Tit for Tat

Tit for Tat

Hours later, the three who had not been drugged gathered up their things, and administered a Quaalude to the cooperative Chad. Then Preston cleaned up so that Chad would be none the wiser when he woke up in his own bed. Teal departed, leaving a deceitful pair of panties in Chad's laundry. She reflected that it should be interesting to hear what he eventually made of them. Britain borrowed Chad's keys and filled his car up with gas, to assist the mystery.

At 5:10 PM, the phone in the room rang. “Where ARE you?” the impatient Julie asked, when Chad eventually answered.

Chad felt like he had slept on a cloud, and gotten cotton through and through his senses. “Where AM I?” he asked. He soon followed this with a more conventional “Where are YOU? I'm looking at a clock, and it says 5:10, but I'm not too sure what my next appointment is. Was I supposed to meet you somewhere?”

Julie was concerned. Chad was usually both prompt and solicitous. “You were supposed to come by and hang out. Weren't we going to watch a movie?”

Chad was confused. “What day is it?” he asked.

Alarm bells were going off for Julie. “Chad, are you OK?” she asked.

Chad physically shook his head from side to side. “Yes.” he answered hesitantly.

Julie was walking out the door before she finished her sentence. “Don't go anywhere. I'm coming right over,” she commanded.

Two days later, when Julie and her friends from the nursing program managed to mostly sort things out, Chad had cycled through the depression of withdrawal. Preston and Britain had made themselves scarce, and Teal was unknown to the rest. All they could establish for certain was that Chad had lost time. Preston and his girlfriend had apparently left early for the summer, and no member of the group knew how to reach either them or their parents.

Chad could not account for his lost time, and they were pretty sure he had been “dosed,” but with what or by whom, it was impossible to say. Chad had literally NEVER used, and, being ignorant even the name of the drug he had been given, his body couldn't tell his brain to seek it yet again. He just felt like a kicked dog.

When Julie called Jerry to firm up plans for Florida, she was surprised to learn that his room-mate Mark had provoked such a big fight with a girl named Rachelle, that Rachelle had implored Jerry's parents to take her in, to escape his society. Jerry welcomed the buffer of another couple in his parents' home.

On the road, Chad and Julie had time to talk. Chad's memory returned slowly, and conversation wandered into the realm of theories of Justice. “There's more than one way to establish justice, Jules,” he explained.

“How then?” Julie alternated between feeling petulant and solicitous.

“Well, suppose we were distributing a pie among a group. We could make you cut the pie, but then we could make sure you did your best to be fair, by making you take the very last slice.” Chad ruminated.

“That's doesn't seem fair at ALL!” Julie protested. “The last slice will be the smallest one, and I should be rewarded for doing the work of cutting the pie!”

Chad shook his head and wondered if Jerry could explain it to her. “If you do a bad job of making the pieces equal, you DESERVE the smallest piece.”

Julie pondered this like a stale muffin. “What's another way, then?” she asked.

“Well, what if you deliberately stole a piece? Would it be fair to make you choose your own punishment?” Chad suggested.

This made Julie think unavoidably of a certain stolen “slice,” and she shook her head. “NO! Because then I would give myself the worst punishment possible.”

This response showed a little more promise, and Chad explained how. “OK Julie. If you had to do that several times, wouldn't you learn not to overdo it?”

“Several times,” and “overdo it,” seemed like depth charges launched against the enemy submarine of her guilt, and Julie was petulant. “Isn't that against the 5^th amendment or something?”

Chad moved to clarify. “After that, wouldn't you be better equipped to determine a fair punishment for someone else who stole a slice?”

Julie pondered this in light of her infidelities. Chad had never... and even if he did... “There's just NO WAY!” she responded.

Chad was taken aback, being on the outside of the sodden guilt of her brain, all he could see was that she had stated the EXACT opposite of a logical conclusion. Was this a case of leading a horse to water, only to have it refuse a needed drink? “Why do you say that?” he eventually asked.

Julie couldn't just blurt out that Chad had never stolen a slice, and so she hedged. “HAVE you ever stolen anything?” she asked.

Chad abandoned an emotional avenue of discussion in favor of a cooler head. “What if we played Tic Tac Toe?” he postulated. “If I moved upper right, you would move lower left. I'd move middle top, you'd move middle bottom. Then, I'd move upper left, but you wouldn't get to move; the game would be over before you moved bottom right. That system, where each party mirror's the other party's moves is called 'Tit for Tat!'”

Perversely, this way of looking at it illuminated things that Julie's darkened soul would otherwise have bottled up. To be SURE, she would certainly NEVER have left his middle top move unblocked, in a game of Tic Tac Toe, but what he appeared to have inadvertently proven was that IF she tried to get him to fuck around once for every time she had slipped, THEN she wouldn't be able to block his move, and she would lose. “Then how do you EVER establish fairness?” she finally asked.

Chad saw an opening. “I think you've just seen the most important thing about it. Justice and Fairness are not the same thing!”

Julie felt tricked. “Maybe I better drive for a while,” she suggested. Her mother had always said “Life Isn't Fair.”