I didn't figure out the rules until this year. I didn't even realize there was a game going on until I was in sixth grade, long after most of my peers had mastered it. I carefully gathered evidence, scrutinizing the other players and their moves, and on occasion I would figure out a rule and make what I thought was a strategic move. Inevitably, however, my version of the rules turned out to be inaccurate and downright delusional. As a result, whatever game there was, I lost by a wide margin.


Before I went to public school, I had almost no contact with my peers. I spent every waking moment with my Mother, whom I would kiss on the cheek. In my mind, this became a rule: kiss women when you greet them. On my first day of school, before I even had entered the building, I sealed my reputation for four years by kissing the first girl I saw. Her name was Autumn. She was tall.


A riot ensued. Now, my previous lack of social interaction made this a bit like doing shots on an empty stomach. All of a sudden, I was the center of attention in a group of my peers, a position I hadn't occupied before. I made a note in my blank rulebook to the effect of "kiss stranger for one round of unlimited attention," right under "kiss female to greet". Little did I know that attention was not automatically beneficial; it was intoxicating, and that was enough.


Clearly, my version of the rules was faulty. Based on this foundation, I proceeded to operate according to other rules. "Touch other students on their rear ends for attention," was one that got me into trouble and led to an embarassing parent-teacher conference. "Weird=superior" was an all-purpose rule that I kept using through high school. Clearly, my rules were not The Rules, but I kept following them anyway.


In fourth grade, my teacher had me tested for Gifted and Talented classes. I was shown a picture of some boys digging, and was asked to write a reaction to it. In my story, the boys uncovered the remains of Baluchiterium, also known as the Beast of Baluchistan. In retrospect, I can see the look on the proctors' faces when they read it and had to look Baluchistan up in the Dictionary. I didn't know that Baluchistan was a place in Russia. I simply liked the word.

So off I went to G&T classes for fifth grade. One would think that I could figure The Rules out a little better, surrounded by kids who were, like me, a bit different. Alas, no. Now I not only didn't know the social rules; I didn't know the academic rules.

Mrs, Gillette didn't do discipline. We each kept a ledger of Free Times on notecards in a little box on her desk. We could earn Free Times for good behavior, and lose them for things like not writing your name on your paper, speaking out of turn, punching a kid in the face and mashing active yeast into his hair during a class experiment (guilty!) or other infractions. Now I was smart. I did my work, but those pesky Rules kept me from reaping the glory of Free Times. These credits could be used to spend time playing video games on the computer(a computer! Wow, fourth grade didn't have anything like that), to get candy, to spend extra time at recess, all sorts of marvelous things. When Mrs. Gillette had an auction for somes goodies, I had my eye on an enormous gummi lizard of some sort. I looked in my Free Times ledger to see how much I could bid. -43. Negative. Forty-three.


Now each of my smart little peers had their own tricks to staying in the social circle. Some wore Jams and spiked their hair. Some talked about Star Trek all the time and turned the monkey bars into a version of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Some even successfully did what I tried to do: be outrageous. Noah S. was one such, and he had the temerity to come as a flasher for Halloween--a stunt that put him at the top of the heap for weeks--but Noah had learned the number one Rule of being outrageous: "Don't Care". If you do it for the attention, you're sunk. People can smell desperation, and they mock it pitilessly.

This was fairly tolerable for the bulk of fifth grade. On occassion I even made little forays into the realm of what I came to know as "Cool". For instance, at one point I caught wind that some of the residents of Cool had formed a clud called the KBI: the Kid's Bureau of Investigation. I inferred from the title that such a group would follow in the tracks of Encyclopedia Brown, The Hardy Boys and, my favorites, The Three Investigators, tracking down and unravelling all sorts of mysteries. My little mind ran wild with this possibility; I had devoted hours to reading and rereading these books, carefully examining the texts for clues before looking in the back, rarely if ever being stumped. It had never occurred to me that these things might actually happen to me, that I myself might solve a mystery, encounter some danger, and--an important ingredient--be admired by my peers for it. I set to work immediately, and my imagination took the idea farther than they probably had conceived. I used PrintShop to create a KBI logo, pixel by pixel, on acard that flipped open along a horizontal axis, just like a real secret agent's would. I bought a book that deetailed the how tos of spying, leaving secret messages, forming disguises, etc. I became obsessed with finding the material known as plasticine which the book recommended for faking scars. Of course, the real problem of forming a KBI was the dearth of mysteries to be found, so I decided to have a weekly mystery contest. I checked out a book of "Two-minute Mysteries" from the library with the intent of posting one a week for fellow members to puzzle over, with the results revealed at the end of the week and prizes awarded for the first correct answer. I would, of course, recuse myself.

The task then became to convince my classmates that this would be a sound plan, forgetting for an instant that it was their idea to begin with. I printed out a copy of my KBI badge and left it conspicuously on my desk. Sure enough, Tim W., one of the select, wandered by and noticed it. "Interesting," I heard him say, and remarked to myself that a good spy would never reveal himself like that. Later at recess, the Brian M., cool, skateboarding leader of the KBI, came up to me and offered me the position of Field Operative, in exchange for the secret of the cool badges.

In my mind, I had uncovered a Rule: "If your ideas are good enough, you will be eventually recognized as cool". Of course, the rule that I should have observed was, "People will say anything to get what they want from you". Evidently, the duties of a Field Operative are to be ignored by everybody else, and for his quite good ideas, even by adult standards, to go unreviewed, let alone accepted.