Easy Target (narrative)
When 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.