The child sat on the warm bricks eating his lunch, leaning against a rough brick wall and watching the other children playing on the grass. He joined in occasionally but preferred imaginary games to the more physical sort of tag they were playing now. He liked marbles, but they weren’t fashionable at the moment so he was content to sit and watch and dose in the sun.
He liked watching, observing the complex and ever changing social hierarchy and it’s effects on the group dynamic. The smallest of things, say bringing a new toy, or comic could vastly improve one’s social standing, but only temporarily, before the next craze grabbed their undivided attention. There were other ways to increase one’s status too. Achievement in sport was one. Another was simply to be seen as popular. He suspected that was why girls often travelled around in groups, by being seen in a group, one was assumed to be popular. He was particularly impressed with this type of circular reasoning as it seemed a likely way for an evolutionary arms race to begin. He’d been reading about them recently and he liked how they neatly explained both peacocks tails and the Cold War. Still thinking along these lines he began to imagine he was a naturalist from the distant future who had been sent back in time to study these primitive humans’ early attempts at education. Perhaps he really was a time travelling naturalist who just thought he was a boy. It would certainly explain a lot. The child would toy with this idea more and more frequently as the years went by. Now, however, his attention was diverted buy a large lumpy shadow which was blocking the sunlight.
“Gimme your hand!”
“What do you want, Kevin?” the child said.
“I wanna show you a trick. You gotta hold out your hand.”
“OK” said the child, standing up and hesitantly holding out his hand.
The large lumpy boy grabbed the hand and bent the thumb backward in what he seemed to think was a very painful way. “Ha, ha. Tricked you!” he shouted gleefully.
“Yes, very funny.” The child said with a completely straight face and walked off.
Walking away, the child felt somewhat disturbed by the incident. Not by any pain in this thumb, young bones are quite flexible and he had been holding his hand fairly loosely, but by the bully’s behaviour. He’d been trying to inflict pain on the child and had seemed to anticipate a reaction that would provide him with some sort of sadistic pleasure. The child had not provided him with this and so he had lost interest. But this might not always be the case. The bully might try his trick on another of the children, perhaps one of the girls, who might react with fear, and thus only encourage him further. The child toyed with the idea of waiting until he observed such behaviour and then gallantly rushing to the rescue, but decided prevention might be better as girls his age probably wouldn’t appreciate chivalry anyway. Looking around for some authority figure to question further about the matter he spotted his first grade teacher talking to one of the girl prefects he quite liked. Prefects where practically grown up, usually about twelve or thirteen they were in the child’s opinion a great improvement on his class mates. Some of them even had breasts! This particular one, Jessica, was very pretty and she had told him several times that she though he was cute. Very politely, the child greeted both of them and motioned them closer in a highly conspiratorial manner. “We have a Thumb Bender!” he hissed.
“A what?” asked his first grade teacher, loudly.
“A Thumb Bender. Kevin, he bends thumbs.” said the child in a more normal voice, his teacher obviously lacked any sense of drama.
“Like with his mind?” interjected Jessica.
The child smiled, “That would have been way cooler, but this is Kevin we’re talking about after all.” The child winked at her. “No, I’m afraid that he’s doing it the more conventional way. He bent mine earlier and I though I should let you know.”
“You poor thing!” Jessica sympathised, putting her hand on his arm. “The rotten bully! I think you should bend his thumb back.”
The child welcomed the sympathy as well as the physical contact but was a bit disappointed by her proposed “solution”. She’d seemed so imaginative before. He looked at his teacher enquiringly.
“I agree!” she said.
“But I don’t want to bend his thumb back.” The child replied.
“Of course you do. He bent yours didn’t he? If you do, he’ll think twice before bending yours again.”
“You really think I should?” the child asked incredulously.
“Yes!” they both replied.
“OK. Uh, thanks.” the child said and backed away slowly from these two obviously crazy people, before making a quick dash around the corner.
After running for a bit, the child stopped, leaned against the wall, and, breathing heavily, began to shake uncontrollably, finally dissolving into a fit of crazed laughter. Eventually he managed to pull himself together enough to stand up straight. The child really hoped that he was a time travelling naturalist and not actually stuck in this crazy situation, but either way, he decided he might as well just sit back and watch the exponential spread of Thumb Bending Behaviour through his elementary school.
And he did.
