At two forty the last class let out. Everybody began yelling and forming a tight circle in the hallway outside the room, pushing Donny and me toward the center. I could see him, and being forced into the situation filled me with a black hatred, the words about my mother replaying in my mind. I remembered the last time we had fought. The swollen, busted lip that burned for days each time I brushed my teeth or drank something acidic. The way I was laughed at. As we neared one another the hatred turned to rage and I became blind to everything else, my fists tightly clenched at my side. Stay loose but firm, my father’s voice echoed. I was ready, breathing heavily, my eyes wide and focused on Donny. He laughed the second he saw the expression on my face.

We got to the center and he came at me. His arms were up and away from his body as though he intended to bear-hug me. I stood firm, my feet parallel to my shoulders despite several hands shoving me from behind. Then I let it go, transferring everything that I am and everything that I can ever hope to be into that fist. I never closed my eyes. I watched it all the way in. As soon as it was thrown I knew it’d connect. I felt the cartilage give way, heard the pop. The feel of the crunch beneath my knuckles sickened me. I closed my eyes to it. The whole group groaned in harmony, and when I reopened my eyes I saw that there was blood everywhere and I instantly knew I was in deep shit. Donny dropped straight down. Then I felt the principal’s hand grab me hard from behind and drag me away. I held firmly to the story, told it just as it had happened. And now I sit waiting.

4

I breathe a sigh of relief when my father’s rickety old pickup truck comes around the bend and enters the school lot. He walks in cocksure and confident, wearing jeans and a black long-sleeve tee, the sleeves of which are pulled halfway up his forearms. He winks at me and together we walk into the principal’s office.

“It should be obvious that fighting cannot go unpunished,” the principal says from behind his desk. He’s an older man, bald with gray hair at the sides and back of his head. “Especially since your son apparently broke another kid’s nose.”

“He did, eh?” my father says. He looks at me. “And what’d the other kid do to deserve it?”

“It was Donny Smith,” I answer. “He called Mom a whore and said we were poor and that I deserved to wear clothes with holes in them.”

My father nods. “And what punishment did Donny Smith get?”