Floating Face Down (boyxboy)

Chapter Nineteen

It's a bad feeling, when you feel inside that there is no law, no one can or will protect you, and it's sometimes hard in retrospect to remember that feeling, so for a moment I looked back at the times when I was being cornered and pushed around with a sense of confusion. 

Why had I let them do that to me? Why hadn't I fought them and raised hell about it? Stormed over to the teachers and demanded they do something.

It was as though for a moment the memory of all I had been through wavered, because everything inside was gone, I was empty, wading about the hallway with a feeling of motionlessness.

In fact I had asked for help, begged for it, fought and been beaten harder because of it, but more than that, the more you fought, the more determined they were to humiliate you as a punishment for it. You go to the teachers and they do these small useless things, like making an announcement not to look down on other kids, or making us all watch videos on bullying, or calling them in and suspending them for a day.

One day in particular, during my first year, when the bullying really started, when Clyde had really spotted me and relentlessly picking on me to the point where it was all graduating into violence. I'd gone red and bruised and fuming to Mr Bronson's office, the head of our form at the time, and told him what happened.

He looked me up and down over the top of his reading glasses, his round nose keeping them fixed in place. "You're not a child anymore sonny, you're capable of sorting out your own disputes like men."

"Like fight him?" I'd been so wide-eyed and shocked that I was practically gawping at him, mouth open and all, like a theatrical actor.

He scoffed. "No not fight him, come on boy you've got a tongue haven't you? You can settled your grievances with words..." He sighed and closed the file he was looking at on his desk and put his pen back behind his ear. "If you want I can take him out of class and put you two up in a room together to talk it out..."

I had expected him to be outraged, to over there and call him up and send him home immediately, for me to maybe even be offered the option of filing charges, which I would decline because it was just a shove and a punch, I'd had it all planned out in my head. I'd prepared for the dramatic fallout of going to the teachers.

And instead he sat there like an icicle in front of me, some kind of wall between us, like my words didn't make it through at all.

"He punched me..." I repeated slowly.

He smiled slightly, a condescending smile like he thought I was being ridiculous, dramatic for no reason, just for a second I saw it flit across his face and he wiped it away.

"Not to play semantics sonny... it's a red mark. You kids need to stop using the word 'punch' for anything that resembles skin to skin contact."

Like the breath was knocked out of me I stood there winded for a long moment.

"Would you like to set up that room for you?"

"No." I answered, feeling cold and shaken as I took a step back.

He exhaled through his nose and pushed his glasses further up his nose, picking his pen back up from behind his ears. "Then close the door slowly on your way out, if Peter stops by outside tell him the copies are still in the printer for him to collect."

I didn't say anything.

"You're alright sonny?"

"Yes sir." I answered quietly.

I wasn't sure why I did, or why I closed the door slowly behind myself and let Peter know as he approached that the copies for him to hand out were in the printer in the IT room.