The Social Contract

Normandy

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 badass bits jump out at me like boxes falling off the top shelf of a long-shut closet, demanding to be given full dramatic due. Even Abraham thinks I've made him out to be some sort of geek social messiah. ('I was ten!' he kept saying when I showed him an earlier draft of this. 'How could I have said that? Do you even know any kids?') But if truth be told, he's a modest man, and 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.

“For Pete's sake!” the lunchroom monitor told us as she gathered up the remains of the folder barrier we'd erected through the middle of the third table. “Give it a few years,” she muttered. “Give it a few years.”

Abraham was at another table, I think. I knew who he was, but he wasn't really on my radar yet, so just chill out and we'll get to him in a minute. In order to understand why I accepted the Unusual Proposition, you have to understand just what kind of people I was dealing with before I signed on.

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.”