The Social Contract

Fabric Softener and Solidarity

I'd been driving north a good hour before I realized there was nowhere to drive to. My only thought as I'd left had been to get away, and north had seemed like a good direction … everything wholesome and everlasting lay north of Wright-Childers College to some degree. But I only had about forty minutes left until I hit the interstate. Where lay refuge?

Obviously I couldn't go see my parents. How would that look? It was 12:47PM. They were already in bed. There was no way I could just bound into my parents' house and announce that everything was terrible, like some overgrown child having nightmares about the ennui-monster. Even in the morning they'd think I was going through a phase. They wouldn't say so but they'd know, between the two of them, the way old people always do. My father might even find it encouraging, my taking an intellectual turn for once, a possibility I couldn't abide somehow. Who'd want to feel like this?

Maybe I was going through a phase at that, but I wanted to find someone going through the same phase.

Some of my old friends still lived near my hometown but I hadn't really bothered to keep in contact. Almost every conversation I'd had with my high school friends had been about our environment: people who lived in it, things to do in it, how much we hated it; now that we'd gone our separate ways geographically there wasn't much left to tether us together. A part of me wished I were still a part of that world, but only because it was the one I came from. A flower has to deal with a few rough transplantings if it wants to make it to the garden of Eden.

Maureen was still being stubborn. She lived with her mother still, in the same old house I'd always visited so eagerly, and for all I knew she was sitting on the doorstep where I got my first kiss, right at that moment. Although it'd be pretty weird, come to think of it, Maureen chilling all alone on the stoop after midnight. She worked mornings.

The conversation I needed to have now was about high level difficulties that cut right to the middle of me; I couldn't just start the story from scratch. I had hoped my fellow collegians would aid me in this regard, with the scruples of a higher level of mental difficulty, but the relative plastic-covered-furniture nature of most of my relationships made it hard for me to communicate certain delicate personal troubles. I'd just recently gotten them to not be annoyed by normal-Tyler – how would they take the basket case version?

“You're studying too hard,” Dextros had once advised me, slapping me on the back after I turned down yet another invitation to trivia night (3.3 adjusted on the Tradition-o-meter. Never actually went but, you know, from what I heard.) 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.”

I don't think it had occurred to him that some people read books they hadn't been assigned in class … almost as if people majored in the liberal arts because they liked to read. And at some point when I hadn't been paying attention, I guess I'd become one of those people.

“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 Dextros. “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.”