The group make their way through the crowd in front of the Georgia Theater, looking at all the people waiting on show tickets as they go. Nick leans over conspiratorially to Travis as they made their way. “Over at the ticket booth. She’s buying one. Check her out.”

“What?” Travis asks and looks. There was a particularly unattractive girl at the booth window.

“Yours,” Nick said casually out of the side of his mouth.

“Sonuvabitch!” Travis curses under his breath. “I’ll get you for that.”

As they pass out of the crowd into the intersection of Lumpkin and Clayton, Travis and Nick raise their voices again. “Oh my God! She was awful.” Nick hits Travis in the shoulder. “Did you see the hair bagel on that one.”

Travis doesn’t reply. Retaliation would have to wait. When someone called “yours” everyone was alert, paying attention to the game. You couldn’t get someone then—unless you were good. You had to wait until no one was paying attention again.

The basic premise of the game was simple, and had evolved out of a game that Nick and Travis had originally developed their freshman year. The original game had been invented for the purpose of commenting on the attractiveness of a woman while in close proximity. The player would spot a target, turn to the other and inquire, “What time is it?” The second player would ask, “Where?” and the first player would proceed to name a city that was North, South, East or West of the players’ location. Once the “target” was spotted by the second player a time between one and ten o’ clock was giving as a rating.

By the time they’d gotten adept at the game, Travis and Nick had also invented twenty or so sayings to follow the time as coded comments, like “I think you’re shoelaces are untied,” which was meant to be interpreted as “She’s too young/illegal for you.” One summer afternoon at an amusement park, Nick and Travis had been debating over a certain young woman’s attractiveness when Travis said, “She’s your girlfriend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Nick, thinking he had forgotten one of their secret phrases.

“She’s ugly and you can have her,” Travis replied.

It stuck. “Yours” developed some obscure rules of its own over the years. A player could never lie to get another player to look at the target—could never claim that the target was pretty/handsome if they weren’t. And the peculiar rule-of-three came into being, meaning that if you were given the same boyfriend/girlfriend three times in a row in three different locales, they were yours for life.

It was all terribly shallow and childish. Nick and Travis knew it. But really, they prided themselves on being shallow. There was more time for fun if they didn’t have to worry about trivial matters like manners or politeness.

Read the whole thread: Carousel Cowboy

Characters and Places: Georgia Theater