The Trust Game

"Okay, rules," Maya said, standing on a folding chair so everyone could hear her. "Two teams. Red and Blue. You play a game where you give your partner some of your tickets, and if they're nice, they give some back."

"They don't have to give them back," Soren added from the floor, sorting tickets into cups. "That's the whole point. You're trusting them."

Maya pointed at the warm-up table. "But first. Everybody on your own team does the silly part. The handshake thing. The staring thing."

The silly part was theirs. Soren had read that trust between people goes up when they look each other in the eyes, when they shake hands, when they sit close. So before the game, each team had to do all of it. Partners facing partners. Hands clasped. Eyes locked for one full minute without laughing, which everybody failed at, which was fine.

"Why?" a Blue kid asked.

"Experiment," Maya said. "You'll see."

The teams did the warm-up. There was a lot of giggling. A girl named Priya stared at her partner so seriously that he snorted soda out his nose. By the end the Red team felt like a Red team. The Blue team felt like a Blue team. You could see it. They'd clumped.

Then the game started.

Soren wrote results in his notebook as the cups came back. His pencil moved fast. Within your own team, people were generous. Red gave to Red. Blue gave to Blue. Tickets came back doubled, tripled. Kids who'd never met an hour ago were splitting their winnings down the middle and grinning about it.

"Look at this," Soren said, turning the notebook toward Maya. "Inside the teams, almost nobody gets cheated."

"The staring thing worked," Maya said. She sounded almost surprised at her own idea. "They trust each other. We made them trust each other in like ninety seconds."

"With a handshake," Soren said. "That's the part I want to understand. How does looking at somebody change what your hands do with your tickets."

"Your body makes a chemical," Maya said. "The teacher said. When you touch, when you look. It turns the trust up."

"Okay, but now," Soren said, and tapped the rules sheet. "Round two. Red and Blue play against each other."

That was where it went strange.

Maya noticed it first, the way she noticed things, before she could say why. She was watching Priya, the serious-staring girl, the soda snorter, the nicest one. In round one Priya had given away almost all her tickets to her own team.

Now Priya was sitting across from a Blue boy. And she went quiet. She held her tickets against her chest. Her eyes got narrow.

"She's not going to give him anything," Maya said.

She was right. Priya gave the Blue boy one ticket. One. The same girl. The exact same girl.

"Wait," Soren said, watching his own column of numbers. "It's everybody."

It was everybody. The teams that had been so generous inside themselves turned stingy across the line. Worse than stingy. A Red kid took a Blue kid's offered tickets and gave back nothing, and laughed, and his whole team laughed with him like he'd done something good.

"That's mean," Maya said. "He wasn't mean an hour ago."

"He wasn't on a team an hour ago," Soren said.

They looked at each other.

"Same chemical," Maya said slowly.

"You don't know that."

"I do, though." She wasn't bragging. She just knew, and was reaching for the why. "It's the same thing. It has to be. We did the staring and the handshakes to make them trust. We turned the chemical up. But we only turned it up toward Red, or only toward Blue."

Soren was already shaking his head, then stopped halfway, because she might be right and he hated and loved that feeling at once. "So you're saying the thing that makes Priya share everything with her own team."

"Is the same thing that makes her not share with the boy." Maya nodded. "It doesn't make you nice. We thought it made you nice. It makes you nice to your people."

Soren wrote that down. He underlined people twice. Then he sat very still with his pencil off the page.

"That's the part," he said. "That's the part I don't like. We didn't tell them to be mean to the other team. We never said that. We only did the warm-up. The friendly part."

"And the mean part came free," Maya said.

"With the friendly part." Soren looked up. "You can't get one without the other?"

"I don't know," Maya said. And she meant it . "Maybe nobody knows."

They ran round three to check. They mixed the teams. Made the Reds and Blues do the staring thing with each other, the handshakes, the close sitting, the failed not-laughing.

It took longer this time. The kids resisted it. Priya did not want to hold the Blue boy's hands. She did it anyway, rolling her eyes.

Then they played again.

Priya gave the Blue boy half her tickets.

Maya let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. "It moved. The line moved. It's not stuck."

"We moved it," Soren said. "With a handshake. The same handshake." He was writing fast now, faster than his neat letters usually allowed. "So the line is real but you can put it anywhere. You can draw the circle bigger."

"Or smaller," Maya said quietly. "Somebody could draw it smaller. On purpose."

That landed in the room between them and neither of them picked it up right away.

"People do, though," Soren said. "Don't they. Draw it small on purpose."

"And big on purpose." Maya looked out at the mixed-up teams, who were laughing again, all of them, no colors now. "It's just a chemical. It just goes where you point it."

Priya tapped Maya's arm. "Are we Red or Blue now?"

"Neither," Maya said. "You're just everybody."

Priya considered this. Then she went and sat down next to the Blue boy, on his side of the table, and slid her whole cup of tickets into the middle where anybody could reach it.

Soren watched the cup sit there in the middle of the table, unguarded, with hands of two different colors resting around it, and he did not write anything down.