The Lake and the PartyThey’d never seen him so drunk, him being used to his glass of red wine per meal, nothing less, nothing more, never been a man of excess in his life. All his life he’d kept himself straight for the sake of his work, his family, and his education, his greatest passion now that he’d traded in his sports career for the aforementioned work and family.
Tonight, though, was a night for celebration. They’d delayed their the departure for their lake vacation just to attend the yearly political festival, which this time around took place in their city. The debates of the morning and afternoon had led into a party fizzing with excitement: attendance at an all-time high, acclaimed masters and thrilled up-and-comers alternated in the musical lineup. “This round’s on me,” one colleague had said, slamming a handful of lire on the bar counter; then another, then another, as his wife danced and his daughter sat at a picnic table, half asleep. The musicians followed each other onstage, the August heat persisted as the moon crossed the sky, released by hundreds of moving bodies. By the time the last grappa was offered, the instruments were being packed, and the bodies were trudging through the dark to the makeshift parking lot.
He followed them, wife and daughter at his side. When he got to the cars, though, he realised that with no lights and his state of mind he could not tell which car belonged to him. They crossed the park a few times before they gave up and sat on the grass, reasoning that it would be easier to find his car when not surrounded by similar-looking ones. They waited for the vehicles to pour out; the parking lot thinned out, but in the dark they all looked too much alike, and even with less of them around he was in no shape to try and open all of them one by one. Over an hour passed. When the second-to-last car departed, only his was left, off in the corner, excavated like bones from a dig site.
He sat at the wheel: his daughter was too young to drive, and his wife’s license was long-expired. “With so little traffic, it’ll take us an hour to get to the lake.”
“We should go home,” his daughter said. “It’s much closer. We can go in the morning, the lake can wait.”
“Nonsense. Our bags are packed. We’ll waste one day of vacation if we wait.”
So they left for the lake. His hands and mind were surprisingly steady, never swerving or missing a signal. He seemed more secure in his driving than he’d been on his feet, probably something to do with his past as a rally racer, or maybe with the knowledge that if he tripped and fell he'd be the only one to get hurt, but if he crashed it would be a bad time for all three of them if not more people. The headlights cut into the darkness, road empty. His wife slept; his daughter's tension kept her awake.
They got to the lake with no accidents, unloaded their luggage and set up their tent as soon as the sun came up. The only moment worthy of note, throughout the whole journey, was when he stopped the car on the side of the road, rested his forearm on the car, and vomited what seemed like every drop of liquid in his body. Then, phlegmatic, he wiped his mouth with a checkered handkerchief and climbed back into the car.
DollyEven the most oppositional-defiant among us did not start out hating the new headmaster. We had better things to do than care about the school administration, such as alcohol, benzodiazepines, or, for a few brave ones, coke and ketamine. The new headmaster had not yet had the chance to put an end to our tradition of bringing four-Euro bottles of champagne to school around the holidays and refrigerating them on the windowsill, so we were holding our judgement until then.
One of our classmates had nicknamed herself Dolly. She had some sort of growth disorder that to the untrained eye looked like she was unusually short with a big nose and mouth, but when it was time to do PE she sat on a bench in her crop top and fur coat and watched us exercise. She had explained to a friend, who had been allowed to spread the word, that her heart-to-rib-cage size ratio was troublesome, and exerting herself could cause her to have some sort of attack.
The new headmaster, as it turned out, was revealing herself to be quite strict. We had to stop going to the vending machines during Religion class, which we were allowed to skip thanks to a document signed by our parents, because she would patrol the halls like she had nothing better to do in hopes of catching us and giving us detention. A friend of mine decided to start crafting lies about the bathrooms in an increasingly large radius being broken to test how far her gullibility went; from the behaviour mark he got at the end of the semester, we deduced ‘not far at all’.
On the day we decided to hate the headmaster for good, Dolly had decided to try playing a ball game with us and see how it would go. She was allowed to stand by the edge of the field in her high-heeled boots and fur coat and acrylics and we stood at her sides in a big circle, and we passed a ball to each other and to her, and she could leave if she had any trouble. So we played for a while, and her heart bravely held on. The reason she had to leave the game, eventually, was not related to any internal organ, but to a failed catch that broke her nail. It was more gruesome than you’d think, blood slowly dripping down her hand, soaked up with a napkin just before it stained her nice coat. Her big pretty face all scrunched up.
Someone took her to the infirmary. An hour later you could see dried blood on her gauzed finger, the ice pack in her hand did a poor job of hiding it. It so happened that the period after PE was Religion, and Dolly went to the bathroom more out of boredom than for any physiological reason. In the hallway, she ran into the headmaster, who took a long look at her bloodied bandages and said, “What are you wearing? Cover yourself up. I’ll see your stomach if you shrug. And never wear heels like that again.” So poor wounded Dolly had her hoodie zipped up for the rest of the day, and we all decided we truly hated the new headmaster.
Easy TargetWhen I was about twelve years old, our school rules dictated that we had to put our chairs upside down on top of the desks before we left, for ease of sweeping of the floors after hours, and back down when we got there in the morning. What that meant for the hygiene of the top of our desks, where we'd eat, sneeze, sweat, and smear various types of school appliances is not relevant to this situation.
It so happened that one day the boy sitting in front of me, P., had set his backpack on top of my upturned chair, preventing me from taking it down, and consequently from taking off my jacket and placing it on its backrest. After I requested him to take it down a few times, something he did made me angry. I do not remember what. Maybe he laughed, maybe he said something mocking. What matters is, I pounced on him; despite my father's best efforts, I wasn't confident in my punches, so I sank my nails into his chest and tore his skin open. What followed was screams, and an improvised chant with hand-drums by almost the entire class calling me disgusting.A few contextual details to this incident:
i: I was not a violent person. I was an angry child, but I was and asthmatic, and not stupid: I knew that if I started a fight, I'd lose almost immediately. Up until that point I had avoided most scuffles via strategic dashes into bathroom stalls or in front of teachers, which had in turn made me paranoid, always looking for a way out in any given situation.
ii.a: I had recently been broken up with due to my reputation, which was causing my partner, one of the most popular kids in the class, to be targeted as well.
ii.b: Most of my classmates did not like me. The prior year I had been one of the two people (the other one being my friend who later dropped out) to be explicitly forbidden from attending the class' last-day-of-school party, and I had been told just as I was approaching them, completely oblivious. A few times I had been violently threatened by older relatives of my classmates times when responding to their insults. While I was often reminded of my undesirability, a few boys would grope me at random times, which had now caused me to reflexively elbow anyone who touched me from behind. Sexual insults were also common. Whenever my friend wasn't in school, I had no positive interactions with anyone who wasn't a teacher.
iii: P. was also a scrawny kid, even shorter than me, with a high-pitched voice that sounded like a whistle when he pronounced the "ee" sounds in his last name. He was one of the best friends of my ex and he had never directly insulted me or threatened me, although he had laughed at some of them and he'd certainly never stepped in to defend me.
iv: I had been a violent person, a handful of times. A few years prior I'd broken my arm and, when one kid wouldn't stop calling me names in a sing-song way, I struck his head with the cast.
v.a: Most of my classmates in elementary school didn't like me either. I reflected for years trying to find the reason, and my only conclusion was that there was something about me that annoyed them. It could've been that I didn't know the difference between rules that could be broken and rules that couldn't, or that I couldn't keep up with trends, or maybe it was just fun for them to be united under the cause of causing me mild to severe annoyance.
v.b: A brief list of incidents I'd experienced during elementary school: my coat was thrown to the ground and stepped on and torn while I was having lunch. I found my classmates huddled close and going through my backpack, making fun of its contents, a few times, and more times I found things missing from it or intentionally cut in small yet purposeful ways. I was invited to play a game once, because the plot required an evil villain in disguise; the plot also required me to be held down and tied to a fence in the deepest corner of the courtyard and, of course, none of this had been disclosed to me when I'd been invited. One of the only people who would come over to my house would do so so she could tickle me or pinch me and record my yelps. My only pair of mid-season shoes was irreparably damaged when they were dunked in water for almost an hour while I was doing P.E.
v.c: It's easier to explain in presence than in absence; I can point to episodes like these, or worse ones I won't mention, and say that that's the reason I didn't like my classmates. It's much more difficult to explain why it hurt that, although I'd briefly had friends I could see outside of school, I can't recall them ever spending time with me inside. It wasn't about betrayal, no; what might seem like an inconsistency makes actually perfect sense if one understands that their priorities were clear to everyone, including me, and that in that list I would never come first if there was anyone else around. Here's the absence.
vi: The kid I'd struck had never, up until that point, wronged me in any particular way, and he was usually meek and not particularly fit. His parents didn't know my parents.
vii: A year or two before the cast incident, I kicked someone in the face propelled by a long-chained swing at summer camp. She had taken a liking to making me stack stone bricks as large as my head to build a place where we'd eventually, she'd promised me, play. About a week in, I realised that the game was actually seeing for how long she could trick me into moving bricks for no reason. She was about my height, and she had no friends there; I could kick her in the head and no one would beat me up for it.
viii.a: My usual tormentors were all tall and large or stocky, usually wearing shirts a size too small pulled taut across their bodies; I never struck them back.
viii.b: The girl who liked recording me was also strong, as she'd demonstrated several times by holding me down with only one hand. At the time, though, I didn't know she was doing anything wrong.
