he asked, changing the subject after a lengthy silence.
“Yeah, totally. Drives my mother crazy.” Craig giggled.
Kendall laughed. “My folks think I’m a Satanist.”
“Seriously? How lame,” Craig said, his eyes twinkling.
“Yup! They think I’m this complete freak. Goes to show how you can live with someone for almost all your life and they still don’t know who you really are.”
“Are you religious?”
“Yeah, I am, but nobody seems to believe me, except my brother. He says it’s none of their business anyway.”
“He’s right. Your brother, I mean. You mustn’t let anyone tell you what you should or shouldn’t believe. Now me, I believe in absolute and utter chaos. Anarchy, you know?”
Kendall stared down at the floor with a blank expression. “I really hate people sometimes,” he sighed.
Craig nodded. “You have no idea, dude. No idea.”
The humiliation of Craig
In the beginning Kendall was a little bit nervous about his new friendship with Craig.
The fact that the new boy actually liked spending time with him seemed too good to be true. Craig was everything Kendall was not – self-assured, determined and tough – which made Kendall look up to him even more. Luckily they had the same taste in music, which almost immediately gave them something to talk about.
Everybody took an instant dislike to Craig. He was odd, as Justin had said, but Kendall didn’t care. All Craig’s talk of anarchy didn’t send up warning bells for him like it did for the other students. For Kendall, Craig had the makings of a best friend, something he had never had, other than his brother.
There was also something about Craig that was dangerous, and Kendall found himself drawn to the boy like a moth to a flame.
To Kendall’s delight, Craig was placed with him in most of his classes, and their closeness was apparent from the outset. The other students, raised on a diet of group thinking, seemed to take the friendship as a personal insult: the weirdos were ganging up on them.
So it wasn’t surprising when Craig became a target of a ruthless humiliation campaign.
It started with the collar. At first the taunts were isolated to the grade eleven class, but all too soon it spread throughout the school. Craig didn’t give in for a long time, but after the taunts and catcalls began to haunt his every footstep, he stopped wearing it. He never spoke about it; one day it was just gone. Kendall never mentioned it, but he admired Craig for sticking to his resolve for so long. That took guts.
It was obvious that this treatment was all too familiar to Craig. Perhaps that was why he joined a new school so long after the start of the new term. At least Kendall and Craig knew what the other one was going through.
If Craig had wanted a new beginning at a new school, his chance was gone. The boys never included him in their conversations, and the chances of girls seeing him as a potential boyfriend were slim to none. It wasn’t just the collar; there was something inherently strange about Craig. It was the repressed giggle after each sentence, the unsure way in which he approached people, the way his eyes lingered too long on an individual. There are some mannerisms that cannot be masked by bravado, and Craig showed his history of past victimisation all too clearly.
He soon realised that his only sympathetic ear belonged to Kendall Mullins, and it was to Kendall that he began revealing the anger bubbling beneath the surface.
Kendall didn’t notice anything odd at first. He believed his new friend was opening up to him, and he couldn’t have been happier.
“Have you ever tried to kill yourself, Kendall?”
They were sitting against the peeling brick wall at the back of the gymnasium with nothing but a cracked tennis court for a view. Students seldom ventured that far from the school building, and that’s why Craig and Kendall liked to spend time there.
“No.”
I did once. I cut myself so badly that the blood was flowing down my arm like a stream. It was the coolest experience ever. I couldn’t stop staring at my arm, thinking how cool it was.”
Craig’s voice was wistful, as if the memory pleased him.
“What happened?” Kendall asked, curiosity prompting him.
“It stopped bleeding after a while. I don’t think I cut deep enough. I could never cut deep enough. Want to see the scar?”
“Sure.”
Craig rolled back his shirtsleeve to reveal the most scar-riddled arm Kendall had ever seen. Some of the scars were red and inflamed, as if they had been inflicted recently.
Kendall looked away quickly.
Craig was smiling. Whether it was because he was thinking about the day he had tried to kill himself or that he had succeeded in shocking his friend, Kendall didn’t know, but they sat in silence for a few minutes.
“I know how to make a noose,” Kendall said after a while.
“Really? Cool. You must show me sometime.”
Kendall had noticed the change in his friend since the incident with the collar. He had become more bitter. Kendall had no idea how to ask Craig if he was okay, since this friendship deal was a whole new ballgame to him.
Kendall leaned back against the wall and thought hard what to say next. “You have any plans for this weekend?” he asked.
“Nothing concrete,” Craig shrugged.
“We could do something if you want?”
Craig’s face lit up. “That would be great.”
The bullying continues
The campaign against Craig didn’t relent during his first months at Percy Fitzpatrick. As he and Kendall became closer, Craig seemed to alienate himself more and more from the rest of the school.
To Kendall and Craig it seemed like the rest of the students in their grade were getting a sick kick out of making them miserable. They were way down on the social ladder at school, and the bullying was worse now that they presented a double target; Kendall’s friendship with Craig was just one more thing his classmates taunted him about. But he didn’t care – at least he wasn’t alone any more.
Craig, however, seemed to take the abuse to heart. He knew only too well that once an individual slides to the bottom of the ladder, it’s impossible to climb back up, especially when those at the top are constantly keeping you down. Craig would curl his hands into tight balls whenever a comment was passed.
In every bullied child’s opinion physical education – PE – was the class they dreaded most, because it highlighted their weakness, their awkwardness, their inability to jump, climb and run as quickly as the other boys. In short, it was physical torture governed by the least understanding teacher of the whole
