Conflict, Belonging, and Status by Dean Gloster

 

            When I was a startlingly obnoxious, undersized freshman in high school, my older brother, Vance, was forced by my parents to take me lots of places with him. He drove a tiny 1970 Toyota Corona.

 

          Vance was a junior and involved in every activity known to adolescence: He was in stage band, debate, junior achievement, model U.N., nearly half-a-dozen other things, and he had his own rock band, so he had lots of friends and acquaintances. Most of them didn’t drive, so Vance sometimes had more than six of us in his tiny car. There isn’t really room for more than five in the passenger compartment of a Toyota Corona, and I was small and quick with the insulting jokes and comments (did I mention obnoxious?) so I often rode in the trunk.

            There was a little latch that I could use to pop open the trunk, and so—in what passed for a blast in 1972 Reno, Nevada—at stop signs I would pop open the trunk, lurch nearly upright, and yell provocative things at whoever was behind us. “Free the trunk people!” “Protect elephants! We’re running out of trunks!” “Sleep, grownups! Or only kids will be napped!” Then I’d slam the trunk and off we’d go. Oh, the sophisticated fun.

            One night, near curfew, when there were 10 teenagers crammed in the front on each other’s laps and I was in the trunk, they tried to yell something to me, but sound was pretty muffled where I was, so I didn’t realize I’d been called off. So I popped up, prepared to yell, and realized I was staring at the headlights of the police car behind us.

            Oh.

            Instead of yelling, I gave the police a small wave, smiled sheepishly, and quietly closed the trunk again.

 

            Which brings us to our blog topic for today, conflict.

            We writers are told that conflict holds readers interest (it does) but that has to be plausibly realistic, character-driven, and it has to matter.

            Fortunately, there are two flavors of conflict that always matter and come up all the time: First, connection (belonging, the opposite of exclusion); second, status/hierarchy.

            If you want conflict in dialogue, for example, have one character try to connect, and another one pulling rank.

            Those kinds of conflict resonate for us humans, because they were so important for the crucial two-million-year hunter-gatherer phase of human evolution: Belonging is critical, because back then, if you were shoved out of the tribe, you probably died. And status/hierarchy was important too, because in a pack being higher status means perks like eating first—a lot more fun than eating non-existent leftovers and moths.

            But we don’t have to go all the way back to the savanna of the Pleistocene to see this in action. A night in Reno, Nevada in the 1970s at a four-way stop is far enough.  

            When I was shoved in the trunk, it was for a very good reason: My parents were about to get divorced, my mom was half-way through her twelve-year program of drinking herself to death, and I was a smart, tightly-wound bundle of anger and sadness that mostly showed itself by my being a sarcastic put-down artist. (Which did not serve me well with peers.) I spent the fall that year in freshman football, smashing myself head first into much larger kids, which worked through enough of my anger that I eventually gave up the smart mouth except for responding to Republican politicians on Twitter.

            But there was still enough of my obnoxiousness in the fall of 1972 before the end of football season that the juniors in Vance’s car made the collective decision I would ride in the trunk, not the passenger compartment. They decided I didn’t belong.

            And—important—they were juniors. And Vance’s friends, whom he actually wanted to drive around. They outranked me.

            My clear recollection is that I couldn’t hear anyone’s orders “Don’t open the trunk!” But maybe that’s just the story I stuck to at the time, so firmly that now that it’s the remembered part. They’d put me in the trunk of a freaking green Toyota Corona, I had the ability to open that trunk, and I was not about to take directions from people who’d put me there.

            Besides, I liked doing my surprise shouty bits. It was sort of like stand-up, except that when I popped the trunk, there was only room to sit up, not really stand.

 

            Fortunately, the cop had a sense of humor. Or was busy. Or did not want the headache of figuring out how to get 11 teenagers home with curfew approaching when only five of them could be seat-belted legally in the car. And—to be very clear—I am white. A remarkable number of my cheerful consequence-free interactions with police from 14-19 all have that strong vanilla smell in retrospect of white privilege.

            But for whatever the reason, he let us go without pulling us over.

            But the possibility did create some suspense, which is a topic for another month.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. School Library Journal called it “a sweet, sorrowful, and simply divine debut novel that teens will be sinking their teeth into. This wonderful story…will be a hit with fans of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars and Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” His YA short story “Death’s Adopted Daughter” is in the anthology Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop from Autonomous Press, and his YA short story, “Proof of the Existence of Dog” is now out in the anthology Spoon Knife 7: Transitions. He is at work on two more YA novels, one in draft and the other in revision, and makes periodic anti-authoritarian limericks and other ramblings on the prince of fools app formerly known as Twtter, at @deangloster. His brother Vance is a fine human being but was pretty annoyed with Dean's obnoxiousness in 1972. For good reason.