Illustration by Evangeline Gallagher

In the eighth grade I hit a kid named Kevin Flowers so hard in the face that he had to travel out of state to get a corrective rhinoplasty. He made a horrible joke. He hadn’t even been talking to me. He didn’t know any better. He only did it where I could hear him. Kevin was sat behind me in the cafeteria talking to his friends. He was saying these terrible things. They were laughing. He didn’t really do anything wrong but it got in my brain like a hot needle. Punched through the leather. I could feel all the red pressure of that make some big evil fist in the back of my eyes, how you’d feel the rot heat of a sinus infection. My shoulders had cramped up so tight that my body was shaking. I figured I had to wreck something to get it out of myself. I figured he didn’t know any better but I didn’t care at all. I got up and wrapped my hand all in the thin, greasy hair on the top of his scalp, wrenched his head back and hit him in the face so hard I split my pointer knuckle open on his canine. People were shrieking. I pulled him backward off the red plastic bench he was sat on and threw him down. He had a carton of apple juice there in his hand. His fingers clamped hard down around it from the shock of being hit and it sprayed out sweet and yellow all over his cotton shirt. He didn’t ever try to hit me back. I knelt on his chest and I hit him twice in the center of his face, arm drawn back how you’d go up to bat in a baseball game, force of the impact just shattering up through my shoulder, pure recoil. I fractured his eye socket. His nose was totally destroyed. I gave him a serious concussion. I split his upper lip, punched back so hard on his front teeth it cut apart right to the gumline. He looked like he had a cleft lip. He looked majorly deformed. It took this big, heavy learning-disabled kid who’d gotten held back a couple of times to pull me off his body and pin me down until I quit trying to get up and hit him again. I wasn’t sure about a lot of what happened once I had come back to myself, but I knew that I’d been screaming in his face, all my hair hanging down on him, quick flecks of drool and limp threads of clear spit how hot oil comes off hot meat while it’s frying. I was screaming down onto him. Is it funny to you. Do you think it’s funny. Do you think it’s funny. He was bleeding so badly. People were bringing him fistfuls of cheap paper napkins to wad up right under his nose. He was totally hysterical. He had pissed his pants while I was beating on him. He was skittering backward on the linoleum with his wet sneakers tacky and dragging on his own blood, wet blue jeans soaked dark and stuck to his weak legs, crying really hard. He was trembling, desperate. He couldn’t get his body to quit. He looked how a dog in a thunderstorm would. He put his wrists up like Christ, held right out in front of him, blood red as ordinary paint, dripped thick and drying in the crazed lines of his hands, and then he passed out with his back up on the concrete support pillar set in the center of the room. They’d painted the whole cafeteria this pastel color of pink. It looked like a kid hospital. I felt really unwell. Kevin had a girlfriend. Laurie Lee. She had a thick, greasy face the color of a rising moon. She had horrible pimples. They looked like they had to be hurting her. I didn’t figure anybody ever thought about that. How what makes you ugly makes you hurt. She had her thick little hands clamped, crab-clawed on the fine branching bones of his shoulder, agitating his slack body and dragging him into her lap, sat cross-legged and stained on the wet floor, and she was saying, You killed him, Hal. You killed him. I didn’t know what to do with the blood on my knuckles. I’d cut up my hand on his face. I wiped it up into my hair. I was feeling really fraught and demented. I didn’t feel like so much of a person. By the time that I was hauled up and out of the room and I saw him there, wet with the piss, blood and apple juice, I understood that I’d done a really terrible thing. I couldn’t quit looking at him. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry but I couldn’t do it. There wasn’t a right thing to do anymore. It had happened already. There wasn’t any way of walking it back. I could’ve gone to juvenile detention if Kevin’s parents hadn’t been so strange about it all. It was a really sad situation. Nobody liked Kevin. He was little and mean. He had gotten in fights before and he’d gotten his ass beat before and it’d been his fault. He’d gotten detention before and he’d gotten suspended before. What happened to him really wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t deserved. He hadn’t earned it. He hadn’t been asking for it. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Nobody thought about that. I hadn’t ever hit somebody. I hadn’t ever got very upset, taken something so hard that I had to destroy and to detonate that way before. I didn’t get in any serious trouble. Nobody tried to hold me criminally responsible. Kevin’s parents pulled him out of school for six months and then they sent him to the Catholic high school a county over for the following year. My parents offered to pay Kevin’s medical bills. My parents were called in to meet with the faculty. They asked me what Kevin had said to get me so mad. I told them I couldn’t remember. I figured they’d push me around on that, but they didn’t, and for a really long time it was true. I had a blank shape where Kevin ought to have rightfully been. Nobody got to shouting. I didn’t look anybody in the eye. They let me go to the bathroom. I put my hands underneath the hot water and spoke to myself, quiet, watching myself in the mirror until my face started to come apart, You killed him, Hal. You killed him. It really bothered me whenever I would think about it hard. I tried to play it again. I tried to play it back like it was only a videotape but there wasn’t a sound or a picture there for it. I had it in colors. I didn’t know what he’d said. I figured it must’ve been bad and I put it away. I quit thinking about it. On the long drive home my mom and dad had a stiffness to their bodies in the front seat that I mostly hadn’t seen before. Packed glitter ice on the road. It was snowing. Nobody spoke. I must’ve felt like a yellow wasp shut in the car with them. I must’ve felt like a devil dog. I wasn’t troubled by that. I wanted for them to look at me. Know me the way that I was. Cold in the blood now, and changed. Going to bed that night I was so cut up and sick about all of it that I couldn’t get to sleep. Long hours turning my body around, sweating, wispy baby hairs soaked to my forehead, damp of my shirt stuck flat onto my slick back. I got up out of the bed and I crept through the drowsing house, shedding my wet shirt, my bed pillow under my arm, and I locked myself into the bathroom. I slept in the bathtub with all the lights on, my left hand a navy-blue thundercloud, weeping clean plasma and cradled to my chest the way that you’d hold a stuffed animal. I got a week of suspension and for a long time I forgot about Kevin. Mandated counseling sessions two times a week. His name was Benjamin. He wasn’t a real therapist. He had a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the state college. He said if I ever felt like doing something like that to anybody again then I ought to try to take some deep breaths. Benjamin gave me a smooth pink stone out of a drawer in his battered desk. He said to hold it real tight in my fist anytime I was feeling afraid or upset. He really liked crystals. He really liked rocks. I carried that stone around in my chest pocket with my quarters and my peppermints, sometimes a crushed half pack of Newport menthol cigarettes. I slept with it tight in my hand. I guess Cody John saw me hit Kevin in the cafeteria. His father was the wrestling coach over at the high school. Cody John didn’t hardly know me at all, though I guess we had gone to the same birthday parties in kindergarten. He had no reason to think I was anything other than bad. He had no reason to want me around but I guess that he talked to his father about it. His dad came around to my parents’ house one afternoon not long after I hit Kevin Flowers. He asked my mom if I might maybe want to try wrestling. He said he thought it’d help me to get some aggression out. I didn’t want to get any aggression out, but I knew Cody John wrestled, and I figured Cody John’s dad came off as a decent type of man. He didn’t freak me out. He didn’t kick me around. I started going by the high school. Cody John was always glad to see me, which I couldn’t ever really understand. We’d sit on the wood bleachers watching the varsity team hit each other and struggle. Cody John’s dad always drove me home after, even though it wasn’t on his way to anywhere, and me and Cody John would sit in the back of the car, me on the left side and him on the right, how we did in Dylan’s car, even though he could’ve sat up front with his dad if he’d wanted to, and pretty often Cody John’s dad would buy me a soda at the gas station, or fries and a milkshake at the drive-through, the same way that he would for Cody John. I tried to give him twenty dollars one time, because he took me and Cody John to the Dairy Queen. I got a Dilly Bar and Cody John got a Blizzard with hot fudge and Butterfingers. He had to hold it with both of his hands. Cody John’s dad got a chocolate malt, and when I tried to press the crumpled cotton bill into his tough, chapped hand he said, Come on, Hal, and he laughed, and he wouldn’t take it from me. That made my chest hurt. I was so hurt that he’d laughed. I was so torn up about it. It really bothered me. Next time I saw him I told him to fuck off when he tried to put his hands on me at practice. He’d put his hands on the other boys to get them into position. I got up off of the mat and I walked out. I stood all alone in the locker room. I wasn’t sure what to do with my body. I couldn’t quit twitching. I couldn’t quiet myself down. I put my shirt and my blue jeans on over my singlet and wet my hair under the faucet. I put my wrestling boots in the trash. I sat out on the dark parking lot, shivering, until the practice was over. I wasn’t feeling so much of anything. I’d left my sweatshirt, my jacket and sneakers inside of the gym. Cody John found me there, out on the lot, in my socks, with my knuckles blue-pink and my mouth blue. He got the keys to the truck from his dad and he got it started, hit the heat high, wrapped me all up in a fleece hunting blanket he found in the back seat and sat me up front by the vents. He thawed me out. What had been numb got to hurting. I kept trying to tell him that I was sorry. My jaw was locked stiff. He was talking to me all the time. He didn’t seem fucked up about the way that I was. Cody John told me to wait in the truck. I hadn’t ever been so tired before. He got my wrestling boots from the garbage can. I’d figured Cody John’s dad would be ugly to me about it, but he wasn’t that. We didn’t talk about what happened. I fell asleep in the passenger seat while he drove me home. When Cody John’s dad pulled up on the drive, when he said, Wake up, Hal, buddy, we’re here, I felt just like a little kid. I wanted somebody to carry me. I wanted somebody to put me to bed. I said good night to them both and I went in the house. Cody John’s dad didn’t ever get mad when I got mad. He didn’t put his hands on me again. He was a good man. He gave me a whole lot of grace. By the time I started at the high school I had a lot of pretty good acquaintances. I knew all the wrestlers already, and they were decent to me, and nobody bothered me, and nobody tried to push me around. I didn’t think about Kevin at all. Not for a long time. Not until I heard about what had happened with Laurie Lee. She got too drunk at a house party, winter break sophomore year, and she tried to walk home by herself. They found her a street south of her own house in the dull suburb she lived in. All the houses looked the same. When her keys wouldn’t work in the door she lay down in a snowbank. She wasn’t wearing her jacket. She’d left it back at the party. They found her, blue and undamaged, there, grit and salt knotted in her stiff hair. They had to chisel her off the packed ice. She was fifteen. I knew that I’d really scared her, with Kevin. I had made one of her days bad. I couldn’t forgive myself for it. I got to thinking about what had happened a lot. We had a mandatory meeting in the high school gym the first day back at school. The microphone kept feeding back in a negative loop. Everybody bored on the bleachers. Some of the girls cried. Afterward I got a cheeseburger with Cody John. We were headed back around to the high school in my mother’s car when I remembered what Kevin had said in the cafeteria. I put it all together really fast. I pulled the car over, stalled out on the gravel shoulder and I put the parking brake on. I said, Cody, could you drive, maybe, and he said, Sure, Hal, for sure. Pale concern plain in his voice. I got out of the car and I threw up on the road, wet from the snowmelt, streaked slick with bright, grimy rainbows of oil. Ground beef and pickles. Cody John got me up. He fed me slow sips of his soda. He got in the driver’s side door and he got the car started. I lay my cheek on the door plastic, gripping my wrist tight until it was wax white and bloodless. Cody drove it with the windows down. Clean smell of pine and cold water. I didn’t talk about it. I was late to fifth-period chemistry. I didn’t want for anybody to see it. I had come to understand that if I didn’t feel anything on the outside then it couldn’t do me any damage in my body. I knew that it set me apart. I knew that it made me too different. I knew that if I said it out loud nobody would look me in the eye ever again. I knew that everybody thought I was strange. I figured that they didn’t want to know why. I hadn’t wanted to know why. Probably not ever. I hadn’t wanted a reason. I wanted power, and muscle, and teeth. All of the wrestling made me tall, somehow. Scaffolding of my weird, jointed, stiff body rebuilt, reconfigured in some way that made it strong, whole, long and tough, broad and built out of gristle, and wire, and iron. Fat wrapped around it to make me look just like a regular man, but I wasn’t that. I had gone wrong somewhere. There was no fixing that. There was no turning away from it. I wore it under my shirt. Caught in the wrong type of light you could see it glitch. Dark halo. Frail splinter hologram. I didn’t like to look anybody in the face for too long, how I hated to see it there. I was afraid that I’d see it there. Somewhere I was always afraid.