There Are Some Challenges to Stand and Face and Others You Must Escape
A consequence of innocence is the weight of undeserved shame
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Like dogs at the pound, the students erupted at the ringing of the bell. Tails wagging, desks slamming shut, there was an explosion of noise and a blur of motion.
Mrs. Whitewash slouched back into her chair, exhausted. Always on the edge of losing control, she’d made it through another day.
Kip knew better than to go running to the cloakroom. Kids like Eric, Martin, and Dean would be fighting in there. Actually, they didn’t call it fighting. They communicated through beating, biting, and kicking. To them, that was normal behavior.
Everything had to be a race. The bell was a starting gun. They knew Mrs. Whitewash had already given everything she had. The echo of the tiny hammer against the bronze meant they were free. It was a good thing none of them knew how to tell time or they might have anticipated the bell and broken the last thread holding Mrs. Whitewash together.
A moment before entering the cloakroom, one of them would try to push the others into the wall. They were the type of kids that could withstand tremendous impacts.
Once, during a game of King of the Hill, Martin had propelled Eric into the brick corner of the school with such force that Kip was sure he’d been knocked clean dead.
Face first, arms behind him, Eric slammed into the brick, a full-on headshot right to the skull.
For a full beat, he remained motionless on the ground. Before anyone could track down a recess monitor, he began to move, slowly at first. Then, without warning, he exploded into the air with enough fury to drive away any sense of sympathy that’d been gathering among the onlookers.
“I’m going to KILL you for that!” Eric screamed.
Martin, who had been laughing this whole time, reached over to grab another boy to hurl at Eric and impede his everlasting charge up the inclined surface of the snow hill. The battle raged on.
Back in the classroom, Kip made eye contact with Lyla.
Lyla had large, brown eyes.
Sometimes Kip became displaced in his own memories and he got confused about what was real and what was fantasy. He often couldn’t decide which world he’d rather inhabit.
“It’s better to let them finish before we go,” somebody said, and Kip realized it was Lyla. Lyla was speaking to him!
“Yes,” Kip said. “They get too rough.”
“They have to bounce off the wall six times before they get their boots on.”
“And they don’t care who they hurt,” Kip said.
Something about this conversation with Lyla made him feel good. It calmed him as if, maybe, he’d found an ally.
Lyla offered a comforting smile, then she looked past him to the cloakroom.
Eric and Martin emerged as if pursued. Simultaneously, they slammed into either side of the cloakroom door.
“Why…” Mrs. Whitewash began to mutter, and then she gave up and resumed the unfocused stare that was customary for this time of day.
Kip felt emboldened. “Yes,” he said, “why do they have to crash into the walls? Why? And why doesn’t anyone tell them to stop?”
“Oh, they tell them,” Lyla said. “It’s just that the boys don’t listen. Somebody needs to make them stop.”
Kip nodded.
The feral boys vacated the space. Kip went to stand up but saw that Lyla had started to stand as well so he sat back down.
“Aren’t you coming?” Lyla asked.
“I thought I’d let you go first,” Kip said. Then he shrugged. “There’s not much space in there.”
“Come now,” Lyla said. “All the other kids have gone, there’s plenty of room for us.”
So Kip stood and went.
In silence, he sat beside Lyla putting on his boots, snow pants, and jacket. His hat and mittens were in the sleeve of his jacket right where he had left them. The cloakroom floor was covered in single gloves and even a sock. The feral boys had come through like a stiff wind through an autumn forest.
“How do you lose a sock?” Kip asked. “Don’t they notice when they get outside? Don’t they get cold?”
“They don’t feel anything,” Lyla said.
Kip nodded and struggled to lift his backpack. His backpack was always heavy. He had seven tomes from seven different subjects that he had to bring home every night.
Eric, Dean, and Martin never carried backpacks. They ran free through life consuming and destroying everything in their path without consequence.
It was odd. They were a mystery. A different set of rules applied to them.
Kip noticed that Lyla was struggling with her shoulder straps, so he helped her.
“Thank you,” she said.
And then, they were moving.
Both of them knew you could never pass through a doorway without looking. Kids were always sprinting by at full speed. Projectiles flew through the air, paper or pencils or spit.
The two paused behind the cover of a doorway to survey the scene. Lyla gave the all clear and Kip followed.
Mrs. Whitewash didn’t even look up at them. She sat like an unplugged vacuum cleaner that the janitor had forgotten to put away.
Into the hallway.
Past the lines of lockers.
Down the stairs.
Stairs could be lethal. With Dean, Martin, and Eric flying around, there was a high probability of getting knocked down the stairs, not even on purpose. On more than one occasion, Kip had saved his own life by ducking into a door well as the feral kids went hurtling by.
Falling down the stairs didn’t hurt them. They just left cracks in the concrete and dusted themselves off.
Kip and Lyla made it through the front door and into the yard.
The line of yellow buses stood grumbling in the street.
The river of children diverted like a delta. Colorful jackets, hats, and backpacks made their way to the buses.
Normally, Kip’s bus was the third in the line.
But not today.
Because today, Kip saw something that made him pause and blink and wonder if he was confusing fantasy with reality again.
He saw a man who appeared to be his dad. The man was leaning out the window of a two-tone Chevrolet Suburban. The car was light blue on the bottom and top, with a dark blue stripe in the middle.
Kip didn’t recognize the car, but he recalled a disagreement between his dad and his mom as to whether they should be purchasing a car.
“But it’s such a great deal!”
“Our car is fine.”
“You’re being unreasonable, at this price, we’re losing money by not buying it!”
“Money you spend on a car you don’t need is lost no matter how great a deal you think it is.”
Kip’s thoughts were interrupted as his dad began leaning on the horn.
“Hey, Kip! Hey! Over here!” At the sound of the horn, every kid in the various rivulets of humanity that were trickling out of the front of the school turned to look in his direction.
They all scowled.
Dean, Martin, and Eric cried out, “Look, there’s the guy who’s holding up the busses. It’s Kip. We’ll get him tomorrow.”
Kip’s dad kept laying on the horn. “Hey Kip! What’s the matter, don’t you see me? Yeah, you, kid! Get over here! We’ve got to get home! Come on! You’re making everyone wait. Don’t you realize what a huge nuisance you’re being?”
Now kids started laughing, but not humor laughing. It was rage laughing.
Kip looked out over a sea of hatred.
In the midst of it, he saw one set of sympathetic brown eyes.
Lyla.
But then Lyla had to duck and cover because Martin kept crashing into kids and transferring his momentum. Those kids hurled through space, each one crashing into two more.
The whole schoolyard was about to go nuclear.
A meaty hand clamped down on Kip’s shoulder. He didn’t need to turn to see what had happened, but he turned anyway. The meat hook in his shoulder was connected to a massive arm. The arm trailed away, into the clouds. Way up in the heavens, he saw a massive meatball of a head. On the head, there was a face.
The face was scowling.
It was Guy Gantic, the principal.
“You Kip?” Guy Gantic said, looking with disgust at the two-tone blue suburban with the deranged man laying into the horn, waving and yelling, “KIP! KIP! KIP!”
“Yes…” Kip muttered.
“Do me a favor Kip,” Guy Gantic growled. “Go and tell your dad not to park in the bus lane in the future.” Then he turned his massive, meaty, scowling face onto Kip. “GOT IT?”
“Y-yes, sir!” Kip said.
Then, Guy Gantic shoved Kip. It was exactly the type of thing that Kip dreaded. He hated being thrown down stairs. Unfortunately, being thrown down the stairs was just a daily part of his existence.
This was worse than normal because Kip knew everyone was watching. Even Lyla, but thinking of her watching didn’t hurt the same way as it did with all the others.
He did his best to accelerate his feet and swing his arms as he flew through the air, but it was no good. One foot hit the corner of the last step, but he was going too fast. He slid off the edge, took an awkward step, slipped on the ice, and crashed into the snowbank.
As quickly as he could, Kip brushed himself off and rushed over to the car. As he went around the front, his dad hit the horn making Kip jump and causing another round of mockery from the gathering.
He struggled to open the heavy door and get inside.
“What took you so long?” his dad said. “Didn’t you see me?”
“Guy Gantic said you shouldn’t park here in the future.”
“Who?”
“Guy Gantic, the principal,” Kip said, pointing to the hulking figure that was still on the steps.
Kip’s dad turned to look. For a moment, he sized him up as if preparing for a fight. Then made an indifferent grunt. “Whatever,” he said. He turned back to Kip. “You need to be more careful when you go down a flight of stairs. You looked really stupid when you fell.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to remember that, thanks dad.”
“All the other students saw it, they’re going to think you’re a dork.”
Kip blinked a few times. His vision was blurry.
Almost, it was as if the world began to melt away, and the line between reality and fantasy disappeared. Kip focused on all the colors.
The yellow of the buses, the blue of the dashboard, and the purple, green, and orange of the hats and jackets.
It was like being in an enormous gumball machine.
Kip liked the thought of that.
He wasn’t at school. He was a tiny little gumball nestled cozy and warm with millions and millions of other gumballs.
Red and blue and purple and green and orange…
…and brown.
Then, with a belch of exhaust, the buses began to move, once Kip’s dad, in the Suburban which was new to them, finally decided to be on his way.
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A fictional story with sadly more than a bit of truth. Yikes!
Your story took me right into a public school where the kids are raging out of control. After reading, I felt like I was recovering from a sucker punch. The piece you wrote about your cousin using you as a punching bag (kicking bag?) on his quest for martial arts glory had the same visceral impact.