OptionalFiction

Okay, I know the challenge was to write a piece of fiction every day, but I wasn't feeling that spark today. I know it doesn't bear well for things to come to run out of juice after a week, but we'll see. Anyway, I thought I'd just tell an autobiographical story from my past. I've told it at parties a couple of times already, but maybe I can up the quality in the process of writing it down. I went to school in Germany where secondary school runs from grade five (around age 12) to grade twelve (around age 18). In my own second year the school introduced a “buddy programme” where older kids form grade eleven were paired up with the newly arriving kids from grade five. The goal was to give these new arrivals a person to turn to if they had some trivial problems. The young kids were referred to as “buddies,” the older kids as “mentors”. I was in grade six already, so I didn't get a “mentor,” but I did see these odd couples walk around the school yard during recess. Obviously most of these Buddy relationships quickly stopped and the kids found friends within their own grade and age group. But a number of them didn't. I remember being confused by seeing some of the little kids still tagging along with their “Mentors” a couple of weeks in. And the strangest thing was that these Buddy couples were the ones that seemed the most dysfunctional: The little kids would often be berated, made to carry backpacks or would awkwardly hover around a conversation their mentor was having with their friends. In hindsight I recognize the manipulation tactics that are now so often reported on in the context of toxic (often romantic) relationships. Back then it just seemed odd. But what elevated this oddness to a completely new level was when two “mentors” got into an argument. I never found out what the original dispute was about, but the important thing is that the two decided to settle it by having their little “buddies” have an actual fistfight. The poor kids were in too deep already and it only took minimal convincing for them to have at it. I can't give you the details of the fight as I wasn't present (and also it's two 12 year olds hitting and kicking each other), but I did see the loser after. He was just a bit bruised and mostly just a bit muddy. I was surprised to find a lot more buddies pairing up with their mentors again after that. When I asked a class mate about it she explained that the mentor of the winner had rewarded his performance by doing his homework for a week. There had been a couple more fights (all unprovoked, “just for fun”, as I could tell) until the mentors all got together and planned a big tournament to find the “best Buddy.” Thankfully the teachers caught wind of that before it actually happened and the buddy programme was shut down. When that didn't stop the buddies from tagging along with their mentors a rule was put in place that forbade “association of children more than two grades apart.” They had teachers policing the school yard and splitting up buddy-mentor couples. There still were four more fights before all of these relationships were ended, at least on school grounds.