Eshtine

Girls Chase Boys part 2

Now to the playing of the game itself.
In its original incarnation, someone would shout "Girls chase boys!" and all the girls would stampede after the boys. Then someone (the same someone? A referee? One of the players? I don't remember) would shout "Boys chase girls!" and the tide would be reversed.
Nothing but that frantic yelled command has stayed in my memory about the original game--nothing about whether the object was to tag or capture, nothing about how the timing of the call to switch from hunting to hunted was determined. It could well have been, essentially, a game without rules. Maybe I don't remember tags or captures because if any girl came close to tagging a boy, his friend would shout "boys chase girls!" and the rush would become retreat. Maybe it was set up in such a way that nothing would ever be accomplished.
Games without rules can end up having the most complicated rules of all. Bill Waterson, who drew the fabled comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes," demostrated this principle with "Calvinball," a game played by the strip's 6-year-old protagonist and his stuffed tiger. Each of the players was continually proclaiming new rules whose object was to give the rulemaker an advantage. "Girls Chase Boys," an anarchic game at the start, evolved by a similar process to mind-boggling complexity.
There were team captains--I was head of the girls' team, Scott P. head of the boys' team. There was a second in command on each side--Tim H., Angie S. There was a base or headquarters for each team--that space between the doors leading out of each playground. If we dragged a boy within the girls' HQ, he became a "girl." That, then, became the object of the game--to capture and evade capture. Immediately the complications spun forth. There was a slab of white pavement just within the "cave." The boys we captured insisted they didn't achieve girl status unless we brought their feet down on the red brick beyond this white space. One time we achieved this (too easily, I realize now) with Scott P., who read rather a lot of Ian Fleming. He quickly became a plotting member of the girls' team, assisting with all our plans of attack--until we learned it was all a setup. He was feeding our information back to the boys' team as a double agent. Oh, that was a misunderstanding, he told us when we confronted him. He wanted the boys' team to think this way to gain their trust and get more information out of them. He wasn't a double agent but a triple agent. We were only too happy to have him recaptured by the boys' team. (The only other time we almost captured Scott we did so with brute force. On a Class Mass day, at least four girls had him lifted off the ground, two for each arm and two for each leg, trying to carry him to the base. But he wriggled and wriggled and wriggled some more, managing to drop from our clutches just as the bell rang.)
There were other intrigues--like a time when Girls Chase Boys plotting spilled into the school day (not an isolated occurence, I'm sure) and I let a gullible boy intercept a fake battle plan. There were quiet, non-Class Mass days when Scott and I were the only two at school before church. There'd be no point in the elaborate game if we had no players, and we'd lost interest in the simpler game, so we'd just hang out and talk--guardedly of course, careful not to give away any secrets to the enemy. Still, I came to think of him with the grudging respect I imagined some high-ranking CIA agent held for a KGB mastermind. I called him "comrade." It was the 80s; we couldn't help but play Cold War.