The Game Player by Rafael Yglesias

road.”
    â€œNot if you handled it. Look, you killed the colors in two weeks.”
    He not only ceased to look amused, but he sighed. “Oh, come on.” He stood up and ran his hand through his hair. He looked pale. “I’m tired.”
    â€œSo rest and then get to work on the road.” I reached over to tap his foot encouragingly.
    â€œYou don’t understand. I had to become known in that school. This gave me an excuse to talk to sophomores, juniors, seniors, all the teachers, everybody. God! I made that pious speech thousands of times.” He looked off at the autumn trees, whose brilliant colors gave the suburbs a fragile beauty they sorely lack. “I don’t want to help them do something.” I watched him press his body with his hands. He grabbed a thigh and squeezed, ran them over the small of his back, stretched, and then flexed an arm muscle: a whole series of movements that didn’t seem so much like a maintenance check, but like an awakening of the spirit. “What a bunch of fools.” He sounded almost sad. “I’m surprised by the teachers, I really am. They’re not smart.”
    â€œBrian.” I had made a decision. “You know something? You’re the one who’s not smart.” I stood up to equal his eye level. “You think you fooled them into making you Student Councilman. But sure enough, you were the best person for it. Joseph would have known it was crap, but he would never have acted with such energy. And your opposition was successful because you were right, not because you outplayed them.”
    He looked happy during the silence that followed my speech. His face had smoothed out while listening, he seemed less harassed. His eyes brightened with the wavering light of a flame’s reflection on an opaque surface. He put a hand on my shoulder and I felt the long fingers tense and hold me. “Howard, I’m a demon. A ferocious engine. I’m barely hanging on to the controls and I might start going at any moment and circle wildly. You watch me.” He let me go. “I need you to watch me. Because I don’t care what effect I have. I just enjoy functioning.”
    â€œBut that’s what I’m doing. I’m telling you to push the road.”
    He made his left hand rigid to use it as a comb. It looked like an actor’s idea of someone having a stroke. “Look, I’ve got the football team to handle now. And, besides, our schoolwork’s gonna start getting heavier. I’ll tell you what. Next year I’ll do it.”
    There wasn’t much of a follow-up in Hills People about the proposed school colors change. Just a line that the committee assigned to investigate it had, by a vote of four to two, recommended against making a change. And the Council concurred.

5
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  I like to see ’em squirm.
Bobby Fischer, age fourteen
    H IGH SCHOOL BEGINS with a mad rush to power, but the middle years are stable. It is up to the ten top students to maintain their positions, which they invariably do, though perhaps I can flatter my generation with more fluctuation in this regard, because our sophomore year began in 1967 and our junior year ended in 1969. Drugs, sex, and the Vietnam War were great explosions whose shocks interrupted and distorted our reception of signals from the adult world. My freshman class was all that America could hope for: we wanted the best colleges, the most beautiful of lovers, and a complete collection of American technology. But just as a light bulb will glow intensely before blowing, we were racing our engines, trying to outrun the changes in the world we had been told was waiting for us.
    I remember waking up and going to school sometime towards the end of my sophomore year and everyone seemed to have grown their hair long. I heard about marijuana once and then everyone was smoking it. Only the jocks ever liked the Vietnam War. Most