something like this:

Me: So I'm in the corner of another endless party trying to exist.

Brah: It's after midnight. Go home and sleep.

Me: Yeah, but I can't exist when I'm asleep. You go to bed if it's so late.

Brah: No, you can sleep and exist in dreams. I'm in the computer lab, so I can't.

Me: I want to be here. I just want it to be better.

Brah: Sorry, can't help you there.

He had a different fall break than me, I think, and he'd spent Thanksgiving at his aunt's out of state. Now, finally, we were both home at the same time and could see each other in person. And I couldn't think of an excuse to. I didn't have one big problem, just a thousand small ones. The little I'd heard from him suggested he was doing awesome, too, so a pity visit was out. I decided to wait until he initiated, except he never did.

But Ross did."Want to go down to Donny's?" he texted. I agreed.

Jackson, Maureen, and Jenna were waiting for us,taking up the entire booth side of a booth table. Normally Donny's rates about a six on the tradition-o-meter, but having to sit table side brought it down to maybe a 4.1.

"Tyler!" cried Maureen by way of greeting. "Why aren't you ever on eyeChat?"

I said, "Well you see, my dear, I am not an enormous douche. Thus I try to steer clear of the douchier chat clients on the market in favor of classier virtual establishments. Like StrangeWords and Screen of Fortune."

She poked at me with a fork.

Jackson laughed and backed me up. "We're men of the world," he explained. "We live where we are, and we forget where we're not. And we don't feel guilty about either."

"Aha," said Jenna. "As in, it doesn't count as cheating if you're in a different zip code."

Jackson fixed her with a good-natured wink. "I won't deny it. Not among friends."

"Seriously though," I said. "Do any good conversations ever happen on eyeContact? It's maybe half a step above having a conversation in a loud nightclub. Every time I go on I see all these people I barely know, and they're either agreeing the hell out of each other or having the most pointless, heated, drawn-out --- I mean my cousin and his friend spend like three days having some kind of blood feud over the Erin Kuzma case. Must've been fifty posts long. What the hell does any of it matter? Why get all upset?"

Maureen smiled a bit. "Yeah, but ... what're you going to do? You think 'oh, I'm not going to get involved in this. Both of these people having this eyeChat are completely ignorant and I don't have have all day to spend setting them straight and I bet they'd still insist they're right even if I made the best argument in the world.' And then you join in anyway. And it does take all day. And you do get very, very angry, and in the end nothing gets settled, ever. But I mean ... we're people, and that's what we do."

Ross took a long look as he agreed with her. "It's just nature."

On the way back to Ross', I must admit I grilled him a little.

"What the hell was that?"

"What?"

"Her. You know."

"Which her?"

"Maureen. Jeez, I couldn't give a rat's heart about Jenna. It was her idea, breaking up!"

"Who, Jenna?"

"No, Maureen. I just said I couldn't give a rat's heart about Jenna. But Miss 'oh, we should keep in touch', I mean ... she thought she was too good for me! She basically told me that! And I'm supposed to chat with her when she's bored now? What the hell man. Bitches and whores."

Ross tried to steady me. "I think you know deep down that Maureen had your best interests at heart. That's got to be hard to accept, I know, but it's nice that she still cares about you, even when she has to be far away."

I stopped walking. "Ross. Why. The balls. Do you always. Have to take. The goddamn high road."

He didn't know. I guess it's easy to stay on the high road when you've never looked down.

"How have you been, Tyler? How's college?"

I guess I could've given him a straight answer. Ross was just as loyal and kind as Abraham, and also more pleasant on the whole to hang around. But I hadn't had a completely honest conversation with Ross about anything important in years. My teens had wrought some ugly developments, both on top of my skin and under it. I was sure Ross didn't have the same dark little prickles growing on his insides. And I didn't want to scratch him with mine. Besides which, fifteen years of simple pride stood between said carotid undergrowth and my dry old mouth.

I said, "It's great. Nothing but late parties and loose women. How about you? How's the store?"

"Pretty good," he said. "I'll be management before you know it."

A slight little off chance occurred to me. What if Ross was just as screwy as I was inside? What if he was having a terrible life, and he hated Jenna and Jackson and me for leaving him here while we went off and played at bigger and better things?What if he was just better at showing the world what we wanted to see than the world had ever suspected? For all his humble grins and misplaced gratitude, he had to have some dark spots in there.

I mean, I couldn't do anything about his problems. Possibly I could guess at what they were and fumble at the terminology to express my guesses, all the while hoping he didn't feel insulted. But even if my intuition proved sound, what then?I possessed no magic words either to transform lives or to affirm them. I kept thinking.

"You should take Maureen out for coffee sometime," I said.

He glanced down at me. "You wouldn't mind?"

I looked up and agreed that I wouldn't.

We headed back to the scruffy old one-bedroom apartment he was so proud of and talked awhile, of the old days and the older days, touching on the new only often enough to remind ourselves we were still us.

# Chapter 24

I approached my second semester of freshman year with an increased level of confidence. Dex and Zach guided me from dawn to dusk – uh, noon to dawn, rather – and I appreciated their resolve not to snub me simply because I disappointed them in every possible way. It wasn't so hard to keep up now we'd fallen into a routine. You see, we were always up and doing (or reclined and hung over). We attended cheesily named events and themed parties, we engaged like-minded groups of women in conversation, and on Sundays we got up and made eggs (8.9 on the Tradition-o-meter, for best use of pepper jack cheese; went on nearly a whole year). In this life people will cut you an enormous amount of slack simply for your temporal loyalty. Everyone wants to feel praised and supported in existing. But we didn't exactly sit around contemplating much, and even after a few drinks I found it nigh impossible to match up their worries (that someday the pleasure-streaked lifestyle they were living right now would end) with my fears (that it wouldn't).

Sometimes Dex was okay on his own though. One day in January, I got back to my room to find him playing some video game with dreadlocked elves slicing up an underground cavern.

"Hey," I said. "Is that Wandlore?"

Immediately, Dex shut off the TV. His whole body tensed up.

"What?"

"The game. I didn't know you played RPGs."

He said nothing as I sat down on my bed and pulled out my textbook. I'd almost forgotten about Dex, when suddenly he said, "Don't tell Zach, okay?"

"Don't tell him what?"

His head jerked toward the TV.

"Don't tell him you were playing Wandlore?"

He nodded.

"Why? What difference does it make?"

"Just please don't, okay? Don't tell the girls either."

I shrugged. "Fine, I won't. No one cares what games you play though. It's not like you were watching porn."

He looked up. "Would you really -"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

I grinned. "I'd tell the whole floor if it was porn."

He threw a notebook at me.

"Only if it was weird shit though."

Dex laughed. "You coming to trivia night? Five dollar pitchers."

I pointed to the book in front of me. "Too much due tomorrow."(Trivia night was a 3.3 adjusted on the T-meter. Never actually went but, you know, from what I heard.)

"You're studying too hard," he advised me. I think by 'too hard' he meant 'at all'."Your mom and dad did not send you to this beautiful institution so you could read books all day," he reasoned. "Practical education is priceless. And time-sensitive."

"Yeah, well," I told him, a weak defense about the eyebrows, "My mom and dad expect me to do this in four years or less. They're, like, super geniuses and they expect me to follow in their footsteps just because I have the same genes."

"What? No they don't!" said Dex. "You're supposed to rebel your ass off. That's what they secretly want. They just can't tell you because, well, obviously that would be dumb."

"So maybe I just like the books," I countered. "They're all shiny and leathery and all."

"Then get a turtle!"

"You, sir, have no life. You were sent by the devil to test me."

He just smiled and shook his head. "Naw, dude, you have it backwards. You were sent by God to annoy the crap out of me."

After I felt I'd stared at Environments and Biology for long enough, I wandered down to Shay's room. While we were watching French Adventures and inventing ridiculous translations for the dialogue, she suddenly looked up.

"Tyler!" she groaned. "I want to date this boy, but he doesn't know it."

"That sucks," I said. "Have you thought about telling him?"

"He's not like you. He only likes hot people."

I thought about telling her she was beautiful and all that, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I knew what she meant, and she knew what she meant, and I wasn't going to make this awkward.

Of course She of the Man Harem had no such scruples. Popping her head up from Aesoppa's Song, she said, "You're so gorgeous though! You'll find somebody. This guy sounds like a jerk."

"He does," I agreed. "You need someone who only likes great people."

Shay sort of hid under her blanket.

"Hey Shay," I said, "do you think you could take me to the pharmacy sometime? I need a refill on my meds. I'm somewhat dying and so is my car."

"Sorry," she said, and she sounded like she really meant it. "I sort of left my car to my little brother. I realized I wasn't really using it that much and he needed it more than I did."

It was then that The Girl said, "I can take you."

"You can?" I said, surprised.

"Sure," she said, as if I didn't treat her like green Popples on a regular basis. "But then you have to help me study for Eggs and Bacon."

And she did, and I did.

"Maslow didn't even know," she told me later that evening, the hour before quiet hours. "He thought it was so easy, like we didn't get so mixed up all the time about what we wanted."

I shook my head. "Maybe he was just a little more level-headed than you are."

"Yeah, well, if you don't help me out with remembering all these not-true bullet points it's not going to matter how level my head is, because it's going to get chopped off."

I offered her a seat. "Maybe we should make up a song. The Maslow song. That stuff always helped me remember when I was a kid."

She giggled. "There's a lot of pages here. I don't think I have time to write an opera."

"Okay, then, why don't we group-learn? We can talk about all the stuff we have to memorize, and then it'll help us remember because we actually put it through our brains."

"Ugh," she said.

"Fine. I'll just talk about psychology with myself," I muttered. "Good luck learning like a pioneer child."

I was beginning to wonder why she wouldn't just pick anyone else in the world to study with. I was a very modest kid.

# Chapter 25

Time passed. Specifically, there was this one terrible week. That week had thrown everything at me, from all-nighter projects to a cut from a no-cut rec sports basketball team.

"I don't know, Freimann," our captain had said to me Sunday afternoon, trying to distance himself from the words he had been chosen to say to me. "I just think you'd be happier in a different league. You don't seem to take the game too seriously. But I'll tell you what; my girlfriend plays basketball every other week with the mentally handicapped. It's a really great service opportunity. Why don't you check it out?"

Yes, I didn't say. Because after all this rejection what I really needed was to lose at a full-contact sport while doing volunteer work. In fact, when you got down to it, I couldn't remember the last time I'd said yes to anything. It was as if 'not in the mood' had become my default state of operations.

Sunday night, Zach had insisted we watch the entire Shoot the Moon trilogy, just because Dex hadn't seen it. I told him it wasn't any good unless you were a kid, and Dex even said he hated science fiction, but somehow Zach could win an argument one against two. Unable to sleep through all the psychedelic lasers, I'd submitted.

Apparently the series had grown in popularity after the first installment, because Zach kept pointing out all the actors in the third movie who had also been in other movies which I didn't care about either.

"That one," he would say, pausing the movie and pointing. "The tall moon ranger there – guess who that is. Guess!"

"Uh, wait, Reggie Forrester?" Dex would guess politely.

"Yes!" Zach would say. "And the Grand Duchy?"

"No idea."

"That guy from High Blues," Zach would announce as if revealing the secrets of life. "David Lee Colt. I shit you not."

Only he did it in such a sure voice that I honestly felt like an idiot for not knowing what he was talking about. (This was not an uncommon feeling for me.) Finally, running low on fake enthusiasm, I decided to pretend to be asleep as he pointed out young versions of old superstars to Dex and I recorded the information carefully with my mind. Guess you could say this was an up-late-studying kind of exhaustion.

The next morning, as happened every Monday and Wednesday, I awoke to the vibration of my phone and dressed in the dark. Zach and Dex didn't have an 8:30 class and apparently wanted to pretend I didn't either. The walk to class was cold as balls, but because the calendar said it was March, I had not dressed accordingly, and was even colder as balls than it had to be. All I wanted to do when I entered the classroom was cuddle up in my hoodie and nap.

The Psychic Mafia was sitting front and center as always, chatting away about how excited they were to be going to Dinner Theatre this weekend, as they did every month. (Somehow I just know they spelled it 'theatre' in their heads). (I never got invited to Dinner Theatre obviously, but I'm going to go ahead and give it an honorary 2 on the Tradition-o-Meter.)

Being sleepy sometimes makes me behave inappropriately. I knew I was lame for listening to them, knew no good could come of listening to them, but also I knew they wanted people to hear.

"Yeah," said the tall one with the jewfro to Lainey Carroll, "well, pretty much every other line is a reference to an Alfred Hitchcock film, so your boyfriend's probably not going to appreciate it."

"Oh my god, no boyfriends or girlfriends," Alan Synecki announced."I'm making that a rule right now. This is about us and the fictional Russian super agent underworld."

I was freaking surrounded. Everyone in the world belonged to a culture besides me. Not the same culture, of course, but some culture. I was the only expatriate. I floated around on international waters, watching other people know things and have lives. I wished I were back in bed.

The Girl was in my early morning class, though, so I had to fake competence as well as I could. Something about her made me ashamed of my head full of uncombed hair and my notebook full of irregular scribbles. Flipping to a fresh page, I wrote down the words from the board without really understanding them.

"Wake up," she said as our classmates filed out the door. "Scientists say you do your best learning early in the morning."

"Yeah, well," I replied, "I bet those were scientists with coffee. We should get coffee."

The Girl smiled. "Only if it's dining hall coffee. I'm tapped out."

Taking ahold of her elbow, I said, "Today isn't a day for the dining hall. I will personally purchase you a student union beverage if you will accompany me."

"Is that sexist?" she wondered, scrunching her upper face muscles together.

"Nope. Class-ist maybe."

"Or perhaps discriminatory toward drinkers of tea?"

I smiled. "There we go. I have to offend at least one major social group before lunch every day."

We had a nice cup of coffee and a conversation. Something weird was happening. Slowly, the casual exchanges were turning into jokes, and the jokes were turning into stories, and the stories were turning into something I wasn't prepared for.

"I'd do it," she said to the group that night in the common area.

"Really?" said Shay. "Not me. I'd be afraid."

"Most people live," The Girl said confidently. "I mean, only about four percent die during the actual surgery. If it were someone I loved, I'd do it. How could you not?"

Shay shook her head. "It's not the surgery. You'd have to live out the whole rest of your life with one kidney, worrying in the back of your mind, 'What if this one gives out?' I'd be terrified of the regret alone."

"None of us would do it," I said to Mother Theresa, as if sure. "It's totally different when there's a med student with a knife standing over you. You'd go home and write a poem about how you loved your kidney too much to let it go. I know you."

"I'd just get blackout drunk and sign the papers," Dex put in impressively.

"You don't know me!" she said to me, ignoring Dex's bravado. "I would so! Ten years down the road I'd ... I'd give YOU one if you said please."

"Ten years down the road you're going to be a faded old housewife," I said, a bitter edge to my tone. "You're never going to be more idealistic than you are right now. You'll just get cynical and give up. You're only prolonging the fight against the tide."

"At least I'm trying!" she roared. "I know I'm still young and ignorant. But I'm still growing. I'm trying on new ideas and becoming something. And you, Tyler? Your soul is dead! You're just hanging around to haunt the mortals, aren't you?"

"How would you know?" I asked her. "Just because I can't get behind East Asian sex revolutions and web 4.0 awareness campaign memes doesn't mean I don't have things I care about too."

"Well," she said, "knowing and caring are two different things."

"I'll care when it's worth caring," I said. "I'm still looking for the truth. And then I'll sit down and care about it when I find it."

Later, of course, I felt guilty. She was right about what she said, even if she was wrong about literally everything else in the world. So I ended up writing her this horribly rambling message on eyeContact:

Hey,

So I haven't been too fair to you. I've made assumptions about things I haven't read up on, and I've laughed at genuine attempts to make the world a better place. When you friendzoned Zach I may have said some unkind things about you which went beyond trying to cheer up a friend. Also, I was the one who tore down your flyers for the Festival of European Dance. Mostly it just felt right at the moment and afterwords I didn't have a staple gun and there were big obvious holes in them anyway and I thought, seriously, you're blocking the dorm movie schedule with those things and they're not even approved or anything. I know you think the admin has an unfair prejudice and that's why they won't make the S of ED an official club and approve your flyers, but they're totally right; European Dance does fall under the category of World Dance and you and Lainey should just work out your differences so all the guilty fine arts kid only have to buy a ticket for one crappy dance festival per year.

Anyway, before Zach made his move on you I seriously did hate you a little bit even for pretending to play along; he doesn't need any more attention! But of course you also got on my nerves because we are two very different people, so after you turned Zach down I was two parts 'Yeah! Rejected!' and one part 'Bros before hos' because even if he does think he's a little too awesome, I still have to live with the guy, and just so you know, Dex sided with you because he wants to get into your pants. But I'm sure you know that.

So you're not really that bad, anyway. You just have too much power, and power corrupts people, so even though I disagree with you most times and I wish you would stop driving half the hallway crazy with your sweatpant short thingies because they don't make a feminist statement at all, which you know goddamn well even the RA agreed with me. But anyway. Even though I'm the vulture to your lamb, and you're the sunrise to my curtains ... I don't actually think you're that bad. That's all I wanted to say.

Cordially yours,

Tyler

She came by the next day after class. "How are you doing, Tyler?" she asked, almost as if she'd come to see me and not my roommates.

"Pretty good," I said, to her surprise. "Today is a getting-shit-done kind of day."

"That's good."

"How are you doing?"

She flushed a little. "Could be better."

All of a sudden, something came over me. I desired to make that girl smile. It was as if I'd been suppressing that desire for months, and now I couldn't anymore. Standing up from my swivel chair in one energetic motion, I said, "You know what? Let's do something."

"Like what?"

"Dunno. Something where we won't have to talk."

Suddenly she lit up. "Can you salsa dance?" she asked, grabbing my hands and jumping into action.

"No. No I can't." What I could do was step forward and back in an effort to protect my toes.

She agreed, "No, you can't." But she kept going, pivoting around on the tips of her feet while I watched.

"Do ... do you want me to find you some music?"

"No, I'll stop," she said with a nervous laugh. "Let's, uh, let's go down to the Island and swing! You can push."

We went down to the Island. She swung. I pushed.

If she was waiting for me to soften with time, to play out her favorite Victorian novels for her complete with a sneer and a quiver, well, it was starting to work. My instincts were revolting against me. That's the shitty thing about instincts – they don't care about the castles we build ourselves. They don't care about anything but babies. And I hate it when babies tell me what to do.

The night dragged. Although anyone could've told you my reading assignments weren't going to happen, I thrived on the pretense that a thick open course packet provides. This ruled out actually going anywhere. On the other hand I wasn't going to be one of those fools who seeks out a legitimately quiet place of study, because my brain tends to revolt against such tactics. Thus situated, my eyes made a casual observation of the material from their safe distance while refusing to cross the street and shake hands.

Zach was working the late shift, which meant Dex had settled in for a long session of Wandlore.

"Auuuughhhh - I - am - the - goo - monster," I narrated as he faced off against some minor boss. "I - eat - babies - and - science - majors - and - shoot - lightning - out - my - aw, there you go, he's down. Explooooooosions and vengeance!"

"Nice!" Dex hissed, about to run off for a save point.

"Come on, man, there's a whole mountain of sparkly things there. Giant hat dude'll go apeshit if you bring him all those. Might even trade you for the Big Shiny Sword of Virginity."

Dex grinned. "You know if you wanted, you could stop being an assheart and actually play with me. I can set you up with a nice premade account."

"No way," I declared. "I think we work better as a team."

Just then, Shay burst in. "Lady Godiva's looking for you," she told me. That's what she called The Girl. As tight as they were, Shay had never fully gotten over the shock of having a friend who kept a gumball machine full of condoms.

I set out to find Hello Dolly at a brisk pace. What if this was it? (Not in her room.) What if she'd finally turned around to face the tension we couldn't laugh off any longer? (Not in the section lounge.) It made sense, really; she was the kind who would make the first move. (Study room?) Didn't women want to be happy as much as men did? (Laundry. It was laundry night.)

I entered the laundry room slowly. This was the kind of moment a man remembered a long time. She was sitting on dryer number seventeen, well across the room, and I noted with joy that her book was the one I'd swapped with her at our last book swap. I stopped to watch her kick her heels into the dryer door until she looked up.

In a voice that didn't belong to me, but to a film reel in a vault somewhere, I said, "You were looking for me?"

"No I wasn't."

That had me a little flustered. "Shay said you were. Although that was awhile ago."

The Girl looked impatient. "Oh, well I wasn't. Are you sure that's what she said?"

I fought off the urge to squirm. "Unless she meant the actual Lady Godiva. In which case, woohoo! Time machines for everyone!"

She was not fooled. I left before things could get any worse.

Wednesday evening I was tied up all night in the randomly assigned group project group from hell. We'd completely covered the basement study room in Horace-Briggs with posterboard, unsharpened pencils, and seventeen different colors of SmartMarks, and Lainey Carroll was guilt tripping us about having skimped over some of the preliminaries.

"I have to do everything!" she groaned. Really Short Kid had bailed on us, claiming his rehearsals ran until midnight, and Mark Han and I didn't seem to meet Lainey's exacting standards.

"It's fine!" Mark insisted. "There's no way we can get lower than an eighty on this thing. Let's just get something down for every box and get the hell out of here."

"Is that what you want, Mark? Oh, yeah, we could have gotten an A but Mark had to run off and watch Lavender Ladies, so we figured why not half ass it? It's not -- Tyler, stop looking at your stupid phone and draw some boxes!"

"Come on, Lainey, we all know this is about your dumb crush on Synecki," said Mark. "He's not going to notice your poster – his head's too far up his ass!"

"Yeah, well, it's nice that all academic achievement comes down to sex for you, Mark, but I plan on having a career one day."

The Girl was somewhere with Zach, Dex, and Shay, and she seemed anxious not to let me miss any of Zach's quotables for the evening. It was as if she didn't realize he said ridiculous things purely to get her attention.

Buildings are just overgrown sand castles -- our Zachy :J

I set down my phone, picked up my ruler, and began tracing the outline of our grid of information, overlaying Lainey's pencil marks in a reliable dark blue. Unfortunately the horizontal lines spanned at least three feet, so you could still sort of see the place where she'd had to pick up the straightedge and move it down. She ought to have measured, at least; one end of her line was half an inch below the other.

But I couldn't bring myself to say anything. The possibility of a confrontation outweighed any satisfaction I might get from fixing the problem. So I just traced over her guiding pencil marks as best I could and hoped the bullet points I'd come up with would satiate her stringent soul.

When I got back to my dorm,I really wasn't in the mood to write a five-page paper. "Come on, Zach," I whined. "I wrote you that huge Civ and Soc essay last month. I'm having a shitty week and I just want to not think."

"Well, maybe you should've considered that before," he said, just as if he knew it would infuriate me. "I'm going out tonight. There's an eighties party at Frost."

"Can you at least start me off?" I begged.

"What the hell do I know about philosophy?"

"Well what the hell do I know about Civ and Soc?"

"You did pretty well actually. You cited books! The real kind! I can't compete with that."

Zach didn't have to do research half the time. He skated by on an analytical diet of supreme bullshit and flowery narrative, unencumbered by numbers or dates. "This is philosophy. You can talk for pages without saying a damn thing! You and this paper were made for each other."

He shook his head. "I was made to dance with fake Tina Turners in legwarmers. My bullshit factory is just a premium feature." And, patting my head, he left.

It was then that I spotted Dex up in his loft, face down in unwashed pillowcase. Uncharacteristically, he hadn't said a word in hours.

"Hey, Dex!" I called. "Did you take Philo II yet?"

"I'm not writing you a paper," he said firmly. "My life just died. I can't do shit."

I wandered to the other side of the hallway looking for feminine sympathy, but I only found Shay.

"Where is she?" I asked bluntly.

Shay shrugged.

"Tell me what she told you last night," I demanded. "When she asked to see me. Tell me exactly."

"I'm not telling you anything if you don't ask a little nicer," said Shay.

I breathed in. "Listen, whore. I've had a shitty week. Be the first person in the world to cooperate with me?"

"Other people have had shitty weeks too, you know. Some of us just have manners."

Slamming her door shouldn't have made me feel that good, but it did anyway. But as I turned to go, I saw none other than The Girl, on her way in, a big brown paper bag in her arms.

"Hey!" I said. "I desperately need feminine sympathy."

She shouldered past me. "Some other time, Freimann."

"Wait..."

"This ice cream's about to melt."

And I couldn't get another word out of her.

Realizing that time is words, I returned to the cave of solitude and banged something out. I doubt it made sense. Making sense wasn't really the point of core requirements, though, and I couldn't bring myself to give a shit. Might have gotten in some nice jabs about the professor's mother, come to think of it.

At midnight I sent the monstrosity to the drop box. Part of me wanted to catch the end of the party, but the rest preferred to sit up and fume. Sleeping didn't even seem to be an option.

Thursday I could barely concentrate for frustration and exhaustion. Thursdays were isolating to begin with, because I didn't know anyone in lab and no longer possessed the will to acquaint myself with squirrel-baiting companions. I was looking forward to a particular end-of-midterms party off campus, but my game was off so hard that I messed up my reaction and had to start all over again, causing me to return to the dorms later than usual. And as expected, my roommates had gone on to the festivities without me.

This was too far. In fact the next time I looked up, I was in the standing parking lot with no real memory of why. Maybe I'd planned to head to the party myself, but as I passed our host's house, something prevented me from stopping. Perhaps it was the long, long line of cars – I couldn't be bothered to find a spot, could I? What was the point, anyway? This party clearly contained enough people without Tyler Freimann butting in.

What started out as a calming drive about town led to the entrance ramp for the freeway as naturally as you followed from the metaphorical twinkle in your mother's eye. And I think you've been reading this story long enough to know where I ended up driving to.

# Chapter 26

Where did he go to school again? U-Ferg, wasn't it? I smartphone'd the place. Two hours and nineteen minutes ... challenge accepted. Of course I didn't know where specifically he lived but I could always contact him when I got close.

After I'd arrived, though, it didn't seem so simple. I parked on the street and picked up my phone and called, but he didn't answer. Maybe he had class in the morning and was sleeping. What was I going to say to him anyway? Neither my predicament nor his role in it could be explained in a sentence or two. So for now I just texted him:

I'm on the east side of campus; what dorm and room are you in?

As I waited for him to text back,I observed the late night foot traffic at Ferguson National Overachiever Asylum, or whatever it was called. Everyone seemed to be walking toward or away from the library. I studied the passing faces and reflected. Each one of these strangers carried with him at least one hometown, nation, area of study, team or club,an inner circle or two, and many more left discarded in the deep annals of a patchwork past. Pride, grief, nostalgia, forehead creases, inside jokes and pearls of yesterday's empathy clung to them all like stickers on a suitcase.

It occurred to me that groups died as well as people, some after a semester and some after a millennium. The cutting pop culture references of this year's comedy blockbuster would one day be as the sex jokes of Shakespeare, every drop of laughter lost in translation on the trip to the untrained and unenthusiastic young scholar's ear. If the bard were here today I know it would kill him to see us patiently chanting the exact words he wrote even as they drift to a foreign language, dissecting each line with the piety of an archaeologist laying out the newly excavated playthings of a long-dead toddler. Because all he really wanted was for some working-class stiff to laugh so hard he spilled his jumbo box of hazelnuts.

I was not Shakespeare. When I died, I'd be dead.

When no longer needed or remembered, our words and smiles and institutions would be scrapped and salvaged for spare parts by a new generation, which wouldn't hesitate to throw out the bits it didn't see the use of. My enthusiasm would die on its own one day, and my embarrassment with it hopefully. Even The Girl wouldn't look so irresistible delivering her sarcastic digs to the rib when they bit into unimpressed children, some decade long after her male contemporaries ceased to pay them any mind.

But it didn't seem that way at the time. If my life were a movie, The Girl would die young at the end, and you'd sob like a baby.

'Stop it!' said my brain to my heart. 'You know damn well why you're doing this. It's because she's hot! She's super duper hot, and confident, and everyone else wants her. If you shout at pretty girls enough, your hormones will trick you ten ways to unrequited.'

And what if I did obtain her? Would I spend one whole minute in a week genuinely enjoying the gentle female's company and the rest worrying about screwing it up? We wouldn't last. Next year there would be more silly classes and more silly parties and more silly girls and a new season of Conference Call. Great life.

I started to wonder what I was going to say to Abraham. Surely I'd figure something out by the time we'd rendezvoused. Until then it was naptime.

I woke up when my phone buzzed:

The one with the four towers. I'll meet you in the lobby and let you in. What's wrong?

Well that was nice, I thought. He didn't even give it a second thought. What a guy. I soon reached the door and there he was, in all his just-threw-on-pants-ninety-seconds-ago glory. He sat me down on a sad old couch in the foyer and gave me an expectant look.

"Uh, hi, sorry to drop in on you like this," I apologized. "Couldn't think of anyplace else."

"Yeah, obviously. What happened?"

I had absolutely no answer to that question.

"Someone die or something?" he prompted.

"If I said I was having an existentialist crisis, would that make this seem legit?"

His face changed from patience to annoyance. "Tyler, you're not allowed to have an existentialist crisis during midterms."

"We had ours last week," I told him, miffed.

"Yeah, and I bet you're in one of those bullshit majors where you can just skip a day of class for no reason," he surmised.

"I don't even have class on Friday!" I protested.

He frowned at me. "Well then, that explains why you can just show up and bother those of us with real studies whenever you want."

"We have a different scheduling system," I explained, trying to defend myself. "A lot of people have community co-ops on the weekend."

"I don't care!" he announced, waving a hand at me. "Why did you have to show up now? I have like three exams tomorrow."

And then it happened. Some guy, some random guy walking through the lobby, spotted Abraham, caught his eye, and held up four fingers.

I immediately wanted to put a knife through both of them. I know that is probably the most pathetic sentiment since pathetic came to pathetic town, but I did. My eyes met the armrest of the sofa and stayed there.

Abraham looked over in recognition at his other ally. And then he looked at me.

"Tyler?" he said in surprise.

I looked over. I wanted to say a lot of things. I said nothing. In my silence, Abraham appeared to take in what he couldn't hear over the sound of my words.

"What?" he said.

But still I said nothing.

He tried again."Come on, you must have made some of your own ... "

"... Nope."

His face clouded up. "Really?"

"Not a one," I replied.

"Oh," he said.

I nodded.

"This is serious, isn't it?"

I nodded.

He stood up and grabbed me by the shoulder. "I don't have an overnight guest form, but you can sleep in the basement of the CBL building. Come on."

We shuffled along the path to a yellow brick building, then down to a long, narrow basement full of cots and circuits. "This is the best room on campus for a nap," he said. "If anyone asks you're in the middle of a senior design project."

I sat down on one of the cots and drew my knees up to my chin, waiting to see what he would do next.

Abraham sat down next to me."So. You drove to Flaxon. In the middle of the night."

"It's not that late," I said sulkily. "Are you, like, an old man or something?"

He shook the point away. "What's up?"

The question was too difficult.

He corrected himself. "I mean, what started whatever's up?"

I began scratching my thumbnail with my other thumbnail."You know what my dorm had last night? An eighties party."

"Yeah, those are popular here, too."

"None of us were even born in the eighties!" I exploded. "But we're all familiar enough with the tiny details of a bunch of mediocre movies and songs that our parents liked at our age that eighties nostalgia is not only possible, but was chosen above all other potential themes."

"So don't go to the party," he said impatiently.

"Don't you get it?" I moaned. "I have to live with these people. I have to choose all of my friends from this group of child-adults. They go out to the same bars every night, in these big giggly groups that keep them safe from the possibility of meeting anyone different from them. And they take stupid pictures of themselves, and then they put them on eyeContact, and then they make fun of themselves for looking stupid in pictures where the whole point was to look stupid! And then they go color in their Princess Mindy coloring books and watch the sun rise like it's something they invented. And they're so completely wrapped up in themselves that they only get involved in each other's lives for the entertainment of it."

Abraham said, "I know. I know, Tyler."

"No you don't! You have ..." I waved my hand vaguely outward.

He breathed in. "Allies."

"You franchised."

He smiled in agreement.

"Well," I said, disconsolately. "Never mind. Good for you. You don't owe me anything."

And then he said, "Tyler, I owe you everything."

I looked up.

"Without you I'd still be..." he shook his head. "I wish I could be there for you myself. I know we stopped counting pretty early on, but you were ahead. At least it feels like you were."

"Naw," I said. "What'd I ever do but yell at you?"

"You taught me," he corrected. "You're basically the only reason I trust people at all. You're fucking epic at being an ally, Tyler ... why can't you make any?"

"I don't know how!" I shouted. "Am I supposed to draw up another contract or something?"

He laughed. "No, of course not. You just find someone who seems reasonably nice and comp them an eraser. In fact, make it two. And you wait to see who gives you one back. I mean, you've got friends, right?"

"Sure," I said.

"Well, you may find this hard to believe, but a lot of people are allies with their friends."

I smiled. "I'm decent to my friends. They're decent to me. We study together. We party together. We eat goddamn breakfast foods and watch foreign television and all the stuff we're supposed to do."

"Can you trust them?" he asked. "Like, if you were stranded on the side of the road, would they come get you?"

"Yeah, probably. That isn't the problem."

"So what is?" he asked. "What's missing?"

"I don't know," I said. "The other stuff."

"Oh, you mean all the suicide pacts and hand jobs," he said, laughing at me. "What other stuff, Tyler?"

I looked at him dead on. And I realized he knew exactly what I meant. He was just being a jerk about it.

"What do you want me to say, Abraham? That I feel like I can tell you shit? I mean, without sounding like I want your dick -"

"Fuck off with that crap," said Abraham. "You know what? If that were a rule, an actual rule, that you weren't allowed to have emotionally honest relationships without having sex with a man first? I would probably do it. That first time you open up to someone, it's like doing a hit of E or something. But fortunately, there's no such rule. You spend your whole life looking over your shoulder in case somebody catches you having feelings because you're a coward. And I get it. I was like that once. But then one day a really smart guy told me I wasn't a space alien."

I thought about it for a moment. I imagined telling Zach he hurt my feelings, or Dex. It was unthinkable. It would be not just terrifying but also stupid.

"It's more complicated than that," I said. "If you knew my friends ... It's a risk."

He said, "There's pretty much no risk. If it turns out your friends don't want to be your friends anymore, go find more. College is fucking easy mode; it's like a thousand person sleepover."

"But it's -"

"Hard? Scary? Tough. You have to do it anyway, Tyler. You need a whole fuck ton of allies. They're easier to lose than car keys." He breathed in. "But life's not worth living without them."

I looked up. "I don't know if I can."

He paused to consider this. And then with absolutely no warning, he reached over and hugged me. No, that's an understatement. He hugged the ever loving bats out of me.

Immediately I tensed up, startled. On one shoulder, I felt a sharp tap from the heterosexuality police; on the other shoulder, the icy finger of self-loathing. Abraham waited patiently.

And then, in a sudden rush, I realized four things.

1) I was a human being.

2) I wanted a hug.

3) Abraham was offering me one.

4) No one else was around.

I leaned in.

Abraham yawned. "Now, I've got a huge chem exam tomorrow, so until then ..."

"Thanks," I said. "You've done more than enough already. Uh, I mean... S...G...Z...M...J...R."

His face lit up.

"What," I said, "you thought it was going to take me more than nine years to figure out?"

"No," he said. "I'm just impressed that you bothered."

He went back to his room. I lay awake for a long time.

# Chapter 27

In the morning I took a glance at my half-dead phone. The blinking light told me someone had noticed I was missing. Now that was something. Without bothering to read my missed texts, I grabbed a cup of coffee at the student union and set sail for home around noon.

When I got back to the WCC dorms, an annoyed roommate confronted me.

"Where were you last night?" Zach asked.

Instead of explaining, I flopped onto my back on the gritty old sheets, which promptly snapped off the corner of my pitiful mattress. "It's been a weird week."

Zach said, "Weird week ... You called Shay a whore and then you just disappeared! What the hell?"

It took me a second to remember what he was talking about.

"I was just kidding!" I protested. "How do you even know about that?"

"Well in context I don't think she took it as a joke!" said Zach.

"What context?"

"What ... You didn't know? She's pregnant!" said Zach.

At this Dex looked up.

"People are going to find out eventually," Zach told him.

Shitshitshit.

"Wait, really?" I said.

Zach nodded.

How could Shay be pregnant? She had a poster of the BunnyBears above her bed! "Well I didn't know that! How could I? What-- I mean, who's the father?"

Dex raised a sarcastic hand.

"What? When --"

"Ask her," said Dex. "I've got shit to do."

I was speechless for a few moments. When I recovered my senses, off I slid to Shay's room.

"I'm really sorry," I said to her closed door.

She let me in and we sat down on her bed.

"I didn't know you were pregnant. Well obviously; I'm really bad at gossip. You're not a whore. I'm sure you know ... Anyway."

Shay looked confused. "You didn't know?"

"How would I have? Nobody tells me shit," I grumbled.

"Well then why did you say all that awful stuff to me?" she demanded.

I waved a dismissive hand. "Stupid reasons. I'm sorry. None of it seems important now."

"Well where the hell were you last night?" she asked.

"Never mind that," I said. "I was just taking a little trip. You're pregnant. Do you want to talk about that?"

For the first time I took in how tired she looked. "I've been talking about it for days. First Dexter, then my friends, then my family, then Dexter again ..."

Now, by instinct I can be a selfish man. Even as I was attempting to project sympathetic waves to Shay, part of me was definitely thinking, 'I thought I was your friend -- why wasn't I included in this conversation?' But the socially correct side of my nature knew those kind of thoughts were no good. The more you focused on them, the less people wanted to be around you. And I wanted people to want to be around me.

I put a hand on her shoulder. My morbid curiosity could wait.

"I understand," I said. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. Is there anything I can do to help now?"

She shook her head. "I don't even want to think about it anymore. I can't even imagine nine more months of this nonsense. It's like a week ago I was Shay, and now I'm Pregnant Shay. Like, what if I just want to go paint some pottery or something? Of course there's probably some stupid rule about pregnant women being around paint fumes or something, just like there is about all of the fun things that could take my mind off it for five seconds ..."

"No, let's do it." I said.

"Really?" she said. "You don't want to hear all the gory details first?"

I shook my head. "Sometime I will. Not today though. Today is pottery day. We can sneak out the back way and make some ashtrays or something."

Shay looked at me gratefully. "Sounds like a plan."

We got back a few hours later. Dex didn't look like he'd left our room the whole time.

"Hey," I said.

It was like talking to a lump of clay.

"Uh ... how are you holding up?"

Dex turned over to face me and shrugged.

"You guys make up?" he asked.

"Yeah," I said. "I took her to Monkey Jack's to unwind."

The corners of his mouth turned up slightly. "That's good," he said. "She needs that."

"Yeah," I said. "So what about you?"

Dex blinked. "I can get drunk. She can't."

"So that's your plan?" I asked. "Get drunk?"

He sat up. "Yeah. I mean, not for the next eighteen years. But until the initial shock wears off, I think it'll do me some good."

"So you guys are definitely -"

"- Sit down, Freimann," he said. "You picked a shitty night to be away."

I sat.

"Yeah," he said. "We're keeping it. I mean we're keeping him or her. The baby. Shay's definitely going to finish out the semester but I don't think she'll be back next year."

I imagined being at school without Shay. It wasn't a pleasant prospect.

"And you?" I said.

Dex looked up at me as if the question had surprised him.

"Fuck if I know," he admitted. "There's a lot of choices and they all suck."

"Yeah?" I said. "What have you got so far?"

As he talked, his knees came in and his hood came down. "I could drop out with her and then we'd probably be broke for the rest of our lives. I could stay here, but if she goes home our kid won't have his dad around for the first couple years of his life. Or we could both stay in school and we could get an apartment and do ... something ... with our kid while we're at class, but we'd be broke for years, or maybe our parents could help us, but then... Fuck this, Tyler. Fuck all of this. This is fucked."

I remained silent for a few moments. "What did your parents say when you told them?"

"That I'm an idiot," he said. "And I am. What a stupid thing to do."

I attempted to engage eye contact. He sort of wouldn't let me though. "Hey," I said.

"Oh, you're going to tell me it was a brilliant thing to do?"

I shook my head. "I don't know what I was going to say. I've got nothing. Sorry."

He blinked at me, waiting.

"You aren't stupid, Dex," I said. "You were unlucky. You did the same thing as a bunch of other people did, but it bit you in the ass and not them."

"Sucks," he said.

"It really does."

His knee kept jangling up and down."I don't know what's going to happen," he said.

And I said, "Something will happen. I don't know what, but it'll be the thing that happens. And one day it'll be the thing that happened."

He laughed a little bit. "Thanks for that, I think?"

I gave up trying to fix anything and just sort of kept him company for awhile. Eventually we went to dinner.

When we came back, Dex wanted to go out. We were about to leave when The Girl came by.

"We need to talk," she told me.

# Chapter 28

I motioned for Dex to go on without me.

"What?" he said.

"I'll catch up later," I said.

"You expect me to go to Loki's alone?" he asked.

"Just ... be not here for a minute, okay?" I said frantically.

Obediently, he left.

"Hey, where were you last night?" she asked, sitting down on my bed with me.

I groaned, already tired of this question. "I went to go visit an old friend from high school," I said. "He goes to U-Ferg."

"Oh," she said. "Without telling anyone?"

"It was a spur of the moment kind of thing," I said. God, she could be adorable sometimes. How could I say what I needed to say when I just wanted to poke her and make her laugh? Whoever said women were designed to be the helpmeet of men must never have seen a busty female in work overalls.

"Oh," she said. "Any particular reason? Did Shay -"

"She didn't tell me," I explained, allowing a fraction of the bitterness in me to flood into the words. "I just found out a few hours ago."

"Oh," she said. "So that's not why you left?"

I inhaled and tried to swallow something. Maybe my natural reserve, or the inescapable compulsion she put on me to impress her, whether she was worth it or not. "Look," I told her. "I need to know right now if you actually give a shit."

"I'm your friend," she said, annoyed. "Why would you ask that?"

I shrugged. "I've had plenty who didn't. I'm asking you officially now exactly how many shits you give. Because if this is just a game to you, trying to get me to have a serious conversation so you can make jokes at my expense later, then fine, you win. Right now, I need you more than I need my healthy ego. And if you're asking because you're bored, well, this isn't likely to amuse you. So here we are at Polite Defusing Station, the last stop before Tyler's Depressing Bullshit Town. Anyone getting off?"

"Why would I do any of those things?" she asked. "I've never been anything but nice to you. You're the one who told me exactly what you thought of me when we first met!"

I was about to rise to this bait when I stopped and thought. What would be the point? "You're right," I said, as straight faced as I could. "I'm sorry and I'm trying to change, but it's scary and new and I just need your absolute promise to call off the sarcasm stormtroopers for an hour or so, because I'm not feeling up to them tonight."

"There you go again! I will if you will, asshole."

But I took her in with one eyeball and I knew she didn't want to fight any more than I did. My shoulders slumped, all contrite, and I softly said, "Yes. Nothing but white flags for now. Please."

Her knee was next to my knee somehow, her whole body inclined to face mine. "Of course," she said seriously, shaking her perfect head. "Talk."

"All right," I agreed, and tried to remember the sentences I had been thinking out in the car. "Look ...I have this problem. With, ah, people."

By a mighty effort she didn't say whatever it was she was going to say, and just gave me patient eyes.

"It's a bit of a catch-22," I said. "When I'm alone I want to be with people. There's nothing worse than studying while everyone's having fun. But when I'm with people ... it's hard for me to know how to be." Feeling amazingly weak for such an admission, I looked up.

And her hand made its way to my shoulder. "You seem all right with people to me," she said. "What kind of problem?"

"Like ... a closeness problem," I said, pulling on my fingers. "Like, I should've just had an honest and reasonable conversation with Shay instead of yelling at her. We're friends, and I should be able to talk to her about things. But I didn't. And it's hard to explain why I didn't. But I couldn't."

She shook her head. "I don't understand. Why couldn't you?"

I threw up my hands. "I don't know how."

"Look, I know you and Shay are close, but now that she's-"

"- I told you, I didn't know about that!" I said.

She said, "Well just so you know, she was afraid to tell you because she thought you were going to kick Dex's ass or something. Or she would have."

"Why would I ... Jesus, is there a reason for me to kick Dex's ass?"

"No, no, no!" she exclaimed. "Nothing like that."

"Then why would I?"

"I don't know!" she said. "I just think it's a little weird that you'd just leave town right around the same time. What are you not telling me here, Tyler?"

"Nothing," I said. "I'm telling you everything there is to tell. What else do you want to know?"

"I want to know why you randomly left town last night!" she said.

"Because I needed to talk to someone!" I shouted.

"About what?"

"Just ... stuff!" I said, tensing up.

"Stuff that made you upset with Shay?"

"Look, drop it about Shay and me! We're not ... this is not about weird romantic drama. It's more mundane than that."

She appeared to relax. "Then what is it about? You had some motive for suddenly driving to the next state over."

"I'm trying to tell you, if you would listen and stop jumping to conclusions." I said. "I was a little annoyed at Shay, about something stupid, but it was more that I happened to run into her when I was in a bad mood. The truth is I didn't even notice she was in a bad mood, too, which makes me kind of shitty, really, because she had a good reason to be cranky and I didn't."

Quietly, she asked, "What was the reason?"

"I didn't have a reason; I just said that."

"You said you didn't have a good reason. I understand you regret snapping at her, but there was a reason for it, and I'd like to know what it was, whether it's valid or not."

I realized I could no longer talk in circles. "It's hard to explain. It's like ... when you have a good reason to be angry, like, say, someone kicks you in the face, then you can, you know, react. You can fight back, or call someone, or at the very least go find your friends and say, 'Hey, some guy just kicked me in the face!' And your face will still hurt for awhile. But the whole thing's over."

I breathed in and tried to hold onto my momentum. "But other times you don't have a good reason to be angry. And then it's like, like how gunk gets stuck in a pipe. You start to get upset about something, but you stop yourself, because you know you're wrong. You know you're upset about nothing, about things that are none of your business. But you're still upset, just now you can't process it. It's gunk stuck in a pipe. And eventually the gunk hits a critical mass and you need an oil change, but you don't want to touch the gunk because it's all ... disgusting and bitter and embarrassing and the whole reason you didn't say it at the time was because it was stupid, so it'd be even stupider to say it later. And that's where I was at last night."

She gave my shoulder a squeeze.

"I think I know what you mean," she said.

"You do?"

"Yeah. That's why people drink."

I smiled. "That doesn't seem to work for me. I'm one repressed motherfucker."

Her hand was on my arm somehow. "So let's change your oil."

I wanted her to change my oil. I wanted it more than anything. It terrified me, though. I picked up my left elbow in my right hand and tried to tell myself I had nothing to lose.

"You sure?" I said.

"Definitely."

I blinked at her in acceptance of the offer.

"Every time I overhear the Psychic Mafia talking about one of their parties, I want to stab them. Every time I find out Zach and Dex went somewhere and didn't invite me even though they could have easily invited me. Stab. Every time Zach references a band and Dex knows who they are but I don't. Every time I'm hanging out with Shay and we have to leave because she's afraid of nothing." My voice was rising in volume. "Lainey Carroll's special brand of guilt. Almost every conversation with my parents. Not getting any court time in rec sports. Getting decent grades on exams but terrible grades on papers because I can't write for shit. Having conversations about people who keep up with current events and feeling like a moron. Just generally feeling like a moron all the fucking time."

Her arms were wrapping around me and I let them. She smelled like some sort of nice fruit. She was stroking my back. I thoroughly enjoyed the double high of emotional release and soft hands.

After a minute, I pulled back. "Oh yeah, one more. Getting distracted by how beautiful and fun you are but not being able to ask you out on a date because the same thing that happened to Zach is going to happen to me."

That one kind of threw her for a loop.

"Really?"

I nodded. "I like you a lot, Rosemary. I'm very attracted to you. I don't know you well enough to say any more than that. But I'd first-date the shit out of you if you'd let me." I held up my hands. "And you don't have to let me. I respect your rights as a feminist and all that. You can say no and I'll drop it."

Her forehead crinkled.

"Oh, god, this was an amazingly inappropriate time to ask you out," I said. "Can I try again later?"

"Kind of shooting yourself in the foot, here, aren't you?" she said.

"Yeah. I'm good at that. I seem to recall calling you a tool within a day of meeting you, so it's hard to go much lower."

"It was a 'huge tool'," she said. "Let's be precise here."

And then she paused forever.

"I'd go on a date with you," she said.

I just stared at her. "Really? ... Why?"

She laughed. "Can you maybe learn to take yes for an answer?"

We went and found Dex. He was very confused as to why we were so happy.

Volunteer special ed basketball could have been worse, and three weeks later I wasn't calling it that anymore. I thought we'd be corralling uninterested parties all day, but I ended up facing some decent competition. One of the seasoned veterans stayed behind one night to help me learn some fundamentals.

"Nice!" he said, slapping me on the shoulder after my third successful jump shot. "See, Tyler? You've got all the stuff you need in there somewhere."

"Thanks!" I said, meaning it. "Say, do you by any chance feel like a bratwurst?"

Jared did feel like a bratwurst. We'd been working very hard. "Sure. Did you have a particular place in mind?"

"Yes. Oktoberfest in March. Literally a sausage fest, but you take what you can get. Cheap and delicious, with condiments included."

He looked a little wary. "Oh, you mean the thing in Frost? I dunno, those guys are ... how do I put this ...."

"Douchebags? Sure. They throw a good party though."

Jared frowned. "I dunno. I feel like I'd be feeding the system."

"But ... but bratwurst ..."

"If we could somehow get in and out without talking to any Frostmen, I'd say yes."

I thought for a second. "Actually ... I have an idea."

"You do?"'

"Yes," I continued. "An idea that's going to change your life forever."

He smiled. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," I said. "And you're going to LIKE it."

# Chapter 29

There was one other time in my life when I signed a contract binding me to another human being.

"How many people are we inviting to this thing?" I asked Rosemary, some years later.

"I don't know," she said. "Sort of a lot-ish. I'm pretty sure I swore this blood oath at eighth grade graduation to let my best friends be bridesmaids."

"Oh," I said. "You still keep in contact with people from middle school?"

"Nope," she said. "They're going to be pretty damn surprised."

I laughed, then frowned. "I basically don't talk to any of my friends emeritus anymore. I see maybe two friends from high school twice a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. I haven't even seen Jared since Homecoming weekend. All of my friends are people I met in the last year and a half, mostly at work. I'm pretty much the worst person."

"So they're going to be pretty damn surprised too!" she announced.

"I don't know," I said. "It'd be weird to invite people I don't talk to anymore, right?"

"Too bad. This is maybe the only chance we're ever going to have to throw a huge party where everybody has to show up even if they live far away. It's like being the birthday girl times ten!"

"For the bride, sure," I said. "For the groom it's an awkward night in a sweaty fancy suit where I have to shake a bunch of people's hands and rock back and forth while you dance me around the floor."

Rosemary grinned. "No way. I believe in equal rights, so you're the birthday girl just as much as me. Other than we have to say all the mumbo jumbo words, there are literally no rules."

I grinned too.

The next day, I called up Abraham, because Rosemary was not often wrong. "Hey, it's Tyler Freimann." I told him.

"Tyler?" he answered. "I thought you were dead!"

"No. I'm getting married. I want you to be my best man."

A well of angst that I hadn't felt in years flooded through me as I waited for his response. Could the adventure actually be dead, after all this time?

"Man, it's going to take at least three erasers to get me into a tux."

I breathed. "Don't worry. We're making it a zero-tux production."

My bachelor party could have been worse. By his mid-twenties Abraham had learned to accept the concept of alcohol; however, his relative lack of personal experience led him to choose the cheesiest, most embarrassing version of every pre-marriage tradition known to pocketbook. Some folks claim bachelor parties were invented to mortify a groom, perhaps to distract him from the guillotine to come. And by 'folks' I mean 'complete asshearts who have never had their knees invaded by a spasming brunette in a nurse's outfit in front of twenty onlookers.'

"You don't have to do this ... uh, Nurse Mindy," I said, consulting her lip-shaped nametag. "You're better than the sum of your parts."

She giggled. "You have to admit I have pretty nice parts."

"I'm serious. I know it's your job to flirt with me but can't we just not and say we did? I bet you're, like, a microbiology grad student during the day or something."

"Am I making you uncomfortable?" she asked sweetly. "Because that's my real job."

"Too true," I agreed, and let her carry on.

In the corner Jared was manfully taking on Dex in pool, because beer makes strange connections possible. Some guys from work were outlining a list of rules I had to lay down immediately after carrying my prize over the threshold.

"No taking your shoes off at the door," Brian told me."Once you have to take your shoes off at the door it's all over."

"But I always take my shoes off at the door," I said. "Were you born in a barn?"

"And don't let her withhold, ah, y'know, conjugation."

"No chance of that. She wouldn't last a week."

Brian looked impatient. "Well ... do you like to watch sports on Sunday afternoons?"

"I don't; Rosie does. Unless it's basketball. I'll watch basketball with her, but football sucks."

"You're missing the point," Brian said, throwing up his hands.

"No," said Bill. "I think you are. A wife lasts a long time; at least young Tyler here has found one who suits him."

Brian looked as if he'd just lost at seven-card stud.

And then somehow I was in the lobby with my chin in my hand. "Jesus, Nurse Mindy," I slurred. "What am I doing? Rosemary doesn't deserve this. I'm not fit for her. Unfit. Unfit husband I am. Sure of it."

"Okay, Mr. Freimann," she said, like someone who sees buyer's remorse three times a week. "I'm just going to grab someone who can handle this."

A minute later, Abraham and Ross were dragging me up to my room. "I like hotel rooms," I chattered. "Not the really fancy ones, the budget ones. They're ... full of movement. I wish I lived in hotel rooms. You'd never have to get used to anything you didn't like."

"Get his feet!" said Ross, ignoring me.

When they had me comfortably recovery positioned on the bed, I began to make my case. "This isn't the right thing to do, is it? This is an unequal match. I need to spend about ten more years growing up before I can even think about marriage."

"You are pretty young," said Abraham. "I mean you can't even rent a car yet."

Ross may have made a face at him, but I had rolled over by this time so I couldn't tell. "Juliet was thirteen when she got married."

"Yeah, but she died immediately after," Abraham pointed out.

"Well, but Tyler and Rosemary's parents aren't angry Italian nobles, so I think they'll make it to thirty at the very least," Ross reassured me.

"Never mind," said Abraham. "It'll be fine Tyler. You have sixteen whole hours left to mature."

"I don't think anyone's ever really ready for marriage," Ross mused kindly. "It's probably a good sign if you think she's better than you, right? Maybe she thinks you're better than her."

"Aghhh, don't think so. She's never said."

"Jesus. Look at her actions though," said Abraham, sitting down approximately beside me. "She's marrying you. She could've married that idiot Dex."

"Don't think she could. Dex isn't much of a committer."

"So ... you're afraid you're just her Honda."

"Could be."

"Meaning you think she's stupid and shallow."

That had me sitting up. "No, of course I ... ahhh, I see what you did there, Brah."

"Come on," said Ross. "You love her, and she loves you, and I'm literally going to throw you in the shower if you don't go to sleep."

"How will that help?" I complained.

Ross laughed. "Carrot and stick, man, carrot and stick."

"What's the carrot in this situation?"

Abraham laughed, too. "Not getting thrown into a cold shower."

As it turned out, it wasn't an empty threat.

We had a block of hotel rooms where all our friends were staying, so in the morning, I wandered downstairs for some continental breakfast. Dex was already there, bouncing a very excited flower girl on his knee. Well, perhaps flower girl would be inaccurate. Instead of petals, it had been Rosemary's brilliant idea to arm Dex and Shay's lovely progeny with firework poppers to drop on her journey down the aisle, as we felt it would be more entertaining, even if we didn't get our deposit back.

"She insisted on wearing the dress all day," Dex explained. "I told her she was going to spill something on it, but whatever."

Rosemary, who was also wearing her outfit for the day already, said, "Why waste a good dress?"

"Shay coming?" I asked.

Dex smiled. "Eventually. You try having a human alarm clock permanently set to dawn in your house. You take sleep when you can get it."

Ross and Jackson arrived next. "Belgian waffles," Ross demanded sleepily.

"Belgian waffles," Jackson agreed.

I knew we weren't going to see Abraham or Jared for hours. From my time living with Jared, I had developed a very specific routine for dragging him into the land of the living, but for the time being I let him be. I dug into some cereal and enjoyed the light breakfast conversation. It seemed to go on for hours, people coming downstairs and going up and remembering and lingering far into the soggy, crumb-filled, brunch time of a day without minute markings.

The venue was nearby, so at the designated time, the bridal party met up in the lobby, and everyone walked to the church together. People walk at different speeds, so although I started out next to my parents, I slowly passed through the entire body of our little parade, catching snatches of conversation here and there. When I got to Abraham, I pulled up my pant legs to show him that I was wearing two different socks.

I realized I would never see this exact group of people together again in my life. For a moment, I wished I could slow them all down.

I started to think about all the things I was going to promise Rosemary in a few minutes. We'd already had poorer (a cheerful way of life at twenty-four), sickness (oolong tea, extra honey), and bad times (mostly mine, a few hers). It was the part about 'as long as you both shall live' that was going to be new. I was up for the challenge, of course, but the idea was going to take some getting used to.

Rosemary looked up from her conversation with one of her old friends and smiled at me.

I was pretty sure I was getting the better end of the deal.

###
