"There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is a confession." - Daniel Webster
Kids are mean. The world is cruel. And life is unfair. There's nothing we can do about it, though. When you're down, you have no choice but to get back up. Crying won't solve anything, feeling sorry for yourself is a waste of time. Now I bet you're all thinking of a time when people were horrible to you. But really, you should be thinking of when you were horrible to someone else.
In sixth grade, there was a small, quiet boy who took my bus. He had moved to our school at the beginning of the year. His name was Anthony, he didn't talk to anyone, and that's about all we knew about him. At recess while the other kids were playing, you could find Anthony by the payphones, whispering into the receiver and looking troubled. When asked to speak in class, he would shake his head and go back to furiously scribbling in an old notebook of his. The teachers didn't pester him much. Wasn't worth it.
His bus stop was one of the first. He'd sit at the very front of the bus every day, on the edge of his seat. As soon as the bus stopped, he'd dash off it and run fast as he could up a narrow dirt path. This happened every single day, and we'd all sit and laugh at him, watching his scrawny legs kicking up dust behind him as he went.
He was tortured about it from the boys. They'd all surround him, taunting. It happened on the bus, in the schoolyard, and when the teacher wasn't in class. Us girls would watch, giggling, but not joining in. Anthony never opened his mouth. He never told those boys to shove off, although I wish somebody had. No, he just sat motionless, looking down, like he was blocking out the world or something.
One day we all got on the bus early and filled up the first few rows so he'd have to sit further back. This was the only time I saw any real emotion on his face. It was just a quick flash in the eyes, a look of sadness. He nervously went to the seat as close to the front as he could get, which was right behind me. When the bus stopped, he jumped up and ran right off the bus, sprinting faster than ever down that lane. We all laughed until our sides were about to split.
Then Anthony did something extremely peculiar. While in class one day, the teacher told us to get out our math homework. Anthony pulled his notebook out of his backpack and something fell out and rolled across the floor, stopping right in front of Ms. Hay.
She picked it up, a big bottle of Aspirin. "Anthony," She said. "Why do you have a large bottle of Aspirin in your school bag?"
"I get headaches." He softly spoke.
Ms. Hay walked over to him and peered inside his bag. She gasped, pulling out bottle after bottle of various medications. "You have more pills in here then I do in my whole medicine cabinet. This is unsafe, and I demand an explication now."
"I had to bring them to school today." Anthony mumbled, "My sister, she needed me to bring them..."
"Your sister needed you to bring a dozen bottles of pills to school, did she?" Ms. Hay's sharp voice cut across the room. "Anthony, do you understand how dangerous this is?"Anthony nodded. "Are you trying to kill someone?"
He now shook his head. I sat fairly close to him and to this day I'm not sure, but I think I heard him murmur, "I'm trying to save someone."
That day, he ran home as usual. But the next morning, he wasn't waiting at his stop for the bus to come. Nor was he was the next day, or the next. After a week he finally came back to school. No one asked him where he'd been, and he didn't offer any information. He was acting normal, although he didn't use the payphones at recess. That afternoon, we were all looking forward to seeing him run.
The bus stopped and he stood up and got off slowly. We all watched, confused, as he walked down the road solemnly. It was almost as if he was dreading arriving home. The following morning when he came on the bus, his biggest bully, Jerry, called out, "Hey loser! Why didn't you run from the bus yesterday?"
No one expected an answer. It was a shock when he stood up, turned around and replied, "What I ran to salvage is now gone. I have nothing left to run for."
We all snickered, not really knowing what he meant. That was before we knew the truth. Anthony ran home every day to keep his sister from killing herself.
I'll never forget the day he stopped running.
