The Social Contract

Pirate Strategos

We hit our next little adventure a few years later. Abraham had 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 now occasionally held social conversations purely for enjoyment, usually with people who knew more imaginary languages than I did real ones. I was, well, pretty much the same, with slightly more developed tastes in slightly more developed women.

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

Between the end of my last class and the arrival of my mother, who had by that time gotten a real job because she didn't love her family, I would sit in The Lounge and wait. Probably I spent about 96% of my life in The Lounge. 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 Conquer 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 which ate nickels, so if nickels were all you had, you had to arrange things ahead of time with Mr. Portis, the unofficial Lounge Guru.

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.

“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 for the school art show. “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.”