Small Boy Drama

A couple of weeks ago, my son went down the street to investigate what his friends were doing. He wanted to ride bikes outside. Unfortunately, they wanted to wrestle and play video games (which they were currently engaged in when he arrived). For a child who loves to play at cage fighting with his grandfather, he is surprisingly uninterested in physical altercations with children his own age (and, to be fair, the cage fighting games are highly ritualized, involving helmets and outfits and announcers and everything...), so he outright refused to participate in wrestling. And he had his heart set on bike-riding, so he didn't want to play video games either.
Unfortunately, then he made a mistake. He told an entire group of 9-year-old boys that they were boring. Obviously, they retaliated in kind and, since he was one against many, he was banished from the house and the fun.
I was sitting on the front porch to watch him go down the street, so I was also witness to his return, tears pouring down his cheeks, and disappointment writ in every line of his sad, skinny little self.
Such little dramas are usually commonplace in our neighborhood. Someone won't like what someone else is doing in a game, tempers will flare, and angry tears follow. Usually the upset is short-lived and by the next day, they have all forgiven (and probably forgotten) what came the day before.
However, this time, that didn't happen.

I'm not sure if it was because it's the tail-end of summer, and it's a million burning degrees outside, and these other children's parents are just tired of preventing their boys from playing video games 24/7, or if the insult was really that deeply felt on both sides of the argument, or if the other boys were on vacation and actually out of town. For whatever reason, our front door was shockingly un-molested for the next 2 weeks.

My proud, hard-headed son refused to seek out their company, despite his own boredom with the pace of adult life that pervades in our house. Every suggestion of "go find out what your friends are doing" was met with the disgusted rejoinder "they're not my friends any more."  One day, while helping E clean his room, I found a scrap of paper with "I hate A & N" (the two boys he's closest to) written over and over in rather hilariously disturbing fashion. I was beginning to think that the little idyllic neighborhood gang had truly fallen apart.

Then one evening, the day before school was going to start, E was complaining after dinner that he was bored. Being extremely persistent, I timidly suggested "Maybe you should go see what your friends are doing." Sure enough, as hotly as ever, he replied "They're not my friends!" But then, D said mildly, "They came looking for you this weekend."
There was a profound pause.

"Well, maybe in a little bit, I'll go see what they're doing." He threw out nonchalantly, the eagerness in his voice not at all well-hidden.

Within 5 minutes, there was a knock at our front door. E leaped off of the couch like he had been shot from a cannon, disappeared out the front door, and in no time, this is the scene that was playing out on our back patio:

All is right with the world again.