door. But of course I was wrong.
“‘Hey, Jason. How ’bout a kiss?’ Bret Forester quipped somewhere off to my right. ‘I hear you like boys,’ he said, and there was no mistaking the motive behind that jab.
“I didn’t think, didn’t deliberate. I responded out of pure self-preservation because to not respond—to continue to ignore it—would only make matters worse.
“I dropped my books and swung. I wasn’t a fighter, wasn’t big or particularly athletic, but I had the advantage of surprise—and fury—on my side. My clenched fist struck him directly in the nose, making that scrunched-up face of his fold in on itself even more. He fell backward against the wall, his small ugly mouth forming a perfect circle of astonishment. And suddenly the blood began to flow—a startling amount for the single shot he’d taken. His nose was broken. I could see its crooked angle through the splay of fingers pressed against his face. I said nothing, just stood there and stared him down, waiting to see if he would come for me, ready to go to the ground with him if necessary. But bullies are really cowards, and all it takes is the proper show of force to back them down—at least temporarily.”
Jason glanced at me then, and I could see a furrowing in his brow that hadn’t been there before. “But bullies can also be dangerous when crossed. And they have friends. So I stood there and did the math in my head, totaling the reinforcements on both sides of the equation. On my side, of course, it was just me. There was no one else I could count on, and I realized then and there that I would take a beating for this. They would gather their forces and come for me. I would be ready for them—expecting it—but I knew I couldn’t win. Not on my own. And even through the blood and pain, the cold, hateful look in Bret Forester’s eyes told me that he knew it, too.”
I allot a certain amount of time each day to talk with my patients, and my session with Jason had already run over, but I couldn’t leave it at that. “Eventually, they caught up with you,” I surmised, and he nodded.
“I couldn’t outrun them—not with my ankle the way it was—and so the first time they came for me I simply stood my ground.”
“How badly were you injured?” I asked.
Jason shrugged. “Not as badly as I’d anticipated. Black eye. Cut lip. Once I went down, I was able to get my arms up over my head and face, but they kept kicking me and managed to break a few ribs and bruise both of my kidneys in the process. The ribs took six weeks to heal, and there was blood in my piss for three days after the assault. But all things considered, I counted myself pretty lucky. Mostly, I was just glad it was over.”
I waited for him to continue.
“Except, of course, it wasn’t over. With guys like that, it’s never really over, is it? Once they set their sights on you, it becomes a compulsion, like a patch of dry skin they just can’t scratch to their satisfaction. And even though you’re cracked and bleeding—and on some level they must realize that they’ve gone too far—they simply can’t stop until something irreparable happens, until the wound is too macerated and ruined to tolerate anything further.
“The second time they came for me was in the school bathroom. I fought back hard that time—hit one of the boys, Tim Maddox, in the windpipe, putting him out of commission. Clayton Flynn took a kick to the knee that I hope he still feels on rainy days, and I kept swinging at Bret Forester’s pimply, bulldog face, trying to break his nose for the second time. But there was a fourth boy, Billy Myers, who was mean, quiet, and probably the only one of them with true lethal potential. He’s locked up in a maximum-security prison somewhere right now, I just know it, but on that day he snuck up behind me while most of my attention was on Bret and he hit me in the back of the head with something hard and metal, and that’s all I remember of the fight until I woke up to a small crowd of students around me, some teacher’s voice calling my name, and my head resting on the lower lip of a urinal.
“They took me to the hospital—my fourth visit in two months—only this time the ER doctor was a woman who made small noises I couldn’t interpret and shook her head as she examined me. They did a CT scan of my brain, which was thankfully normal, kept me overnight for observation, and discharged me the next morning with a diagnosis of concussion.”
Jason’s eyes cleared for a moment. “My sister came to visit me in the hospital,” he recounted. “She sat at my bedside and studied me, saying very little. I had other visitors, of course, but it was her presence that I remember the most. We must’ve spoken to each other during that visit, but the only thing I remember was what she said to me just before leaving. She walked over to the bed, leaned forward, and planted a kiss on my forehead—which was pretty unusual behavior for her. She drew back a bit, observed me with a calculating look. I thought she was going to give me a brief lecture, tell me something useless like how I needed to stop fighting and just stay away from those kids. But what she instead said was ‘This will not happen again.’ Then she turned and left, leaving me to wonder how she could promise a thing like that. Yet, somehow, I believed her, and a half hour later I pulled the string to shut off the fluorescent light above my bed, closed my eyes, and slept better than I had in weeks.”
“Was she right?” I asked.
“In a way,” Jason replied, and he smiled as if I’d said something funny.
About fifty feet from where we stood, Menaker’s groundskeeper, Kendrick Jones, spotted us and lifted an arthritic hand in our direction. His forearm was a tapestry of scratches, his face stained and weathered by the relentless sun. He tried to stand fully erect, but could not—his back permanently stooped from all those years tending the yard. I could see the dull, sightless opaqueness of his right eye, the result of being jabbed four years ago by the sharp end of a branch he’d been trimming. I tried to imagine how Kendrick might’ve looked his first day on the job, and whether he would’ve taken the position at all if he realized how the hospital would latch itself on to him like a parasite, sucking the youth and vigor from his body until he was nothing but a brittle, pathetic shell. I raised my hand to return his gesture, but his good eye had spied a wayward thistle near the fence. He frowned and scuttled after it, leaving the two of us alone once again.
“Three weeks went by before they came for me again,” Jason told me. “I can’t say I was surprised. I knew they would come, knew they weren’t finished with me yet, especially since I’d gotten in a couple of good shots the last time. They wanted a decisive victory, wanted to humiliate me completely. I realized there was trouble as soon as I got off the bus that afternoon. The neighborhood was too quiet, the streets emptier than they should’ve been. Right away I got that fluttery feeling in my stomach, like I wanted to giggle and throw up at the same time. I’d only covered a half block, walking fast, when Tim Maddox stepped out from the bushes onto the sidewalk ahead of me. He smiled, but there was no humor in it, and as he started walking toward me I broke to the right, running but not all-out yet, saving my wind for when I’d really need it.
“Bret lived three blocks away, and as I ran down the sidewalk he and Clayton stepped off his front lawn and into the street. Clayton had a bat in one hand, its thick end resting on his shoulder, and he looked eager to use it. I hooked left into the woods, moving through the trees until I came to the lip of a gulley. I could hear them entering the woods behind me, taunting me, calling out, ‘Wait up, we just wanna talk to ya.’ And all the while I kept thinking, Where’s Billy Myers? The stealthy one. The meanest of the four. The only one with murder in his eyes.
“I ran along the edge of the gulley, my ankle beginning to ache. The path of my flight was looping around toward home. If I can
