How Green Becomes Wood

"I think of myself more as the big sister of the group," Sloan said, "anyway, it's hard to be the mom of the group when certain group members can't cope with being cared for. Anyway I'm not packing fruit snacks for you all, I'll just give you advice."
 
"I'll pack fruit snacks!" Alec volunteered.

"You'll fully intend to pack fruit snacks and then forget," Xander said dryly.

Alec shrugged. "Close enough. We gotta head to class! I'm not sure where it is."

"I got it, don't worry," Xander sighed.
 
"See you!" Alec waved.

"We share our last class. That's nice!" Peter remarked happily. "But for now, I have to bid you guys a fair dinkum day!"

Xander snorted while Alec laughed and said goodbye. Xander looked for Milo again as they went to their next class, intending to sit near him if possible, but he didn't want to pressure Milo or make him feel smothered, so if Milo was ducking him or didn't want to sit together, he'd take the hint.
 
Milo did come and sit near to Xander. For one thing, Xander, despite being shorter than him, was significantly more intimidating, so he felt more secure, but more importantly, he was his friend, and not one who forced him to talk all the time. Really, though, he was just glad the day was coming to a close, because he was already completely fried.
 
"Last class!" Alec cheered, but even he was getting tired. He was ready for the day to end, too, though he'd had a good amount of fun. "Time to face the last class." He couldn't help a yawn. "Do we have cookies at home? We should have cookies."

Xander muttered quietly, not really paying attention to Alec as he tiredly plodded along ahead of him. He was ready to go home, and he didn't care if there were cookies or not, but there was one last class.

As they walked through the hallway, a larger boy neither Alec nor Xander recognized was roughhousing with one of the football players and clearly not paying attention. When the slightly smaller but still substantial footballer stumbled toward them, Xander instinctively shoved Alec and Milo out of the way before blocking the bigger guy with his arm and body weight. The footballer wheezed when Xander's forearm caught him across the back but didn't seem to care. He caught a glimpse of Xander and then launched himself back at the bigger guy.

"There's not enough room for that," Alec grumbled as he hurried to take shelter in the classroom.
 
Milo stared at all of the boys with a flat, almost vacant expression on his face, "It is the first day back. You think they could wait a bit before getting back to it." Then he slipped into the classroom, very nearly visibly annoyed by the hallway situation.
 
"I agree," Alec huffed, settling into his seat. "I understand boys our age are supposed to be prone to messing about, but why not outside? On the grass is a lot softer and less dangerous."

"It's like sticking two new horses in a pasture. They need to muck about and reestablish who's boss before school tames them and takes their extra energy," Xander said dryly.
 
"Girls are like that, too, but in a different way," Alec said, lining up his pen and pencil. "Girls are constantly taught not to be confrontational in a physical way, and a large majority of them are naturally inclined not to be confrontational. Boys, on the other hand, well, we have a lot of testosterone and the primal urge to claim dominance. It's actually been shown that in elephant herds, if there are too many young males together without an older male, their testosterone levels massively spike and they will behave exactly like those boys in the hallway and cause a lot of damage to themselves, each other, and their surroundings. However, if you add an older male in the mix - or multiple depending on the size of the herd - they essentially tell the younger ones to knock it off and behave or else, and that brings down their testosterone levels. In this environment, for us humans, we have too many adolescents per adult, and adults are either constrained from telling kids to knock it off or have bought into ideas like 'boys will be boys' and laugh it off, ignoring the trauma they, themselves, went through at that age. They call it such things as 'rights of passage,' but really it's because they are feeding the temporary primal nature with no regard to the future or others' temperments."
 
"You spend a lot of time with your mom, huh?" Milo replied, not intending to sound dismissive, "I must have missed the testosterone message. I've never, you know, felt like I really need to compete, like that. I'd rather be ignored, you know? I'm like, a, uh, you know, opossum."
 
"Yes, yes I do," Alec said almost proudly with a little nod. "And there's always outliers, and you, by the sounds of things, was not raised by a gorilla, and you were in situations where you had to do real survival. After that, you'd either be worse than those guys, or like how you are. Of course, all of this is general. Individuals will always be individual."
 
Milo shifted uncomfortably at the phrase true survival. That made it sound really severe, which isn't at all how he felt about it, mostly because it was still too hard to except, "We're all doing real survival, you know. Just in different ways."
 
Alec started to say something about survival, but Xander nudged his leg under the desk and shook his head. Alec looked at Milo, realized now was very much not the time, and changed the subject quickly. Class was about to start soon, anyway. "Sloan's birthday is this Friday."
 
"Wow, 18." Milo said, slouching down. He hadn't known her long enough for her becoming an adult to really strike him as astounding, but she was only a year older than them, which meant, "We're really close to being adults, aren't we."
 
"I doubt it," Xander said. "18 is just an arbitrary number. Some of us are already adults, and some idiots are still big kids at 40."

"I think a lot will open up for us," Alec said with a smile.
 
"I think some of us may feel like adults, but we've still got stupid teenage brains." Milo replied with a shrug, "I bet when we're 30 we'll look back at how we feel like we were adults at 16 and laugh."
 
"True, but then a lot of stupid teenage brains make better choices than adults, sadly," Alec sighed. "It's all just so... random and weird, but you're right. We'll probably think we were such children when we're older."
 
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