One by one, they smashed their fists into my cheekbones, then my ribs, then my chest, my collarbone, and finally, my bollocks. Winded, I lay on the concrete and waited for them to leave me in peace, so I could start hurting. But they didn’t. Instead, they laughed at me. The big one – Andrew, I think – took quick kicks at me every so often, just as I thought I was about to stop feeling the pain. They watched me lying on the floor in a shallow pool of my own blood. They watched me lying on the floor in a deep pool of shame.
When I went to sit up, they brought me back down. They gripped my t-shirt and took another swing at my face.
After groaning, I moaned, “Just leave me alone. You’ve gotten what you want.”
At that, they just laughed. All seven seemed to think my pain was their pleasure. I was fed up of it, but what was I to do? I was just one pathetic human being against an army of everyone else in the world. Sometimes I wondered whether even my own mother wanted me around. I knew she didn’t really understand what happened after Dad went. I think she just stopped loving me.
Finally, after what seemed like hours, the boys left me to lie on the curb feeling more ashamed of myself than ever. I lay there for a while of my own, wincing every time I tried to move. I wasn’t used to this type of pain. My joints felt like they were made of steel, completely unable to move, joined up and stuck there to last forever. I’ll be honest, getting beat up was a regular occurrence. It was a weird day when I didn’t walk into school with a hood over my head to hide my black eye or swollen lip. But this was just cruel. Did people really hate me that much to kick the living crap out of me?
I moved my leg and could almost hear it squeaking as though you were moving a gate after years of rusting. It hurt, bad. It took every muster of my strength to move my arms and push myself up off the floor. Metallic tastes exploded in my mouth as I swept through my own blood. My own hair dripped with my own fluids. It made bile rise in my throat.
I finally got up and standing, though shakily I admit. I took a deep breath and started to walk, but buckled under myself and plummeted back to the ground, whacking my head on the floor. Pain shot across my skull at the same time as searing madness and fire erupted my ankle to pieces. Great.
I lay there for a few more minutes before a wild idea occurred in my brain, and I decided to take it. Who would care anyway? This idea pushed me up and I managed to hobble down the short road. I had to lean against the wall taking rasping breaths because something in my ankle hurt so badly. I rubbed my hands over my face in exasperation, extracting them immediately to see that they were now stained red in the dim street light. That’s just brilliant.
I hopped the rest of the way home, making my way past the extravagant new houses and then past the normal nice houses and then finally getting to my street. Barnely Road consisted of a few short, old, dank houses that don’t really have any significance whatsoever. They have thatched rooves that leak every time there’s heavy rain and windows that shriek every time there’s heavy wind. This one time, years ago, my neighbour’s roof caught on fire because of what he explained as ‘heavy sunlight’.
Finally, as I hit my gate, I collapsed to the floor in a pile of myself. I couldn’t take the pain anymore. I couldn’t take anything anymore.
“Noah, is that you?” I heard my mother shriek from inside the house, but I didn’t have the energy to answer back. I lay on my gravel path and waited for her to get too worried about me that she’d come out and look for me. Of course, that’d never happen. I’d be fooling myself so far into naivety that it’d almost be like believing in dragons.
I remember before when I was little, when my folks actually cared about me, they took me to the park and I played on all the things. The monkey bars were my favourite by far. I used to swing on them bad boys for days on end, not daring to let go of them.
